Life and Money

The Genealogy of the Liberal Economy and the Displacement of Politics

Ute Astrid Tellmann

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544078
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Life and Money uncovers the contentious history of the boundary between economy and politics in liberalism. Ute Tellmann traces the shifting ontologies for defining economic necessity. She argues that our understanding of the malleability of economic relations has been displaced by colonial hierarchies of civilization and the biopolitics of the nation. Bringing economics into conversation with political theory, cultural economy, postcolonial thought, and history, Tellmann gives a radically novel interpretation of scarcity and money in terms of materiality, temporality, and affect.

The book investigates the conceptual shifts regarding economic order during two moments of profound crisis in the history of liberalism. In the wake of the French Revolution, Thomas Robert Malthus's notion of population linked liberalism to a sense of economic necessity that stands counter to political promises of equality. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes's writings on money proved crucial for the invention of macroeconomic theory and signaled the birth of the managed economy. Both periods, Tellmann shows, entail a displacement of the malleability of the economic. By tracing this conceptual history, Life and Money opens up liberalism, including our neoliberal present, to a new sense of economic and political possibility.

Part I. Life

CHAPTER 1

The Invention of Economic Necessity

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the question of life and subsistence entered the political stage. It did so more dramatically in the case of France, and more hesitantly and indecisively in the case of Britain. The event that paradigmatically encapsulated the looming threat of an unprecedented intermingling of life and politics occurred on October 5, 1789. On that day six thousand women were marching to Versailles, demanding bread and commanding the return of the monarch back to the city. A longstanding despair about the inadequacy of bread supplies and its continuing high price had mingled with dissatisfaction about the reluctance of the king to accept the declaration of the rights of man. After besieging the place, they succeeded in forcing the king back to the city. On October 6 the carriages with the king and a crowd of people were returning to Paris, with wagons containing flour following them.1

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke put his exasperation about these events into words, famous for the rhetoric and the political debate that they ignited.2 His despair about the lack of veneration for tradition and the “swinish multitude” received a powerful reply from the hands of Thomas Paine, who declared Rights of Man, including those to subsistence. Both of these texts stood at the beginning of the “most turbulent period in modern British history.”3 This period was characterized by unprecedented popular mobilization, widening political participation, and the proliferation of new political languages that expanded the notion of politics. Society, regarded as a material–social entity, turned into an object of experimentation in a context of political and epistemological uncertainty. Languages of rights, utility, sentiment, and probability mingled in this attempt to link the political revolution to a social one. But within a couple of years all of this was forgotten; it had faltered under the pressure of political opposition, bad harvests, terror, and war.4

Modern political theory has ascertained the politicization of life that occurred around this time in sober terms. In respect to the French Revolution, Hannah Arendt has famously argued that the social question invited the necessity of life onto the political stage, thereby abandoning the foundation of freedom to the “rights of the Sans-Culottes,” which were “dress, food and the reproduction of the species.”5 It was “under the dictate” of the needs of the body that the “multitude of the poor” “appeared on the scene of politics”: “Necessity appeared with them … and the new republic was stillborn; freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself.”6 In her view, the political stage cannot accommodate the natural being, whose needs are uniform and who is governed by immediacy and want.

Michel Foucault has suggested a very different but equally disillusioned take on the politicization of life in this period. Side-stepping altogether this short-lived political spectacle and the terror that followed, he focused instead on the much more lasting innovation of the techniques of governing the living that emerged in this period. He diagnosed that political modernity crossed the biopolitical threshold at that time, meaning that the question of how to govern the living turned into a major administrative concern: health, longevity, circulation of goods, and the milieu of life became the objects of governmental care. For Foucault, this inclusion of life into politics was a correlate of new technique of power. The naturalism of life in the domain of politics unblocked the “problem of government” from the “juridical framework of sovereignty” and resulted in the extension of relations of power.7

But the politicization of life was not just about the refashioning of governmental strategies regarding the living. It was neither just a road to terror—if it was that at all. Instead, the politics of life was an open question, containing both a promise and a threat. The emergence of economic subsistence and life as a political question belonged to a scene of heated contestation. The intermingling of political passions, the appearance of novel political subjects on the stage and the impending politicization of economic life gave this decade its specific quality as a moment of “dissensus” in the sense that Jacques Rancière has defined this term: as a situation in which the “object or stage of discussion itself” is in question.8 Different political languages, proposals, and demands overlapped while political passions and revolutionary hopes ran high.

On this scene of contestation, political economy emerged as a scientific discipline: “The transformation of political economy into a universal science, in the early decades of the nineteenth century was a repudiation of these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary disputes.”9 This new science changed the idiom of public debate as it confronted the heated political demands and experiments with the assessment of the inner workings of the economic system that determined the wealth and poverty of a nation. “The scientific analysis of the economic workings of society” became more and more a touchstone for the political promises of revolution and reform. Political economy counted as the “most highly developed and useful branch of the scientific study of society as a whole.”10 From the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, the “abstract propositions of economic science were invoked in practical politics”; they became constantly recurring “tropes and figures” in the “speeches, writings and conversations of all social classes.”11

The book that prompted the public importance of political economy at the very moment of heated political contestation was the Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. The essay furnished an argument about the harsh realities of economic scarcity that cannot be mitigated through political programs of reform.12 It was a great success. Even though it “rained refutations,” as one biographer of Malthus puts it, Malthus was never ignored, and within the following decades the book changed the terms of public debate.13 The essay went through six editions by 1826 and “immediately became the centre of heated political debate.”14 “No contemporary volume,” commented the Edinburgh Review two years after Malthus’s death in 1838, “produced so powerful an effect upon the age in which it was written as the Essay on Population.”15 Malthus’s doctrines of population and his political economy were popularized through a children’s book, novels, journals, debating clubs, and public lectures.16 It informed the reform of the Poor Laws in 1834 that was believed at the time to be “the first piece of legislation based on scientific or economical principles.”17 Malthus’s political adversaries hoped in vain to “restore the old principles of political science” against the new language of population and economy in order to counter the success of the principle of population.18 Malthus himself, referring to the “increasing attention paid to the science of political economy” found it “particularly gratifying, at the end of the year 1825, to see that what I stated as so desirable twenty years ago, seems to be now on its eve of accomplishment.”19 The success of his work on population earned him the chair of political economy, among the first one’s ever instituted at the East India College in 1805, subsequently named Haileybury College.20 Other universities and colleges followed suit.21 By mid-nineteenth century, the laws of economy had become a world of its own, and the science of political economy an “innocuous, unpolitical subject.”22

This chapter argues that the invention of economic laws of necessity, which the Essay on Population became famous for, was a response to the political uncertainty. The essay appeared in a context, in which the meaning of liberalism and the relation between economy and politics in liberalism had become ambiguous. Against this background, I read Malthus as a political theorist who is concerned with the virtues and dangers of the unlimited exercise of political reason. To Malthus, the widening of the political sphere appears to require epistemic foundations as a counterweight: the envisioning of the economy in terms of laws and scarcity that created undisputable facts. Just as Immanuel Kant fears that pure reason lacked proper limits and needed to be brought back to the shore of experience, Malthus seeks to bring political reason back to the recognition of unchangeable laws that would limit the amount of experimentation and change. But a notion of economy that is born out of a fear of politics is shaped by this apprehension. As a consequence, the economic realm appears as more immutable than it needs to be.

The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows: The first section unfolds the situation of political contestation in England at that time. It substantiates the claim that politics was out of bounds. The second section addresses the “languages” that were dominant in the politicization of the question of life and subsistence. I focus on the epistemic uncertainty and indeterminacy surrounding these issues at the time. The third section traces how a politico-epistemological problematique of lacking foundations is a dominant theme in the Essay on Population. Posited against the “shoreless sea” of political reason, economic discourse turned into a project of foundation. The last section unfolds how—pace Foucault—the entrance of naturalism into liberal politics was about more than an administrative concern of a biopolitical governing of population. It was caught up and shaped by a search for epistemological and political certainty. Malthus feared, just like Arendt, the dominance of the social question in the arena of politics. But the object of this fear is not the politicization of life per se but the potential failure of political judgment in respect to questions that are not wholly political and not wholly economic either, but both at once.

Liberal Dissensus

It was not only Kant who famously contemplated the events of the French Revolution and their impact on the political fate of enlightenment from afar. Malthus was another spectator—albeit a more frightened than elated one. To him “the forcing manure” that brought about the French Revolution “has burst the calyx of humanity, the restraining bond of all society; and, however large the separate petals have grown, however strongly, or even beautifully a few of them have been marked; the whole is at present a loose, deformed, disjointed mass, without union, symmetry, or harmony of colouring.”23 For Kant, the French Revolution was despite of all “misery and atrocities” an event to be more greeted than feared, and he maintained that it could only arouse in the “hearts and desires of all spectators … a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm.”24 To Malthus, it looked like a spectacle that debased the human mind in “the most enlightened nations of the world … by such fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness and folly, as would have disgraced the most savage nations in the most barbarous age.”25

Malthus was alarmed by such revolutionary fervor that, in the words of his contemporary and adversary Marquis de Condorcet, “embrace[s] the entire economy of society, change[s] every social relation and find[s] its way down to the furthest link of the political chain.”26 But he did not have to look across the channel to feel alarmed about such a widening degree of political contestation that challenged the inherited precepts of order. Contentious English politics had started much earlier than the revolutionary upheavals in France. The 1760s had already been a decade of reform politics, characterized by an increasing critique of government.27 But the French Revolution stimulated anew an “intense political debate within Britain and deeply polarized public opinion.”28 The British domestic confrontation gained “a momentum it would otherwise have lacked.” Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution and Paine’s Rights of Man, appearing in 1790 and 1791, respectively, framed the “course of this momentum.”29 After this initial spark, the political debate evolved in response to the unfolding of the political events, but it lacked clear contours. “Reformism or radicalism in the 1790s is protean stuff,” as it does not offer a “single program” and resists “a simple definite classification.”30

Characteristic of this period was a novel “burgeoning political culture”: Clubs and societies were formed, which brought together debates, mutual support, political information, and agitation. This widening of the spaces of expression of public opinion outside of parliament into the coffee houses and discussion clubs changed the political climate.31 It is impossible to overestimate the impact of this change. Pamphlets, writings, and poems circulated through the clubs and radical societies in London and the provinces during the1790s. The “pamphlet had become a weapon, the debate [had become] a struggle over popular mobilization and political ascendancy.”32 The expansion and quickeni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Dick Howard
• Preface
• Introduction: The Economic and the Genealogy of Liberalism
• Part I. Life
• Part II. Money
• Epilogue: Critical Effects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List