Towards a social theory of the economy

Public roundtable with Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht University), Kolja Möller (TU Dresden), Lisa Herzog (University Amsterdam), Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), and David Kennedy (Harvard Law School).

Organised by the Centre for Social Critique an der HU Berlin

Topic: The economy is irrefutably social. The division of labor, the distribution of social wealth, the modes of production and exchange are defining features of every society. What is more, economic practices depend on social and political institutions as well as cultural understandings without which the interactions of economic agents would become unstable or fail altogether. In other words, what we call “the economy” boils down to human activity and, as such, is subject to historical change. However, the precise relationship between economic practices and the other forms of social, political, and cultural agency is rather difficult to conceptualize. The economy seems to presuppose social dispositions (as the analyses of Max Weber and Louis Althusser suggest) as well as the social reproduction of human life and labor power (as feminist theorists have insisted). And – as the neoliberal era has amply shown – economic logics are capable of transforming and “colonizing” (Habermas) other social spheres, such as education and health care, science and art, and are embedded in historically entrenched relations of domination, dispossession, and extraction on a global scale (as postcolonial critics have argued). Weak versions of economic determinism could point to the dependence of all other social spheres on resources provided by the economy exemplified by the dependence on the economy’s dominant medium: money.

Conversely, the dependence of economic practices on social, political, and cultural background conditions, as well as on functioning ecosystems and sustainable access to natural resources, implies the possibility of dissonance, and thus conflict, between divergent social rationalities. Contrary to social theories that conceptualize the economy as a particular social system with definite boundaries and a specific rationality, the complex interactions and interdependencies of social spheres suggest the need for a wider, more social concept of the economy. Economy and society permeate each other and form a compound of socio-economic practices – a form of life. Such a wide concept of the economy revives core claims of classical Critical Theory. Social critique must address the material foundations of society, i.e. the ways in which society reproduces itself. The public roundtable of this year’s International Critical Theory Summer School will provide an opportunity to discuss approaches to the economy in contemporary social theory.

Round Table in English. Free entrance.