The history of European economic thought has long been written by those seeking to prove or disprove the truth-value of the theories they describe. This work takes a different approach. It explores the philosophical groundwork of the theoretical structure within which economic subjects are presented. Demonstrating how the subjects of economic texts tend to be defined in and through their relationship to knowledge, this study addresses the epistemological constitution of subjectivity in economic thought.
This essay serves as a response to Kurt Smith, who wrote a philosophical and historical commentary on my 2018 essay entitled 'Crises, confidence and animal spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes' in The Journal of Philosophical Economics. It also provides a rejoinder to my original commentary on the role of animal spirits in relation to dualism in the work of Descartes and Keynes. I address Smith's historical-philosophical response to my work in three ways. First, I revisit Gilbert Ryle's concept of the intellectualist legend with respect to understanding the Cartesian tradition of thought and expand upon my own exegetical approach in order to clear up the thorny issue of determining and asserting authorial intention. Second, I address the problem of establishing analogies between texts and disciplines. In order to do so I will revisit my earlier critique of the concept of 'the Economy' and show that, contra to Smith's reading, it is not in fact analogous to Descartes' 'human being.' Finally, I open up a fresh exploration of the nature of the relationship between economic rationality and economic system, looking at the broader economic vision of Keynes and some of his notorious opponents – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
The interdisciplinary project to unite the field of mathematics with the social and biological sciences marks the work of Vito Volterra, one of Italy's most prominent mathematicians of the twentieth century. This paper explores the connections between Volterra's 1901 inaugural address at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and the work of two of his contemporaries, Léon Walras and Irving Fisher. All three thinkers were ardent advocates of the mathematical turn in economic thinking. This paper argues, however, that it is the previously unexplored relationship between Volterra and Fisher that sheds the most light on the way in which mechanical physics contributed to the project of mathematization within economics more generally. Furthermore, it explores the way in which mathematical inquiry postulated a new and coherent abstraction of the economy, at the same time that it gave epistemological authority to the economist.
This paper will explore the nuanced epistemological status of the economic subject in Keynes' work, alongside the physiology of the human subject in Descartes' Passions of the Soul and Treatise on Man. In both instances 'animal spirits' serve as an indicator of dualism within the subject. In Descartes, the spirits mediate between the soul and the body, between the rational and non-rational, by their effect on the pineal gland. In Keynes, animal spirits push up against a certain form of economic rationality and represent a non-rational impulse inherent to human nature that is often opposed to economic reason. While Keynes' conception of economic subjectivity extends well beyond the rationalism of many of his predecessors, the dualism presented in his work by means of the animal spirits is worth considering in philosophical terms. Ultimately this paper will conclude that Keynes' work contains an element of what Gilbert Ryle (1949) has termed the 'intellectualist legend,' that is, the philosophical assumption that we must think first, and then act, relegating spontaneous action to the realm of the 'animal' or the 'non-rational.'
