Abstract

Starting from an ambiguity in the title of the recently published journal Economics and Philosophy, this article tries to comment on the task of a philosophy of economics from a more or less continental point of view (no claim to uniqueness being involved however).Seen in this light, the general philosophical relevance of such topics as the reading of economic texts, the choice between absolutism or relativism in the history of economic thought, the relation between ethics and economics, is open to reassessment. Although all of these themes have been subject to heated debates, they hitherto seemed to belong to that most isolated of all domains — the one reflected upon by economic philosophy. We believe however that, as it stands, these themes reveal a problematics not unfamiliar to that of philosophy at large. This becomes clear by focusing the analysis on the discourse on primi-tiveness in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890¹-1920⁸), a text the importance of which for the development of economic theory is undeniable. Indeed, the main concept brought to the fore by this analysis — the autoreferential structure of economics — raises questions that call for a metatheoretical treatment, — questions very similar to the ones raised in recent work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, among others. Our main objective being to prepare the field for such a metaphilosophy of economics, only some rough indications are given. Foucault's remarks on co-constitution and Derrida's comments on original retardation could be used to counter a tendency to objectivism characteristic of the human sciences and of economics in particular, by reinscribing the problem of the authority of (human) science in its Utopian structure