the philosophy of the diary

How do we – this we, this other and me, the writer, this shadowing and secret sharing editorial we! – gather our data about the formation of character under capitalism? What does ‘under capitalism” even mean?

One can imagine a computer, being steadily fed data concerning the everyday habits of the population that existed ‘under capitalism” for two hundred to three hundred years, storing it and collating it, tying, a cybernetic Varuna, person to person in the coils of its 0 and 1, from which would emerge, at some point, a hermeneutic, a heuristic, a set of axioms, or maybe simply a surrender to the ceaseless flow of info for its own sake.

One can imagine an economist making a model of what the character should be.

One can imagine a novelist tracing the events in some fictitious character’s life that are somehow meant to be typical.

Or one can keep a diary and make penetrating generalizations that go outward towards the world and inward towards one’s own peculiarities, a mutual articulation that is always perched in the doubtful state between the outward and inward, like Raphael’s hat. The diary keeper’s entries share some formal characteristics with the accountant’s – both rely on the spread sheet principle that objectifies time, both “account” – a word which, according to the OED, has its root in the Latin computare, which has a further root in putare, pruning trees or ‘cleaning”, purifying. Although putare could also mean counting. Let’s quote Girard Minaud, in La comptabilite a Rome: essai d’histoire economique…, quoting Emile Benveniste here:

Emile Beveniste considered that one ought to being with the technical sense of putare: “In following (from the base to the top) the count, to detach successively the articles which have been verified. From this, ‘to verify, purify””. This image can be understood by seeing the pruner begin his work from the lowest branches for progressing towards the height of the tree and attaining its summa. The procedure explains why the summa designated, for the ancients, what is called the “total” today, but also the ‘sum’. E. Benveniste has in effect taken care to specify, concerning addition: “In the classical civilizations this operation is conducted according to a different model than our own. One made the count of numbers superposed on one another not, as with us, from the highest to the lowest, but from the lowest to the highest, until attaining what they called the summa, that is to say, the superior number.” (169)

The tree, the accountant, the diarist and the computer – a root connects them all, and an inversion marks a history.

But of course the computer and the accountant have specialized in a certain branch of objectivity, while the diarist, the clerk of literature, prefers not to.
(tbd)

the thread

“The first distinction I would make is between two major classes of line,
which I shall call threads and traces. By no means all lines fall into either
category, but perhaps the majority do, and they will be of most importance
for my argument. A thread is a filament of some kind, which may
be entangled with other threads or suspended between points in threedimensional
space. At a relatively microscopic level threads have surfaces;
however, they are not drawn on surfaces.” – Tim Ingold, Lines: a brief history, 41

The God Varuna, for example, has the magical power to tie people at a distance by ties as magic as all sovereignty in these [indo-european] civilizations. Varuna is always omnivoyant, all powerful and a ‘binder’ by that very magic. Indra, himself, ties by the atmosphere that is his laces and his thread. Varuna acts like a binder with his passive reticulation, Indra proceeds by aggressive acts of imprisonment.” – Christian Werckele, “The power of the ephemeral and the network of the invisible”.

There are three themes that I should clarify here, should have clarified by now.
One is that the character of man or woman under capitalism is always in some relationship, whether voluntary or involuntary, knowing or unknowing, with the mythic rational economic agent, with homo oeconomicus. Though first explicitly given a name and a habitation in the golden years of mathematical economics, when the models were carved out of perfect and perfectly fictitious models of marketplaces structured by the irresistible attraction of an equilibrium between supply and demand, the myth has roamed far, in the century since the 1890s, among the policy papers, economics textbooks, legal codes, and in the popular mindset. The hero of economic rationality has even voyaged to all the disciplines and founded colonies there.

