David, Paul A. --- "Path Dependence: A Foundational Concept for Historical Social Science" [2011] ELECD 240; in Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter (eds), "Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory

Editor(s): Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448230

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Path Dependence: A Foundational Concept for Historical Social Science

Author(s): David, Paul A.

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

4. Path dependence: a foundational concept for
historical social science
Paul A. David1

1. PATH DEPENDENCE: WHEN `HISTORY MATTERS'

`Path dependence' is an important concept for social scientists engaged in studying
processes of change, as it is for students of dynamic phenomena in nature. A dynamic
process whose evolution is governed by its own history is `path dependent'. The concept,
thus, is very general in its scope, referring equally to developmental sequences (whether
in evolutionary biology or physics) and social dynamics (involving social interactions
among economic or political agents) that are characterized by positive feedbacks and
self-reinforcing dynamics.
Although the assertion that `history matters' has come to be coupled frequently with
references to the concept of path dependence, the precise meaning of the latter term ­
and hence the significance of the former expression ­ more often than not remains rather
cloudy. This is unnecessary as well as unfortunate. The fundamental idea is straightfor-
ward enough to be intuitively grasped without any instruction in economics; indeed, a
thorough training in modern economics actually might interfere with human intuitions
about history, and especially about processes involving historically contingent evolution.
Even the formalizations of the concept of path dependence (to be introduced subse-
quently) are far from forbidding and readily will repay the effort spent in absorbing them.
They will be seen to lend a useful measure of precision to descriptions of the special class
of dynamical systems that are neither completely deterministic nor purely random in


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The general shape of this ...