A strange species of economic analysis pervades contemporary mainstream economic thinking. I also posit that this mode happens to be the globally dominant economic episteme at the moment and has been so since the eighties of the twentieth century. I shall call this type a priori economics after the logical tradition which provides it with its explanatory and demonstrative tools. It is marked by a refusal to proceed from economic facts grounded in the life-world of individuals to axiomatic propositions about the behaviours and tendencies prevailing in that life- world. Economic facts are informational entities that contain the knowledge of transactional relationships between human beings that are determined by the production and reproduction of the individual life of persons and the collective life of society.
A priori economics is motivated by the need to promote a minority conceptualisation of such facts as the only viable option for understanding the creation and movement of goods and services on one hand, and the dynamics of institutions that both regulate and make this creative motion possible, on the other. The economic outlook, founded fundamentally on the experiences, interests, hopes, and motives of a socio-economic minority, excludes alternative outlooks from the repertoire of easily accessible workday concepts used to understand economic facts as defined above. Ostracism suffered by alternate narratives paves the way for the endless reproduction of the reversal of causal chains that link different economic facts together.
This reversal results in the incomplete understanding of social phenomena. This understanding remains incomplete because, by making facts flow from axioms, critical thinking surrenders to the dogmatic insistence on vindicating cherished belief systems. This partial understanding appears as the loss of confidence in the transformational capacity of human practice and leads to the hardening of the upside-down belief that economic facts invariably and inevitably corroborate and, therefore, consolidate axioms with the result that the corpus of such axioms becomes the how-to manual of establishing a social system of narrow-cast benefits without much scope for major modification.
The practice of limited distribution of welfare is in turn sustained by the deductive-inductive circuit (I choose to abbreviate it as DIC) which powers the enterprise of a priori economics. This circuit is made up of a deductive visioning which enforces the realisation of its proposed premises in the form of real social acts to be followed by the inductive confirmation of the preceding deductive moment. In a world ruled by a priori economics, relationships between social groups within one and the same society, and also between different national societies are caught up in this circular motion wherein induction is pre-determined by deduction. To make it impregnable against the occasional recall of the side-lined alternative worldviews, econometric modelling and neoclassical conceptual set-pieces are used to bestow a veneer of mathematical and logical infallibility on the world willed into being by the DIC.
DIC-powered a priori economics also disturbs the conditions of emergence of human knowledge. Born at the juncture where the infinite human desire for self-expansion meets the finite world – both natural and social – in the course of fulfilling determinate human needs, human knowledge is the result of the unstable equilibrium of the desire for self-expansion and the world maintained by the pressing demand of human needs. In this sense, knowledge can also be viewed as the defence mechanism for coping with the traumatic experience of the shock generated by the confrontation of human desire and the world. A priori economics comes into being when the needs of any particular social group come to be confused with human needs in general. This conflation provides such a social group or section with the means to escape external control simply because goals of a particular social segment are viewed, and therefore, pursued as the universal goal.
Just as confusing particular with universal goals allows a social group to impose its own needs on the rest of the society, so, in like manner, the particular desire of a social group for domination comes to be seen as the general desire of all. This generality of desire allows human desire for expansion to dominate natural and social worlds, but only after it has concentrated itself in the shape of the desire for domination of a specific social group. The transformation of particular goals and desire into general goal and desire hides the fact from view that all social systems are subject to change and replacement. The theory of knowledge raised on a priori economics, therefore, serves to preserve the world it helps in creating by projecting it as the natural and eternal form of the organization of human life reducing the history of humanity and society to a process for the reproduction of timeless axioms about the temporal socio-economic relationships between people. The opportunity cost of this epistemic a-temporality and the world founded on it is the cognitive impoverishment of the private and public lives of human beings.
The writer is a Senior Policy Analyst working for the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation and can be contacted at [email protected].
