This book analyses contemporary critiques of political economy and highlights the challenges to rethinking contemporary discourses and practices. It carries out a multi-pronged critical and transformative dialogue involving political economy, moral economy, moral sociology, moral anthropology, and spiritual ecology. The authors discuss diverse themes such as the relationship between consciousness and society, the dialogue between Karl Marx and Carl Gustav Jung, a critical sociology of morality and property relations, moral and political economy of (...) the Indigenous peoples and a critique of modern civilization, economic evaluation, as well as alternative traditions of thinking in Marx, Thoreau, Gandhi, J.C. Kumarappa, Rammanohar Lohia, B.R. Ambedkar and Jayaprakash Narain. A unique transdisciplinary text, the book brings together authors and approaches from both the Global North and South. It will be indispensable to students, research scholars and teachers of humanities and social sciences in such fields as economics, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and development studies. (shrink)

To this day, there persists a widespread assumption that Adorno's references to Marx - and especially to Marx's critique of political economy - represent a relic from an early and short-lived stage of Adorno's theoretical development. On the basis of relevant and largely unpublished textual sources, this book refutes this thesis while showing that the centre of Adorno's critical theory of society is occupied by a critique not only of political economy, but of (...) class='Hi'>economy in general. (shrink)

Volume I is one of the most influential documents of modern times, looking at the relationship between labor and value, the role of money, and the conflict between the classes. The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories. The third volume was unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, strove to (...) combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx asserts controversially that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But he also offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society. (shrink)

In recent years, a series of key social, political and economic events has placed the critique of capitalism very much on the theoretical agenda. Responding to these developments, many have begun to express the need for a rapprochement between social criticism and the critique of political economy. The present essay represents a contribution to the recovery of the project that was once synonymous with critical theory itself via a critical engagement with the early writings of (...) Jürgen Habermas. Not only is Habermas’ explicit engagement with the critique of political economy among the most substantial to be found within the mainstream tradition of critical theory, his early social-theoretical insights into the emergent ‘primacy of the political’ in late capitalism can be taken as representative of a number of broader trends in late-20th-century thought which sought to go beyond the premises and categories of Marx’s economic works. Simply put, no reappraisal of the relationship between critical theory and the critique of political economy can succeed, I submit, without taking seriously Habermas’s path-breaking and wide-ranging innovations. (shrink)

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx (...) with Adorno. Rather, it highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice. (shrink)

This book presents a positive account of Aristotle's theory of political economy, arguing that it contains elements that may help us better understand and resolve contemporary social and economic problems. The book considers how Aristotle's work has been utilized by scholars including Marx, Polanyi, Rawls, Nussbaum and Sen to develop solutions to the problem of injustice. It then goes on to present a new Social Welfare Function as an application of Aristotle's theory. In exploring how Aristotle's theories can (...) be applied to contemporary social welfare analysis, the book offers a study that will be of relevance to scholars of the history of economic thought, political theory and the philosophy of economics. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 174-183, February 2022. This article is a commentary on Asger Sørensen's book Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, especially his definition and delimitation of neoliberalism. Overall, I sympathize with Sørensen's aim and critical project and also acknowledge the contribution of his particular approach to a critique of capitalism, political economy and more specifically neoliberalism. However, I shall discuss whether his definition of neoliberalism is the most appropriate from a critical (...) perspective, i.e. as a Critical Theory approach to the role of neoliberalism in contemporary capitalism. This commentary aims to provide a perspective to certain themes in Sørensen's text by discussing his approach in comparison with other ways of defining and understanding neoliberalism. (shrink)

In his late unfinished work on aesthetic theory, Adam Smith develops the concept of rythmus to explore such arts as music, dance and poetry. Smith argues that rythmus communicates emotion in a very specific way. For Smith, narrative arts, such as drama or the novel, predominately seek to recreate or represent in the minds of their readership or audience the emotions of the characters that are portrayed. But what we experience through rythmus, by contrast, is an original, and not a (...) sympathetic, feeling. Rythmus is the communicative medium of a paradoxical mode of collective feeling in which each person feels his or her own emotions, and yet all feel the same thing; in which social being is at once non-fungible and shared. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of analysis of the social relation called ‘capital’ in (...) his work can also be investigated by means of a detour into the economic writings of theUnion des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste, the political organisation in which Badiou played a leading rôle throughout the 1970s in particular. By excavating this theoretical work of the 1970s, we can identify more precisely the historical and political reasons behind Badiou’s ambiguous relation to Marx and specifically to Marx’s systematic grasp of the logic of capital. This excavation will consequently lead us to a reflection on the limits and openings in Badiou’s thought for the Marxian critique of political economy. (shrink)

