Critical Political Economy: Complexity, Rationality, and the Logic of Post-Orthodox Pluralism

by Arnsperger; Christian

• ISBN13: 9780415446303
• ISBN10: 0415446309
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This bold and ambitious book attempts to diagnose and remedy what is wrong with economics, so that it can become an emancipatory form of knowledge. Arnsperger's emphasis falls on the idea that economics neglects the possibility that individuals, people to be precise, ask not only ‘what is in it for them’, within a given socio-economic context, but also care about the context itself. The result is a book which will be of interest to serious economists and philosophers of social science everywhere.

Author Biography

Christian Arnsperger is Senior Research Fellow with the Belgian National Science Foundation (FRS-FRNS) and Associate Professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Foreword	p. xviii
Introduction	p. 1
Think again!	p. 1
Economics in a liberating economy	p. 4
The idea of Critical Political Economy	p. 6
A self-undermining orthodoxy	p. 8
The new aims of political economy	p. 10
The mainstream use of economic models	p. 12
Economic knowledge as a tool for action	p. 15
Plan of the book	p. 17
Uncritical complexity	p. 21
Uncritical atoms: the limits of standard economics	p. 23
Two basic questions	p. 24
A tradition of social criticism	p. 26
The anti-emancipatory inversion of standard economics	p. 31
Homo economicus and reflexive social change: study of a constitutive impossibility	p. 39
Looking for homo criticus	p. 54
Uncritical mass: the limits of complexity economics	p. 56
The bottom-up irrelevance of standard economics	p. 57
Post-Walrasian approaches	p. 61
The structure of complexity economics	p. 63
The suicide of the critical subject	p. 74
The use of uncritical knowledge in society	p. 82
The Hayekian heritage of complexity economics	p. 82
Theorist's ignorance, agents' ignorance	p. 84
The competitive process as a real-time "theory"	p. 89
Competition and "spontaneous consciousness"	p. 92
From co-evolution to co-reflection	p. 96
Bottom-up Critical Theory: the logic of self-criticizing complexity	p. 103
The use of critical knowledge about society	p. 105
Creating a potential for social emancipation	p. 105
"Superstition" and the control of social forces	p. 113
Critically oriented interaction and "conscious spontaneity"	p. 129
The unavoidable necessity of critical rationality	p. 133
Bottom-up Critical Theory: what does economics describe?	p. 139
Toward a bottom-up Critical Theory	p. 139
End-state versus process	p. 151
"Critical descriptiveness": what does economics describe?	p. 154
A self-criticizing economic system	p. 162
Emancipation in complex systems	p. 164
From "spontaneous consciousness" to "conscious spontaneity"	p. 174
Toward a theory of self-criticizing systems	p. 181
To what real economy do we aspire?	p. 193
Toward a critical mainstream?	p. 195
A formal approach to critically rational action	p. 197
Why normative economics needs other foundations	p. 197
The spread of critical ideas in complex economic systems	p. 201
Can normative economics become emancipation-oriented?	p. 217
Which characteristic emergents do we want?	p. 220
Breaching the positivelnormative divide	p. 224
Critical Political Economy: the logic of "post-orthodox" pluralism	p. 229
The use of economics in a complex economy	p. 231
The economist as participant observer	p. 231
A self-criticizing economics in a self-criticizing economy	p. 235
The individual use of economic theories	p. 239
Path dependence, variety, and ignorance	p. 240
Opportunistic consultants	p. 247
The dynamics of theory diffusion and the Hayek-Fukuyama theorem	p. 249
Critical consultants and the Horkheimer-Marcuse theorem	p. 251
Free-economy economics	p. 256
An economics that reflects on itself	p. 256
Economics as an intrinsically political discipline	p. 258
Another "Purple Rose of Cairo"?	p. 267
Post-orthodox pluralism in economics	p. 275
Economic theory and local knowledge	p. 275
The thorny issue of "economic literacy"	p. 278
Critical Political Economy: an ideal curriculum	p. 281
Knowledge institutions in a genuinely liberating economy	p. 285
Dominant paradigm or neutral language?	p. 288
The most lucid way ahead	p. 289
Taking the "CPE test"	p. 291
Notes	p. 293
Bibliography	p. 295
Index	p. 306
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