postmodern_moments

8/7/2019 postmodern_moments

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This is an extended version of the review which appeared in:

Review of Political Economomy, 20 (1), 2008, pp. 157-161.

Copyright Taylor & Francis

Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics

David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio

Princeton, Princeton UP, 2003, pp. 349, $35.00, hardcover

ISBN 0-691-05870-9

At last postmodernism, though this school or mode of thought is hardly a recent devel-

opment, has arrived in economic science. David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio, profes-

sors of economics at Notre Dame University and Merrimack College respectively, give

their readers both a concise introduction to postmodernism and an extended application

of postmodern thinking to economics. Or rather, they show where, by whom and in

which respects postmodernism has already found its way into the dismal science. By

postmodern moments in modern economics they refer to the fact that postmodernism

had and has not deliberately to be transferred to economics, but on the contrary evolved,

at least to a certain extent, involuntarily out of economic reasoning itself. Nevertheless,

the authors do not confine themselves to pointing out the postmodern as a kind of hid-

den and illegitimate offspring of modern economics; instead they plead for the recogni-

tion, adoption and radicalization of economics implicit postmodernism.

Chapter one presents the various available definitions of postmodernism. The

authors distinguish between postmodernism as (a) a (new) historical phase or even ep-

och, (b) the condition, state or constitution of our time and (c) a specific critical style of

reasoning. They favor the latter interpretation. Against defining the postmodern

chronologically as having left modernity behind stand difficulties in finding and naming

a historical break and, more importantly, the obvious social, political, scientific, and of

course, economic continuities that align our times with the unquestionably modern late

19th and early 20th centuries. Although less easily discarded and, at least at a first

glance, easily confused with their favored definition of postmodernism as a style of cri-

tique, Ruccio and Amariglio do not see the postmodern as an essential trait of contem-porary Western society, because they reject all forms of essentialism, any definition of a

thing or entity as being such and such as still, if not typically, modern. It is this essen-


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2tialism, together with the related notion that science, or any other discourse for that mat-

ter, is able to represent the being and interaction of things correctly, i.e., objectively

and neutrally, which they see as already undermined by modern economic theories

and which they want to criticize and attack openly. They do this by taking up mainly

heterodox, though not necessarily marginal schools of economic thought and critique,

namely (post-)keynesianism, feminism, (neo-)institutionalism, and Marxism though

neoclassical and everyday economics enter the stage as well which they discuss in

terms of their achievements and shortcomings in dissolving modern economic science

as a supposedly single, methodologically and epistemologically unified field of research

and knowledge.

Chapter two is devoted to the topic of (true) uncertainty, which they consider

to be the shibboleth of postmodern theorizing. Ruccio and Amariglio remind their

readers of the long history of economists efforts to come to grips with the problem of

uncertainty as either a hindrance to conscious choice and economic equilibrium and/or a

condition of economic enterprise and individual freedom. The focus is on the writings

of Knight, Shackle and Keynes. Relying on these authors they repudiate any efforts to

transform uncertainty which Keynes described as that which we simply do not know

into mere probability, malleable to one kind of statistical manipulation or another. If,

on the other hand, true uncertainty is taken into account, economics becomes much

softer than generally pretended, i.e., economic model building becomes an exercise in

outlining possible connections rather than finding necessary, true or causal relations.

However and here we touch a point of indeterminacy pertaining not just to this

chapter, but to the whole book Ruccio and Amariglio reject any form of ontological

uncertainty, be it subjective, that is due to the natural limits of individual knowledge as

in Knight, Shackle, Simon or Austrian economics, or objective, that is due to the at least

partially contingent and thus unforeseeable world out there as in the late Keynes

work. For our authors uncertainty is discursive, i.e., a product, a more or less voluntary

construction of (the economic) discourse itself. Uncertainty can be shown, they claim,

to be one effect of the impossible closure of discourse and theory; of their incapacity,

not to point to, but to effectively reach reality. For postmodernism language or any

other language-like means of communication as convenient symbols or mathematic

formula are not only an indispensable tool of mutual understanding and research but

also the impenetrable screen which separates our everyday as scientific constructions

from their perhaps underlying reality. Postmodern truth is not the proven corre-


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3spondence of notion and thing but an intradiscursive and sometimes technically opera-

tive convention. Thus Ruccio and Amariglios at least implicit claim that postmodern-

ism is able to shake the only seemingly firm because discursively constructed foun-

dations (and conclusions) of economic modernism is just a claim, whose relative truth,

superiority, value or usefulness technically has to compete with those being criticized.

