Sonya Marie Scott's Architectures of economic subjectivity: the philosophical foundations of the subject in the history of economic thought. London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 302 pp.

Abstract

Review of Sonya Marie Scott's Architectures of economic subjectivity: foundations of subject in history of economic thought. London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 302 pp.This book is an historical study of economic science that provides a close reading of Ricardo, Marx, Marshall, Walras, and Mises in order to unearth not philosophical and economic premises of a given model or theory, rather an interaction between explicit or [...] methodological assumptions and implicit, often contradictory practices (p. 9). More precisely, book deals with constitution of subjectivity in history of economic thought (p. 2), with a special emphasis on its architectonic. Subjectivity is defined as the logical and epistemological prescription to which purported 'people' that economics describes are subjected (p. 2), whereas architectonic, a term borrowed from Kant, refers to the attempt to create a coherent theoretical [...] an enclosure [...] around concepts, subjects and logic that comprise unity (p. 3). architectonic, for Scott, is never complete, but all theories she describes are somehow moving towards such enclosure.In first chapter (influenced by Marx's account of Ricardo in his Theories of surplus value) work of Ricardo is located history of modern liberal subject [...] [that is] homo oeconomicus (p. 11). Scott argues that Ricardo imposes a rational structure on subversive realm of natural, a realm linked with labouring, subsisting subject, and that this move underlies whole edifice of Ricardian thought. body of labourer is conceived as a factor of contingency and instability that is at same time basis of labour theory of value since labouring body of worker is source of economic value. Scott deconstructs Ricardo's attempt to tame beast of labour by suppressing and subsuming it within a rationalised doctrine. But labour cannot be fully known, and quest for an invariable standard of value, Scott argues, is bound to fail. concreteness of labour and qualitative nature of labourer are dispensed with; workers are deprived of any independent agency, while rational agency of those who control capital and their self-ascribed superior understanding (epistemological in Scott's terminology) become determining features of this process. As Scott puts it, The labourer is robbed of his materiality, made abstract and bound into reified relations, i.e., relationships characterized by price, by units of labour-time, etc. (p. 51). domination of a particular class-the rational owners of capital-is textually demonstrated from Ricardo's treatment of taxes.Ricardo's immaterial but invariable standard of value is a failure: to be rooted in material, but continuously requiring material in order to substantiate its existence, it becomes impossibility of Ricardo's system itself (p. 35). Thus, along with labouring body and rational capitalist third implicit subjectivity emerges-that of political economist, or scientific observer who wants to embrace whole of economic system within his model, but is unable to do that since abstraction used is both directed at reality and separated from it by quixotic quest for an invariable standard of value.The second chapter goes back to Smith. Scott describes wealth of nations as enacting scattered, tangential and tentative economic subjectivities (p. 53); Smith's architectonic is merely partial and tentative. text is read primarily not as a theory of value but as a collection of historical digressions. In particular, reading digression on colonies, Scott suggests that the profound conflict that lies at heart of Wealth of Nations (p. 87) is difference between concrete economic subjects (who belong to different classes and nations) and abstract individuals populating ideal system of freedom. …