Jean-Pierre Dupuy
2011
My work of the past thirty years in the philosophy of economics has been guided by the conviction that not only must the economy be linked to religion if we wish to understand its meaning, but that the economy occupies the place left vacant by the process— eminently religious in nature— of desacralization that characterizes modernity. It is in this long perspective that the present moment must be inscribed.
Like many, I find the arrogance of economists unbearable, today even more than usual. It's as if they alone had a monopoly of reflection on what is referred to as the "crisis"; as if they alone, flanked by politicians who are now but applied economists of sorts, were entitled to formulate prescriptions for "ending the crisis"; and this even as their essential myopia on human affairs is in active solidarity with the troubles of the world.
Let there be no mistake. I do not blame economists for not foreseeing the crisis; even less for causing it. It was obvious there would be a crisis. It was impossible to foresee how it would start and evolve, and at what moment these events would occur. One reason will suffice: in human affairs, and especially where the economy is concerned, a crisis is triggered when one foresees it and announces it, and not at the moment when one foresees that it will occur, so sensitive are present events to the anticipation of future events.
What is in question at the present moment is not finance capitalism; it is not capitalism per se; it is not the market, regulated or unregulated, self-regulated or self-deregulated, subject or not to short-selling. It is the place of the economy in our individual lives as in the workings of our societies. That place is immense, and we see this as ordinary. When I write économie in French, I refer to two things that are distinguished in English and confused in French-which works to the advantage of French: a part of social reality ("the economy") and a kind of outlook on the world and human affairs ("economics"). This part and this outlook tend to occupy the totality of our world and of our thoughts. We won't find in them the meaning of such a massive and extraordinary phenomenon, since the économie is both judge and party. Only a distant view that would have successfully detached itself from it can produce philosophical astonishment at what seems self-evident to the modern citizen having fully become, unbeknownst to himself, homo oeconomicus.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) Professor Dupuy is by courtesy a Professor of Political Science.
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