Intellectual History of Economic Normativities

Mikkel Thorup, Mikkel Thorup

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137594167
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The book investigates the many ways thateconomic and moral reasoning interact, overlap and conflict both historicallyand at present. The book explores economic and moral thinking as a historicallycontingent pair using the concept of economic normativities. The contributorsuse case studies including economic practices, such as trade and finance andtax and famine reforms in the British colonies to explore the intellectualhistory of how economic and moral issues interrelate.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Mikkel Thorup (ed.)Intellectual History of Economic Normativities10.1057/978-1-137-59416-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Profiting from Words

Mikkel Thorup¹

(1)

Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Nobelparken, Jens Chr Skous Vej, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

End Abstract

Whether shillings or arguments are being considered, evil consciousness consists of a man’s awareness of the badness of the article which he intends to pass off as good.

(Jeremy Bentham, Handbook of Political Fallacies, 1824, §5.3)

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King gave his famous speech known by everyone for its moving “I have a dream” part at the end. Less known is the speech’s start, where Dr. King laments the continued effects of slavery not yet remedied:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Standing before what was then the largest crowd ever gathered in Washington, he declared: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned.” Mobilizing a religious rhetoric, he said, “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

King powerfully combines an economic and a moral language and turns the individual experience of bankruptcy into a national shame. The truly insolvent is the USA. Working the daily experience of many blacks at the time, who were effectively barred from the ordinary banking and lending system, into his speech, he paralleled the nation with a bank: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Coming out of a religious rhetorical tradition, the quoted parts of King’s speech demonstrate how economic and moral concepts can be intertwined rather than separate spheres. ¹ The economic metaphors in the speech become powerful moral indictments because they are recognized and accepted as economic practices—practices which are then in turn dependent upon strong moral, often implicit, connotations. To pay one’s debt is both a moral and an economic imperative. In both the moral realm—like honouring one’s parents or paying one’s debt to society—and in the economic realm—such as paying back one’s bank loan, getting paid for a day’s work—the exchanges of debt and payments, obligations and expectations work, as they remarkably often do without question or protest, because the moral imperative borrows strength from the economic language and vice versa. To write a bad check is not only an economic and legal transgression but also a moral one. King’s speech works because the economic language draws upon the daily experience of the listeners and upon independent but interdependent economic and moral codes. The economic references in the speech are ordinary economic practices and institutions but they are also infused with moral ideas about reciprocity, indebtedness, promises, trust, and so on. They are, to phrase it in a way so that it is impossible to entangle the economic from the moral, dimensions of credibility.

Economic Normativity

This is what is meant by economic normativity in this book: the operative indistinctions of the economic and the moral; the ways they overlap and draw meaning and strength from each other; and the ways those overlaps can be subversive of purity claims from both the moral and the economic side. Basically, economic normativity is a conceptualization wanting to draw attention to the myriad ways ideas, concepts, meanings, and practices can be simultaneously economic and moral.

That is not to say that everything economic is also always already moral or that everything moral is also economic. Contrary to some studies related to this concept of economic normativity, the purpose is not to expose that economics is really morals by another name. That may be true or not, but is not the claim or issue here. The analytical starting point in the concept of economic normativity is to explore entanglements of the economic and the moral, keeping the historically specific and contextual content of “the economic” and “the moral” in clear view. “The economic” and “the moral” are languages situated in time and place, and the chapters in this book explore among many things how “the economic” was brought into conceptual existence as a sphere ideationally defined in opposition to many of morality’s characteristics like the personal and the intimate, but legitimating this separation in clearly normative terms. Their entanglements and conceptual overlaps, their explicit oppositions and implicit linkages, change from time to time and from case to case.

There is no one single or constant relation, but a relation there is. Anthropology and sociology have done a great job demonstrating these relations in the lived experiences of people all over the world, now and in the past, and this book gives a small contribution to that endeavour by adding the intellectual productions of the relations. This includes studies of how “the economy” was perceived before the modern functional differentiation, when economics was an explicit moral activity, and how possibly the gradual establishment of a differentiation between the economic and the moral was never complete; studies of the normative motivations of establishing concepts and institutions as economic and what conceptual moves were needed to establish “the economic”; studies of how economic terms are mobilized or translated as normative terms linking them to everyday justifications of behaviour, similar to what has happened to psychology and sociology as academic languages seep into everyday conversation and self-presentations; studies of parallel developments in economic and other languages, like the transition from a religious to a secular understanding of man and nature or the shift from a collective to an individualist culture, and how that translates into scientific theory building; studies of how normative terms are mobilized and translated into economic argumentations, and how the language of morality borrows from developments in the economic language; studies of how economic and moral imperatives become self- and other-defining resources for subjectivation processes and how the economic and the moral, the profitable and the just, to say it like that, oftentimes mingle and combine. An intellectual history of economic normativity asks us to detail the conceptual production of indistinctions among the economic and the moral, also, or maybe especially, when that indistinction comes in the form of an explicit distinction.

