Resisting the Single Neo-Classical Mindset: The History of Non-Western Economic Thought Highlights the Antiquity and Diversity of Economic Ideas

Since the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s, Economics has claimed the status of an exact science, like mathematics and physics. To resist this orthodox economic thinking is to challenge this premise: there is no absolute truth within Economics. Economics is more akin to a social science, open to debate and controversy, like literature and sociology. And, like any social science, Economics has many schools of thought, defending diverse and varied ideas. To reinforce this idea and further resist the single neoclassical mindset, this article highlights the contributions of economic thoughts in the ‘global South’, i.e. in the non-Western world: we present economic ideas that originated in the Chinese, Indian, and Arab worlds, in order to highlight the antiquity, richness, and diversity of economic ideas that developed in great civilizations. In the Chinese world, schools of thought developed during the ancient Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods: Taoists, Confucians, and Legalists took up economic and social issues. In the Indian world, economic ideas appeared even before the Gupta Empire, in the Arthashâstra attributed to Kautilya. In the Arab world, economic concepts emerged in pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, before being developed within the Arab-Muslim empires. This highlighting of ancient economic ideas that originated outside the Western world not only serves to emphasize the diversity of economic ideas and combat neo-classical groupthink, but also serves to highlight the shortcomings of the History of Economic Thought, which in the vast majority of cases is content to present Western economic schools of thought — European and American — while completely neglecting the contributions of other civilizations. Thus, historians of economic thought, consciously or unconsciously, display a certain ethnocentrism that must be challenged. Resistance also means resisting single-minded thinking. Resistance also means highlighting the antiquity, diversity, and richness of economic ideas.