Chapter Twenty-Two - Epilogue: Political Economy and the Social

Summary

As we have seen, the economic turn deeply transformed the European world, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Scandinavian tundra, from the Andes to the Urals. It spawned a new consciousness, a kind of “economizing” of minds and practices. It was powerful enough even to inflect the Enlightenment, which too became increasingly economic. Rather than a passing or circumstantial swerve, the economic turn was in many ways irrevocable. The French Revolution grappled with its implications, the industrial revolution later embodied the finest and most worrisome of its promises. One of the lasting contributions of the economic turn was its didactic capacity and inspirational vocation: it stirred men to think and write about almost everything that mattered to people in society. The agenda was staggering in range and richness, and even Diderot marveled at the ways in which his own Encyclopedia had to adjust. Among the leading voices in the mapping out of the Economic Enlightenment were the well organized and extremely influential group of thinkers who appropriated the title of “économistes,” or Physiocrats, and a much looser constellation of economic writers, administrators and merchants—the alter-economists—who contested both the symbolic hegemony of the Physiocrats and their doctrine.

The great debates opposing Physiocrats and alter-economists during the economic turn posed some of the deepest and most abiding questions of the social and human sciences. Perhaps the inaugural question concerns the nature of society itself. This issue matters enormously to all the alter-economists. If they do not necessarily articulate a passage from the state of nature to society, their notion of transition bears a strong Hobbesian whiff that never vanishes. For if the resulting social order is less overtly turbulent than the state of nature, it remains obstinately fragile. This vulnerability, this brittleness is perhaps the major (de-)structuring force in their conception of the social.

The state of nature narrative is less telling for the Physiocrats, for whom the decisive idea is that only nature can found and sustain society. They focus on the solidity rather than the fragility of society: anterior to any form of social or political organization, natural law, if fully respected, must issue in the first of the many equilibria that mark Physiocratic equations of life.