ABSTRACT
The economic man, political economy and economics Producing and consuming economic man has been a workhorse in the history of political economy ever since his introduction with his ‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ by Adam Smith (1776: 12) in the eighteenth century, as the materialistic foundation of political economy. These propensities are neither located in metaphysics nor mere assumptions. They figure as ‘the necessary consequence of the faculty of reason and speech. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals’ (ibid.). As such ‘to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ are psychological and anthropological universals, according to Smith. Economic man has transmogrified into rational economic man. He is the workhorse in the history of economics, from the second half of the nineteenth century till today’s workhouses of academic economics. In our times he has been supplemented with quasi psychic faculties in recognizing the future socioeconomic constraints on the unfolding of his economy. This faculty is traded as ‘rational expectations’, as the ability to foresee, e.g. any degree of contra finality his planned economic activities may lead to.1 This a priori, nonsociological yet materialistic, foundation of economic theory has been praised and attacked from the very moment it was published. As an introduction to an edition of The Wealth of Nations, E.R.A. Seligman cites ‘Read Adam Smith as he deserves to be read and you will perceive that before him no political economy existed’ as eulogies of Jean Baptiste Say’s and the dissenting John Ruskin alluding to Adam Smith as ‘the half-bred and half-witted Scotchman who taught the deliberate blasphemy: “Thou shalt hate the Lord, thy God, damn his laws and covet his neighbour’s goods”.’ (Smith 1776: v). These extremes in the recension and history of reception refer to the materialism, and ethical radicalism, imbedded in the ‘inquiry into the causes of wealth’
by Adam Smith. A world view, ‘Anschauung’, with economic man’s selfinterest, ‘self-love’, as a final end. Self-interest as motive for creating wealth through interaction, ‘truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’, with the degree of fulfilment of the motive as the yardstick for ethical value.
