The normative within positive science: locating hidden discourses of democracy in economic science.

During the 20th century the social sciences have been heavily influenced by a philosophy of science that has led social scientists to separate scientific/explanatory and moral/normative inquiry from each other. The discipline of economics has been at the forefront of arguing for the separation of scientific and value-based inquiry. However, economics has not always been, nor is it necessarily, an a-normative science. Indeed, some of the founding fathers, as well as many leading figures, of modern economics were explicitly driven by normative questions and principles regarding the 'good life'. This paper seeks to explore whether and how normative assumptions might be embedded within supposedly a-normative economic science. It does so specifically with the aim of elucidating how economic theorists and their discourses may support, encourage, or delimit assumptions made about the meaning of 'democracy'. Taking as its focus a selection of leading economic scientists, classical and neoclassical, the paper asks, first, how is the role of normative assumptions conceived in their work and, second, what kinds of normative visions of democracy do their frameworks support, even if implicitly? The interest in these questions here is not abstractly theoretical: it is informed by a set of puzzles about the ways in which economic science discourses are treated in current debates on global financial governance and also on democracy promotion. Indeed, the paper is ultimately interested in examining the consequences that hidden democratic discourses within economic science may have in constraining and enabling the roles of global financial organisations and in shaping the practices of democracy promotion. This paper, which seeks to both speak to themes of the present ISA panel on the normative-explanatory theory relationship and a wider project by the author on 'political economies of democratisation', argues that despite the value-neutral image that is widely held about economic science, it embraces a whole series of normative assumptions, as well as a variety of different theories or visions of democracy. This finding contradicts the theoretical basis for the perception that global financial governance organisations and their economic discourses are 'value-neutral' and 'a-political', and exposes them as surreptitiously involved in 'democracy promotion'. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]