Page 25 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy
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14                         Chapter One

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           The Wealth of Nations  describes the operations of such an economy. But
           none of this is at all clear from reading Smith, who seldom cross-referenced
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           the two works. And for good reason! They are fundamentally inconsistent.
           Wealth of Nations celebrates “self-love” as the engine of economic prosper-
           ity and denigrates altruism for interfering with wealth creation; Moral Senti-
           ments, conversely, lauds empathy (what Smith termed sympathy) as the high-
           est of human virtues, and claims that sympathy is in no way compatible with
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           self-love. In writing separate and essentially inconsistent books, Smith fig-
           ured prominently in separating political economy from moral philosophy. 9
           Furthermore, Smith redefined political economy as the study of wealth gen-
           eration, as opposed to the study of wealth distribution (economic justice),
           which had been the central problematic for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and
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           other of his precursors —again pointing to his role in segregating political
           economy from moral philosophy.
             A second distinguishing characteristic of classical political economy is the
           labor theory of value, which was developed most notably by Smith, David
           Ricardo, and Karl Marx. Arguably, it was Marx’s claim—that if labor is the
           source of value, then workers should rightfully receive that value—that
           caused mainline political economists (to become known simply as econo-
           mists) to struggle in the late 1800s for a new theory of value, one less prone
           to spotlighting injustices in the distribution of wealth and income, and hence
           less threatening to established power.


           Neoclassical Economics
           The new mainstream position, developed in the late nineteenth and early
           twentieth centuries and still de rigueur today, is neoclassicism. Neoclassical
           economics proposes that value derives not from labor, but from consumer
           “tastes and preferences.” This new, or neoclassical, approach makes no refer-
           ence to class (everyone, after all, is a “consumer”), and thereby consumer sov-
           ereignty became enshrined as the discipline’s new axial presupposition and
           principle. 11
             As with any axiom, however, the rightness or justness of consumer sover-
           eignty itself is seldom questioned. Nor are the nature and composition of con-
           sumer tastes and preferences assessed. Rather, in the words of Nobel laure-
           ates George Stigler and Gary Becker, “De Gustibus non est disputandum;” 12
           literally, tastes are not to be disputed. Although the production and consump-
           tion (i.e., the supply and demand) of cultural goods and services  are ad-
           dressed by the neoclassical paradigm, they are treated solely as commodities,
           produced and purchased in the marketplace to satisfy preexisting tastes and
           preferences, not as factors which through use might alter consumer wants and
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