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This panel explores how economic ideas and methods have been produced—and challenged—through engagement with living things since the 19th century. In doing so it suggests an emergent way of conceiving of the relationship between economics and histories of science more broadly. For much of the 20th century, the social study of science was Marxist in method—think Boris Hessen or Hilary Rose—and hence took political economy as a key, even foundational, frame of analysis. When STS and allied fields solidified in the 1970s, however, economic concerns took a back seat to those of expertise, culture, or politics. Economics has since returned, on the one hand via STS-inspired studies deconstructing the economy, quantification, and finance; and on the other, descending from earlier Marxist studies, by using the categories of (critical) economic sociology to study contemporary biotech and pharmaceutical industries. We want to offer a way to combine insights from both these fields by studying how economic practitioners themselves have grappled directly with life, from attempts to standardize the value of human life in the antebellum US South or 1980s EPA, to population growth and common resources, to the use of pigeons to develop theories of intertemporal choice and economic behavior. Economics, we want to suggest, has always been a life science.
