This book is a major new study of the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The author argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the difficulty of coordinating paradigms of intellectual and material labor, Mieszkowski shows that the relationship between the imagination and practical reason is crucial to debates about language and ideology.From (...) the Romantics to Poe and Kafka, writers who explore Kant's claim that poetry "sets the imagination free" discover that the representational and performative powers of language cannot be explained as the products of a self-governing dynamic, whether formal or material. A discourse that neither reflects nor prescribes the values of its society, literature proves to be a uniquely autonomous praxis because it undermines our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression or self-determination. Far from compromising its political significance, this turns literature into the condition of possibility of freedom. For Smith, Bentham, and Marx, the limits of self-rule as a model of agency prompt a similar rethinking of the relationship between language and politics. Their conception of a linguistic labor that informs material praxis is incompatible with the liberal ideal of individualism. In the final analysis, their work invites us to think about social conflicts not as clashes between competing interests, but as a struggle to distinguish human from linguistic imperatives. (shrink)

In recent years, AI research has become more and more computationally demanding. In natural language processing, this tendency is reflected in the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. These powerful neural network-based models can be used for a range of NLP tasks and their language generation capacities have become so sophisticated that it can be very difficult to distinguish their outputs from human language. LLMs have raised concerns over their demonstrable biases, heavy environmental footprints, and (...) future social ramifications. In December 2020, critical research on LLMs led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, co-lead of the company’s AI Ethics team, which sparked a major public controversy around LLMs and the growing corporate influence over AI research. This article explores the role LLMs play in the political economy of AI as infrastructural components for AI research and development. Retracing the technical developments that have led to the emergence of LLMs, we point out how they are intertwined with the business model of big tech companies and further shift power relations in their favour. This becomes visible through the Transformer, which is the underlying architecture of most LLMs today and started the race for ever bigger models when it was introduced by Google in 2017. Using the example of GPT-3, we shed light on recent corporate efforts to commodify LLMs through paid API access and exclusive licensing, raising questions around monopolization and dependency in a field that is increasingly divided by access to large-scale computing power. (shrink)

Vilfredo Pareto's Manual of Political Economy is a 'classic' study in the history of economic thought. It is not only one of the leading works in the Lausanne tradition of economics, which centres on the theory of general equilibrium, it is one of the most important books in the history of neoclassical economics. This 'critical edition' of Pareto's Manual of Political Economy is a very significant work for two main reasons. First, it is the only variorum (...) translation of the 1906 Italian language Manuale di Economia Politica and the 1909 French language Manuel d'Économie Politique. Second, it includes extensive contributions by the editors, all of whom are authorities on the work of Pareto. It total, the editorial contribution are around two hundred pages and range from brief annotations, to extended editors' notes and detailed notes on the 1909 mathematical appendix. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the eighteenth-century debate about luxury, Wahnbaeck traces the shaping of a new language of political economy. By charting not only the development of political economy in Italy, but the methods of transmission of the ideas at the heart of this debate, the author argues that the focus on economic thought is characteristic of the Italian enlightenment at large. Ultimately, these methods were responsible for the development of very distinct 'cultures of enlightenment' (...) across the Italian peninsula. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 465-481 [Access article in PDF] The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Catherine Packham The Scottish Enlightenment has been described as uniting a concern with the origins and foundations of knowledge with a preoccupation with the useful application of knowledge in schemes of practical improvement. 1 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (...) of the Wealth of Nations, which combines a theoretical account of political economy with specific proposals on politico-economic matters, might seem to exemplify such a characterization. For some commentators at the time of its publication, however, Smith's lack of practical experience in the field of trade disqualified any claims he might make to authoritative knowledge. Sir John Pringle, for instance, military surgeon and friend of Smith's, thought that a man "who had never been in trade could not be expected to write well on the subject"; and while Dr. Johnson repudiated this, suggesting that all that was necessary was "extensive views," Pringle's opinion was not unusual. 2 Such objections, interrogating the very basis of Smith's expertise, reiterate, in the context of his work, the same kinds of questions regarding knowledge's provenance which preoccupied his age, and which were indeed addressed by Smith himself. Smith's own account of the formation of philosophical knowledge rests not on the authority of experience but on the role of the imagination; he understood systematic knowledge as an imaginative "machine" or work of fancy created to please and soothe a mind disturbed by phenomena which are observed but unexplained. 3 Smith's account of philosophical [End Page 465] knowledge, in which he would include his own Wealth of Nations, suggests that his own expertise should be judged not on the extent of his personal experience of the matters discussed but on the explanatory power and pleasurable nature of the system which he outlines. With its emphasis on the work of the philosophical imagination, his account also suggests that some of the sources for that system might be somewhat unexpected, a suggestion which this paper will pursue.Such questions concerning the genesis and formation of the new discourse of political economy instituted by Wealth of Nations have recurred in our own time, informing some of the more illuminating of recent work on Smith. Rejecting a tradition which assesses the significance of Wealth of Nations in terms of its anticipation of modern economic analysis, revisionist historians of political and economic thought have, since the late 1970s, offered more contextualist accounts of the work, tracing the relations between Smith's moral and economic philosophy and the contemporary discourses of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism. Other commentators have borrowed from literary scholarship to examine the textual and discursive conventions through which Smith's writings construct and sustain their meanings. 4 Such work has given a new emphasis to the textual and discursive nature of Smith's work as a means to understand its derivation, sources, and influences; it has replaced an older perception of Smith as inspired prophet-founder of the new political economy with an effort to interpret his work in the context of other, adjacent and contemporary forms of inquiry. Collectively, such work highlights the varied and disparate discourses which informed Smith's thinking on economic and other matters and seeks to understand how the complex and diverse forms of interaction with and assimilation of aspects of these philosophical and other discourses may have contributed to the formation of Smith's work—and hence, must also figure in our own attempts to read it.This paper, by exploring a strand of physiological language and imagery which runs through Wealth of Nations and considering it in the context of new developments in Scottish physiological research in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, also seeks to understand Smith's work by examining its relations with contemporary philosophical discourse. Where other recent accounts of Wealth of Nations have reassessed its relationship with moral, political and legal discourses, it will... (shrink)

