Economics, the Structures of Knowledge, and the Quest for a More Substantively Rational World

The “structures of knowledge” designates the long-term intellectual and institutional division in knowledge production, the arena of cognition and intentionality (the “socio-cultural”) that we recognize as the relational hierarchy between the sciences and the humanities, or the “two cultures”, and it is just as integral to the development of the modern world as the realms of material production and distribution (the “economic”) or of decision making and coercion (the “political”). The modern discipline of economics emerged from a medium-term restructuring of the structures of knowledge in the late nineteenth century along with the other, multiple, social sciences between the sciences and the humanities each with proprietary subject matters, theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches. The contemporary crisis in the field of knowledge production is part of the overall exhaustion of the processes reproducing the structures of the modern world-system. Contemporary economics in this “far-from-equilibrium” world should be well placed to contribute to an understanding of the alternative futures available today. But this would entail a reexamination of its inherited theoretical approaches and methodological practices.