Chapter VI - The New Historiography of Political Economy

Summary

In recent years, the study of political economy has acquired a fresh vitality and intellectual cachet. It has (re-)emerged both as a free-standing problématique on its own, with an epistemological self-consciousness and reflexivity heretofore largely absent, and as a powerful lever for making sense of the rest of history, from which it has often been unyoked and even cloistered, sometimes by choice. If this estrangement seems not to have been resisted by liberals, who enjoyed a certain dominion in the subfield, it certainly was favored by the collapse of Marxism, which had begun, at least on the margins, to question the utter subordination of superstructure to infrastructure, that is to say, to reconsider the relation between things and ideas. At roughly the same time that the Soviet empire imploded, and postmodernism began to hector the complacent mainstream, in both rewarding and perverse fashions, more and more historians took the culturalist turn: a rejection of the usual methodological hierarchies and causal ontologies, a fundamental interrogation concerning the relation of texts to contexts (predicated upon an absolute refusal to reduce texts, images and myriad artifacts to the status of reflections of their time), a heightened sensitivity to the claims of language and an ambition to fathom more rigorously the linkages between ideas/words and actions/“reality.”

Some of these historians began to reexamine political economy as a discursive practice and as a worldview, a reflection quickened by burgeoning ambient anxieties about the “financialization” of the economy, the profoundly unsettling impact of globalization, growing disparities between rich and poor not only between different economies, but also within manifestly wealthy societies, and a budding realization of the subterranean sway of what could be called economic ideology, lodged within a characteristically unexamined (a-)moral philosophy. If the midwife to the rebirth of political economy was cultural in spheres of Anglo-American influence, in France it was as much economic and sociological as cultural. Some of the most creative French scholars entering this field, often formally trained as economists, less frequently as sociologists, nourished their historical investigations with robust theoretical tools drawn from these disciplines and others.