menting problem of poverty now stood revealed: economic society was subjected to
laws which werenothuman laws. The rift between Adam Smith and Townsend had
broadened into a chasm; a dichotomy appeared which marked the birth of nineteenth
century consciousness. From this time onward naturalism haunted the science of man,
and the reintegration of society into the human world became the persistently sought
aim of the evolution of social thought. Marxian economics—in this line of argument—
was an essentially unsuccessful attempt to achieve that aim, a failure due to Marx’s
overly close adherence to Ricardo and the tradition of liberal economics” (Polanyi 1957,
125–126). For a radical and very early critique of Marxist and liberal economics, see
Tarde 1902.
- Here I am extending the reversal carried out by Michel Callon, in the wake of
Simmel 1978 (1900) as well as Polanyi, a reversal that makes it possible both to keep the
virtues of the discipline of economics (in particular the formatting of ties) and to avoid
the belief that the economy defines the basis of the world, in Locke’s fashion. See, in
particular, Callon 1998b. - In addition to the seminal work of Laurent Thévenot on including economi-
zation as a particular form of action (Thévenot 1986), on accountability I have bene-
fited in particular from Peter Miller’s research (Miller 1994), and from Power 1995; on
the operations specific to marketing, Cochoy 1999; on the progressive construction of
economic theorems, Lépinay 2003. Polanyi went the furthest toward understanding
the science of economics as the chief agent of the economy, a stroke of genius that in-
stalled the sociology of economics at the heart of the critique of political economics,
something that the usual critics of economism had completely missed, owing either
to scientism or to humanism: “To the bewilderment of thinking minds, unheard-of
wealth turned out to be inseparable from unheard-of poverty. Scholars proclaimed in
unison that a science had been discovered which put the laws governing man’s world
beyond any doubt. It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed
from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name
of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion”
(Polanyi 1957, 102). - On the materialization of modes of calculation, see Callon and Latour 1997; this
amounts to making economics undergo the operation of material embodiment that the
other sciences have undergone thanks to science studies and to the efforts of “situated
cognition”; see Suchman 1987, and the essential book by Edwin Hutchins (1995). We
can sum this up with a slogan:Cogito ergo sumus,“When I think with precision, it is the
laboratory that thinks.” If a rational calculus exists in economics, let us look for the
laboratory (in the broad sense) that allows it. - The numerous attempts to absorb political ecology into political economy
thanks to the choice of anotherquantum—for example energy instead of money—
would keep the defects of the old Constitution intact, or rather would compound the
defects of thethreenaturalizations, since the meta-economy thus produced would have
causal, moral, and natural bases all at the same time! What would one not do to spare
oneself the hard work of taking up political life again! The economy of the environ-
ment, as we shall see, serves conversely as an indispensable instrumentalization for fol-
lowing procedures of externalization.
NOTES TO PAGES 135–136
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