Abstract
In this article, I propose four considerations that might frame a history of economic consciousness from the pre-modern oikonomia to the modern economy. (1) Before the economy dominated attention in the public sphere, economic consciousness was pre-discursive. Only once economic concerns were being dealt with, discursive practices were possible. Thus economic practices, for most parts of human history, have been considered a condition rather than a locus of culture. (2) As soon as economic affairs enter the discursive sphere, they cause problems of trust and nourish a culture of suspicion. This is manifest specifically in the pre-eminence of ad-hominem arguments. (3) Modern economic knowledge results from a set of strategies that avoid, rather than deal with, this mistrust. This is apparent from the tendency of economic knowledge to be formal. The notion of the economy as an anonymous social structure emerges from this intellectual avoidance. (4) The problem of the ideology of economic knowledge is less that of hidden interests but that economists cannot assume social responsibility without losing their face as scientists and indeed reinforce the culture of mistrust inherent in modern economic discourse.
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Notes
Among the many economic discourses that link up with economic experiences—and furthermore with history, values, cultures, etc.—think of economic sociology from Georg Simmel to Richard Swedberg, or of economic anthropology beginning with Harold Garfinkel (1967). Also, many of the so-called heterodox schools in economics generally put less emphasis on abstract knowledge of systems and more on descriptive knowledge of actors. The proper starting point for linking these discourses with Husserlian philosophy would be some kind of ‘regional ontology’, as notably proposed by the sociologist Alfred Schütz (1967). Instead of a foundation of (pragmatic) knowledge of economic actions based in Husserl’s early philosophy, we utilize the genetic approach of the late Husserl (1970) to understand the demise of phenomenological reason in the dominating discourse, that of modern economic science. For a critical comparison of my approach to a phenomenology of economics departing from the work of Alfred Schütz, see the engaging article by Špecián, who tries to justify (some) economic abstractions as Schützean “ideal types” (2019). For an explicit interpretation of heterodox forms of economic knowledge within today’s discursive landscape, see Düppe (2011a, 2011b).
Recent economic criticisms that approach the logic of economic discourse from the point of view of psychoanalysis question the integrity of exactly this life-world in today’s capitalism, and thus phenomenology for being insufficient for analyzing it (see for example Žižek (2006) with reference to Lacan). The four considerations of this essay prove the opposite. In short, the capitalist logic of discourse is not a logic of desire, but can be phenomenologically understood as a form of “oblivion”.
The chronological order of these considerations does not exclude that there is plenty of evidence of the four “stages” of economic consciousness in other periods of time. In fact, the co-existence of ancient, early modern, and modern feelings surrounding the economic is characteristic of the current logic of economic discourse.
For more on Husserl’s historical epistemology, see Hyder et al. (2010). It is this historical aspect of the genealogy of reason that fascinated the late Husserl (as well as Heidegger, Arendt, and Levinas) and which is absent in the pragmatic approach to the structure of the life-world in Alfred Schütz. Špecián (2019), for example, only provides a (convenient) example of an economic theory today to illustrate the meaning of a Schützean foundation without considering the history of Western economic reasoning.
In this sense, the notion of pre-epistemic practices can be contrasted with the notion of “tacit knowledge” of Michael Polanyi (2015, 1958), which is also highly favored in Austrian market theory going back to Hayek. Saying that pre-modern economic consciousness was pre-discursive is not to say that there are two types of knowledge, the implicit knowledge of skills and the explicit knowledge of concepts, but that economic practices precede and enable discursive practices. In other words, the liberty to think conceptually is an accomplishment, as Husserl would say, an accomplishment of economic life, as I would add.
“Propriety” is related to “property” only in the sense that property constitutes responsibility of “proper” use—which is the main theme of premodern oikonomic writings. For a historical discussion of premodern institutions of property as social bond, see recently Picketty on “ownership societies” (2020: 99–125).
It is for this reason that the framework of instrumental reason that ranks high in the phenomenological analysis of social action in Alfred Schütz (1967), as well as in the praxeology of Mises (Eberle, 2009; Lavoie, 1986), is not sufficient to understand the genealogy of economic reason. The very notions of “action” and “choice” are the result of a complexity of economic life that is limited to a modern context in which a specific form of knowledge became dominant.
Only in early modern Europe, as Foucault has argued, did the notion of a unified order between the governing of the soul, of territories, of populations, and of states arise (2008).
This is done in many heterodox approaches in economics, for example institutional economics, following on the classic historical analysis by Karl Polanyi (2001) arguing that only in modern societies did the economy become separate from the cultural sphere. Polanyi is only seemingly compatible with the current narrative.
For this reason, a Schützean legitimization of the abstraction of the so-called homo oeconomicus, as proposed by Špecián (2019), might apply to a school like Austrian economics but not to economic equilibrium models. The notion of the individual is the result of the structural notion of the economy, not the other way around.
Regarding Husserl’s notion of the Urstiftung, see Niel (2017).
The historian Jean-Christophe Agnew ascribed this feeling of a “problematic of exchange” to the sixteenth century, a feeling that arose from the frustrations of continuous lamentations about the rising commercial culture. “What stands out in the ‘long-sixteenth-century’ inventory of complaints is its groping to envisage a social abstraction—commodity exchange—that was lived rather than thought. (…) In the century preceding the English Civil War, then, Britons could be described as feeling their way round a problematic of exchange; that is to say, they were putting forward a coherent and repeated pattern of problems or questions about the nature of social identity, intentionality, accountability, transparency, and reciprocity in commodity transactions—the who, what, when, where, and why of exchange. The answers to such questions form the basis of any ruling class’s claim to authority, legitimacy, and justice” (Agnew, 1988: 9).
The increased complexity of society is a common theme to evoke when speaking of the necessity of specialized economic knowledge, in most economic sociology but also in Austrian economics (e.g., Lavoie, 1986).
The belief in the interplay of deduction and induction is generally held among economists, and has been a common topic in economic methodology since John Stuart Mill. It is equally evoked by Špecián (2019) when interpreting Schützen ideal types in terms of the ‘zooming in and out’ of generality. The problem, however, is that there is a tendency to ‘forget oneself’ in the abstraction, and this even applies to the recent empirical turn in economics, as I would argue. See also Düppe (2015) for a phenomenological account of the mathematical experience.
In line with many other commentators of the discipline, Špecián (2019) argues that economics has undergone a transformation in recent decades and is by far less formalistic and married to equilibrium theory. Behavioural economics is often evoked as a warrant of this change. However, this should rather be read as a strategy to rescue the “neo-classical” mainstream. The divide between the discipline of economics and that of economic anthropology or sociology, for example, applies today as it applied seventy years ago (see Mirowski, forthcoming).
See the study of Harro Maas on the comparison of the ethos of economists such as John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, Alfred Marshall, and other more modern economists such as William Stanley Jevons and Jan Tinbergen (Maas, 2014).
The history of this critique begins with the so-called Post-Keynesian movement in the 1970s, among others John Kenneth Galbraith, and the most recent Rethinking Economics movement among students. The idea that scientific rigour comes at the cost of political relevance (and urgency) will persist in spite of the so-called empirical turn in economics.
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Düppe, T. Economic Consciousness. Hum Stud 45, 265–282 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09627-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09627-5