Estudios de la Economía

[A fines de febrero tuve la suerte de asistir a un workshop llevado a cabo en Copenhagen Business School para discutir los capítulos sobre la economía del libro An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (AIME) de Bruno Latour, quien también participó en el taller. Para participar debíamos enviar un breve texto respondiendo o complementando alguno de los aspectos del proyecto iniciado en el libro. En este post comparto mi contribución, la que construí a partir del uso que Latour hace, de la idea propuesta por Timothy Mitchell, de que la economía es un invento reciente. A su vez, el post continúa varios de los temas que se han ido discutiendo en este blog]

Timothy Mitchell has made a thrilling suggestion: “The Economy” was not born until the mid XX century. With this he doesn’t deny, as shown for instance by Foucault in his Security, Territory and Population, that economists and political economy existed well before, but suggests that it was only in the mid XX century that the economy started to be seen as a whole that could be counted and called that way. Playing with Michel Callon’s terms, with the amazing growth of economic statistics that enabled counting, summarizing and inscribing the millions of transactions carried out in a given country, economists performed a calculable “Economy”.

The Economy described by Mitchell however does not correspond to any “economy” Continue reading →