The Concept of Interest

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert O. Hirschman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Self ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Économie Politique ◽  
Personal Welfare ◽  
Analytical Power

This chapter showcases one of Hirschman's keynote lectures at the Collège de France. Hirschman had chosen the theme of an enlarged political economy (une économie politique élargie) to show that the idea—the concept—of “interest” had a history and had been the battleground for economists since the seventeenth century. It is linked, however, not just to the concept of the self, but to the idea of political power itself. Through this lecture, Hirschman attempts to show that personal welfare and statecraft were intertwined from the start. The effort to narrow the definition had threatened to separate behaviors and activities from one domain of life from that of another, and distinguish selfish or “interested” motivations from altruistic or “ethical” actions. This trend had drained the concept itself of its great analytical power.

Happiness and the Theology of the Self in Late Seventeenth-Century England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
Appropriate Use

Muldrew traces the integration of Aristotelian into Christian thinking about happiness, by Thomas Aquinas and during the Renaissance but more particularly in the thinking of late seventeenth-century ‘Latitudinarian’ divines. He argues that they were seeking an alternative way to achieve peace and tranquillity to that offered by Hobbes, who had stressed the need for strong authority. Their alternative drew on a variety of classical ideas about self-cultivation and self-discipline, but built upon and further developed relatively hedonistic versions of these. The pursuit of moderate sensual gratification was legitimized as an appropriate use of human faculties implanted by God. Although this was an erudite tradition, it was presented to a less erudite audience in sermons: these writers often transposed ideas from a classical to an English-language setting. In that context, the word ‘happiness’ came to loom large, appearing frequently and functioning as a key motif in latitudinarian thought.

無為 – On the Eurasian Roots of the Laissez-Faire Doctrine

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gerlach
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Diffusion Process ◽  
Crystallization Process ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wu Wei ◽  
Master Model ◽  
Laissez Faire

Abstract This paper focuses on the diffusion of 無為/ wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three significant developments; first, the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It is revealed that the details of Chinese expertise entered Europe via the textual diffusion of Jesuit texts and the visual diffusion of millions of so-called minben-images during the ceramic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, the hypothesis is advanced that the diffusion of wu-wei, co-evolved with the inner-European laissez-faire principle, the Libaniusian model. In the second part, it is shown that the intellectual foundation of Europe’s first economic school, Physiocracy, is a direct replica of the imported Chinese economic, agrarian craftsmanship of wu-wei; subsequently, it is denied that the indigenous European Libaniusian ideology can be considered the intellectual master-model of Physiocracy and his founder Quesnay. Finally, we argue that Switzerland can be identified as the first European paradigm state of wu-wei. The crystallization process of wu-wei inside Europe ultimately ended with the economic-political reorganization of the newly formed Eidgenossenschaft in 1848. The Swiss succeeded in institutionally transforming traditional Chinese agrarian wu-wei into the modern version of European “commercial wu-wei”. In due course, this alpine paradigm enabled the endogenous Libaniusian model to verify and reflect upon its theory of commercial society. Additionally, this third focus also demonstrates that the later development of Europe’s laissez-faire doctrine has to be seen as a Eurasian co-production – without importing China’s wu-wei, Europe’s pro-commercial ideology might never have matured.

scholarly journals Co-evolving with self-tracking technologies

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 3624-3640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorthe Brogård Kristensen ◽  
Minna Ruckenstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Quantified Self ◽  
Use Of Self ◽  
Technology Market

Seen in a longitudinal perspective, Quantified Self-inspired self-tracking sets up “a laboratory of the self,” where people co-evolve with technologies. By exploring ways in which self-tracking technologies energize everyday aims or are experienced as limiting, we demonstrate how some aspects of the self are amplified while others become reduced and restricted. We suggest that further developing the concept of the laboratory of the self renews the conversation about the role of metrics and technologies by facilitating comparison between different realms of the digital, and demonstrating how services and devices enlarge aspects of the self at the expense of others. The use of self-tracking technologies is inscribed in, but also runs counter to, the larger political-economy landscape. Personal laboratories can aid the exploration of how the techno-mediated selves fit into larger structures of the digital technology market and the role that metrics play in defining them.

CRITICAL NOTICE

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Guala
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
General Theme ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Contemporary Liberalism ◽  
Academic Year ◽  
Critical Notice

The title of this book is rather misleading. “Birth of neoliberal governmentality,” or something like that, would have been more faithful to its contents. In Foucault's vocabulary, “biopolitics” is the “rationalisation” of “governmentality” (p. 261): it's the theory, in other words, as opposed to the art (governmentality) of managing people. The mismatch between title and content is easily explained: the general theme of the courses at the Collège de France had to be announced at the beginning of each academic year. It is part of the mandate of every professor at the Collège, however, that his lectures should follow closely his current research. As a consequence it wasn't unusual for Foucault to take new directions while he was lecturing. In 1979, for the first and only time in his career, he took a diversion into contemporary political philosophy. His principal object of investigation became “neoliberal” political economy. More precisely, he got increasingly interested in those strands of contemporary liberalism that use economic science both as a principle of limitation and of inspiration for the management of people.

scholarly journals Discovering "The Significance of Communication": Harold Adams Innis as Social Constructivist

2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Menahem Blondheim
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Current State ◽  
Économie Politique ◽  
Main Ideas

Abstract: The complexity of Innis’ texts has led to the streamlining of his main ideas and arguments into a sharply reduced abstract. This study juxtaposes Innis’ texts with this generally accepted précis and proposes its modification, mainly by way of understanding Innis as a social constructivist and communication determinist. On the basis of this construction, the study explores the origins of Innis’ approach and methods, considering continuities from his earlier work in political economy, the influence of the Chicago School, and his perspective as a civically involved Canadian, academic and official. The article concludes by considering the relevance of Innis’ ideas and approach to the analysis of our contemporary communications environment and the current state of communication research. Résumé : La complexité des textes d’Innis a entraîné la simplification par d’autres de ses idées et arguments principaux, ce qui a mené à un résumé profondément réducteur de sa pensée. Cette étude juxtapose les textes d’Innis avec ce résumé généralement accepté et propose sa modification, surtout en suggérant une perception d’Innis comme constructiviste social et déterministe communicationnel. L’étude se fonde sur cette perception pour explorer les origines de l’approche et des méthodes d’Innis tout en considérant leur continuité par rapport à ses premières oeuvres en économie politique, l’influence de l’école de Chicago et sa perspective en tant que Canadien, académicien et officiel qui s’impliquait civiquement. L’article conclut en considérant la pertinence des idées et de l’approche d’Innis pour l’analyse de la communication contemporaine et les recherches actuelles en communication.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

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