Economic Agents, Rationality and the Institutional Setup: The Advent of «homo oeconomicus» in the Representations of the Levant

Abstract

Shortly after its emergence in the nineteenth century, homo oeconomicus was deployed as a yardstick to measure individual economic behaviour irrespective of temporal and spatial differences. With the European penetration into the Levant, the concept was applied to the evaluation of the economic behaviour of locals. This led to the implicit conception of homo levanticus as the opposite of homo oeconomicus. This paper dwells upon primary sources and travelogues to make this point and then shifts the primacy from agents and their rationality to the institutional setup, in conformity with the historical and institutional critiques of economic orthodoxy.