A second theme, which may seem unrelated (o bind these themes, great stringer of men!) is an opposing tug on the formation of character under capitalism. This is the tug of alienation. I take this theme primarily from Marx, not only because I think his construction of alienation in the 1840s supplies us with a perfect tool for understanding why capitalism is peculiarly oppressive, but also because, in Capital, he produced a picture of capitalist society that allows us to do nuance: for alienation varies according to the level in which the economic agent is placed. The alienation of the producers has taken the greatest share of attention, but the level of the producers, if we trust the (Engels edited) second and third books of Capital, is different from the level of the agents of circulation. One of my hypotheses is that the agents of circulation, which have become much more numerous than the producers in the developed economies, suffer from a different form of alienation, one that incorporates not only the alienation of the assembly line worker but, as well, the alienation that arises from the remove from production. Although Marx does not predict that the agents of circulation will become preponderant as the industrial system of production evolves, one can credibly draw on Marx’s insights to understand this story.

Foregrounded in this network of speculation, I want to look at a certain lineage within modernity, which inherited the reticular wisdom of the moralistes of the early modern period and transformed it into the clerk’s Dao. The clerks of literature, the clerks of the arts, figure here both as the makers of characters in which the stress and Sturm of capitalism is registered and as characters themselves. Indra’s net, here, becomes James’ In the Cage.

And then the third theme. For in tracing out these tendencies, or more frankly, creating this Begriffsroman, where concepts are the plot elements, I am struck by how the great theoreticians of modernization (Marx, Simmel, Weber, Foucault, etc.) have invested the story with an absolute sweep. The story is that of the iron cage – cages again! – in which all forms of archaic economic activity are ruined and buried under the system of economic rationality, until rationality becomes synonymous with self-advantage. The narrative, here, is epic, but I think it leaves out everyday life, that unpurged primitive remnant. When we plunge into the worlds of work or home, when we look at the now endless media net in which we all struggle, when, in short, we plunge into the negotium and otium, the public sphere and the private, we find the capillary work of earlier forms of exchange and reciprocity still as active as ever. They appear now as the favor you do a friend, now as the barbecue cookout, now as the shared task, now as mental illness and night sweats – they appear all over the place, barter and gift, earmarked money and piggy banks. All the archaic forms that bow to homo economicus return, secondary elaborations that spring up even in the most economically ‘rational’ institutions. This does not seem to me to be an accident, a feature of incomplete modernization, but the persistent, human supplement. The collective vision of the alienated clerks is of a world in which that supplement is extinguished.

These are my threads.

the outside and the inside of a hat: the decline of aura

So much depends upon the hat…

When Raphael is explaining the prison of debt into which he is forced in order to court Foedora, he speaks of a spectre that haunts him: “In the midst of poetry, in the midst of an idea, or at dinner, surrounded by friends, with happiness, with sweet raillery, I see enter the room a man in a chestnut colored suit, holding in his hands a dilapidated hat (un chapeau râpé). That man will be my debt, my letter of credit, a specter who will wilt my joy, who will force me to quit the table to speak to him…”

It is the dilapidated hat in the hand of the specter, in the hand of debt itself, Raphaël’s double – for the man is the spirit of Raphaël’s signature on the letter of credit – of which I’d like to speak. If a hat, in the Freudian dream language, is an augur of castration, what further effect is put into play by the delapidation of the hat?

Balzac has already alerted us, at the very beginning of Peau de Chagrin, that much will depend on the hat. In the first sequence in the book, as we follow Raphael’s trajectory through Paris, we find him going into a casino – at which point the authorial voice bursts out with the following commentary:

When you enter into a house of games, the law begins by despoiling you of your hat. Is this an evangelic and providential parable! Isn’t it rather a manner of concluding an infernal contract, with you in demanding I don’t know what stake? Is it to require you to keep a respectable attitude before those who are going to win your money? Do the police infiltrated into these social sewers insist on knowing the name of your hatmaker, or of yours, if you have inscribed it on the interior band? Is it at last in order to take the measure of your skull and construct an instructive statistical table on the cerebral capacity of gamers? On this point, the administration keeps a complete silence. But know well, hardly have you made a step onto the green carpet than you no longer belong to yourself .”