A friend, correspondent and intellectual successor to David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch forged his reputation in the emerging field of political economy by publishing deeply researched articles in Scottish periodicals and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From 1828 he spent nearly a decade as professor of political economy at the newly founded University of London, thereafter becoming comptroller of the Stationery Office. Perhaps the first professional economist, McCulloch had become internationally renowned by the middle of the century, recognised (...) for sharing his ideas through lucid lecturing and writing. First published in 1825, this textbook was an expanded version of an article originally written in 1822 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reissued here is the 1830 enlarged second edition. In Britain and America the work reached many students, and was translated into multiple European languages. Several other works written or edited by McCulloch are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. (shrink)

Control over food supply was advanced in the kingdom of France in the Eighteenth century by Physiocrat economists under the seemingly advantageous label of 'freedom of grain trade'. In 1764 these reforms brought about a rise in grain prices and generated an artificial dearth that ruined the poor, some of whom died from malnutrition. The King halted the reform and re-established the old regime of regulated prices; in order to maintain the delicate balance between prices and wages, the monarchy tried (...) to limit speculation in subsistence goods and achieved some success in regulating the provisioning of public markets. Le Mercier de la Riviere concluded that executing these reforms required more effective political control. After 1774 the new king gave the Physiocratic reforms a second chance, reforming property rights and establishing an aristocracy of the landed rich. Again, this led to price hikes and as a result so-called 'popular emotions' erupted. Turgot ordered military intervention to dispel the protesters, marking a first rupture between the monarchy and the people over speculation on subsistence. Turgot's experiment failed and he was dismissed, but the Physiocracy had discovered that the market in subsistence offered new opportunities for economic power under the misleading legitimacy of 'economic laws'. Turgot's followers, Dupont de Nemours and Condorcet, continued to develop this 'theory' that was later translated into a 'scientific language' that ultimately asserted the autonomy of the economic sphere and its alleged independence from ethics and politics. The paper examines the continuity of events through the six great jacqueries and the French Revolution, including the all- important agrarian reform that ensued after 1792. Robespierre's concept of 'popular political economy' is analysed and compared with the notion of unfettered private property rights that lies at the heart of neoliberalism. (shrink)

