ancient historians, although there has been a change of strategy during
the last decade, albeit a change that has coincided with a new sense of
doubt among contemporary economists.
During the last two decades, and particularly in the years since the
financial downturn of 2008, economists have had to face up to an
apparent gap between prevailing economic theories and the inescapable
realities of economic crisis in many parts of the globe. For a number of
historical analysts, the economic downturn has acted as a catalyst,
clarifying existing doubts about the ways that contemporary capitalism
is thought to work, rather than undermining established assumptions in
a fundamental way. The re-evaluation of theories about contemporary
economic phenomena has coincided with a renewed interest in the social
dimensions of economic behaviour, in part due to the application of
evolutionary theory to economic life, and partly as a result of experi-
mental approaches, which suggest that people do not behave in the ways
that theory predicts.
The principal problem faced by economic sociologists, and socially-
inclined economists, has been, on the one hand, to make coherent
connections between the thinking individual, who chooses how to live,
and the broad matrix of society; and, on the other, to make sense of
economies in holistic ways, whilst analysing trends, patterns, or out-
comes. From Karl Marx to George Soros, analysts have sought to draw
general principles from particular experiences; but the search for univer-
sal laws, or rules of economic dynamics, have proved frustratingly
elusive. Analysis can capture something of the essence of economic
patterns, or economic relations, but the process of simplifying ideas in
order to understand what is going on has usually meant that other,
possibly key, factors have been excluded in the process. This methodo-
logical difficulty awaits any economic analysis, whatever the period or
place.
For much of the twentieth century, sociologists and economists
adopted different routes and different methodologies towards the analy-
sis of historical economies. In a defining article published in 1985, Mark
Granovetter identified these parallel approaches as a tendency of some
theories to be‘under-socialized’(a predominant weakness of classical
economic theory), while sociologists have tended to produce‘over-
socialized’models, giving an exaggerated importance to the influence
of social mores on economic relations. The same sort of critique has been
used to examine the kinds of models that have been applied to classical
antiquity, although, as in the case of other periods and more recent
contexts, there is little agreement among specialists about how these
evaluations may lead to more holistic ways of approaching the
Societies and economies 89