Balzac is capable of outbursts that predict all the styles to come – here, surely, we have the style of Melville, a sort of opium dream decoding of the fate of the world, as written in the language of the world’s little accessories. It is this warning that we should remember when reading of another night’s wanderings – the night in which Raphael, plucked of all his money and still unable to move the heart of Foedora, finds himself staring at his hat as the rain stops on a Paris street.

“And I always loved, loved that cold woman whose heart wanted every second to be conquered and who, in always effacing the promises of the previous day, the next day made herself into a new mistress. In turning under the grill of the Institute, a feverish movement held me in its grasp. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t possess a cent. And to top it all off, the rain had deformed my hat. How to approach, thenceforward, an elegant woman and present myself in her salon without a satisfactory hat? Thanks to my extreme care, even as I cursed the stupid and ignorant fashion for exhibiting the inside of our hats while keeping them constantly in our hands, I had up to that moment maintained mine in a doubtful state. Without being curiously new or dryly old, denuded of pelt or very silky, it could pass for the problematic hat of a careful man – but its artificial existence had arrived at its last gasp: it was wounded, dejected, over with, a true rag, worthy representative of its master.”
Raphael’s hat is, of course, ruined for show. And yet, what is this ruin? It is a question not just of keeping the hat new looking, but keeping this particular thing – a hat, a thing that protects the head from, among other things, rain and mud – in a doubtful state of care, which is exhibited by the inside of the hat – the coiffe, the band. Where, remember, the police might look for the name of the owner.
The outside and inside of Raphaël’s hat is a model of something uncanny inside use value – inside the artificial existence of the commodity.
While the state of the hat is a variable within the grammar of fashion circa 1830 that has gone out of fashion, one can easily find equivalents for the outside and inside of the hat today – for instance, in that perpetually doubtful thing, a pair of blue jeans.

markets and talismans (changed a bit)

The great metaphor for George Foster’s thesis of the image of the limited good, published in the 1960s, preceded George Foster by one hundred years: it is the talisman in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, or The Wild Ass’s Skin.

Treasure, treasure-hunting and rarity are all bound up with each other in a stubborn cosmic vision of the distribution of goods in the world that appears in our dreams, love life and friendship. This world is ruled, as I will point out multitudinously in this essay, by Nemesis. No one saw the affective changes that were occurring in the switch between the regime of the old economy and the new – the economy of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, the economy of growth – better than Jules Michelet. Michelet, writing in 1846, picks up on the difference between the terms 'treasure' and "money" to demarcate a division not only between the emotional regimes of wealth but in how these dominant affects correspond to a basic division between urban and rural society. For the peasant who comes to the city: “How difficult it is, what force one needs, what domination of oneself to hold money captive and the pocket sewed close, when everything solicits the worker! Add to this that the savings account that stands guard over an invisible money gives one none of the emotions of the treasure that is buried and dug up by the peasant with so much pleasure, mystery and fear…” [La Peuple, 95, my translation]

The People, Michelet’s experiment in a sort of romantic ethnography – using his own experience, hearing with his own ears the 'voices of the crowd' – is a shifty text, romantic, full of sentiments, displaying too much the pulses of its heart – and yet Michelet’s instincts for the larger social facts is very good. He sees very well, just as Marx does, that agriculture is being industrialized – it is for this reason that he compares a British agricultural economy that has devolved into an agribusiness that employs workers or tenents with the small holding farmers of France. But he also sees the tension between ‘invisible’ money and visible treasure, an object to be buried. It is a tension between the invisibility of the system and the hiddenness of piecemeal primitive accumulation. Latter in the nineteenth century, Georg Simmel will take up the issue of the difference between the money economy of capitalism and the ‘natural’ economy of the small holder. For Simmel, the affective side of economics – pleasure, mystery, fear – are not contingent or accidental properties that one can put to one side, but feed back largely into economics as it is incorporated – a death drive - in a whole way of life.

