The pre-eminence of the economy in contemporary societies has become commonplace: the commodification of most goods and services; advertisements that punctuate television programmes, are plastered across screens, films and series, and even on athletes; the stakes around purchasing power and social inequalities; work itself, increasingly rivalled by AI and robots; the associated international tensions, such as tariffs; the energy question… The economy sits at the heart of our lives.
The proliferation of critiques—of production, of the private appropriation of profits, of markets or of consumption—attests to this pre-eminence. Often, they help to entrench it rather than to call it into question. For however indispensable they are, such critiques keep our attention fixed on the economy: they almost always discuss ways of transforming it, and rarely how to gain distance from it. Karl Marx’s approach is exemplary in this respect: he sought to demonstrate a major contradiction of capitalism (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) using concepts and methods of calculation forged by the classical economists—thus from within economics, which he regarded as the primary explanatory factor for social phenomena1. Yet such a conception was far from self-evident before the nineteenth century, and it remains the subject of lively controversy.
By what paths did the economy rise to the status of organising principle, to the point of sometimes seeming to supplant religion and politics? Investigating the valorisation of the economy leads us to question the relationship between thought and reality: did material conditions dictate the course of historical processes? If not, which ideas acted as a springboard for the economy? Of course, celebrated analyses have already cleared part of this ground. Most have adopted a particular angle: the Protestant ethic in Max Weber2; the Jewish community in Werner Sombart3; the rise of capitalism and its tensions with the state in Fernand Braudel4; the genesis of liberalism and its social limits in Karl Polanyi5; passions and interests at the source of the market in Albert Hirschman6; or the economic ideology as the “culmination of individualism” in Louis Dumont7.
Each of the foregoing angles offers a complementary light on events and ideas. However, adding theoretically non-neutral perspectives complicates the task of forming an overall view. One might imagine that, in the twenty-first century, a historical and philosophical synthesis of the valorisation of the economy would exist, but such an undertaking does not seem to be on the agenda—perhaps because of the mass of knowledge to be compiled, or because academic division of labour fragments perspectives. This seems regrettable in a world driven by the economy and confronted with the two greatest upheavals it has known since the eighteenth century: the accelerated automation of economic activity as a whole, and global warming. These two features of our time are revolutionary because they call into question the economy as it has been practised for more than two centuries.
Following The Question of Freedom, the reflections on science and those on nature (not translated in English), here is a new series of articles on the valorisation of the economy, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries inclusive. Its sole aim is to better understand the world we live in—a world subject to radical and destabilising changes. For it is only through knowledge that distance can be cultivated. The goal is not to produce a full-dress historical and philosophical synthesis, nor to repeat what has already been admirably formulated and synthesised, but to sketch a perspective encompassing facts and ideas—by way of salient events or figures and, of course, a selection of concepts articulated with one another.
We will begin our historico-conceptual journey with the Italian Renaissance—of the city-states, of humanism and of Machiavelli—which appears as the cradle of economic dynamics and of philosophies that support them. We will then embark for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when commercial horizons extend to Asia, Africa and the Americas; when economic theories are constructed and diversified; when scientific and technical discoveries accelerate; and when theories of contract and natural law are elaborated. We will not, at this stage, go into further detail about the itinerary of these reflections, for detours or shortcuts may be taken as readings and intuitions suggest.
List of the Articles
Notes
1.↑ The economy constitutes the infrastructure of society; ideas the superstructure.
2.↑ Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr & Gordon C. Wells. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.
3.↑ Sombart, Werner. Modern Capitalism, Vol. I: The Pre-Capitalist Economy (translated from the 2nd German ed.). Wellington: K. A. Nitz, 2019. (First English volume of Der moderne Kapitalismus; further vols. not widely available in English.)
4.↑ Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 3 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row / London: Collins, 1981–1984; paperback reissue, University of California Press, 1992.
5.↑ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 2001 (1944).
6.↑ Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977 (Princeton Classics reissue, 2013/2018).
7.↑ Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis I, Gallimard, 1985, p. 75. English version: From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.