25 Novembre 2013 - Séminaire interne - Loïc Charles - Economics for the Masses: The Visual Display of Economic Knowledge in the United States (1910-1945)

Date de publication : 18 déc. 2015 16:02:28

Papier co-écrit avec Y. Giraud, Thema-Université de Cergy-Pontoise. Abstract: The rise of visual representation in textbooks is an important feature of the development of the economic discipline after WWII. In this paper, we argue that it has been preceded by a no less significant rise of visual representation in the larger literature devoted to social and scientific issues. During the interwar period, editors, propagandists and social scientists altogether encouraged the use of visual language as an important main vehicle to spread information and opinions about the economy to a larger audience. We explore different yet related aspects of this development by studying the use of visual language in economic textbooks intended for non-specialists, in periodicals such as the Survey, a monthly magazine intended for an audience of social workers and finally the use of those visual representations by various state departments and administrations under Roosevelt's legislature. We focus on two types of visuals that developed very rapidly and held a strong relationship with social science in this period: photographs and pictorial statistics. In the last part, we will discuss how visualizations that have been created as part of a critical program of more abstract forms of social theorizing (e.g. classical and marginal political economy) were transformed into an engine for New Deal political propaganda in the 1930s.