ABSTRACT
We are a philosopher and a literary critic who for the past few years have been involved in discussions with both centrist (“neoclassical”) economists and those on the margins of their discipline, including feminist economists and institutionalists, as well as radical economists, both determinist and non-determinist. We have also been writing articles aimed at clarifying (pace McCloskey) the modern history of economics to noneconomists. We have discussed some of that history in relation to mechanism in our contribution above; here we will briefly summarize the history in order to respond to two questions posed by Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio. They ask about “the specificity of the contribution [of ‘literary/cultural economies’] to economic thought.” From our familiarity with their work outside this volume, we know that the new symbolic and libidinal economies have indeed informed their non-determinist, postmodern economic theory. For example, they have tried to include in economics re-evaluations of the experiences and distributions of pleasure and pain, work and desire, hierarchies of taste, emotions and reason, passions and interests, sex, race, and class. They have reconsidered the desiring body of neoclassical economics and contrasted it with the laboring body of political economy. They have commended neoclassicalism for positing that there is no “truly human” body and for displacing the body as origin of value-as it was in the classic labor theory of value. They distinguish this dispersed map of the body-in which the consuming body or its functions is distinct from the producing body or its functions, and none is subsumed into a higher unity-from the organic unity of the body they see in Adam Smith or David Hume. They have also deconstructed essentialisms in both Marxism and neoclassicalism, including the essentializing of markets, planning, the subject, and knowledge, while insisting on the historical contingency of all categories.
