Category Archives: Political Theory

CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 

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Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Critical political economy pertains to the negative and/or positive judgment of the public management of private resources, and in practice denotes two broad intentions: (1) a disciplinary approach to inquiry; and (2) an attitude towards (a) existing literature in the field of Political Economy, and (b) existing political economic practices.

The term critical political economy can be broken into its constituent parts to form a preliminary etymological definition of its subject matter. Starting in reverse order the term ‘economy’ is derived from the Greek composite of oikos, meaning ‘house’, and nemein, meaning ‘manage’, giving us an approximate definition of economy as ‘household management.’. The derivative form of this meaning in contemporary usage relates to the management of material resources at various levels and meanings of the term ‘household,’ though always generally denoting a private sphere of operation: the private sphere of actual households of individuals and families, of local and somewhat autonomous government jurisdictions such as municipalities, or of sovereign states interacting with an international market economy. In all cases there is the notion of managing ‘incomings’ (incomes, imports) and ‘outgoings’ (expenditures, exports) within a sphere of privation. The word ‘political’ is also derived from Greek, in this case polis, meaning ‘affairs of the cities’. Putting this into historical context, its origin derives from the Ancient Greek era of city-states, such as Athens and Sparta, and is therefore now also associated with matters of the state. Even when operating in a local context (e.g. municipal government), politics are generally subject to state jurisdiction of laws (e.g. the necessary compatibility of constitutional and state law), and sometimes extend to partial budgetary limitations. Affairs of the city are never without controversy, and the everyday meaning of politics today suggests something of a contest over who gets to determine the affairs of the city, and how they go about it. Politics thus comes to be associated with struggle played out in the public sphere; struggle over the social form of jurisdiction in question, be it a city, sovereign state, or other social entity of significant size. Putting this definition of ‘political’, together with ‘economy’ we arrive at something like the public struggle over management of private material resources. Though this may seem a counterintuitive definition when speaking of an entity such as a sovereign state government, which should be setting policies for both public and private management of state resources, it in fact still captures the meaning that a sovereign state has certain private material resources specific to that state that it wishes to manage in the public sphere of the international economy, for example in trade practices. The same principle of public and private applies at various levels of political and economic activity.

The term ‘critical’ in itself denotes a number of different meanings each of which may color the meaning of the composite term critical political economy. It may be linked with related terms such as criticism or critique, both of which suggest a judgment of sorts, but differ in the scope and aims of such judgment. Criticism tends to evoke the idea of negative assessment, of challenging the very substance of the subject matter in question without necessarily offering positive suggestions for improvement; it has both an everyday and a professional or scholarly context. Critique instead evokes a practice more open to both positive and negative assessments, and applies more to a scholarly context of systematic assessment and interrogation. 

The ambivalence of the term ‘critical’ is not in fact limited to a difficulty of etymological definition, but also points to an ambivalence in the actual usage of the term as it emerges as both a scholarly approach and attitude.

Speaking to the first of these two interpretations (scholarly approach), it is useful to draw on a distinction made by the international political economist Robert Cox (1981, 128-130) between problem solving theory and critical theory. Problem solving theory is an approach that takes the world as it finds it, and attempts to solve problems arising in discrete parts of the complex whole with the aim of smoothing out the functioning of the whole. In its unquestioning assumption of the whole as a given, it therefore constitutes a conservative approach that is either consciously or unconsciously value-laden—ideological, even—and serves to preserve, and perhaps even strengthen, the status quo. Conversely, critical theory is an approach that takes an outside perspective on the world and questions how it is that this world came about, and whether normative alternatives to that world should be considered. In contradistinction with problem solving theory, critical theory is directed at the whole rather than discrete parts of the whole, and is radical in that it seeks change as opposed to stasis. Critical theory subsumes problem solving theories within its own frame of analysis and renders them as distinct ideologies. For problem solving theory this detracts from the practicality of theoretical work, however, critical theory is not so much unconcerned with practical matters of the ‘real world’ as it is attempting to transcend the existing order and question its underlying (unquestioned) assumptions.

Benjamin Cohen (2016) makes reference to this distinction in specific relation to Political Economy, by criticizing the paucity of scholarship aimed at addressing international, or systemic, matters of monetary policy and management since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009. His argument is that the shortage of academic work on this matter is a result of prevailing methodologies in the discipline, methodologies that focus on narrowly focused, segmented, quantitative work—‘hard science’ as it were (Cohen 2016, 3). This amounts to problem solving theory as defined by Cox. Critical Political Economists instead reject the otherwise hegemonic focus on segmented analysis, and focus on the progression of change and stasis within the system as a whole (Cohen 2016, 15), which in Cohen’s argument manifests as a focus on the neglected area of international monetary policy. This further relates to Cox’s definition of critical theory, in that Cohen points out the work in this domain has largely focused on power and crisis, both of which would point to ideological factors impacting Political Economic discourse and practice, as well as bringing a normative perspective into view in addressing how to deal with perennial crises that problem solving theorists of Political Economy otherwise treat as unquestioned and unavoidable, perpetual but transitory (i.e. cyclical) features of Political Economy.   

