ABSTRACT
This chapter serves as a first installment of the argument that political economy, including contemporary economics, has a theological structure. It provides a broad overview of the kinds of claims I make in the book and prepares the background for later chapters. Again, I don’t claim simply that modern and, more specifically, Enlightenment thought from which political economy emerges is religious, though it might be motivated by religious convictions or often incorporate explicitly religious notions. I emphasize instead that the symbolic order which political economy and, later, economics occupy contains a theological structure, particularly when it resorts to a kind of theodicy to vindicate the laws of economic life set within a natural order. In this chapter, I tell two stories. The first locates political economy within Enlightenment natural theology. The second explores Leibniz’s theodicy as a model for the vindication of creation deployed by political economy and followed broadly by later economists. The two narratives are neither seamless nor complete, necessarily so given the territory I try to cover in a short space. I aim to signal broad connections between natural theology, theodicy and political economy that set the stage for the central argument of the book that political economy and economics work to justify suffering or cover the wound that suffering linked to economic life creates in the modern project.
