Economics

History

Economics as the institutionalized ideology of mental-rational consciousness

Peter Pogany:

"Geographic globalization was complete by the end of the 15th century. The visualization of Earth as a three-dimensional object became a powerful catalyst to spatial thinking and the path was cleared for the gradual coming to dominance of mental-rational consciousness. The birth and development of economics as a specialized field of interest coincided with this process. After the discovery of the Americas, increased agricultural productivity and the massive transatlantic flow of monetary metals facilitated the rapid growth of commerce, industry, and urbanization in Europe. The nation state revealed itself as the viable intermediary unit of organization between local socioeconomic milieus and the world at large -- tending toward an exhaustive distribution of the planet. Thinking about social conditions and history brought to life the motivation to quantify phenomena, to build comprehensive analytical models. The rationality of science and technology began to imbue individual behavior with the harsh directedness of cost-benefit calculus.

Nakedly self-centered materialism was elevated to the foundational principle of a world-organizing socioeconomic model with the 1776 publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Many economic historians consider this work the true genesis of economics as an independent field of academic inquiry. Laissez faire (classical) capitalism drew its ideological sustenance and prescriptions for individual and national conduct from The Wealth of Nations. An ideological conviction took root that blossomed into the following general view: Scientific progress and the magic power of the market are destined to make man (the subject) the master of nature (the object). The free market credo effectively locked the repertoire of socioeconomic behavior into the narrow closet of calculative, money-metric self-interest and turned the past into the prehistory of a rationally assessable, eternally valid, equilibrium-centric order. Although classical capitalism went through a major transformation during 1914-1945 to become incorporated into our contemporary global system (mixed economy/weak multilateralism -- or modern capitalism); its hypostasized ideological core (demanding, thriving on, and conserving mental consciousness in its inflated rationalist mode) has survived to our epoch."

(Fifth_Structure_Emergence_in_Economics)

Source

* Article: Fifth structure”- emergence in economics: Observations through the thermodynamic lens of world history. By Peter Pogany. International Gebser Society Conference, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. 15th - 17th October 2009.

(Fifth_Structure_Emergence_in_Economics)

NOTE that the URL humanthermodynamics dot com doesn't pass the filter of the wiki, also add dot pdf at the end