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 Philosophical Reflection on the Emergence of Economic Thought



Philosophical Reflection on the Emergence of Economic Thought

The philosophical archaeology of economics reveals not a linear progression from moral to mathematical reasoning, but an ontological transformation in the idea of human action itself. For Aristotle, the oikonomia was not an autonomous object of inquiry but a derivative art—a prudential discipline embedded within the ethical architecture of the polis. The household, in his schema, was a microcosmic theatre of distributive justice, ordered by a teleological sense of sufficiency (autarkeia). Economic conduct, therefore, was inseparable from ethical moderation. The scholastic condemnations of usury, likewise, were moral commentaries upon the metaphysical nature of value and time, interpreting money not as a neutral medium of exchange but as a sterile, almost theological abstraction — an attempt to make time itself fertile through interest, a kind of metaphysical hubris.

With the rise of the mercantilist state, however, the discourse of wealth was de-ethicized and secularized. The frame of inquiry shifted from the moral constitution of exchange to the arithmetic choreography of trade flows. Gold, taxation, and tariffs became alchemical substances of statecraft. The modern oeconomy thus emerged not as a moral habitus but as a symbolic organism whose circulation of value mirrored the arteries of political power. Knowledge of wealth was no longer moral introspection but empirical state surveillance — a precursor to later positivist epistemologies.

It is only in the eighteenth century that the “economy” — previously a practical art — crystallizes into a conceptual object, amenable to scientific investigation. In the works of Cantillon, Hume, and above all Adam Smith, the invisible regularities of exchange disclose a hidden moral geometry: unintended consequences wrought by self-interested agents generate systemic order. Here, Smith’s “invisible hand” is less a teleological law of providence than an ontological insight into human finitude — that the self’s pursuit of private ends engenders effects beyond its comprehension, a dialectic between intention and outcome reminiscent of Hegel’s later “cunning of reason.” Economic law thus arises from the sedimentation of innumerable contingencies — a moral chaos sublimated into mathematical necessity.

John Stuart Mill codifies this transformation by explicitly delimiting political economy to phenomena arising from the human pursuit of wealth — wealth abstracted from the totality of human motive. In doing so, he delineates economics as a science of partial humanity: rational beings stripped of passion, justice, or love, animated only by aversion to labour and the hunger for luxury. The rational subject here is not ethical but calculative, a ghost of Benthamite logic who exchanges being for optimization.

The neoclassical revolution completes this abstraction. In its formalism, value no longer inheres in nature, virtue, or even utility per se, but in the marginal calculus of preference — a numerically translucent aesthetic of desire. Pareto and Hicks strip the theory of its hedonistic vestments, leaving behind a pure grammar of choice — completeness, transitivity, consistency. The agent of modern economics is thus a discursive construct: a being that ranks but does not feel, that prefers but does not suffer. Rationality becomes formal coherence rather than existential orientation.

Lionel Robbins extends this hollowing of content into a universal form of action: economics becomes the science of choice under scarcity, a logic of all human activity regardless of ends. Yet in this expansion, there is contraction — for while economics aspires to encompass the human, it simultaneously effaces the human beneath its own analytic rigor. The “economic” becomes a metaphysical schema, a way of being-in-the-world where scarcity, preference, and optimization replace virtue, meaning, and belonging. Thus, the philosophical question recurs with renewed urgency: is economics a descriptive science of behavior, or an ontological narrative about what it means to act, to value, to live in a world made finite by our own desires?


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