Review of Economic Philosophy

Tag: Value

  • A Market for Values

    Abstract

    Individual autonomy is a good in itself but also a necessary condition for strong communities. In this article, I propose to create a market for experiences of values, which would offer an incentive to exercise functional autonomy, meant as the ability to choose moral, organizational and cultural values independently from one’s social role. This instrument would contribute to shaping a social identity and to strenghtening community. I also argue that the current proposals to « change capitalism » overlook the importance of autonomy, as they largely rely on the role of money.

    Beginning of the article

    The political and cultural debate has long underlined the need to promote environmental and social sustainability as an unavoidable urgency. Also in the economic sphere, several voices propose to overcome or radically change capitalism. However, beyond the appropriate analyses for instance on the limits of a purely subjective approach to value, these proposals do not capture the basic element that Max Weber and many other social scientists have emphasized for more than a century, namely the dominant role of instrumental rationality in our lives.

    Indeed Weber offered an essential analysis of the processes of rationalization in capitalist societies and of its elements: intellectualization, impersonality, bureaucratic control over human lives. And he showed that, while the formal-procedural rationality [Zweckrationalität] is essential in indicating the consequences or results of actions, it is not necessarily consistent with, and may even contradict substantive-value rationality [Wertrationalität], which is rather an expression of ultimate meaning (as argued by Talcott Parsons) and intrinsic value. Weber clearly indicated the risks for freedom and agency which come from the iron cage of a dominant formal rationality, a place which hosts the “last man” for whom it might well be truly said:
    Specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved
    My proposal for a market for moral, organizational and cultural values, described in this article, is based on the idea of fostering value rationality, and it is in service of a better relation between economics and ethics, individual and community, capitalism and democracy…

    Keywords

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    Codes JEL : A12, A13, Z10.

    [See the article on Cairn]

  • The Last Gorz and the Value Criticism

    Abstract

    At the of the 2000s, André Gorz (1923-2007) met with enthusiasm the “Value Criticism”, an heterodox interpretation of Marx, and seemed to find arguments to support his own radical critique of capitalism. The article questions the philosophical status of this link and defends the idea that the Gorz’s Existentialist Marxism is not, fundamentally, compatible with the structuralism of this Marxist current.

    Keywords

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    JEL Codes: B14, B24, B5

    [Read the review in Cairn]

  • Capital read by Moishe Postone: Alchemy or astrology?

    Abstract

    Moishe Postone’s book Time, Work and Social Domination (Postone 1993), is meant to be a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s Capital. Capital is the great subject that moves itself under the impulse of value. Its “movement” is related not to class relations, nor to the market, which is supposedly external to labor, but to the temporal constraint inherent in a dialectic proper to value, which chains everybody up in an infinite process of abstract labor. The reign of value destroys the concrete world of use values. And this until we become aware of the contradiction between what capitalist society is and what it “should be.” According to the author, such a statement, which interprets this work more from its rough draft, Grundrisse, than on the fifteen years of re-elaboration that followed, is built on the basis of confusions concerning the main Marxian concepts referred to: labor, domination, value, valorization, abstraction, and production.

    JEL classification: B51

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  • Hermeneutics and economics: The valued, valuable and usable

    Abstract

    The aim of this paper is to identify the conditions (and limitations) of the extension of the hermeneutic paradigm to economic science. The discussion focuses on the project that looks for an epistemological matrix capable of countering the positivist ambitions of neoclassical economists in the textual sciences. Rather than explaining market mechanisms based on the model of natural sciences to identify principles, we must understand their meaning, based on the model of a text that must be interpreted. The price to pay for this epistemological extension is to sacrifice the explanatory part of economic science and the place of institutions.

    Code JEL: B5.

    Keywords

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