The Economic Imaginary of Modernity: The Historical and Knowledge Transformation of the Market Concept in the Western Discourses
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Wu, Hong-Chang
Abstract
The subject of this dissertation is the developing history of the absolutization of the market concept. The central research questions of the dissertation are "why and how can the social imaginary of the economy, which is represented by the concept of the self-regulating market, be considered disembedding in modernity?" and "why and how can the concept of the market be regarded an institution without history and social context, and be essentialized and absolutized?" The main argument is that these questions can be related to a twofold complex composed of the economic imaginary of modernity, which means a particular way to treat the economic reality, and the knowledge imaginaries of the economic discourses, which refer to the theoretical framework of the main current economics.
In order to dismantling the complex, I develop a research strategy by reviewing the issues of modernity (Introduction: the imaginaries of modernity and the imaginative modernity), the phenomena (Ch1: the social engineering of economics and the paradox of the theoretical framework of neoclassical economics), the theories (Ch2: the debates of the market society and the meta-reflections of the representation modes of the main current economics), and the methodologies (Ch3: Foucault’s critiques of the imaginaries of modernity and Bourdieu’s reflections of knowledge imaginaries of the main canonized disciplines). According to the strategy, I research the history of the market concept from the classical period (17th -18th century) to the modern era (20th century) by tracing the emergence of the market concept in the classical period (ch4), the debates and the evolutions of the governmentality of the market (ch5), and the orientations of the laws of the market in the history of the fighting between orthodox and heterodox economic discourses (ch6). After that, I find that absolutizing the market involved the historical and knowledge transformations along six axes: 1. from oeconomy to the economy; 2. from marketplaces to the market; 3. from the imaginary of a utopia to the realization of the market society; 4. from the principle of laissez-faire to the constitution of the competitive order; 5. from the science of a legislator to the formalist revolution; 6. from natural laws to the normative formalistic theorems. Based on my discoveries, I argue that the contemporary social theorists’ critiques of the market (capitalism) and neoclassical economics have lost their power because they ignore the transformations of the market concept and the economic discourses, and then I offered some suggestions about the reconstruction of the social theory of the market and the reassessment of modernity.
Subjects
modernity
the market
history of economic thought
economic sociology
social theory
Type
thesis
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