This article shows how attention to a third political discourse -- mercantilist thought -- provides a direct understanding of the issues of commerce and market relations in the framing and ratification of the constitution drafted at the Philadelphia convention in 1787. Mercantilist political discourse was readily employable alongside the republican, liberal and other political languages already studied at greater length. In contrast to the vagueness of classical republican references to �commerce�, which made it a metaphor for entire (...) social and political orders, mercantilist thought enabled Anglo-Americans to be precise and elaborate in discussing economic relations in political contexts. Mercantilist thought provided a positive analysis of market activities, but it simultaneously forestalled a complete identification of liberty with economic self-interest. By assuming that economic regulation might serve a public interest, mercantilist thought allowed the hypothetical possibility that regulation of the market need not be a compromise of freedom in a republic. (shrink)

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It consists of three sections - 'Texts, Objects, Mediality', 'Sound, Aesthetics, Embodiment', and 'Time, Place, Circulation' - containing chapters and short commentaries, framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology. Each section theorizes intersections, (...) connections, and relationships between language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It consists of new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to discuss New Political Economy as a label for the economic analysis of politics, in the English language. The term 'political economy' itself, although it has ceased to be the preferred term by which economists refer to their discipline, it is still being used by a variety of scholars, especially for interdisciplinary research with political science, international relations and other social sciences. Marxist- inspired social scientists also have a claim (...) on the term 'political economy'. The term gained relevance again with economists, in the 1950s, thanks to various critiques of orthodox economics, especially to the theory of economic policy and to economic planning. They ignored issues of political economy, such as the self- interest of politicians. The public choice movement revived these issues by applying rational choice theory to politics and preferred the label “public choice” to designate its movement. Scholars and traditions not affiliated with the public choice movement prefer the label '(new) political economy' to refer to their own economic analysis of politics. The search for a proper label is still ongoing, but they show how they can differentiate their objectives and affiliations. (shrink)

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant (...) in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)

This book provides the first English translations of pivotal essays and debates on the role of language politics, linguistics, and translation in Antonio Gramsci's influential cultural theory. It also includes new works from leading and up-and-coming anglophone scholars to create a vital resource for a wide variety of readers interested in Gramsci across many disciplines including cultural studies, critical political economy, social and political theory, literature, sociology, post-colonialism, and philosophy.

In a recent paper, Chomsky (1989) has proposed two principles which choose among competing transformational derivations. He calls them principles of “Economy of Derivation”. These are the Least Effort principle and the Last Resort principle, seen in (1a-b). (The _________ _________ _ _ nomenclature is partially my own: Chomsky uses the term “Principle of Least Effort” for (1a-b) together.).

In standard interpretations of the history of socialism, the cosmological and providential side of nineteenth century socialist thought tends to be ignored. What still today is often considered the core of socialist reasoning was its preoccupation with the claims of producers, its championing of the cause of the working class, its critique of political economy. In the twentieth century, the most characteristic goal of socialist parties - at least until the advent of Tony Blair - has been the (...) socialisation of the means of production. The particular association of socialism with a language of productivism - with work, producers, the character of labour, and a critique of political economy - goes back to the commentaries of the 1830s and 1840s. Adolphe Blanqui, the brother of the famous revolutionary, in his History of Political Economy in Europe published in 1837, described Fourier and Owen as 'utopian economists',1 while Lorenz von Stein in his Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs, first published in 1842, defined socialism as a theory which made work the sole basis of.. (shrink)

This publication deals with the practical philosophy in Barhebraeus's enclyclopaedia of Aristotelian wisdom "Butyrum sapientiae". The three Syriac books on Ethics, Politics and Economy are unique and the only specimens of its kind, surviving in the Syriac language and literature.

This publication deals with the practical philosophy in Barhebraeus's enclyclopaedia of Aristotelian wisdom "Butyrum sapientiae". The three Syriac books on Ethics, Politics and Economy are unique and the only specimens of its kind, surviving in the Syriac language and literature.

This publication deals with the practical philosophy in Barhebraeus's enclyclopaedia of Aristotelian wisdom "Butyrum sapientiae". The three Syriac books on Ethics, Politics and Economy are unique and the only specimens of its kind, surviving in the Syriac language and literature.

Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This (...) is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies.This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times.This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)

“A fine collection of essays exploring, and in many cases extending, Jim Buchanan’s many contributions and insights to economic, political, and social theory.”– Bruce Caldwell, Professor of Economics, Duke University, USA"The overwhelming impression the reader gets from this very fine collection is the extraordinary expanse of James Buchanan's work. Everyone interested in economics and related fields can profit mightily from this book."– Mario Rizzo, Professor of Economics, New York University, USA This book explores the academic contribution of James Buchanan, (...) who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986. Buchanan’s receipt of the Prize is noteworthy because he was a maverick within the economics profession. In contrast to the preponderance of economists, Buchanan made little use of mathematics and no use of econometrics, preferring to used logic and language to insert his ideas into the scholarly community. Moreover, his ideas extended the domain of economic inquiry along many paths that numerous economists subsequently pursued. Buchanan’s scholarship brought economics and political science together under the rubric of public choice. He was also was a prime figure in bringing economic theory into closer contact with moral and social philosophy.This volume includes essays distributed across the extensive domain of Buchanan’s scholarly contributions, reflecting the range of his scholarly interests. Chapters will examine Buchanan’s scholarly work on public finance, social insurance, public debt, public choice, economic methodology, constitutional political economy, law and economics, and ethics and social theory. The book also examines Buchanan in relation to other prominent economists, both from the distant past and the recent past. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores the role of symbolic languages within and between positivist disciplines. Symbolic languages, of which mathematics is the most important example, consist of tautologically true statements, such as 2 + 2 = 4. These must be operationalized before being useful for positivist research agendas (i.e. two apples and two oranges make four fruit). Disciplines may borrow either the symbolic languages of another discipline or the symbolic language and the accompanying operationalizations. The choice has important theoretical effects, (...) and affects the kind of interdisciplinary community created. The game theory community is an example of a community based on the interdisciplinary exchange of symbolic language only, while the ? political economy? community exchanges both symbolic languages and operationalizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary (...) composition by clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of (...) political language and how it represents the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy. (shrink)

Any approach to the study of managerial situations undertaken without reflection on the underpinning philosophy is flawed because it limits our ability to question the validity of the knowledge claimed in the analysis. The paper considers this issue and presents a philosophical reflection on the use of a systems approach to the modelling of human enterprises. It draws on insights from systems thinking, cognitive science, autopoiesis, communication theory and non-linear dynamics. These are interpreted within the context of social systems as (...) networks of conversations that are generated in language. It is written to invite an exchange of ideas concerning the role of the generative dialogue. (shrink)

This book provides the first English translations of pivotal essays and debates on the role of language politics, linguistics, and translation in Antonio Gramsci's influential cultural theory. It also includes new works from leading and up-and-coming anglophone scholars to create a vital resource for a wide variety of readers interested in Gramsci across many disciplines including cultural studies, critical political economy, social and political theory, literature, sociology, post-colonialism, and philosophy.

The essay investigates the proposition that economic questions are a fit subject for science. This investigation will involve a selective examination of seventeenth-century writings before looking at again selective Enlightenment texts. The essay is deliberately wide ranging, but it aims to pick out the emergence or crystallization of political economy by noting how theorists sought to establish it as a subject matter and in the process develop ways of studying it that aimed to uncover regularities and exhibit generality, (...) systematicity, and precision. Together these supported its pretensions or claims to be a science that would in a Baconian manner be useful and free of the perceived shackles of a moralistic classical disparagement of economic activity. (shrink)

Karl Marx is forgotten as a philosopher today not because he failed, but because the praxis-philosophical core of his Critique of Political Economy has not been rightly perceived. Marx’s Critique of Political Economy is a negative theory which takes it upon itself to uncover the negative aspects of capitalist values theory. It is not selfgrounded, and substantiated solely by Marx’s earlier writings. It cannot serve as the basis for any kind of common, ecological economy, its (...) importance lies only in its practical-philosophical conclusion that we must overcome the human- and nature-destructive value logic of capitalism. (shrink)

Karel Kosík’s book Dialectics of the Concrete. A Study on Problems of Man and World, elaborated under the impact of the de-Stalinization process, is one of the important attempts to rethink Marxist philosophy; it was an attempt to overcome the theoretical stagnation caused by the Stalinist period. It considers the state of Marxist theory, its relations to the past theoretical tradition, as well as it attempts to develop a critical and creative dialogue with different contemporary theoretical conceptions, then hegemonic. Through (...) his reading of Marx and his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy project, Kosík searches for ways of discussing different relationships between philosophy and economics in the contemporary world, and, in particular, he analyzes different theoretical or ideological forms of the reified characteristics of the pseudoconcrete world of care, homo oeconomicus and economic factor. (shrink)