Balzac’s Human comedy doesn’t just try to capture the workings of French society from the Revolution to the apogee of the Bourgeois King, Louis-Philippe – in its many passages, incidents, cities, shuffles of character, essayistic asides, it crystallizes into plot and counterplot the cosmic vision of capitalist society at the moment when it first becomes aware of itself. Marx’s affinity for Balzac comes out of his similar venture in Capital, although Capital, of course, surveys the comedy from a different focal point, in which the Human is denuded of the moraliste’s universality that still raggedly clung to it for Balzac.

In The Wild Ass’s Skin, we are, once again, plunged into the world of the search for luxury objects and their seemingly odd markets, where the deals are all about valuing the ‘invaluable’. In this case, the object is a beautiful woman who has inherited a fortune – Foedora. She is first introduced to Raphaël, the novel’s protagonist, by Rastignac, under the category of her price: she is the unmarried possessor of an income of 80,000 livres. That income comes from investment in bonds – properly, she possesses 80,000 livres in ‘rentes’.
La peau de chagrin is a young novel, written in 1830 and published in 1831 and considered the first of the Human Comedy novels. It begins with the magical contract that, as I noted above, is a wonderful image of the limited good. Here is the premise of the book, unrolled at the very beginning, when we follow Raphaël de Valentin as he walks about in a fever, waiting for night to come so he can throw himself off a bridge. In the course of his wandering, he comes upon a shop full of odds and ends, and in it he finds a mysterious talisman made of onyx hide. The talisman is inscribed with a phrase in Arabic. Balzac, that master of cod learning, reproduces it and allows Raphael the knowledge to read the “Sanskrit”, as the owner of the odd shop calls it. promises to make the wishes of the person who uses it come true. “If you possess me, you will possess all. But your life belongs to me. God wills it. Desire, and your desires will be realized. But regulate your wishes according to your life. It is there. For every wish, I will shrink, like your days. Do you want me? Take me. God grants it to you. So be it!” And so the desire for fortune, the want realized, is paid for in kind – by a counter-gift of the days of one’s life. The talisman is the very image of one way of looking at the almost magical supply of goods and services that already, in 1830, could be felt on the horizons. The culture of growth never shakes off Nemesis, who balances and casts an evil eye on the “too much”.
Under this image, Balzac sets up Raphaël’s rescue from poverty and suicide. And it is after the talisman has realized the first of his wishes – for Raphaël is unexpectedly rescued from poverty and the feeling that he must commit suicide that very night – that we hear how Raphaël came to be in such a plight. It is a tale he tells a group of his friends, and some sympathetic demi-prostitutes.
I love the story, I love the operatic language that Balzac employs, I love the vital energy of this text that expands as the onyx skin contracts. I will pluck from my love the story of Raphaël’s hat.
Under a more secular magic spell, cast by Rastignac, Raphaël – who has been living happily on a pittance that he inherited, frugally, writing a philosophical work that he is sure will gain him esteem and the means to continue his esoteric studies – throws away that money in a mad attempt, via theater tickets, carriages and suppers, to seduce Foedora. Foedora is quite a name – a name that wreaks of foeter, of odor, and of foeter hepaticus, the breath of the dead, a medical term applying to the smell of the breath of patients having a certain genre of disease. In short, the name is vampiric. And so it is that Raphaël transitions from the man in the attic, struggling with his thoughts – the man who has prided himself on living on 1100 francs over a period of three years, “three sous for bread, two sous for milk, three sous of meat” every day, carefully managed – to a man on the burning streets of Paris in 1830 (the burning streets to which Michelet refers to when, in his History of France, he speaks of the moment when the great work appeared to him – when he saw how the fall of Charles X and the Revolution and all the kings could be fit into a Viconian system, a system of circles and counter-circle, a maelstrom, and needed to be written), looking at his hat.

use value blues: finding products of human labor after the deluge

I am going to take off from where I left off writing about the market in antiques and objets d’art in Cousin Pons. Let me suspend, for a moment, the notion of the image of the limited good, and return here to the symbolic regime of treasure.

