There is a long-standing debate on how economics as a subject is gender blind giving rise to various branches within the subject that seek to address ‘the woman question’ (as early feminism has been labeled) within the discipline. Giandomenica Becchio’s book A History of Feminist and Gender Economics is not merely an attempt to understand the history of economics and how the various dimensions of ‘the woman question’ have entered the discipline of economics over the years. The book also explores the work of women economists who mostly remained unheard in the discipline, the women who struggled to enter into the academic realm and the debates within these economists about addressing ‘the woman question’.
The recent ‘insurrection’ on Capitol Hill should put an end to any liberal illusions that 2021 would usher in, in Biden’s words, a return to decency. Surreal images of the QAnon Shaman roaming the US Senate may yet become one of the defining photographs of the Trump presidency. In many ways it is symbolic of the President himself – inchoate and unashamedly atavistic yet, emboldened by law and order, obstructive and corrosive.
Many of these themes are touched upon in Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth’s short book Angrynomics. In many senses it is a timely book, published just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the largest global recession since the Second World War, these are fertile grounds for anger. Certainly there is very little to dispute about Lonergan and Blyth’s premise:
“We have an abject failure of policy. Rather than presenting a major programme of economic reform, the global political elite has offered nothing substantive, instead choosing either to jump on the bandwagon of nationalism or insist that nothing fundamental is wrong… The political classes, bereft of ideas, are now desperately peddling old ideologies and instincts, or pursuing bizarre distractions like Brexit.”
As a result of this abject failure, people are angry. They are either publicly anger or privately angry. That public anger either manifests itself in moral outrage (think, for instance, of an Extinction Rebellion protest) or tribal rage (for example, and this is used in the book, fans at a football match). Private anger, meanwhile, gives us an insight into the daily micro-stresses of people’s lives. This is the Lonergan and Blyth typology of anger.
Whose Anger?
While the authors are clear that “we need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends” (22), their analysis often fails to live up to the task. Through the centrality of “legitimate moral grievances in the Rust Belt” in explaining the election of Trump (25) and the “real stressors” of immigration driving the Brexit vote (111-112), Angrynomics ends up sidestepping important discussions of race for an overly simplistic explanation of class.
Ontology is the study of being. Social ontology is the study of social being or, in other words, the study of the nature and basic structure of social reality. We all do ontology all of the time, economists included, whether we like it or not. For all practices carry ontological presuppositions. Economists only have a choice between doing ontology explicitly or implicitly. Tony Lawson’s contributions stand out and are of such profound significance precisely because he explicitly grounds his analysis in an account of social ontology. It is only by redressing the ontological neglect that has for some decades characterised the discipline that a productive transformation of economics is at all feasible.
Lawson is perhaps best known amongst heterodox economists for his critique of the mainstream emphasis on mathematical modelling. Lawson shows that the implicit ontological presupposition of an insistence of mathematical modelling is a world of isolated atoms and argues that, as the social realm is not characterised by isolated atoms, the mainstream approach will produce largely irrelevant research. However, it would be wrong to consider this critique to be his major contribution. Rather, it is but one of an increasing number of powerful (sometimes startling) results derived from Lawson’s three-decade project of developing and defending, along with other participants of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, an account of the nature of social reality.
The Nature of Social Reality: Issues in Social Ontology provides the latest developments that Lawson has made in the field of social ontology. Here, he sets out an account of social ontology that has come to be regularly referred to as a theory of social positioning, demonstrating its explanatory power. An exciting feature of the book is that it sets out the theory of social positioning in its most advanced form to date and then puts it to work through analysing the nature of the corporation, money and emancipatory practice. Whilst Lawson is pursuing themes in social ontology at an advanced level, he takes great pains to ensure that the analysis is everywhere accessible. The detailed and provocative accounts of the corporation and of money provide ample illustrations of the enormous potential of the social positioning framework. Read More »
Adam Hanieh’s book ‘Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East’ is one of the most important works on contemporary Middle East. The book analyses the specificity of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as part of global capitalism by focusing on the socio-economic structures of the six Gulf States, the interlinkages between them and other socio-economic and financial relationships with the rest of the world. Joining other scholars, Hanieh draws attention to the fact that scholarship on the Middle East including the GCC has inclined towards an exceptionalism which overwhelmingly focuses on the Middle East as a resource-rich country and a site of various conflicts. This reductive emphasis diminishes the various ways in which the region integrates the contemporary patterns of capital accumulation and historical lineages of familial and monarchic capitalism. As he mentions, even the modern concept of the ‘BRICS’ excludes the large population of the Middle East. Filling this vacuum, the book focuses on how the GCC absorbs and reproduces contemporary modalities of capital accumulation in diverse sectors including finance, agribusiness, real estate, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities. The six states of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have special linkages with global powers including the US, Israel, China and other Arab states. As important logistics hubs and sites of intermediate supply chains these states also connect with other countries.Read More »
Kalyan Sanyal’s Rethinking Capitalist Development (2007, 2014) is a rare work of political economy for many reasons. It is written by an economist, but it’s so interdisciplinary that you won’t be able to tell. It is an attempt to theorize capitalism in the postcolonial context from the inside-out rather than outside-in, i.e. with no reference to an ideal type. It refuses to sit neatly in theoretical boundaries — it is not entirely Marxist, not entirely Postmarxist, not entirely neo-Gramscian, not entirely Foucauldian, but a strange concoction of all. Perhaps the only thing that is not rare is that like most interesting and influential works that emerge from the Global South, it too has been largely ignored in the academic circles of the Global North, especially in Economics. Read More »
Pluralistic Economics and Its History, edited by Ajit Sinha of Thapar School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Patiala (India) and Alex M. Thomas of Azim Premji University, Bengaluru (India), contains seventeen essays. This review seeks to engage with some of the principal themes that animate the essays in this volume. Read More »
How should one assess a book on economic policy that takes a dim view of the state and redistribution in a country that is home to multiple and intersecting inequalities? Economic inequality and the role of the state in tackling inequality emerged as a major talking point in the last decade and it is likely that it will continue to animate academic and policy debates in the following decade too. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to evaluate any book on economic policy based on the seriousness with which it engages with inequality and how it imagines state intervention in the economy. This review seeks to do precisely that by unpacking the conventional wisdom about the nature and role of the state presented in the book In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah.Read More »
The newest book by Giorgos Kallis, one of the most prolific degrowth advocates is entitled Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. It is a short and accessible read which contains some important and unconventional arguments. In what follows, I will first briefly summarize the core arguments of the book, which promises to provoke important discussions on the matter of limits and subjects. Then I will reflect on the fuzziness of the primarily cultural conceptualization of capitalism, and argue that neither self-limitation nor degrowth qualifies as a mode of production, such that they could constitute an alternative to capitalism.Read More »
Developing Economics 