Savage Economics

Wealth, Poverty and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism

David L. Blaney, Naeem Inayatullah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135265038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This innovative book challenges the most powerful and pervasive ideas concerning political economy, international relations, and ethics in the modern world.

Rereading classical authors including Adam Smith, James Steuart, Adam Ferguson, Hegel, and Marx, it provides a systematic and fundamental cultural critique of political economy and critically describes the nature of the mainstream understanding of economics. Blaney and Inayatullah construct a powerful argument about how political economy and the capitalist market economy should be understood, demonstrating that poverty is a product of capitalism itself. They address the questions:

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• Is wealth for some bought at the cost of impoverishing, colonizing, or eradicating others?

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• What benefits of wealth might justify these human costs?

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• What do we gain and lose by endorsing a system of wealth creation?

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• Do even "savage cultures" contain values, critiques, and ways of life that the West still needs?

Opening the way for radically different policies addressing poverty and demanding a rethink of the connections between political economy and international relations, this thought-provoking book is vital reading for students and scholars of politics, economics, IPE and international relations.

1
The cultural constitution of political economy

The “West” constructs itself, in part, through the discipline of political economy. Political economy as theory and practice comes into being through a self-idealization of the West as wealthy, modern, and civilized. This idealization splits the West from others who are deemed poor, backward, and savage. One effect of this split between the West and its others is to hide troubling questions about wealth, modernity, and civilization. Is wealth for some bought at the cost of impoverishing others? What benefits of wealth might justify such immiseration? More generally, what do we gain and lose by embracing modern wealth creation? Do other, even “savage,” cultures offer values, modes of critique, and institutional forms that the West still needs?

Standard economists rarely pose such questions because they assume the vast benefits of wealth creation. Few would be surprised by economists’ implicit commitment to wealth creation, or by their disregard of larger issues. What we may find surprising is that today’s social and cultural critics rarely engage these questions about economy. Interestingly, economists and their critics tend to share an understanding of economics as an acultural domain whose logic operates regardless of the particularities of space and time. Economics’ purported universalism serves both economists and their critics: economics can present itself as science, while critics can dismiss economics as a mode of inquiry devoid of cultural and ethical meaning. Both ignore the emergence of political economy as a cultural project and, therefore, neither really engages the ambiguities of wealth.

Contemporary studies are impoverished by this bifurcation. This impoverishment appears all the more striking in contrast to the relative richness of classical political economy. Figures like Smith, Steuart, Ferguson, Hegel, and Marx help restore our sensitivity to the political and ethical content of modern economic life. Their work helps us specify how wealth production inflicts a wound upon the West and the world. Festering within this wound is the problem of modern poverty: the social deformities created by wealth creation when some are subjected to others in the name of such values as freedom, equality, and individuality. Retrieving the complexity and intractability of modern poverty may permit us to revive international political economy as a domain of ethical contestation and, perhaps, to better encircle the wound of wealth.

I. Political Economy and the Utopian/Savage Slot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot has noted that “the savage is an argument for a particular kind of utopia.”¹ The West, Trouillot explains, constructs itself in relation to a complex other.² On one side, “the savage” serves as exemplary of an early state of humankind, against which modern progress is measured and vindicated. On the other, the savage is only possible as set against the “West” as a “utopian projection,” a “universalist” and “didactic” project. If anthropology came to fill “the Savage Slot” in the “field of significance” that constitutes the “West,” as Trouillot emphasizes, we suggest that what might be called the “Utopian Slot” comes to be filled mostly by political economy.

Political economy serves to articulate our greatest ambitions and values— for wealth, social stability, ethical refinement, peace, (in)equality³ and freedom, to draw a list from Adam Smith and his Scottish Enlightenment fellows. David Hume is exemplary. For Hume, “industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages.”⁴ “Law, order, police, discipline: these can never be carried to any degree of perfection, before human reason has refined itself by exercise, and by an application to the more vulgar arts, at least, of commerce and manufacture. Not to mention,” Hume continues, “that all ignorant ages are infested with superstition, which throws the government off its bias, and disturbs men in the pursuit of interest and happiness.”⁵ For Hume and the Scots, wealth accumulation moves humans to a refined or civilized society.

Political economy, as Hume hints and as we explore at length in this book, emerges from a cultural partitioning where others serve as a negative benchmark against which Europe is wealthy, civilized and rational. These others, the developmentally anachronistic—the non-modern—are appropriately poor, barbaric, and irrational. The savage is precisely what the modern European self is not. The non-Western or non-modern appear, then, not

1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot,” in Richard G. Fox (ed.) Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1991, p. 27.

2 Ibid., pp. 18, 26–9.

3 Modern accounts of equality are simultaneously accounts of necessary and justified inequality.

4 David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Essays: Moral, Political, Literary, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985, p. 271.

5 Ibid., p. 273.

merely as outside of political economy, but also as the excluded other against which the West and the modern are defined. The savage serves, in Timothy Mitchell’s terms, as the “constitutive outside,” so that the identity of the modern West can be seen as a product of the colonial and neocolonial management of difference.⁶ We might say that political economy’s role within the field of significance of the “West” reveals it to be less a discipline analyzing the commonality and variety of human experience and more a particular political/cultural project that is an effect of this splitting of self and other; a kind of splitting where, nevertheless, the disowned elements of the self remain essential to its very construction.⁷ In this sense, political economy is always a global project, encompassing a universal vision though imagined in relation to certain repressed but constitutive others.

The splitting of the West and the savage is achieved temporally.⁸ The rigorous observation and systematic comparison of Scottish political economy is transmuted into a stadial scheme in which the West is located at the apex of development. The savage, while an historical curiosity, is ethically relevant only as a superseded moment of an heroic tale of social progress that culminates in the modern commercial self. Still, the splitting of the savage from the West, and the savage slot from the utopian slot, is not so easily accomplished. Though the savage may serve as the negative marker that continues to give a globalized or internationalized political economy its ethical purpose as theory and practice, the idealized self of the West and the savage have multiple, overlapping, and intimate relations. As Mitchell points out, modernity “depends upon, even as it refuses to recognize … forces that escape its control.”⁹

The Scots themselves sense this difficulty. They deploy a stage-theory of social development to secure this splitting, erecting a “temporal wall” between the West and the savage other.¹⁰ But this architectural metaphor simply conceals an overlap of the utopian and savage slots.¹¹ Though separated and pushed backward, the other nevertheless returns and finds life within the self. The modern cannot eradicate the values and visions of the imagined savage. Nor, more strikingly, can modern commercial beings do without the savage, since we continue to require those superseded values and visions as a mirror to the idealized self and as a corrective for the deficiency

6 Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Timothy Mitchell (ed.) Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000, pp. 4–5, 12–13.

7 See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon, 1988, pp. 25–31, 62–3, 218. This claim was presented in an expressly Nandyan/Lacanian form in the Introduction.

8 We have developed an earlier version of this argument in Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, New York: Routledge, 2004, ch. 2.

9 Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” pp. 12–13.

10 See ch. 2.

11 We are reminded of the power and fragility of architectural metaphors by Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Numbers, Money, Cambridge: MIT, 1995, pp. 6–9.

of modernity.¹² Jonathan Friedman argues that because modern theories of civilizational progress turn on the suppression of the primitive, they consistently bring us back to the primitive as a moment of protest or as an alternative vision of the ideal.¹³ Further, this uneasy juxtaposition of an idealized image of self and its backward other provides an opportunity for the West to tame its most obtrusive anxieties and doubts. Where better to bury doubts than in the richest source of dreams and fantasies—a domain that seems to vindicate the West and represent its greatest historical achievements? Perhaps the separation of self and other is most faithfully defended in political economy because that is where their overlap appears most dangerous.

An investigation of the cultural constitution of political economy involves exploring an identity formation that splits self and other. It also requires articulating the transgressive vision that lies within the necessary overlap of self and other. We find in this space the modern “West’s” most sacred and enduring social and political ideals, its greatest fears and anxieties, and potentially powerful alternative visions of social and political life. Exploring this terrain also means recognizing that political economy is a cultural encounter.

II. The Bifurcation of Culture and Economy

Economy and culture are often set in opposition. The difficulty of the relationship of economics and culture results because, as Philip Crang notes, “the economic and the cultural have long been cast as ‘self’ and ‘other,’ each defined by what the other is not.”¹⁴ Cultural critics usually blame conventional economists for their imperial reach despite the limited relevance of their categories. For example, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that economic concepts are inappropriately applied “outside of any reference to the work of historians or social anthropologists.”¹⁵ Stephen Gudeman pits his cultural analysis of economic life against the “widely accepted view” that “an economy comprises a separate sphere of instrumental or practical action.”¹⁶ William Jackson’s reflections on the economics discipline indicate that “mainstream economists never stray beyond core theoretical assumptions which eschew cultural ideas.”¹⁷ “Positing a set of individual motives and

12 As Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993, suggests, the very purifying moves that construct the modern also proliferate hybrids.

13 Jonathan Friedman, “Civilizational Cycles and the History of Primitivism,” Social Analysis, 1983, no. 14, pp. 39–42.

14 Philip Crang, “Cultural Turns and the (Re)Constitution of Economic Geography: Introduction to Section One,” in Roger Lee and James Willis (eds.) Geographies of Economies, London: Arnold, 1997, p. 4.

15 Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, Cambridge: Polity, 2005, p. 3.

16 Stephen Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Modes and Metaphors of Livelihood, New York: Routledge, 1986, p. xii.

17 William A. Jackson, “Culture, Society, and Economic Theory,”Review of Political Economy, 1993, vol. 5, p. 453.

capacities as universal” eliminates any possibility of seeing cultural difference, as Rhoda Halperin explains.¹⁸ Daniel Miller argues that the construction of “algorithms that model particular relationships within capitalism” render it a “general and ideal system,” bearing little resemblance to an “holistic” view that considers “behaviors … within the larger framework of people’s lives and cosmologies.”¹⁹ “Economy,” claims Timoth...

Table of contents

• RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The cultural constitution of political economy
• 2 The savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism1
• 3 Necro-economics and Steuart’s geocultural political economy
• 4 Capitalism’s wounds
• 5 Shed no tears
• 6 Marx and temporal difference
• 7 Savage times
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index