De l’agent économique à l’homme capable. Une critique de l’économisme à partir de l’herméneutique critique de Paul Ricœur

Abstract

Paul Ricœur’s dialogue has been constant with the human and social sciences, but with little attention given to economics. This Ricœurian silence on the economy is relative. Without developing an epistemology of economics, he showed a constant preoccupation with the working-class condition (cf. Simone Weil) and the practical effects of economic alienation. He has constantly focused on work rather than economics, on exchanges rather than modeling the mathematical economy that forgets economics as a social science. His anthropology is an anthropology of the capable man rather than that of the accounting man. Indeed, its ethical concern reinstates in terms of evaluations an economic activity, not only standardizing but unidimensionalizing, which resorbs the plan of value in that of price. His anthropology of the capable man reevaluates the figure of the economic agent. Thus in Ricœur, the ethical concern is epistemologically informed by the social sciences. He thinks ethics and economy together through the symbolic mediations of the institutions and structures that make exchanges possible. From whence a fine approach to the theses of Marx on economic alienation, and later an encounter with the works of the economist Amartya Sen, not without links to the works of Martha Nussbaum on capabilities.