ECONOMY AND SOCIAL THEORY

This project provided a comprehensive study and articulation of the ways that economy has been thought in different social theoretical and philosophical traditions and how the equation economy-politics-society has been solved in them. The simple aim of the project was to underline that economy has a history. Economy has not always been what we today understand with it, it has not always functioned with the same principles and means and its place in society has not always been what it is today. That is why also changes in the future are likely, even if the rhetoric of the economical necessities – used at the moment, for example, in the current economical crisis of Europe – seduces one to think otherwise. On the contrary, in this lack of options and “there is no other way” there is something essential of the logic with which economy functions in the era of floating values and continuous state of emergency and with which it forces us to believe in the a-historicity of a certain form of production.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

Risto Heiskala & Akseli Virtanen (eds.): Talous ja yhteiskuntateoria [Economy and Social Theory]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus 2011- 2018.

Vol 1. (2011) “Economy in the Old World and Great Transformation” deals with ways economy was thought in stateless societies and antiquity, Islamic society, Midle Ages Mercantilism etc. before the great transformation and the ways anticipating it and breaking and replacing the old moral-political structure of the world with new thinking and means organized around the centrality of economy.

Vol 2. (2013) “Economy in the Modern World and its Critique” deals with the economy of the modern world and its different critiques in a situation where the great transformation is over in the sense that economy is now thought as its own sphere of reality and the center of the organization of society. And this both in economic and social theory: from Neoclassical economics to Keynes, Schumpeter and Neoinstitutional economics, from Weber, Simmel, Veblen to consumer research, Frankfurt School, Rawls and Post-colonial theory…)

Vol 3. (2018) “Towards New Political Economy” tries to think about approaches to economy (e.g. Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Deleuze, Zizek, Heidegger, Bataille, Baudrillard, C. Schmitt, Tarde, Negri, feminist economics) with which we could perhaps start to understand the new great transformation, that is, the situation where economy has began to unfold over its modern boundaries, methods and rationality (as articulated in the Vol 2) and become again general economy, or “political economy” in the original sense of the syntagma: economy as general management of life and society.