Economics Enlightened

The concept of ‘Enlightenment’ is, of course, a treacherous one. Adorno and Habermas were neither the first nor the last to discover this. Ratio and rationality were gradually inscribed into Europe's scientific and philosophical mind map since the mid-seventeenth century, including the field of economics and political economy (which have been given far less attention by intellectual historians than other fields, such as the natural sciences). Contrary to a widely-cherished textbook notion, the eighteenth-century Physiocrats weren't the first to entertain the notion that economics should be interpreted as a science in itself, with the subject of study – the economy – being understood as a separate realm of analysis that followed its own mechanisms and ‘laws’ of motion. The Cameralists were here long before the Physiocrats, but it was the latter who drove the notion to its extreme, describing the realm of economy using the morphology of physics (which during the later nineteenth century became an even more popular analogy in the modern economic sciences). The Cameralists on the other hand (and many Mercantilists) understood the economy to be an ‘organism’, a living being (which it was and is and always has been: economics is about interaction between humans) – something for which biological analogies may be invoked, but certainly not abstract physical laws or working mechanisms. In the modern economic sciences post-1880, when the ‘Marginalist’ or Walrasian Revolution had finally taken hold, this interpretation of the economy as a physical mechanism or system (rather than a biological organism) finally teamed up with a quasi-ethical standpoint of ‘valueless-ness’ (objectivity) coupled with what would become known and cherished as the homo oeconomicus principle (rational individual with perfect overview on chances, available menu of options and ability to precisely calculate/ quantify opportunity costs, maximizing benefits at a given cost structure or, alternatively, minimizing costs in a given framework of desires).