In other words, how to judge the truth of the Cretians statement that all Cretians are

liars, if not either by assuming a superior position which allows one to decide the truth

of this statement or by bracketing the universal claim in favor of testing specific propo-

sitions one by one?

Yet, neither is this kind of testing done, nor is any allegedly superior position

taken in the book under review. What the authors do is not to prove the falsehood of

modern or orthodox neoclassic economic views but to show that, given that there is true

uncertainty, given that any correct or adequate representation of the world is impossible,

given that there is no coherent subject, and whatever the assumptions of modern

economists may be, other descriptions of economic data and their interplay become pos-

sible. However, if that is the case, it remains unclear what else the fierce and in my

view principally justified attacks on economic modernism resemble but sheer rhetori-

cal maneuvers. Thus, I doubt that a critique of economic orthodoxy can afford not to

ground its alternative views on scarcity, exchange, profit maximization or man itself in

an alternative outspoken epistemology and/or anthropology. Even to claim that man has

no nature is a statement about mans nature.

Chapter three is nominally about the body, or to be more precise, about the natu-

ralness of its wants. Interestingly, Ruccio and Amariglio here see a postmodern mo-

ment within the inner fortress of economic modernism, namely the Arrow-Debreu

model of economic equilibrium. As can be inferred from the preceding paragraph, any

anthropology that assumes a given set of bodily wants or that equates any empirical

embodiment of man with man itself is discarded as fictitious and, more to the point, as

politically dangerous and repressive. For he who pretends to know what man is, so the

argument goes, automatically declares deviant (human?) beings as non-human. (What

if it were mans nature to supplement himself by diverse forms of culture?) Now the

formalism of Arrow, Debreu, Frank and others is praised for leaving enough space to

fill in any concrete body. Since Paretos proposal not to consider cardinal but only

ordinal wants, and since Samuelsons further move to de-psychologize economic man

by taking into account only his revealed preferences and not his inner or real desires,


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4neoclassic theory has successfully struggled to rid itself of the most essential features of

man, thus allowing one to conceive of the market in purely abstract, anthropologically

happily flat and superficial terms. Indeed, this reading of economic modernism aims at

revealing its inherent postmodern moments, yet it remains to be asked whether the Ar-

row-Debreu model really is as anthropologically empty as Ruccio and Amariglio

would have us believe. For the producer, who can allegedly be conceived of as a kind

of universal machine, still has to obey the supreme order of profit maximization,

whereas the consuming bodies are still only apparently overcome utilitarians that

have to endure or enjoy (118). What is more, the authors show in the following chap-

ter that the same formal models which are lauded for de-essentializing humans, are in

fact inhabited by male white Western man.

Chapter four deals with feminist critiques of mainstream economics. It is struc-

tured, like most other chapters, with the first half devoted to the presentation of, though

heterodox, widely and rather easily accepted modern positions critical of neoclassical

orthodoxy and the second half to a discussion of more marginal and radical authors

whose proposals consist less in complementing mainstream theories than in abandoning

them in favor of full-blown postmodernism. Thus, the feminist critiques of economic

modernism are divided in those which, according to Ruccio and Amariglio, somehow

rightly but insufficiently point out the implicit gender bias of homo oeconomicus and

his selfish pseudo-autonomous market behavior while neglecting or even suppressing

such allegedly feminine, but in fact universally human capacities as sympathy, imitation

or solidarity, and those which do not at all try to restore whole man but which plead

for renouncing the notions of gender and subject(ivity). While authors of the first group

show for example that within neoclassical theory the market ironically functions as a

substitute for the loving and caring mother, being just and forgetting none, the second

group relates the fragmentary character of man not to his modern (mis-)understanding,

but to the discursive construction of femininity, masculinity and therefore subjectivity

as such. Yes, there may be, within in a given society or context, typically female or

male roles of behavior, but inasmuch as these roles are in themselves never coherent or

stable, are subject to history, and even prone to switch gender, the subject is or rather,

if postmodernism as a style of critique stuck to its pretensions, could perhaps profitably

be considered as a fiction that cannot seriously be maintained. Embedded in this

chapter is a short but very important and far reaching debate of the economy of the gift,

which, in my opinion could not only function to destabilize taken for granted economic


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5wisdoms like the all but evident knowledge of what exchange means, but also figure

as a positive rival anthropology of economic discourse. However, such an approach

remains deliberately unconsidered.