This critical theoretical approach is also brought into view in the work of figures such as Karl Marx (1976) who specifically situates his analysis as operating in with an historically distinctive moment, with a particularized (though lawful, in the sense of forming predictable patterns of observable behavior) social form that is, because historical, consequently vulnerable to change (Marx 1976, 126). Hence his critique of Capitalism looks beyond surface appearances of entities such as the commodity (cf. Marx 1976, 125) in order to determine how it is that this entity came about historically, and to render visible otherwise concealed assumptions that go unquestioned in traditional political economic analysis (cf. Marx 1976, 138). Indeed, one of the great qualities of Marx’s critique of Capital is that contains within it the problem solving theories of classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and critique’s those theories on their own terms, revealing their (intentional or unintentional) ideological leanings, and tendency to support status quo practices. Max Tomba (2009) similarly points to the state violence of primitive accumulation (i.e. original possession of the means of production), and, instead of taking it as an unquestioned assumption about the origins of the modern economy (and therefore irrelevant for contemporary political economic analysis), treats it as an ongoing and permanent process of disaccumulation (Tomba 2009, 55). This has implications not merely for scholarly theorizing about Political Economy, but also for real political action related to economic affairs in contemporary society. Such analysis draws our attention to injustices embedded within the dominant mode of political economy and challenges us to develop a normative framework that looks beyond such injustice.

The second interpretation of the term critical political economy above, was broken into two subforms relating to attitude. The first of these related to a critical attitude towards existing literature in the field. It has already been noted that Marx’s analysis critiques the classical political economists on their own terms, and therefore shows that this interpretation of critical political economy is linked to the critical theoretical approach. Marx, for instance, postulates that the value of commodities is independent of the labor process, in an apparent refutation of John Locke’s notion of value being a mix of human labor with nature (Marx 1976, 126). Such an attitude becomes apparent in more general terms as well. Smith, for instance, in postulating the origins and benefits of productivity of machinery, offers an anecdote in which a child automates part of the labor process with the outcome of creating for himself additional leisure (liberty) time (Smith 1776, 17). Marx’s response is to immediately recognize that the time freed up to automation would not immediately be given to leisure, but would instead be diverted to other work tasks so as to compound the productivity gains given by innovation. Marx refers to this as ‘relative surplus-value (Marx 1976, 429-438). Another example is Cohen’s (2016, 6) criticism of scholars who apply monolithic analytical terms–e.g. “all voters”–in their analyses. The problem with such a move, he argues, is that the theoretical convenience of using such an analytical device (‘all voters’) obscures the messy reality in which money in politics has a significant effect on skewing voting preferences through advertising, campaign funding, and so on.

The second critical political economic treatment of attitude relates to existing practices. Of course, this is already linked to that which has already been discussed both in terms of the approach of critical theory, and by derivation, in the attitude of political economic literature criticism. However, it extends to practices that may be observed and not necessarily theoretically documented. Smith, in his discussion of productivity, notes three specializations deriving from the division of labor: dexterity, task consistency, and machinery (Smith 1776, 14-17). While these results are perhaps true in practice, what Smith fails to note is that dexterity as a result of performing one sole operation leads to drudgery, task consistency leads to the unbroken intensity of labor in the workhouse (and later factory), and machinery leads to mass unemployment. Another practice that may be criticized is the trend towards private sector management of finance and monetary governance, demonstrated by the contemporary influence of US bond-rating agencies in being able to determine which economic actors are deemed creditworthy and of economic worth in doing business with (Cohen 2016, 11). Leaving such matters to private institutions which may be influenced by private, partisan interests leaves the practice open to critical analysis in that it may serve the needs of an elite few rather than the public. The lists could go on and on.

The various meanings of critical political economy discussed above overlap with each other to the extent that it becomes difficult to clearly demarcate or distinguish the content of these definitions in any strict way. What they all specifically share, however, is a commitment to challenging the status quo, and contesting descriptive and normative assumptions about how the economy should be organized. At the beginning it was noted that ‘Politics’ denotes something approximating a contest over the determination of social form. If this is true, we may ultimately say that in the end critical political economy constitutes a genuinely Political Economy.

(See Capital, Feminist Economics, Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, Fetishism, Urban Political Economy)

Bibliography

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of money revisited.” Review of International Political Economy, 24, no. 4 (2017): 657-680.

