Economies, Technology, and the Structure of Human Living

This paper argues that we need to rethink what the object of economic analysis is; that is, what the intelligible relations of an economy are. The paper starts by acknowledging that economies are a constitutive element of human habitats. It also agrees that modern economic analysis based on the price-auction market has provided substantial knowledge about the operation of economies. However, I argue that a more fruitful line of inquiry than the price-auction market is to focus on the schemes of personal and social meaning that set the context for economies. In developing this argument, I describe how such schemes function as a network of human relationships which provide the conditions of the possibilities of the emergence of economic technologies. That is, the explanandum of economy is not the classical price-auction market but the recurrent social cooperative structure (order) of economy in which markets are embedded