Magnitudes in Badiouʼs Objective Phenomenology and Economic Consumer Choice

The young Marx once remarked that political economy finds itself in an estranged form and is therefore in desperate need of a critical reconstruction of its object [Gegenstand]. He proposed a complete deconstruction of economic objectivity and its categories, hoping to recover the true species-life of man. In the article, we assert that contemporary economic theory remains confined by this estrangement, despite managing to ‘revolutionize’ itself out of the grip of classical political economy. The subjectivist-marginalist reliance on ‘measurable’ consumer preferences not only solidified the discipline’s estrangement, but also wrested away any remaining basic principles of economics through neoclassical reconceptualization. A break with estrangement would require novel critical economic thinking that would do away with the discontinuity between classical and neoclassical (contemporary) economics. It would therefore need a rich enough framework to scrutinize its principal categories. We argue that Alain Badiou’s objective phenomenology possesses a complementary synchronic structure able to conform to basic economic tenets, allowing for a comparative and synthetic approach. This would then be the basis for a new model of economic theorizing. We conclude the article with Marx’s value form, seeing it as a possible central category of a newly proposed economic framework.

Political Economy and the Question of Freedom: Notes on Hegel and Marx

The reception of classical political economy played a prominent role in the development of Hegel’s and Marx's political thought. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, to present the general outlines of the reception of classical political economy in Hegel and Marx; secondly, to evaluate the implications of the reception of classical political economy in the concept of freedom in both philosophers. I argue that the reception of classical political economy, due to different philosophical standpoints, leads Hegel and Marx to develop a different conceptualization of freedom. My main concern was to provide not an exhaustive analysis of the topic but a brief sketch of the implications which different interpretations of political economy have on the question of freedom, indicating, if that should be the case, works that may shed more light on some of the issues addressed throughout the contribution.

Introduction

This chapter describes how the book departs from the existing historiography that concerns the work of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. In short, the approach here is to focus on intellectual contexts and linguistic evidence. This excludes the usual treatment of these authors in terms of their methods and models, and it also forecloses the study of their work in relation to ‘classical political economy’ since this category is a retrospective invention of Karl Marx that he coined for the purpose of establishing his supersession of these writers. The implications of the general revision attempted here are far-reaching, especially in relation to the propriety of approaching past thinkers in terms of their ‘method’ and the nature of political economy as a vocation in the early nineteenth century.

Conclusion

This Conclusion closes the study by summarizing the account of political economy that has been developed, which is intended to replace the standard accounts of ‘classical political economy’. The premise motivating this alternative account is that it is unacceptable to simply assume that classical political economy existed. By studying the major controversies of the period, the forms of argument active in them, and the reception of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in the doctrinal contests between Malthus and Ricardo, it was not possible to support the claim that such a unity existed. Instead, the evidence suggests that political economy was an ill-defined staging ground for contests spilling out of parliamentary debate. This is why the vast majority of texts represent attempts to supervene on policy. These texts—including those by Malthus and Ricardo—were almost always produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments. That is, political economy was constructed with great freedom, without intellectual specialization, and in dialogue with the controversies of the day. Moreover, it did not possess its own vocabulary or methods and was even construed as a species of political metaphysics of the same type thought to have caused the French Revolution. In such a context, theoretical speculation concerning commercial life was neither a prestigious nor an accepted form of behaviour, and both Malthus and Ricardo went to elaborate lengths to justify ‘theory’. This circumstance represents a major discontinuity between their time and ours.

Before Method and Models

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.

COVID-19 and the modern plantation: Debunking the neoliberal moral economy

Plantations have long been justified by moral and racial hierarchies that value specialised, export-oriented producers over domestic or subsistence-oriented producers. In this paper, I associate this value hierarchy with the neoliberal moral economy, explain its roots in classical political economy, provide examples of its workings and argue that the Covid-19 crisis provides a crucial opportunity to debunk the neoliberal moral economy. Collective experiences of food insecurity wrought by the pandemic expose the fallacy of central moral economic values underpinning industrial capitalist food supply chains, such as comparative advantage. Shared experiences of food supply chain failures, borne by people in the global North as well as the South, strengthen the moral and economic legitimacy of alternatives.

Economic and Theoretical Aspects of the Structure of the Modern Economy

The article analyzed the modern structure of social production. From the standpoint of classical political economy, we demonstrated the traditional division of the economy into the sphere of material production and the non-production sphere. We argue that in the conditions of scientific and technological innovation, it became necessary to differentiate social production into the sphere of material production (the real sector of the economy) and infrastructure. We highlighted the need to identify the production, energy, social, institutional, information, and environmental infrastructural components in the infrastructure complex. We consider that further social development will lead to the emergence of new infrastructural segments of the economy.