One of my main memories of studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Hertford during the early 90s was having to decide which of the numerous modules to take in my second and third year, each placed within one of the three disciplines. As a student, you don’t really question the reasons why modules are defined and categorised in a certain way. You just decide on what looks interesting and feasible, then make your choices. Since then, working as an academic researcher and lecturer in political studies during the last 20 years, I’ve learnt further that the question of what it means to study these three subjects together remains very much a live, open one.
Unsurprisingly, debates about PPE as a combined degree are as long-running as this century-old course itself. Going back to the early twentieth and nineteenth centuries, there are important precedents for combining scholarship across the three fields. For example, it would be hard to find two more influential thinkers than Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek, whose work cut, seemingly effortlessly, across all three PPE subjects. Time has moved on since they articulated their very different visions for human society, Marx with his case for socialist revolution, Hayek with his compelling account of the indispensability of markets to modern civilisation. However, the concepts and insights they offered on issues such as the social impacts of market economies and the challenges governments face in addressing problems, remain vital. My recently published book, Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination, highlights the need and scope for future research to draw from this political economy tradition of engaging directly with evaluative questions about governance and policy effectiveness.
Clearly, the potential benefits of the PPE combination were evident to founders of the degree in 1920. However, in the years that followed, internationally the three disciplines became, in some important ways, more strongly demarcated. As is expertly reviewed by Robert Skidelsky’s What’s Wrong with Economics?, mainstream economics established itself ostensibly as a predictive science based on mathematical modelling techniques. Political science focused on building explanatory analyses of political processes and behaviour. As my book sets out, there is a tendency for these mainstreams to leave aside philosophical questions about how to evaluate the political and economic systems that shape our lives. Addressing this need, I propose an in-depth, qualitative, interdisciplinary approach to evaluating governance and policy in terms of impacts, in the face of complex, inter-connected problems.
To address the challenges of such evaluation, there is a vital need to draw from key recent, internationally influential scholars, branded as ‘heterodox’, whose work cuts across PPE boundaries, challenging mainstream assumptions. For example, Amartya Sen who devised the UN’s Human Development Index, has questioned the dominance of GDP as a measure of human welfare. Herman Daly has re-framed the economic case for ecological sustainability. Elinor Ostrom’s research highlighted the potential for local-scale, sustainable ecosystem management in different parts of the world. She explored the rich variety of institutional arrangements, both formal and informal, that shape how markets work, taking us beyond the market-state dichotomies of earlier debates. There is still some way to go before disciplinary boundaries of the past are further disrupted. However, with the PPE degree having gone global, now being studied in over 170 universities worldwide, the foundations for this PPE of the future have been laid.