This volume is one of the most remarkable works in the history of economic thought. First published in 1893, its principal significance rests in its argument that economic theory, however technical or pragmatic, is necessarily formed by and derives its meaning from larger moral and philosophical systems and assumptions. Bonar traces the inexorable presence of this moral and philosophical element in a vast, though highly nuanced, survey of the economic aspect of major thinkers from Plato to Darwin and demonstrates how (...) modern economic thought, in turn, grew out of one or another branch of philosophy. Bonar begins with a consideration of Plato and Aristotle, examining their conceptions of wealth, production and distribution, and civil society. Discussions of the Stoics, Epicurians, and early Christianity explore complications introduced by these bodies of thought. His analysis of the classical and medieval world is followed by an extensive treatment of the concept of natural law, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, describing its influence and its relation to ideas of natural rights. The book's later sections concentrate on the dominant modes of ninteenth-cen-tury thought: utilitarianism, idealism, and materialism. Bonar identifies and explores the philosophical topics on which the conduct of technical economic analysis makes assumptions: human nature and human wants, the nature and role of the state, the relation of the individual to society, the nature and origin of property, and the role of ideals in socioeconomic life. He concludes by examining the implications for economics of the theory of evolution arising from the work of Darwin and others. The continuing interest of this volume for economists, philosophers, and sociologists lies in Bonar's contention that at the heart of the relationship of philosophy to economics is the problem of order: the ongoing need to reconcile conflicts between freedom and control, continuity and change, hierarchy and equality. In his reading, the fundamental question to which philosophy and economics are both brought to bear is that of changing the structure of power and opportunity in the social economy. This is, in short, a classic in the history of economics as well as the economic element in intellectual history. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be (...) full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. I begin by examining Shakespeare’s earliest depictions of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing specifically on Othello. -/- . (shrink)

This article seeks to investigate the integration between political economy and religion offered in the forum Religion of Twenty (R20). The idea of R20 forum by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is one of the ideas to unite perceptions between countries and religions. It is based on the phenomenon of the global economy which has begun to be disrupted by conflicts and wars in several countries. Various wars by the superpowers have had implications for disrupting economic stability. Thus, the (...) role of religion in terms of world peace also contributes to the success of global economic stability. In further analysis, this article refers to Ibn Khaldun, Al-Ghazali, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill’s political economy to answer how is the relationship between religion and world peace in economic development? And what role does the R20 forum play in integrating political economy and religion for global economic development? The findings in this article indicate that the sources of political economy in R20 are a means of integrating its patterns in line with the values and essence of religious teachings. (shrink)

Economics has long been the ‘dismal science’. The crisis in classical political economy at the end of the nineteenth century produced radically differing intellectual responses: Marx’s reconstitution of value theory on the basis of his dialectical method, the marginalists’ development of subjective value theory, and the historical school’s advocacy of inductive and historical reasoning. It is against this background that economics was established as a discrete academic discipline, consciously modelling itself on maths and physics and developing its focus (...) on theorising exchange. This entailed extraordinary reductionism, with humans regarded as rational, self-interested actors, and class, society, history and ‘the social’ being excised from economic analysis. On the basis of this narrowing of its concerns, particularly from the 1980s onwards, economics has sought to expand its sphere of influence through a form of imperialism which seeks to apply mainstream economic approaches to other social sciences and sees economics as ‘the universal grammar of social science’. The implications of this shift are discussed in Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis’s two volumes, where they analyse the fate of the social, the political and the historical in economic thought, and assess the future for an inter-disciplinary critique of economic reason. (shrink)

