After political economy
Politics and economics were once a unified discipline — and both were much better for it
There was once an influential academic journal called the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. In the late 1960s, it was split into the Canadian Journal of Economics and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. Some scholars, notably the University of Toronto’s C.B. Macpherson, vocally opposed the move. Still, at the time, few can possibly have realized the seismic intellectual shift it portended.
For his part, Macpherson’s opposition was heavily informed by his own approach to political science, best represented by his magnum opus The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and by his overriding belief that the discipline shouldn’t limit itself to either pure empirical description or idealistic abstraction. More generally, criticism of the split reflected the longstanding belief of many scholars working in related fields that politics and economics should be studied in tandem because each is unavoidably embedded in the other.
In Canadian political economy, thanks partly to the pioneering work of figures like Harold Innis, it was long understood that economic institutions like markets always operate against the backdrop of social and cultural conditions that can’t be captured by quantitative metrics like supply and demand.1 Historian Irene Spry, a friend and colleague of Macpherson’s, later explained his opposition to the breakup of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science this way:
…it seemed to him, as I think it seemed to everybody who was influenced by Innis certainly, that you couldn’t separate economics and politics, that it had to be political economy to make any sense at all. Economists tend to think that because they think they can measure things that they’re working at, they are more scientific than other social scientists who are dealing with data that they can’t always measure. And so they feel they should go off by themselves and practice their mathematical analysis separately, without trying to take into account the political elements. But the only way in which you can subject problems to very concrete mathematical analysis is by simplifying them to the point at which you have controllable things to measure. And if you simplify human activities, if you whittle away the social institutions and the political activities, you’re left with such a limited aspect of human activity that it’s unintelligible.
In a 1987 radio program aired in the wake of Macpherson’s death, broadcaster David Cayley pointed out that the problem runs in the other direction as well. Which is to say: unless sufficiently attuned to questions of economics and material reality, political theory can become unhelpfully broad and abstract. And, just as economics cannot simply be abstracted from the social complexities that define economic life in the real world, the study of political theory cannot ignore the material contexts in which political ideas are invariably formed and applied.
When I studied the discipline myself — incidentally in Macpherson’s old department, though no longer called the Department of Political Economy — I was sometimes frustrated by its seeming indifference to where theory comes from. (If you’re going to read Hobbes, for example, don’t you also need to think about the English Civil War?) This aside, I also think that contemporary liberal theory in particular has suffered from a lack of attentiveness to the economic realities that variously, ground, shape, and constrain political institutions.2
In any case, the splitting up of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science ultimately signified something more far reaching than the death of one specialized academic journal. Extracted from political economy, the discipline of economics was free to shift in an increasingly quantitative and empirical direction — becoming, sometimes at least, mathematical to the point of absurdity. This trajectory has had the effect of turning economics into a value-free science: something distillable to a series of generalized laws and propositions that often leaves more fundamental questions unexamined.
Political theory, by contrast, was pulled hard in the other direction and was similarly left the worse for it. In some cases, the result was the kind of postmodern excess that has helped give the phrase “critical theory” a pejorative connotation. Elsewhere, the eschewing of political economy has simply meant insufficient attention to how material realities unavoidably shape political ideas and condition their application: a kind of “republic of letters” approach in which philosophy is put in conversation mainly, and sometimes only, with itself.
In both cases, we are left with disciplines less well equipped to describe and interpret the world, let alone aid in changing it.
The same belief informed Karl Polanyi in his groundbreaking book The Great Transformation, and outside Canada it had an important lineage in the German school of political economy.
There’s a strong case the same applies even to the most progressively-minded liberal thinking. Notwithstanding its undeniable brilliance (and very real attention to the kinds of issues raised by socialists and social democrats), John Rawls’ landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice operates in an abstract register that is largely removed from tangible issues of class and power.
Excellent piece, Luke. Seems relevant to me also (with the necessary caveats about generalizing in this way) that political economy as a discipline is much more left wing than political science or economics.
I think you’re making an important point, Luke. There is a tendency for many on the left to correctly identify material conditions in the equation, but to incorrectly assume that material conditions exist in a vacuum, acting as a discreet value in the equation rather than a variable and simultaneously a product of the equation.
That probably doesn’t make any sense but what I mean is, our built world and material reality reflects the material conditions we experience. A city designed to serve capital begets an world in which we build things to serve capital. And we live in that and our minds map ideology on to the city and the city maps the ideology on to our minds. And that city informs us that we should serve capital to access the higher end areas.
This is apparent in Berlin where West Berlin is full of major shopping streets with glossy windows and big office buildings, offset with nooks and crannies and gritty alleys that are obscured from view and light. The city transformed organically and buildings appeared at the whims of capital.
Conversely East Berlin is uniform in height, a much more human scale, the buildings themselves dominate the landscape with broad boulevards and a defined hierarchy of purposeful streets.
Still, in a post 1989 world, one is where business deals happen and one is where people push kids in strollers to the speilplatz and the cafes are breezy and never crowded. Even the stores in Alexanderplatz feel kinda shoehorned in there and don’t really lend themselves naturally to a Bundesliga kit store.
What am I saying? To the idea of political economy - the end of history presupposes that any physical or material environment is serving capital and liberal democracy. There’s no concept of material conditions beyond the material conditions as they relate to serving capital. This is my problem with the Abundance movement - the abundance they’re describing is the abundance of extremely limited possibilities. Office park. Subdivision. Shopping center.
How often do we discuss workforce development along side economic development alongside land development? There’s a complete absence of any political discussion in that world. It’s totall divorced as you describe in the separation of the journals. Somehow we are expecting a politics that is divorced from actual material reality to somehow influence material reality. This is how you end up with one side that offering feelings-politics via a “politics of joy” and the other side offering feelings-politics of “pissed off about my neighbor getting a bigger above ground pool than me and so I blame immigrants.”
We live in a world where material conditions that support availability and affordability of healthcare is based on how much money you can make off land development. Identifying universal healthcare as improved material conditions is fundamentally inconceivable when you can’t imagine a world where access to healthcare is based on equity rather than municipal incremental tax financing programs.
I don’t know. This probably doesn’t make sense. I have a point. Maybe there’s more specific writing on this but I haven’t read it to apply any sort of language to it.