Page 58 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 47

9. Raymond Williams quotes Coleridge on classical political economy’s split
from moral philosophy: “It is this accursed practice of ever considering only what is
expedient for the occasion, disjoined from all principle or enlarged system of action,
of never listening to the true and unerring impulses of our better nature, that has led
the colder-hearted men to the study of political economy.” Raymond Williams, Cul-
ture and Society 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 73.
10. I develop these arguments more fully in Babe, Culture of Ecology: Reconcil-
ing Economics and Environment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
11. The parallels between the two theories of value are exact. Just as Marx con-
cluded that labor being the source of value means that labor should receive that value,
neoclassicism’s naming consumers’ preferences as the source of value implies that
consumers should be “sovereign,” their preferences always to be unquestioned and to
be satisfied.
12. George Stigler and Gary Becker, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” Amer-
ican Economic Review 67, no. 2 (1977): 76–90.
13. Tibor Scitivsky, The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction
and Consumer Dissatisfaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
14. Citing Kant, Hannah Arendt remarks on the general dubiousness of the de
Gustibus maxim: “It was because of their public relevance that he [Kant] insisted, in
opposition to the commonplace adage, that taste judgments are open to discussion be-
cause ‘we hope the same pleasure is shared by others,’ that taste can be subject to dis-
pute, because it ‘expects agreement from everyone else.’ . . . The activity of taste de-
cides how this world . . . is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will
hear.” Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (1954;
reprint New York: Penguin, 2006), 218–19; emphasis added.
15. William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (3rd ed., London:
Macmillan and Co., 1888), 3. See also Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Eco-
nomics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
16. Samuels, The Classical Theory of Economic Policy.
17. These methods include: marginal or incremental analysis, presuming a psy-
chological basis of value, constrained maximization, equilibrium analysis, privileging
the criterion of Pareto optimality, methodological individualism, and affording su-
premacy to the doctrine of consumer sovereignty. A situation is said to be Pareto op-
timal if for every conceivable change, at least one person will become worse off. The
doctrine is ostensibly premised on the reluctance of economists to make inter-
personal utility comparisons.
18. Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1976).
19. Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics
31 (1960): 1–44. For a critique, see Babe, Culture of Ecology, 111–14.
20. Warren J. Samuels, “The Chicago School of Political Economy: A Construc-
tive Critique,” in The Chicago School of Political Economy, ed. Warren J. Samuels
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 11.