Shackle’s Enquiry Into Choice

Despite the several attempts to rework on his ideas, using non-mainstream approaches, George L. Shackle has remained an outsider in the economic discipline. Shackle, however, if we take seriously what he thought of economics, as a discipline concerned with a subject that is not self-contained but open-ended and impermanent, is not a man alone. Starting from an assessment of Shackle’s understanding of choice as originative and creative, the paper argues that Shackle should be rescued from the role of a nihilist where he is often relegated. In this perspective, a fundamental key to assessing the originality and anticipatory character of Shackle’s contribution can be found in the recent developments of several “friendly” disciplines such as the psychology of motivations and of self-rewarding actions, narrative as the “science” of the possible and the role of calendar time in choice theory. In fact, all these novel rethinkings can contribute to the understanding of Shackle’s main point, that human (and therefore economic) agents are active, creative enterprisers, who cut the deterministic thread by injecting the new in history to come, in making a difference in the future courses of action.