2024/09/01 by Nicolae Bîea · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Political Economy and Marxism #Economic Theory and Institutions #Economic Theory and Policy
paper · doi:10.1086/732184
openalex publication_date 2024/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Scholars have remarked on the recent date at which we began to speak about “the economy” as a definite item. Through an analysis and critique of John Maynard Keynes’s interwar writings, this article revisits the emergence of the economy as a discursive object and reveals it as a site not merely of measurement and administration but also of political attachments. The economy, I argue, was constituted through a specifically perverse utopian promise: that of its own disappearance as the result of technological progress and generalized abundance. I suggest Keynes’s utopianism is the most significant instance of what Marx termed “bourgeois socialism”: the fantasy of a world in which the proletariat has vanished and the sole remaining class is the bourgeoisie. The failure of Keynes’s forecast concerning the end of the economic problem is, at the same time, the failure of a utopian project of reordering the class structure of capitalist society.