Chapter five is on the one hand an examination of (neo-)institutional economics,

and on the other hand, an attack on the positivist axiom that factual and value judgments

can, and must, be kept apart. Here we learn that, and why, Dewey (as read by Rorty)

and Nietzsche are two of the most important philosophers of postmodernism. The first

part of the chapter contains a somewhat lengthy discussion of Tools social value theory

which criticizes the neoclassical, or for that matter modern insistence on neutral reason-

ing and value-free science. Tool contrarily argues that since all science and every con-

clusion it reaches is selective, values as a kind of extra-scientific guide to research and

action form an integral and even necessary part of scientific inquiry. Thus, instead of

disguising the values that lead all research, scientists should make them explicit. Never-

theless, Tool, as well as some of his modern critics, assume that there is a conceivably

culturally variable, but in any case limited set of objective, extra-scientific and extra-

discursive values that already are, possibly can or ideally should be shared by scientists

to promote (economically or otherwise) the well-being of mankind. Of course, Ruccio

and Amariglio attack this proposition. True, all science is value-laden and should

openly defend the goals it pursues. For them, however, not the distinction of a realm of

being from a realm of values, but in fact the privileging of any value is an ontological

fallacy. It is the pragmatist Dewey, and to an even greater degree Nietzsche (whose

genealogy of morals is indeed admirably reconstructed on a couple of pages) who

have shown that every value is a political stake and politically at stake.

(Neo-)Institutional economic analysis should learn this lesson and confess that it itself is

scientifically fighting for a certain contingent arrangement of society instead of hiding

its engagement and one-sidedness behind metaphysical presumptions.

This second part of the chapter is forcefully written and might have, although

economic problems proper are largely avoided, the power to seduce even down-to-earth

economists to enjoy philosophical reasoning. But I doubt, and this is my first critical

remark, whether one can really esteem Nietzsche as much as Ruccio and Amariglio do

without buying his master morals or, at least without discussing why one can. Sec-

ondly, while I welcome taking up again the difficult and willy-nilly central problem of

value theory, I missed in this chapter any attempt to link Deweys and Nietzsches phi-


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6losophy of value to the formation or, if you prefer, the discursive construction of eco-

nomic and monetary value.

Chapter six analyzes the common modernism or kinship of neoclassical econom-

ics and Marxism. Without eliminating the political differences, the authors by the

way editors of the journal Rethinking Marxism convincingly demonstrate that these

two ideologically opposite, if not hostile schools of thought in fact share the modern

distaste for chaos and modernisms corresponding preoccupation with order. In a kind

of chiasm, neoclassic economics start from disorder, the noise of the market produced

by selfish individuals pursuing only their personal interests, to arrive at order, such as

the Pareto efficient economic equilibrium, in which no one can better his positions

without worsening the endowments of others, whereas Marxism starts its description of

the economic process with orderly laws of capitals self (re)production and, corre-

spondingly, the capitalists military-like planning and organization of surplus value and

profit extraction to arrive at the unlimited exploitation of manpower and resources, at

the unjust distribution of wealth and finally the unreasonably crisis-prone reality of full-

fledged capitalism. Marxists mostly do not criticize the economic mainstreams project

to improve the living conditions of as many people as possible. What they condemn is

the supposedly inefficient, structurally violent and potentially self-destructive way in

which capitalism tries to achieve this goal. To overcome capitalism in their view does

not mean to destroy its potential to further increase material riches but, on the contrary,

to avoid the negative and unnecessary consequences of free, i.e., wild and unregulated,

competition. It is or was, for some the attraction of Marxism to eventually fulfill the

modern promise to free man of all fetters of nature and domination, to allow him to de-

velop all his capabilities, to reverse alienation and to become whole again. It is these

rather modern that plain Marxist certainties that postmodernism, its insistence on plural-

ity, contingency, non-linearity and at best fragmentary subjectivity deconstructs and

shakes. It is this belief in the laws of history and its emancipatory destiny that the ad-

vent of postmodernism has questioned, and led the authors to rethink Marxism. Eve-

rything which has and can be shown by a postmodern, or for that matter sociological

critique of neoclassical key concepts (e.g. that markets are embedded, that rational

choice can at best reduce but never tame uncertainty, or that the distribution of wealth is

as much politically shaped as economically justified) pertains mutatis mutandis to

Marxism: there is no transparent organization, there are no planable plans, the distinc-

tion of true and false desires is untenable, and there are no laws of capital like the ten-


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7dential fall of the profit rate that mysteriously steer the course of events. In other

words, whereas neoclassic economics exaggerate the transformation of private vices

into publick benefits, Marxism exaggerates the otherness of socialism. All this is true

and, what is more, makes plausible why, after the end of real socialism, instead of

becoming fervent adherents of free market liberalism, many Marxists became skeptical

postmodernists. They no longer claim to know and fight for the truth of the other;

they criticize from within. I deem this attitude as very important, as an antidote to the

often antisocial excesses of market radicalism. The weakness or even danger of such a

position, however, might be that the critique of economic laws and, correspondingly,

modern mechanistic explanations may lead to a postmodern denial of explanations at

all.