As I have pointed out, this is a rather specialized secondary market – an after the deluge type of market, a combination of archaeology and panning for gold. In Balzac’s Cousin Pons, archaeology is one of the master metaphors, with now the authorial tone taking on the archaeologist’s role and disinterring Pons as a fossil, and now – descending a level to the characters in the plot itself - one of Balzac’s bourgeois heavies, President Camusot de Marville, giving a lecture on archaeology to his husband-hunting daughter, who has not recognized that Cousin Pons’ gift of a Watteau fan is not a ‘petite betise’, but evidence, on the contrary, that Pons is to be reckoned with.

“The reunion of knowledges that demands these ‘petites bêtises’, Cécile, he said, taking up his thread again, is a science which is called archeology. Archeology comprehends architecture, sculpture painting, gold work, ceramics, wood work, a completely modern art, lacework, etc. tapestry, in the end, all the creations of human labor.” [my translation]

It comes down to a question of human labor and its products. Yet the archeologist is not the capitalist, or not quite. His view of objects is aesthetic and historical, and his discoveries and finds transform the first, or primary time of the circulation of commodities into that of a second time, in which the trace of labor is valued for itself – the signature, the mark of the making, the mark of the time of the making, the archaeological ‘almost-nothing’ that gives the product of human labor its invaluable value – its collectable value.

clerks and moralists

Two notes on what I have been working on:

1. The literature of the moralistes, a literature which is, at the center, a reflection on character, is the great ancestor of the literature of the clerks, the marginal Daoist tradition that runs from the clerk Hamaan to the clerk Kafka. Character, for the clerks, is a ruin, a roofless and desecrated temple, an archaeological site – the clerks all respond, in one way or another, to the Bartleby principle: I would prefer not to. The world of the clerks reflect fully the two removes that characterize the modern – the remove from nature and from production – both removes, of course, managed by Capital. The clerks inherit the moralists lack of systematicity (the idea of the essai, of experience as a trial, an experiment), but among the clerks that lack has turned to hatred. And this hatred, what is it? It is hatred of the dominance of substitution, a fear of losing their interiority, their difference, completely to substitution. It is a fear that arises from their place as agents of circulation, in Marx’s terms.

2. When considering Pons, or the man who sacrifices himself to a deal, to the joy of the deal, for objects that are ‘useless’, that are ‘aesthetic’ – I have all too quickly brought up the term obsession, with all its psychoanalytic meaning. But obsession in the 18th or 19th century can be interpreted with the heuristics-in-use at the time.

on markets and choicemaking

I'm rerunning this post, with some changes, from 2005. I want to pick up Heilbroner's critique of the idea of choice by reviewing the controversy between the young Macaulay and James Mill concerning utilitarianism, which, on the surface, pitted Macaulay's conservatism against Mill's radicalism. The subject of Macaulay and utilitarianism is a confused one, as the older Macaulay used Bentham as a template for undertaking the production, ex nihilo, of a code of laws for the British Raj. A topic around which swirls much scholarly conflict.

But on to this post.

I stayed for a couple days in Malinalco in 2004 as the guest of a friend of my friend, M. One day, M. wanted to get some tomatoes and some underpants for her little boy. We walked around the cobbled streets. It was late afternoon. M. wanted to complete our task before the sun went down, because after dark, the pedestrian in Malinalco is prone to attack from the packs of dogs that suddenly seem to materialize out of the shadows. Residents have gates to shut after dark, so they can avoid unwanted canine intrusion.

To get the underwear, we went to a few shops. None of them had the kind M. was looking for. To get the tomatoes, we didn’t go to a shop. We went to the market.

Like every Mexican village, there are some streets in the center of town upon which, every day, venders pitch their stands. Some markets are elaborate, with vendors of Barbie dolls, sunglasses, hats, and computer games pitched next to vendors of cucumbers, watermelons, corn, and tacos. Some are less elaborate. An economist, looking at these structures, might well see materialization of the purest form of market – the one to one relationship between vendor and consumer is such that prices actually reflect real dickering, supply and demand in action.