Economic reasoning is historically contingent on contemporary, cultural, philosophical, scientific, and religious standards. It is filled with metaphors, images, models, and concepts borrowed from outside the world of economics. It is part of society’s struggle with the proper codes of evaluation, part of the societal identification process, naming and owning “problems” and their solutions. It engages in constant practices of “authorization” and discursive constructions of the “true,” “proper,” “profitable,” or “legitimate.” It represents a historically contingent way of knowing, writing, demonstrating, advising, encouraging, and prohibiting, and as such is also to be found outside “pure” economics and economic transactions. We believe that these historical and cultural characteristics of economic reasoning, often involving questions of meaning, discourse, legitimacy, rhetoric, and use of language and metaphors, show that intellectual history has much to offer in terms of an in-depth understanding of the role economic thinking inside and outside economics plays and has played in societies past and present.

Cash and Opinion

“Cash is fact. Everything else is opinion.” ² So spoke the London trader Terry Smith, echoing what many market actors and scholars think about the matter. There are the hard facts and numbers—the economy proper—and over there is all the soft stuff—culture, norms, opinions, and the like. This division has for a long time served economists and traders as well as social and humanities scholars; it is a neat division of labour reflecting preferences and interests rather than reality.

The cultural ³ as well as metaphorical and rhetorical ⁴ properties of economics and the economy are now a major field, as are increasingly its moral properties. What is really interesting is what circulates between or across cash and opinion, what opinions take shape as cash, and what cash as opinions, and what can be seen simultaneously as both cash and opinion, what—in the words of Bentham—happens when shillings and arguments are used, bended, counterfeited, exchanged, or mistaken for each other.

The mid-twentieth-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that “man cannot live without economic theology—without some rationalizations of the abstract and seemingly inchoate arrangements which provide him with his livelihood.” ⁵ Galbraith may have captured the very essence of what intellectual histories of economic normativity are all about: studying how historical actors have justified and legitimized their economic practices. How did past actors and cultures evaluate, describe, or justify their economic activities, their financial investments, their slavery, or the household labour of women? How did they evaluate work or even recognize something as work, as legitimate work or profitable work? Which moral value did they ascribe to different forms of economic activities? Where would they place business, getting wealthy, working all day long, and so on, in their moral hierarchies of life?

The literature exploring the connections between the economic and the moral is enormous. ⁶ One major and quite visible part of this literature is what Viviana Zelizer has called the “separate spheres” and “hostile worlds” approaches postulating a qualitative and constitutive difference between the economy and other spheres, the private sphere mainly, and a contaminating effect if mixed. ⁷ A small sample of recent works would include Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale, ⁸ Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, ⁹ Thomas Sedlacek, Economics of Good and Evil, ¹⁰ Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough?, ¹¹ Michael Sandler, What Money Can’t Buy, ¹² and Philip Roscoe, I Spend Therefore I Am. ¹³ Opposed politically yet related analytically are those, mainly neoclassical econo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Profiting from Words
• 2. The Greed of Gold: Early Modern Conceptions of Money, Nature and Morals
• 3. Trade is a Kind of Warfare: Mercantilism and Corporations in the Thought of Josiah Child
• 4. The Wedel-Jarlsberg-Controversy: Defending the Existing Order against the Reform-Movement in Late Eighteenth-Century Denmark
• 5. The Emergence of the Concept “Political Economy”
• 6. Equilibrium, Natural Order and the Origins of Normative-Deductive Economics
• 7. Representation and Taxation: Fiscality, Human Rights and the French Revolution
• 8. Political Economy at Work: Explaining the Results of Machinery in 1830s Britain
• 9. The Crisis Is the Social Organism’s Mastering of Itself: A Conceptual and Economic History of the Problem of Crisis
• 10. When Finance Became Productive, Scientific and Liberating: A Moral History of Financial Speculation
• 11. The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India
• 12. The Economic Normativity of British Fiscal Administration in Egypt and Nigeria, 1882–1914
• 13. Talking the Creative Economy into Being
• 14. Retweet This: Participation, Collective Production, and New Paradigms of Cultural Production
• Backmatter