This problem, the question of how far postmodernism claims or can claim to be

itself scientifically relevant, the question of what, if anything, distinguishes science

from other forms of discourse is, to a certain extent, taken up in chapter seven but

remains unsolved. Here Ruccio and Amariglio remind their readers of McCloskeys

famous efforts to show that scientific economic discourse formalized or not can not

dispense with rhetorical tropes, and to make its point, has to rely on persuasion as much

as on evidential proofs. The astonishing fact however, is that the same McCloskey

fiercely attacks any kind of ersatz economics, i.e. any kind of uneducated, scientifi-

cally unfounded, amateurish everyday or sleight of hand explanations as essentially

wrong and somehow dangerous. Ruccio and Amariglio rather easily demonstrate that

everyday economics are in fact more coherent and structured than a mere pastiche of

improvised ad hoc interpretations, that there is a discourse or a rhetoric too. Polls regu-

larly reveal that a plurality, if not a majority of the population have similar explicit

views and explanations of economic phenomena which nevertheless diverge from eco-

nomic textbook knowledge. Advertising for example is not seen as a means to inform-

ing consumers but as a tricky way of inducing new desires and of raising prices. The

orthodox and correct view that international free trade is a good thing is not shared by

up to a half of those interrogated, despite the efforts of a whole array of nation-wide

educational efforts to increase the economic literacy of the general population. Are

these popular views necessarily wrong? Is it wrong for an auto worker to fear for his job

because international free trade threatens the profitability of his employer? Since there

are many other instances in which the opinions of everyday and professional economics

coincide it is not sufficient to explain the manifest and often enraged resistance of pro-


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8fessional economists to their illiterate counterparts politically by equating ersatz with

left wing views. Ruccio and Amariglio conclude that it must be the threatened status of

scientific knowledge, the fear of not being able to control and authorize valid judg-

ments, that induce normally well-tempered economists to wage their war against the

economic populace. However, there is no conclusion in this chapter to the problem, not

even a profound discussion of whether there is anything and if yes what that thing

might be which would enable us to differentiate scientific from everyday discourses in

economics not only rhetorically, but with regard to their validity. Everyday reasoning

as institutional analysis might indeed rightly denounce the pretended political neutral-

ity of economic science. Yet does it follow from this discovery that science is just an

alternative way of reading the world? Does it follow that every explanation is as good

as another as long as there is some explanation at all? I doubt it.

Ruccio and Amariglio however seem not to. In their concluding chapter, they

confess that postmodernism, as its critics rightly insinuate, in fact implies nihilism, an

undermining of the very possibility of carrying out economic analysis (291). Fortu-

nately, the authors do not really stick to this view. On the contrary, every chapter of

their book proves that they take the scientific critique of mainstream economics as a

serious and worthwhile business. What they do is give arguments and refute others,

claiming that non-orthodox views on economic phenomena and theories thereof are not

only possible but (more) convincing. Actually, neither the economy, nor a unified,

coherent field of economic science exists. There is already, despite postmodernism, a

modern plurality of economic schools that compete in explaining the same or similar

phenomena, and that follow different political agendas. But if it were true and I think

it is that this plurality, and the relative openness of economics is a sign not of feeble-

ness but of strength, then it is not because anything goes, but because scientific dis-

course is a realm not of unrestrained, but of deliberate choice. Notwithstanding these

critical remarks, Ruccio and Amariglio have written an informative and theoretically

thrilling book, elegant in style, whose reading I can only recommend. True, I would

have liked to see their somewhat paradoxical insistence on indeterminacy replaced less

flimsy foundations, or their radical as it is vague brand of postmodernism replaced by

some form of self-reflexive or performative analysis, which asks and shows the sense in

which the object of research is constituted by the research itself. Still, I am nevertheless

impressed by the range of themes and theories they tackle in what is at least for

economists a new, refreshing and provocative way.


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9Axel T. Paul

University of Freiburg/Br., Germany

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