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 eco-nomics, 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 as-sessment 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 as-sessing 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, narra-tive 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 understand-ing of Shackle's main point, that human (and therefore economic) agents are active, creative enterprisers, who cut the deterministic thread by inject-ing the new in history to come, in making a difference in the future courses