However, since Karl Polyani’s day, economists have seen something else.
In the Summer, 2004 Social Research, dedicated to Robert Heilbroner, the economist who died last week, there were two articles concerned with Polyani and Heilbroner’s notions of the market. In one of the articles, “Heilbroner and Polanyi, a shared vision”, Robert Dimand notices that the two writers both felt that the key to economic history is not given to us by the neo-classical notion of the natural market. Rather, like Karl Polyani, the market as we know it on the larger, global scale – capitalisme, quoi - can only be understood in the context of its managed overthrow of pre-capitalist exchange systems.

Here are the opening grafs of Dimand’s article:

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF HIS INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF debates among Marxist historians and economists over The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism that were initiated by Dobb (1946), Rodney Hilton (1976: 9) recalled that Karl Polanyi (1948) "thought that Dobb had retained from Marx what was bad (the labour theory of value) whilst discarding what he, Polanyi, thought was Marx's "fundamental insight into the historically limited nature of market organisation.'" Beyond condescending praise of Polanyi's review for "a serious attitude to the problems of a Marxist analysis" and passing mention in the next paragraph that R. H. Tawney's review of Dobb "did not raise any of the general theoretical problems which Polanyi hinted at," Hilton (and the other contributors reprinted in the volume) proceeded to ignore Polanyi's challenge as thoroughly as any mainstream neoclassical economist could have done.

In contrast, Robert Heilbroner shared the fundamental insight that Polanyi derived from Marx, and brought it to the attention of millions of readers. Over four decades and in 11 editions of The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner examined the replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution, while in seven editions of The World Philosophers that spanned nearly half a century he explored the accompanying changes in how economists thought about the economy. In his vision both of how the economy had changed and how economic thought had interacted with these changes, Heilbroner stood shoulder to shoulder with Polanyi.”

One of the things philosophers have learned from Freud and Heidegger is that forgetting is a manufactured act – although the manufacturers may not quite understand their own intentions or the process that went into them. There were two, overlapping forgettings that constituted the ideological foundation of the Cold War in the American sphere. One was the forgetting of how this “replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution” took place. This forgetting foreclosed on both the ravages of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and the cost of producing free market economies in the colonial sphere. The terror famines that occurred in Ireland and India under British rule, for instance, were dropped as a subject of discussion, or – in the case of Ireland – sentimentalized. It took Mike Davis’ book, The Victorian Holocaust, to revive interest in a series of famines that, at the turn of the century (circa 1900) in England, were well known to any educated English socialist.

The other great forgetting was about the wars that bubbled up in the capitalist world, finally ending in World War I. In fact, the whole history of the Russian Revolution was systematically distorted by cutting out the crucial facts of the war on the Eastern front – the senseless slaughter of up to two million Russians. Given the shadow of that fact, the bitter Civil War between the Red and White forces could no longer be told as a morality tale in which bad Reds killed wonderfully royalist Whites. Nor could one construct the nice myth of Lenin as the father of the Gulag with quite the straightforward indignation required, if one asks about the capitalist forces in Britain and Germany and France that authored a war that decimated 8 million people. That this slaughter was crowned, in hindsight, as a war in defense of democracy -- when, of course, it was a war in defense of a particular power arrangement among capitalist states, the governing classes of which were agreed on the necessity of perpetuating white power -- was a grim joke.

Polyani and Heilbroner, however, were exceptions to the Cold War rule. They would notice, about those markets, the use of public space, the margins of profit that were not derived from the rational bickering between seller and consumer but often on quite seemingly irrational prejudices on both sides of the buyer/seller divide, indicating different regimes of values. They both questioned the gauge of efficiency in the role of these markets – something M. and I discovered in our odyssey in search of underwear, here.

These issues were Heilbroner’s specialty. In the same issue of Social Research there is an exemplary Heilbroner piece, Economics as Universal Science, which quietly mocks those who, like Gary Becker or certain members of the Chicago School, claim that economics can act as the master-science for studying human behavior (plus, of course, a thrilling dose of sociobiology).