During his first decade on the national political stage , Robert A. Taft contributed to a lively “Old Right” conservative critique of the New Deal’s efforts to achieve economic recovery, promote sustainable growth, and convert to a postwar peacetime economy. This paper examines the senator’s market rhetoric—the ideas on the market, entrepreneurship, and the role of the state that he employed in political arguments after 1935—to understand the foundation of his libertarian brand of conservatism. The following article (...) argues that Taft fused Gilded Age evolutionary naturalism with the Republican Party’s tradition of economic nationalism in order to refute Franklin Roosevelt’s statist liberalism. In particular, he asserted that extra-human natural laws governed the market; that, in the absence of federal interference, it operated flawlessly; that small-business entrepreneurs, not corporations or public enterprise, were the agents of progress; and that the federal government should facilitate, not hinder, entrepreneurial enterprise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DESIRE, TECHNOLOGY, AND POLITICS Pieter Tijmes University ofTwente This essay examines the relationship between desire, technology, and politics in three stages. First, I discuss modernity as a deviation from the general human way of life. By that I mean the general life pattern of human beings since "the foundation of the world," since the emergence of human culture. The expression designates the traditional pattern of subsistence economy. This (...) general pattern is contrasted with modern life as of the sixteenth-century in the West, from which time capitalism governs habits of accumulation and spending that we take to be "natural." But it is in fact exceptional when seen from a larger historical perspective. In the wake of René Girard and in particular Paul Dumouchel, modernity is to be interpreted as the realm of scarcity which is the result of a new way of dealing with mimetic desire. Second, this theory of scarcity is connected with Albert Borgmann's device paradigm of technology which is shown to fit the paradigm of scarcity perfectly. According to Borgmann technology is a matter of devices that procure commodities. In modern ideology technology turns out to be the ally against scarcity. Third, this pattern of the device paradigm is recognized in all our societal and political processes. In this context political problems are solved along the lines of the device paradigm. The consequence is that political ideas and ideals have been eroded. I. Traditional and Modern Society The human way of life that has emerged in the West since the Middle Ages is a new phenomenon in history. One could even argue that modernity as the new life pattern is a deviation from the general human way of life. Nearly everybody agrees on the difference, but there is no unanimity about the nature of the difference between traditional and specific modern 86Pieter Tijimes patterns. A host of interpreters, Karl Marx, Georg Tönnies, Max Weber, Norbert Elias—to mention only a few Germans—have commented on the transition from what I am calling the general way of life to modernity as a kind of deviation. In the wake of René Girard and Paul Dumouchel I would characterize modernity as a different way of dealing with the problem of mimetic desire as the basic form of human behavior. By mimetic desire I mean that people do not cherish authentic desires, but take their desires from others. They imitate others in their desiring. It is the other who tells them what is desirable. This theory of mimetic desire is at bottom a theory of conflict, because conflicts arise from the situation where one desires what another also desires, with the result that the two desires clash with each other over the same object. The norm in traditional cultures is to restrict mimetic desire by various taboos, rites, etc. It is specifically modern to set it loose, with consequences I shall examine herein. Let me formulate this theory in another way: we are not born with fixed ideas, wishes, desires, but we learn them from the social and cultural environment we were dependent upon. Our parents were the first significant others. We learned to look at the world through their eyes. To us reality looked as they saw it. They provided us with their frame of reference to interpret it. This social and cultural learning process is of eminent importance for how and what we think, want or feel. What we found after our birth became our point of departure and was considered as "normal." In this sense, children are the most adapted beings. They will only speak the language they hear, although they have an innate ability for every possible language. Thus we desire in terms of the desires we meet in our environment. We do not start life with a fixed identity, but identity is the result of a learning process that goes on through our whole life. On the one hand, mimesis opens up our possibility of relationships with our fellow men and the world, and on the other hand, mimesis can also be an invasion route for all sorts of entanglements, conflicts and rivalries. How to deal with mimetic desire is a cultural problem. In... (shrink)

Why was Wollstonecraft's landmark feminist work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, categorised as a work of political economy when it was first published? Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft's major writings - including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, (...) and her travel writing - this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details. (shrink)

The program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, formulated primarily by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, of Cambridge, identified the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to early modern writers, while Quentin Skinner, also of Cambridge, treated political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of (...) class='Hi'>political arrangements, and he described such theories as intentional speech acts. Despite the differences in the German and Anglophone modes of treating political language, however, there are no major obstacles in bringing them together. The GG could profit from Pocock's technique of analysis and comparison in identifying early modern political languages, and the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action, as well as the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. The Anglophone mode might profit from considering the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts, and from the GG's systematic use of contemporary sources of language and linguistic definitions. (shrink)

