Economics and the Civic Imagination

By Joshua Banerjee
June 24, 2026

The civic thought movement taking root across public universities presents a significant opportunity to renew the meaning of citizenship and prepare students for the responsibilities and challenges of republican self-government. Yet while disciplines such as political theory, philosophy, and history have already assumed a visible place within civic education, the relationship between economics and civics remains comparatively underexplored. This is surprising, because economics was historically, and can once again become, a civic-oriented discipline. Its core concerns have long extended beyond markets narrowly conceived to encompass institutions, moral obligations, cooperation, and the prerequisites for an encompassing notion of human flourishing.

This short piece considers the affinities of economics with the goals of civic education. It first considers the historical roots of economics as a fundamentally civic discipline, before examining the distinctive contribution economic reasoning can make to civic thought. It concludes by reflecting on several practical questions that will shape the future development of “civic economics” within the emerging civics schools.

Economics as a Civic Discipline: Reviving an Older Tradition

Economics originated as a civic discipline. The political economy associated with figures such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thorstein Veblen was never a mere reductive exercise in finding equilibrium prices and quantities. Rather, it was intimately concerned with understanding the social conditions necessary for gainful economic interaction; the moral obligations of citizens to themselves and the wider polity, and conceptualizing some notion of the “good society.” From this perspective, civic education is not simply importing economics from outside, instead it is reconnecting economics with an older intellectual inheritance rooted in political economy. Earlier traditions of economics were less siloed, and channeled insights from philosophy, politics, history, and social theory, towards a broader understanding of society.

The historian of economic thought Robert Heilbroner captured this vision in his description of the great economists as “worldly philosophers.” In the concluding chapter of the final edition of The Worldly Philosophers, titled “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?”, Heilbroner reflected on how economics became increasingly technocratic and detached from historical and ethical reflection. By contrast, earlier economists had sought to understand the roots of social conflict and cooperation, systems of power, and the trajectory of civilization itself. Quantitative analysis was harnessed in service of these larger intellectual aims, rather than being a de-facto end in itself.

The evolving repertoire of formal modeling and statistical analysis has, in some respects, strengthened economics in important ways. Yet specialization also narrowed the discipline’s horizons. As economics came to define itself through methodological rigor and “scientific objectivity,” it often became more distant from the humanistic concerns that once animated political economy.

The civic thought movement offers a powerful opportunity to recover some of these earlier ambitions without abandoning the analytical strengths of modern economics. A willingness to reconsider often arbitrary disciplinary boundaries and revive older traditions of integrative scholarship will help rejuvenate economics for the challenges of the 21^st century.

What Economics Can Contribute to Civic Education

Civic dilemmas can involve antagonisms between individual incentives and collective wellbeing. Economics provides a powerful framework for examining these conundrums. Concepts such as externalities, public goods, free riding, coordination failure, and collective action are central not only to economics, but also to any serious analysis of citizenship. In this vein, economic reasoning has substantial value within civic education because it trains students to think systematically about how individual actions generate broader social outcomes. The civic value of economics lies in cultivating logical habits of reasoning about trade-offs, incentives, and unintended consequences.

Macroeconomic questions are similarly inseparable from civic life. Unemployment, inflation, inequality, globalization, and financial instability all have the potential to affect the dignity of the individual and the social cohesion of society at large. Economic dislocation can weaken trust in institutions and intensify political polarization, while broad-based prosperity can strengthen civic confidence and promote democratic resilience.  For this reason, economic literacy should be regarded as an important component of civic education. Citizens cannot meaningfully deliberate on public policy without some understanding of fiscal constraints, labor markets, inflationary pressures, taxation, or trade-offs between policy objectives. A civic-oriented economics curriculum does not need to prioritize the production of technical specialists. Rather, its purpose would be to cultivate economically informed citizens capable of evaluating competing policy arguments, and a normative understanding of the appropriate roles of both citizens and the state.

Several subfields of economics are particularly germane to civic education and academic research – though they have often been underrepresented within conventional economics departments. Political economy, economic history, the history of economic thought, and the economics of religion offer especially fertile ground for civic inquiry. These fields are relevant because they foreground fundamental civic building blocks, such as culture, institutions, and identity in shaping – and in turn being shaped by – economic change through time. By integrating concepts such as trust, cohesion, and both individual and collective identity into their scholarship, these fields study citizens, not merely consumers.

A cynical view of economics might regard the discipline as excessively reductive; wedded to technical pretensions, and self-indulgent in its abstractions. Whilst different scholars will have varying degrees of sympathy with such criticisms, they can inadvertently erect a strawman that obscures many of the discipline’s best attributes. In its richest form, economics is characterized by substantial methodological pluralism and can accommodate both quantitative and qualitative approaches to inquiry. An intellectually expansive vision of economics is far from being confined to soulless number-crunching or crude behavioral caricatures. Rather, it has enormous potential to speak across conventional disciplinary boundaries to questions of shared interest in the humanities and social sciences.

The Future of Civic Economics

Discussion regarding the place of economics within the civic thought movement has already begun, although it remains at an early stage. At UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, economist Carola Binder has reflected on civic education through the lens of Ludwig von Mises. According to Binder, a Misesian approach to civic education would emphasize deductive reasoning, the application of logic in understanding the basis of human action and social phenomena, and attentiveness to unintended consequences. Exploring other figures in the firmament of economic thought would be a promising way to flesh out a vision of “civic economics.”

Alongside these intellectual questions lie several important practical considerations. How will civic schools evaluate economists for hiring, promotion, and tenure? Will they replicate the standards of conventional R1 economics departments, or adopt broader criteria more consistent with interdisciplinary fields? Whilst such issues may appear dry or mundane relative to the great debates in economics and civics, they will substantively impact the character of civic economics over the coming years. In many elite economics departments, for example, publishing books prior to tenure (or even after, in some cases) is strongly discouraged and priority is given to an increasingly narrow set of “target journals”. Yet within the largely humanities-centric world of civics, with its voracious appetite for the study of fundamental texts, and where long-form argumentation and production of scholarly manuscripts is highly valued, such an approach would seem highly incongruous.

This speaks to a deeper ongoing debate regarding whether civics schools should seek to nurture and develop civics as an autonomous discipline. Should scholars in civic thought develop their own conferences, journals, and academic eco-system? Or are their goals and interests  best served if the field remains  a multidisciplinary melting pot, populated by scholars rooted in conventional academic identities such as political theorists, philosophers, and economists?

Further contemplation of the themes discussed herein and others besides will be integral to the successful development of civic economics. Clarifying how the disciplines of civic thought and economics might fruitfully intersect will shape not only the development of a civic economics research agenda, but also how a generation of students will understand the relationship between economic life and democratic citizenship. The marriage of these two disciplines promises to be fruitful for both: reconnecting economics with its traditional humanistic preoccupations and widening its intellectual horizons, while equipping civics with a powerful set of tools for analyzing the economic influences upon which human flourishing depends.