ABSTRACT
If economics is about the relations between means and efficient outcomes, art and aesthetic practices – whether as process or work – in contrast are valued for their non-instrumentality. Is the reality of aesthetics then to be related to economics as its antonym, an instructive corrective to the extreme quantification of social life that afflicts the latter? This paper looks at the economic thinking of the early de-growth advocate and economist E. F. Schumacher and the central place he sought to reserve for aesthetic and spiritual relations in thinking through our economic priorities given that such relations (or lack thereof) played a constitutive role in shaping our social truths, our economic priorities and our environmental intrusions. For Schumacher, economics or the allocation and management of resources was important only so far as it served the non-economic or meta-economic needs and values of communal life. In Small Is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed, Schumacher maps the aesthetic and spiritual realms of communal life to underscore the capacities and relations that are bound to atrophy with an increased economic emphasis on quantification and limitless growth. This chapter contrasts Schumacher’s critique of the mathematical and quasi-scientific emphasis of economics as a discipline against his call to cultivate the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human awareness which he argues is crucial in the formation of meta-economic concerns. By reading Schumacher alongside figures such as Hannah Arendt, Donald Winnicott, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, this chapter brings alive the rare instance of an economist who put the ‘aesthetics of existence’ at the centre of his economic concerns.
