Subjectivism and Objectivism in the History of Economic Thought.

Meng, Jude Chua Soo

Subjectivism and Objectivism in the History of Economic Thought

Yukihiro Ikeda and Kiichiro Yagi (Editors)

Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2012 (193 pages)

The book's introduction explains that the contributors are all leading members of the "Japan Society of History of Economic Thought," which explains some of the grammatical infelicities that I found in the text. Still, the quality chapters should, in my view, be sufficient unto themselves to sell. True to the title, the various chapters explore how economists throughout history have dealt with subjective elements in economic theory, in comparison with what is described as the antithetical "objective." The said "subjectivism" varies somewhat across the various economic thinkers discussed--Smith, Menger, Walras, Jevons, Mogernstern, Mises, Sraffa, and so on--although the exploration of the way the subject's epistemology and its deliverances inform economic thinking, broadly speaking, will still tie the pieces together, albeit quite loosely. This left an inevitable sense of disjointedness among the various chapters that, unfortunately, the introduction by Kiichiro Yagi, with an autonomous discussion of yet another economist, F. A. Hayek, and his take on subjective elements, did not help correct.

Fortunately, all of the chapters keep to their predictably welcome task of historically unpacking the subjectivisms in the thinking of specific economists, making them self-contained, informative reads--except chapter 5, "Austrian Subjectivism and Hermeneutical Economics," which seemed to want to do its own thing. Even though forewarned by its title, I was still startled by the insertion of a comparison of Heidegger and Schumpeter, which seemed an extraneous development to what ought otherwise be a clean historical analysis of economic theorists like the rest. Of course, one can compare and develop the subjectivism in Schumpeter's Austrian economics vis-a-vis Heidegger, but should one do so in a historical work?

Yet this odd comparison turned out to be what is most stimulating for me about this book: for it surfaced one important idea that I think needs to be emphasized and retrieved, especially in the current context. Forgive the fact that a study of Austrian economics starting with Menger and Schumpeter ended up with a discussion of Heidegger! Between Heidegger and Schumpeter, as Yuichi Shionoya demonstrates, is the appreciation of the fact that persons are "thrown in," meaning that we are all as persons already found from the very start to be located in a certain context constituted by institutions and values. These institutions and values obviously shape our epistemology, and this, by implication, shapes our capacity for innovation, the latter understood as the disruption of conventions in economic thinking and projections of a new "lifestyle of economy" (83). Put another way, our capacity for innovative economic thinking is very much dependent on the prevailing institutions and their crystallized values, especially because we are "thrown in" to these and so are heavily influenced by them.

The talk of our capacity for innovative economic thinking being dependent on institutions might signal the idea that entrenched and traditional institutions limit our capacity to think innovatively about economic affairs, as it were, that this dependence is a negative thing, and therefore the way to liberate innovative, new thinking is to dismantle these limiting old institutions. However, that should not always be the case. Consider the institution of marriage, understood traditionally as a kind of conjugal union, for which during pleasurable coitus, the intention to procreate and rear children is not separated from the intention to promote the "faithful clinging to each other exclusively as best of friends" that St. Thomas Aquinas called fides. When "thrown in" to societies where such an institution is still supported by law and is therefore capable of strongly shaping our epistemology and axiology, then the disposition of self-giving, first to the child whom one naturally so loves and then to one's spouse, the parent of one's child, can develop. In part this is because the project to nurture one's children together is such an arduous task and thus inconsistent with a persistently selfish hedonism and because the procreative intention generates the practical logic of an other-centeredness as part of the natural dynamism of that intention. Parents know this keenly: to want to have a child is at the same time to be willing to give oneself fully for the child, even to sacrifice one's welfare for the child that is one's very own. Born into the world is hence not merely a baby but also for the participant couples a logic of self-giving and, thus, an economy of gifting: the willingness to trade one's giving for nothing in return without condition.

Such a gifting, economic logic, beginning as it does in the family as traditionally understood can then through virtuous habituation of such other-centeredness lead participants to care for neighbors and even strangers who are now concerned with their human rights and not merely one's own desires. Such an economy of the gift, which begins to think of exchange without return, must be an innovative departure from the self-centered accumulation of capital that hoards one's superfua and that is unwilling to part with one's superflua unless there is return on investment.

Compare this scenario with the state of affairs when the institution of marriage traditionally understood is dismantled and revisionist concepts sanction and promote contraceptive lifestyles without procreative intention or the quest for sexual pleasure for its own sake without procreative intention, whether pursued in solitary masturbation or enjoyed in mutually masturbatory sex (as John Finnis has analyzed) between persons of the same sex. When thrown into such societies without the legally sanctioned institution of marriage, as traditionally understood, and so into societies where revisionist and liberal concepts of sex are aspired toward, then what follows is the proliferation of "idol-gazings," to borrow Jean-Luc Marion's term, in which partners exploit each other's bodies to instantiate a version of their own imaginings for maximum pleasure, driven by a logic of calculative utilitarianism that wants merely to find the most effective means to achieve the consequence of maximized pleasure.

Here is the logic of homo economicus viciously habituating participants into ever-greater selfishness, fully ready to service any desire for more and more of what gives one pleasure, whatever it takes. Here there is no creative departure from a business-as-usual economic selfishness that already has deeply divided society with obscene inegalitarianism between the rich and the poor. Thus, our capacity for economic innovation--not merely in the sense of being able to creatively invent new products but also the to introduce new economic logics--is very much dependent on the fact that, as persons we are thrown into societies where institutions such as marriage and the values associated with conjugal unions are still intact because then and only then can innovative economic logics of gifting emerge, and then and only then can the oppositional, selfish logic of the calculative, consequentialist homoeconomicus that seeks to maximize one's own welfare find an alternative, or at least, find self-restraint. From the odd "Schumpeter with Heidegger" concoction, therefore, one grasps the contours of an "Austrian case" against revising the traditional meaning of marriage in favor of institutions that can generate economic innovation, namely, a gifting economy opposed to any indifference toward the destitute poor.

--Jude Chua Soo Meng (e-mail: jude.chua@nie.edu.sg)

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore