Entanglements of Economics and Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Supposed divisions between economics and politics have been highly operative. On the one hand, the predominance of neoclassical economics in the latter part of the twentieth century gave new life to an older liberal separation of state and civil society, newly delineated by the prolific and commanding realm called “the economy.” On the other hand, parallel divisions have abided in traditions like critical theory, in part owing to the endurance of Marx’s (in)famous base-superstructure distinction, notwithstanding its criticism and reinvention by political Marxists such as Ellen Meiksins Wood. And yet the history of economics also reveals that economics has been suffused with visions of politics that political actors have variously animated and instituted, as Karl Polanyi and Mark Blyth have argued. Closer to home, the fallout of the recent financial crisis—including the austerity policies taken in response to it—makes apparent the overwhelming capacity of the economy to govern people’s lives. Until recently—that is, with the rise of alternative approaches to economics in the academy and of nationalist movements on the back of anti-globalization rhetoric in the public sphere—rather than putting into question the intellectual divisions between economics and politics, these historical processes have been subtended by them. By circumscribing “the economy” and with it the “rule of experts,” in Timothy Mitchell’s words, these divisions have long relinquished democratic governance over increasingly influential aspects of public and private life with disastrous effects. Now, as some academic and popular forces are pushing back—the latter with troubling appeals to extreme remedies that (neo)liberalism purported to thwart—it is more urgent than ever that we further question politics’ relationship to economics, and, moreover, consider what it could be. In this panel, we propose to do exactly this by investigating and elucidating entanglements between economics and politics. In doing so, we seek to build on the growing body of work that examines various modes of politics in what some wish to maintain are quintessentially economic phenomena. Our main goals are to critique undemocratic forms of authority that current categorizations help to efface but also, significantly, to elucidate the affirmative potential that inheres in newly perceived political-economic phenomena. The first two papers in this panel align with the latter. Through a reading of Karl Marx on money, Samuel Chambers argues against orthodox theories of money to reveal money’s social and political character. According to Chambers, doing so advances our understanding of what money can, and cannot, achieve in twenty-first century societies. Tristan Bradshaw’s paper similarly takes up, in order to re-evaluate, a phenomenon already operative within markets; namely, subjective utility valuation. Bradshaw challenges us to see within Aristotle an account of utility that inverts the presuppositions of neoclassical economics and, as a result, the current politics of utility. Where neoclassicism sees scarcity, the use of objects, and happiness as individual preference-satisfaction, in utility valuation Aristotle sees abundance, the use of humans, and happiness as collective flourishing. As such, Bradshaw argues that Aristotle can inform a political economy of radical democracy. The next two papers outline forms of political authority within the economy. Addressing the 2007-09 economic crisis, Erin Lockwood seeks to make legible new forms of authority that economists have cultivated in financial markets that secured the conditions for the crisis and have moderated responses to it since. Lockwood provides an example of the political work involved in removing one form of economic activity from public governance and subsequent attempts to reinscribe it in that realm. In her analysis, Lockwood develops an alternative theoretical framework to understand the forms of authority that continue to underpin contemporary financial markets, which, she argues, cannot be reduced to existing political paradigms. William Clare Roberts then enters the contemporary political fray by addressing the question of public control over the economy. Against prevailing political conflicts, Roberts discerns a possible alignment of liberal and Left-wing efforts to assert public control over the economy by reconstructing the social-republican critique of markets that focuses on both personal and impersonal forms of domination therein. If Lockwood and Roberts denounce the ways that existing political-economic arrangements accrue authority so as to delimit political alternatives—and thereby invite means to counter them—Chambers’ and Bradshaw’s papers seek to find tools within economics to resist what only appears to be the irresistible force of received ideas and practices.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 3: Normative Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Money as the Site of the Political in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy - Samuel A. Chambers, Johns Hopkins University

• Aristotle and the Politics of Utility - Tristan Bradshaw, Northwestern University

• The Construction of Financial Authority - Erin Lockwood, University of California, Irvine

• Discrimination in Semi-Public Spaces: The Sharing Economy as Case Study - Geoffrey C Upton, Seton Hall Univ.

Chair

• William Clare Roberts McGill University

Discussant

• Bentley B. Allan Johns Hopkins University