Marxian ‘Alienation’, Polanyian ‘Fictitious Commodification’, and ‘Keynes’ ‘Love of Money’: An Enquiry Into the Diminution of ‘The Social’ in Contemporary Economic Thought

Abstract

The gradual diminution and effective erasure of ‘the social’ as a formal category of analysis in contemporary, ‘neoclassical’, economics is here referred to as the issue of ‘a-sociality’. An avowed a-sociality, both in this programmatic sense as well as in a general intuitive sense, may be said to be the thematic constant uniting the various analytical shortcomings of the economics discipline in its present state. A-sociality describes first and foremost a methodological habit — namely, that of theorizing the economy as an autonomous entity unto itself, distinct from extant non-economic realms of human social life. We trace the genealogy of this practice, finding its foundations in the endogenous market logic of the so-called ‘catallactic’ framework of economy-society theorization, wherein the market is conceptualized as a closed referential system, severed in its functionality from surrounding social institutions. The point is this: that a failure to theorize about the market system in conjunction with the non-economic, non-contractual, social context within which it is everywhere and always embedded, and upon which it depends for its reproduction, occults the causal channels between these two objects of analysis and, as a consequence, removes from analytical remit an understanding of the manner in which markets often tend to destroy their own conditions of possibility, through their jeopardizing of the human capacity to maintain social bonds. This is shown through a demonstration of the explanatory efficacy to be garnered from the employment of the framework lying in contradistinction to the catallactic framework, namely, the ‘sociologic’ framework — predicated upon the fact of the structural, social embeddedness of the market economy — through a survey of the adverse sociological consequences of capitalist marketization, documented in the works of three renowned adherents of this framework, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and John Maynard Keynes. These ‘consequences’, specifically, are ‘mechanisms’ through which the market effectuates, within its social basis, a generalized Durkheimian anomie, hence undermining its own existential presuppositions. Marxian ‘alienation’, Polanyian ‘fictitious commodification’, and Keynes' ‘love of money’ all in some way contribute to the ‘breakdown of the social’ witnessed under capitalism: the atrophy of the sociocultural processes that supply the solidarity relations, effective dispositions and value horizons — the general capacities for social reproduction — that underpin social cooperation and market exchange. The epistemological constraints of a-sociality renders neoclassical thought blind to these realities in their totality, attaching a certain troubling superfluity to the conclusions therein reached. The bringing of the social back into economics, through the realization of the embeddedness postulate both in theory and in practice, along with the repudiation of the catallactic mode of thought, is proposed to amend this state of affairs.