This dissertation defends the place of representation in music. Music’s status as a representational art has been hotly debated since the War of the Romantics, which pitted the Weimar progressives (Liszt, Wagner, &co.) against the Leipzig conservatives (the Schumanns, Brahms, &co.) in an intellectual struggle for what each side took to be the very future of music as an art. I side with the progressives, and argue that music can be and often is a representational medium. Correspondence (or resemblance) theories (...) of representation, such as the one I offer, have been much maligned in philosophy since the 1960s. Most theories assimilate representation under “meaning,” which has usually been thought to belong primarily to language. As a result, representational content has been taken to be purely conventional in the way that sentential meaning is. People want to know what music “means,” and these theories interpret this as “what does it refer to?” or “what propositions does it express?” I argue that propositional communication is only one (small) part of the issue. Once we overcome the bias of conceiving of musical works as essentially linguistic items, speech acts (performed) or sentence tokens (written), we can begin to take music on its own terms to discover how it represents—one way in which it “means.” The first step is to “naturalize” music’s representational content. Influenced by recent discussions in the philosophies of mind and science, I argue in Chapter 1 that composers represent extra-musical objects, events, and states of affairs through their works by exploiting antecedent relations (such as similarities in pitch, timbre, and structure) in order to secure reference to them. In Chapter 2, I survey and respond to the main challenges that those skeptical of music’s representational possibilities would raise against my theory of musical representation. In Chapter 3, I explore a number of ways through which music has been claimed to represent in order to show how my theory accounts for these diverse phenomena better than its conventionalist rivals, both in terms of the metaphysics and the epistemology. Chapter 4 extends this discussion by offering an account of how we perceive, understand, appreciate, and interpret sophisticated musical representations. I conclude by teasing out some of my theory’s implications and suggesting areas for further research. (shrink)

This Article is made up of two parts. The first part reflects on the dominant functionalist approach to comparative consumer bankruptcy and suggests that this might be supplemented by a political economy analysis that addresses the role of national and international interest groups, including professionals, and ideology in understanding different national responses to overindebtedness in North America and Europe. The second part examines current reforms to consumer bankruptcy and responses to overindebtedness in the UK through this political (...) economy lens and concludes that competition among professional groups, the role and interests of the Insolvency Service, and the ideology of the Third Way in consumer policy will influence the ultimate structure adopted for addressing consumer insolvency. A study of the English experience suggests that there is also an element of national path dependency to consumer insolvency reform that may resist pressures towards convergence of approaches between countries in addressing issues of consumer insolvency. (shrink)

The relationship between Adam Smith's official methodology and his own actual theoretical practice as a social scientist may be grasped only against the background of the Humean project of a Moral Newtonianism. The main features in Smith's methodology are: (i) the provisional character of explanatory principles; (ii) 'internal' criteria of truth; (iii) the acknowledgement of an imaginative aspect in principles, with the related problem of the relationship between internal truth and external truth, in terms of mirroring of 'real' causes. Smith's (...) Newtonian (as opposed to Cartesian) methodology makes room for progress in social theorizing in so far as it allows for a decentralization of the various fields of the Moral Science, contributing to the shaping of political economy. On the other hand, the Cartesian legacy in Smith's Newtonian methodology makes the relationship between phenomena and theoretical principles highly problematic. (shrink)

Contemporary art based on new media is situated at the intersection of art-as-we-know-it, smart technologies, digital and algorithmic culture, networked economy, politics, as well as bio and techno sciences. Contemporary art enters into intense relations with these fields, including interactions, adoption of methodological devices and approaches, changes of the areas of activity, hybridization and amalgamation. This text explores those features of contemporary life and culture which are affected by digital art and the recombination, appropriation, remediation, reusing, repurposing, and transfer (...) of artistic procedures/tools from one context or field to another. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This classic text, first published in 1893, was the first attempt to present a view of the relations of philosophy and economics through the whole of their history. In tracing the history of this relationship the author begins by examining the work of the ancient philosophers and continues with the followers of the theory of natural law. He then explores the utilitarian economics and the ¿idealistic economics¿. This title will be of interest to students of the history of economic thought.

It seems to me that no substantial support can be provided for the thesis that the Darwinian theory of evolution drew significantly upon ideas in contemporary Political Economy. What Darwin may have derived from Malthus was not an integral part of the theory of population that the classical economists, including Malthus, put forward. He did not know the literature of Political Economy; and if he had been acquainted with it, he would not have been able to (...) derive anything from it that was important for the theory of natural selection. The judgment that “with Darwin's theory there was a real transfer of knowledge from political economy to biology” (Pancaldi 1985:262) cannot be sustained. (shrink)

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.