Heilbroner starts off by asking where we locate economies, if they have such modeling force in telling us about human behavior. His own premise goes like this:

“I shall undertake this task by starting from the premise that the continuity of society requires structured ways of assuring social order. These ways range from the routines and habits of daily life to formal institutions of law and order. In referring to this spectrum I shall use the term "sociological" as a portmanteau term that covers the order-bestowing influences of private life, of which incomparably the most important are the pressures of socialization exerted by parents on their offspring--pressures that teach children how to fulfill the roles expected of them in adult life. The second term, "political," I use in the conventional sense of the institutional means by which some group or class within society can enforce its will over other groups or classes. The definition of these terms is less important than my intention to describe a protective canopy of behavior-shaping arrangements, part informal and private, part formal and public, that protects the community from actions that would threaten its continued existence.

“Both the sociological and political elements in this canopy are fundamentally concerned with an aspect of social order and coherence that is usually referred to only obliquely. This aspect is the general state of obedience or acquiescence without which the armature of rights and privileges that defines any social order could be retained only by force and overt repression. With his customary candor, Adam Smith called this necessary aspect of society "subordination": "Civil government," he wrote, "suppose[s] a certain subordination." We shall return many times to this theme, but the challenge it raises should now be clear. It is the disconcerting idea that economics is socialization or
subordination in disguise.”

Heilbroner sees, however, that the ‘imperial” economist, as he calls him, can give two responses to the placement of the socius at the center of society. One is that the socius is actually a network of decisions, and hence of choices. Economics is the science that is going to rationalize that hodge-podge of choices by gauging it according to an optimal model that follows a simple rule: all choices are motivated by the perception of an advantage. It doesn’t matter if the perception is wrong, or distorted, or ignores long term advantages, etc. What matters is the logic of advantage.

The other answer, Heilbroner thinks, is to make economics the study of the division of labor that lies at the heart of the social order. Thus, subordination can again be wrapped into economics.

Heilbroner’s consideration of these options in the light of what Polyani calls the Great Transformation – the emergence of an international, hegemonic capitalist system in the last two hundred some years – is more insightful than the guff one usually gets from economists. Here are two more grafs to chew on:

"Economics thereby takes the economic system to be the living model of capitalism, containing within its categories and conceptions everything that is essential for its comprehension. It is here that economics betrays its fatal limitations as a universal science, and its knavish consequences as an imperial doctrine.

"The first such consequence is that economics itself appears as a neutral rather than a charged explanation system for capitalism. This becomes apparent in many ways. A term of great importance such as "efficiency," for example, is regarded as a quasi-engineering criterion, rather than one whose unspoken purpose is to maximize production as a profit-making--not a purely engineering--endeavor. Similar unnoticed sociopolitical meanings cling to other such terms, including "production" itself, which is counted in the national income accounts only insofar as it results in commodities, not use-values. In much the same fashion, the fundamental unit of the economic system is taken to be the rational maximizing "individual." The economic system is thus conceived as a society of hermits, not as an order of groups and classes.

"This concealment of a social order is most clearly evidenced when we notice the manner in which economics rationalizes functional income distribution. Marx wrote scathingly of Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, each entitled to receive a reward for the contributions each has made to the social product, but modern economics has forgotten the fetishisms that Marx exposed. Of even greater importance, it has no explanation for, or interest in, the curious fact that the reward paid as net profit, which goes only to owners of capital, gives them only a "residual" claim on output, after all factors, including capital, have been paid their marginal products. In view of the repeated demonstrations of economics that the tendency of the market system is to eliminate such residuals as mere transient imperfections of the system, one must be a sociologist or political theorist to explain why owners of capital seem so eager to protect these dubious claims. Thus the manner in which the market supports the class structure of capitalism is a matter before which economics is silent--indeed, a matter of which it is, in some sense, unaware."