Scott - Architectures of economic subjectivity: the philosophical foundations of the subject in the history of economic thought

Architectures of Economic Subjectivity

The history of European economic thought has long been written by those seeking to prove or disprove the truth-value of the theories they describe. This work takes a different approach. It explores the philosophical groundwork of the theoretical structure within which economic subjects are presented. Demonstrating how the subjects of economic texts tend to be defined in and through their relationship to knowledge, this study addresses the epistemological constitution of subjectivity in economic thought.

Because of the problematic and often reductive subjective foundations of economic theory that are still promulgated by contemporary mainstream economics, there is an urgency to this philosophical and historical treatment of economic thought. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), developed the concept of the architectonic form. This coherent and all-encompassing form of reasoning re-emerges in economic thought with the work of David Ricardo (1816), and becomes the conceptual birthplace of capitalist subjectivity in its various incarnations. Subsequently, as the creators of these systems, economists become the architects of modern economic subjectivity. While Ricardo first developed the economic architectonic with all of its conceptual strengths and inherent fault-lines, the traditions of marginal utility theory, Keynesianism and Austrian non-interventionism reveal the vast ideological and philosophical implications of this structure of economic thought and the containment of humanity within a logic of capital and consumption.

This text will be of interest to those engaged in the history of economic thought, the philosophy of economics and theories of subjectivity. It explores key economic texts and thinkers by investigating the architectonic structure of economic thought, the temporality of economic subjectivity and the role of the political economist as a knowing subject. Within this trajectory, it is argued that Ricardos architectonic marks a remarkable shift in economic thought, inspiring the form of economic reasoning which follows even among those who did not agree with his theory of value and distribution, such as Walras, Marshall, Keynes and Hayek.

Sonya Marie Scott completed her PhD at York University, Toronto, Canada.

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