ABSTRACT
Critics of economics and political economy often argue that the discipline artificially constrains our imaginations. Martha Nussbaum (1991), for example, argues that the economic way of thinking impoverishes our sense of life. “If political economy,” she argues, “does not include the complexities of the inner moral life of each human being, its strivings and perplexities, its complicated emotions, its perplexity and terror, if it does not distinguish in its descriptions between a human life and a machine, then we should regard with suspicion its claim to govern a nation of human beings; and we should ask ourselves whether, having seen us as little different from inanimate objects, it might not be capable of treating us with a certain lack of tenderness” (Nussbaum 1991, p. 886).
