Reciprocity and economics in historical perspective

There is now compelling evidence to suggest that people respond in kind to helpful or hostile behaviour, so much so that some have been led to suggest that the subject of economic behaviour is not so much homo economicus as homo reciprocans. This recent interest in the phenomenon of reciprocity is part of a wider (and very welcome) rethinking of the basic attributes of the economic actor. On the basis of this recent work, economic theorising has moved some distance from the traditional modern-economic approach—an approach that simply assumes a strategically rational, egotistical actor and develops elaborate theorems therefrom—and towards a richer, more complex conceptualisation of the economic actor and her acts. On revisiting a remarkably similar debate that took place some 250 years earlier, however, we wonder whether this re-conceptualisation has yet moved far enough.