Intellectual History of Economic Normativities

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) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York

CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Profiting 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, Scientific 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

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Casper Andersen is 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 five-volume collection on British colonial administration in Africa. His current research focuses on UNESCO and decolonization in Africa. Jakob Bek-Thomsen is 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 scientific 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 is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and the History of Ideas at Aarhus University. He is an intellectual historian of twentieth- century 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 different attempts to democratize political economy from below. Mathias Hein Jessen is 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 field 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 Palmelund Johansen is 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 is a PhD and an lecturer at Aarhus University. Jørgensen s research interests mainly revolve around political history and the history of political 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 is 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 fiscal 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 Memes: inteligencia idiota, política rara y folclore digital (2015), a study on the political dimension of Internet memes. Rune Møller Stahl is 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 influence 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 Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation. Mikkel Thorup is Professor with special responsibilities in the History of Political and Economic Thought at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His publications include Pro Bono (2015), The Total Enemy (2015), Intellectual History of Terror (2010), and Rousseau and Revolution (2010). His research concentrates at present on the history of everyday economics.