Intellectual History of Economic Normativities

247 Pages·2016·2.332 MB·English

by  Mikkel Thorup (eds.)

EDITED BY
MIKKEL THORUP
Intellectual History of Economic Normativities

Mikkel Thorup
Editor
Intellectual History of
Economic
Normativities
Editor
Mikkel Thorup
Institute for Culture and Society
Aarhus, Denmark
ISBN 978-1-137-59415-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59416-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59416-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944735
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: Profi ting from Words 1
Mikkel Thorup
2 The Greed of Gold: Early Modern Conceptions of Money,
Nature and Morals 25
Jakob Bek-Thomsen
3 Trade is a Kind of Warfare: Mercantilism and
Corporations in the Thought of Josiah Child 41
Mathias Hein Jessen
4 The Wedel-Jarlsberg-Controversy: Defending the
Existing Order against the Reform-Movement in Late
Eighteenth-Century Denmark 57
Eva Krause Jørgensen
5 The Emergence of the Concept “Political Economy” 73
Nicolai von Eggers
6 Equilibrium, Natural Order and the Origins of
Normative-Deductive Economics 91
Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Representation and Taxation: Fiscality, Human Rights
and the French Revolution 107
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
8 Political Economy at Work: Explaining the Results of
Machinery in 1830s Britain 123
Thomas Palmelund Johansen
9 The Crisis Is the Social Organism’s Mastering of
Itself: A Conceptual and Economic History of the
Problem of Crisis 139
Bue Rübner Hansen
10 When Finance Became Productive, Scientifi c and
Liberating: A Moral History of Financial Speculation 155
Christian Olaf Christiansen
11 The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and
Famine in Colonial India 169
Rune Møller Stahl
12 The Economic Normativity of British Fiscal
Administration in Egypt and Nigeria, 1882–1914 185
Casper Andersen
13 Talking the Creative Economy into Being 201
Jan Løhmann Stephensen
14 Retweet This: Participation, Collective Production, and
New Paradigms of Cultural Production 217
Louise Fabian and Jaron Rowan
Index 233
L C
IST OF ONTRIBUTORS
Casper   Andersen i s an associate professor in the History of Ideas at Aarhus
University, Denmark. He has published extensively on British engineers as imperial
agents and co-edited a fi ve-volume collection on British colonial administration in
Africa. His current research focuses on UNESCO and decolonization in Africa.
Jakob   B ek-Thomsen i s an assistant professor at the Department of Culture and
Society at Aarhus University. He obtained his PhD from Aarhus University with a
dissertation on early modern networks and scientifi c academies. Among his main
research interests is the interdisciplinary nature of economic thinking, especially
with regard to economic growth and circular economies.
Christian   Olaf   Christiansen i s an associate professor at the Department of
Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University. He is an intellectual
historian of twentieth-c entury economic and political thought. His main interest
is to historicize ideas of pressing contemporary concern, ranging from the role of
business in society to the history of social and economic rights.
Nicolai   von Eggers i s a PhD Fellow in the History of Ideas, Aarhus University,
and is writing a dissertation on the economic and political theory of the French
revolutionaries. Relevant publications include “Reappropriating Sovereignty” in
Tropos (8:1); “The Right to Resist in the French Revolution” in Victims and
Agents ; and two co-edited books on the American and French Revolutions.
Louise   Fabian i s an associate professor at the Institute for Culture and Society,
Aarhus University, Denmark. Fabian has published several articles on a range of
topics, including spatial thinking, urban culture, DIY urbanism, social movements,
mediatized activism, cultural resistance, and cooperative learning.
vii
viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Bue   Rübner   Hansen i s a postdoc researcher at Aarhus University. His long-term
research in intellectual history focuses on concepts of organization in classical
German political and natural philosophy, particularly in Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
He is investigating the relationship between societal problems, social movement
practice, and ideation in the contemporary European crisis.
Stefan   Gaarsmand   Jacobsen i s a postdoctoral researcher at Copenhagen Business
School, working on the project “Sustainable Rationalities,” which investigates the
economic philosophies of contemporary climate organizations. He has been part
of the research project “Economic Rationalities in History” at Aarhus University,
where he provided a critical perspective on the development of liberalist economic
thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and shed light on differ-
ent attempts to democratize political economy from below.
Mathias   Hein   Jessen i s currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of
Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School where he works on a project
on civil society. He holds a PhD from Department of Philosophy and the History
of Ideas, Aarhus University, Denmark. His thesis is entitled “Sovereign Bodies—
Constitution and Construction of State, Subject and Corporation.” He works in
the fi eld of political and economic history of thought as well as contemporary
political philosophy and is particularly interested in the state and its relation to the
corporations and corporate bodies within it.
Thomas   P almelund   J ohansen i s a PhD candidate in the History of Ideas at the
Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. His research interests include
the circulation of economic knowledge and ideas about machinery in the early
industrial period. His thesis work explores the contested nature of the concept of
“useful knowledge” in Britain in the 1820s–1840s.
Eva   Krause   Jørgensen i s a PhD and an lecturer at Aarhus University. Jørgensen’s
research interests mainly revolve around political history and the history of politi-
cal and economic thought in the long eighteenth century. In her work, she has
been particularly occupied with how various political agents, in public or within
the state, articulated, conceptualized, and (de)legitimated political, social, and
economic ideas about agrarian reform politics in Denmark during the so-called
reform period from 1784 to 1797.
Jonas   Ross   Kjærgård i s an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative
Literature, Aarhus University. His PhD dissertation was a cultural history of
French revolutionary human rights, emphasizing the importance of fi scal debates
and economic thought with regards to the language of rights. His current research
project focuses on slavery and the French-English competition in the eighteenth
century.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix
Jaron   Rowan , PhD is head of the Art Department at BAU, Centro Universitario
de Barcelona. He also coordinates the research group Objetologías/GREDITS. He
is currently working on a neomaterialist approach to culture and culture policy,
and recently published M emes: inteligencia idiota, política rara y folclore digital
(2015), a study on the political dimension of Internet memes.
Rune   Møller   Stahl i s a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science,
University of Copenhagen, and holds an MSc in Economic History from the
London School of Economics. His research focuses on the processes through
which economic ideas gain infl uence in the wider political economy. His PhD
project investigates the role of neoclassical economics in the neoliberal reform
agenda in recent decades.
Jan   Løhmann   Stephensen , PhD is a postdoc at the AU IDEAS Pilot Centre, the
Democratic Public Sphere, Aarhus University. He does research on creativity,
democracy, and political economy, mostly in relation to digital media. He is also
the editor of C onjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation .
Mikkel   Thorup i s Professor with special responsibilities in the History of Political
and Economic Thought at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His publications
include P ro Bono (2015), T he Total Enemy (2015), I ntellectual History of Terror
(2010), and Rousseau and Revolution (2010). His research concentrates at present
on the history of everyday economics.