The introduction of the concept of capital inCapital– with the words ‘we find’ – has provoked a great deal of discussion about the precise relation between the categories of simple circulation and the concept of capital. In this article, I argue that Marx derives the concept of capital by way of an analysis of the immanent contradictions of money, and that this dialectical derivation can be understood as a conceptual movement in which the concepts of money and capital progressively change (...) their modal status. Furthermore, I examine the development of this transition to capital throughout Marx’s writings from the period 1857 to 1872, arguing that the same arguments can be found in all the relevant writings. Finally, the article provides a critical review of the literature on the transition to capital. (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 (...) class='Hi'>economy, its importance lies only in its practical-philosophical conclusion that we must overcome the human- and nature-destructive value logic of capitalism. (shrink)

This article aims to bring together post-Marxist discourse theory and the critique of political economy in the context of the debate on the Marxian theory of value. Although Laclau and Mouffe criticized Marxism for its economic reductionism, they did not connect this to a comprehensive critique of Marx's writings on value and labor. The merit of considering the theory of value in more detail is underscored by discourse theory's relative silence on the capitalist economy. By (...) drawing on the work of Postone and Elson, it will become clear that there are largely two ways to interpret Marx's theory of value: either as an essentialist theory of price and exploitation, or as a historically specific theory of the constitution of social labor relations in capitalist society. By teasing out Laclau's implicit understanding of Marx's value theory, the article argues that it is in fact his essentialist interpretation of the labor theory of value that constitutes an obstacle toward grasping the social relations of labor and commodity production from a discourse-theoretical perspective. This clears the ground toward approaching Marx's value theory from a post-Marxist perspective, which would grasp the social relations of abstract labor as a hegemonic formation. (shrink)

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)

Written between 1857 and 1858, the Grundrisse is the first draft of Marx’s critique of political economy and, thus, also the initial preparatory work on Capital. Despite its editorial vicissitudes and late publication, Grundrisse contains numerous reflections on matters that Marx did not develop elsewhere in his oeuvre and is therefore extremely important for an overall interpretation of his thought. In this collection, various international experts in the field, analysing the Grundrisse on the 150th anniversary of its (...) composition, present a Marx in many ways radically different from the one who figures in the dominant currents of twentieth-century Marxism. The book demonstrates the relevance of the Grundrisse to an understanding of Capital and of Marx’s theoretical project as a whole, which, as is well known, remained uncompleted. It also highlights the continuing explanatory power of Marxian categories for contemporary society and its present contradictions. With contributions from such scholars as Eric Hobsbawm and Terrell Carver, and covering subject areas such as political economy, philosophy and Marxism, this book is likely to become required reading for serious scholars of Marx across the world. (shrink)

In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx issued several critiques of political economy writings stressing the exclusive duality of states and the national economies. He argued that capitalism had characteristic features quite apart from those shaped by the idiosyncrasies of national economies. In the first part of this article, we critique the contemporary state-centered explanations for the industrialization of East Asia on same grounds. We claim that most political economists misinterpret or entirely ignore the significance of export-led (...) industrialization, which is a characteristic feature of East Asian capitalism. In the second part of the article, we demonstrate the importance of the retail revolution in the US and Europe on Asian industrialization. In particular, we show that the development of the sequential ordering system that is an inherent feature of Western-based contract manufacturing differentially shaped the industrial organization of East Asian economies. The resulting path-dependent trajectories of development, in turn, encouraged government policy-makers to ‘buy into’ trends of global capitalism in different ways. The trajectories also led business people to privilege and adapt some social institutions and cultural patterns over other ones. (shrink)

In "Theology and Social Theory", John Milbank critiques Scottish Enlightenment political economy and its attendant descriptive moral philosophy for "de-ethicizing" human action. A closer look at the development of theoretical understandings of sympathy, however, shows that instinct did not ultimately displace virtue. Moreover, a survey of practical responses to poverty calls into question the claim that political economy obliterated the Christian sphere of public charity. Many of the innovations Milbank criticizes as de-ethicizing in fact reflect serious (...) efforts to absorb into ethical reflection and practice deep social and economic changes, which Christian theology could ignore only at its own peril. Moreover, it was sometimes non- or even anti-religious thinkers like David Hume and William Hazlitt who were soonest to see the dangers involved in appealing to instinctual behavior and providential coordination of social action. Returning to the roots of social theory allows theologians to recover lost possibilities for productive collaboration with "the secular.". (shrink)

Marx counted the Greeks among his greatest teachers. The burden of contemporary scholarship is that Marx's debt to antiquity is principally a debt to Aristotle. Studies of the Aristotelian lineages of Marx's political thought have revealed significant aspects of his understanding of justice and the good life. Just as important, scholars have explored the connections between Aristotle's and Marx's writings on economics. On this view, underlying Capital is a normative ideal drawn mainly from Book 1 of Aristotle's Politics. The (...) aim of this essay is to challenge this reading of Marx. Although Marx learned much about the Greeks from Aristotle, his chief theoretical interest lay in the unique accomplishments of the Athenian demos, not in Aristotle's conception of the human good. (shrink)

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its (...) inherent tensions and contradictions. (shrink)