Cox, Robert W. “Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory.” Millennium, 10, no. 2 (1981): 126-155.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Modern Library. New York, NY, 1906.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Bantam Dell, 2003 [1776].

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical temporalities of capital: An anti-historicist perspective.” Historical Materialism, 17, no. 4 (2009): 44-65.

GEOPOLITICS

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Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The word geopolitics comes from Greek gê, or “earth,” and politiká, or “affairs of the city.” Beyond these aspects, it is a somewhat loose term, broadly used to describe the relationship between physical and human geographies, politics, and/or international relations (IR). It refers to the study of “world politics,” but might encompass geoeconomics, globalization, political geography, political/environmental relationships, or the geostrategic discourse of IR realism. Furthermore, it is widely researched, spoken about, and thus defined outside of the academy. One popular voice on geopolitics, journalist Tim Marshall, claims that

Geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors: not just the physical landscape—the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example—but also climate, demographics, cultural regions, and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many different aspects of our civilization, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade, and religion. (2015, 2)

Marshall’s concern with “the [overlooked] physical realities that underpin national and international politics” (2) is but one aspect of geopolitics. Another aspect relates to political economy: to ports and trade routes, migration, borders, and the new powers of global finance which go beyond environmental and “balance of powers” analyses. Furthermore, in the subfield of critical geopolitics, scholars like John Agnew, Gerard Toal, and feminist geopolitical theorists like Jo Sharp examine the way ideas and discourses surrounding geopolitics influence actual geopolitical practices. Critical geopolitics does not deny its own “fictions,” but attempts to establish a more “cosmopolitan” and “self-critical” analysis (Toal 2010, 316).

Important works from the history of geopolitical thought (an extensive account of which is provided by Agnew in Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics (2003)) include Thucydides’ analysis of land and sea powers in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which posits the inseparability of human (political) actions and physical environments, and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which draws a direct connection between climate, “temper of the mind,” and a society’s governing laws (Montesquieu 2008, 438). Where Montesquieu’s economically minded contemporaries, Physiocrats like François Quesnay, would see economic value as derived from land (nature), these strands of ancient and early modern geopolitics suppose that power is derived from earth’s physical spaces.

Geopolitics as a truly global analysis began in the nineteenth century with the rapid development of industrial capitalism, colonialism and global empires, formal interstate relations, and an understanding of the world as a complete entity. Agnew writes that “World politics was invented only when it became possible to see the world (in the imagination) as a whole and pursue goals in relation to that geographical scale,” (2003, 5) and categorizes the discourse of geopolitics, or “geopolitical imaginaries,” into three historical periods: “civilizational geopolitics, naturalized geopolitics and ideological geopolitics, respectively. World politics in each of the epochs has been organized around the characterizations of space, places and peoples defined by these modes of representation and communication” (Agnew 2003, 85). Agnew’s first geopolitical imaginary, nineteenth century civilizational geopolitics, is based on an international political economy 

characterized by a European Concert in which no one state ‘laid down the law’ for the others within Europe, and by an emerging British economic dominance in much of the rest of the world… Its main elements were a commitment to European uniqueness as a civilization; a belief that the roots of European distinctiveness were found in its past; a sense that though other cultures might have noble pasts with high achievements, they had been eclipsed by Europe; and an increasing identification with a particular nation state as representing the most perfected version of the European difference. (2003, 87)

This understanding of world politics helped to establish the notion of a progressive, developmental trajectory for nation-states, and a hierarchy between “advanced” Europe and  a “backward” colonial periphery. 

Building off of this, thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and the Anglo-world, ascribed geopolitical hierarchy to nature, a “naturalized geopolitics.” This new imaginary “involved elaborating systems of environmental/geographical accounting; classifying states and regions in terms of inventories of resources, racial characteristics, economic and political organization, and climatic types… natural attributes determined national destiny” (Agnew 2003, 101). Naturalized geopolitics envisioned nations as organic bodies which swallowed up weaker nations and needed national economies to counter failing global financial systems. Swedish geographer Rudolph Kjellén first used the phrase “geopolitik” (Kjellén is also credited with coining “biopolitics”), and would greatly influence German geopolitical theorists Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer. Ratzel, for one, saw the territorial state as “the organized expression of the place-specific peoples they ruled—an expression of their Geist (spirit)—and state power was intimately linked to the extent of territory and size of population a state controlled” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 26). Ratzel and Haushofer developed the concept of a “vital space” or lebensraum, which would become an central part of Nazi ideology via the latter’s student, Rudolph Hess (Esposito 2008, 16). This style of organic geopolitics is also rooted in the “environmental determinism” characteristic of Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu, and which underlies darker currents of anti-globalization movements, the alt-Right, and “eco-fascism” today (neo-environmental determinism also enjoyed a popular resurgence with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)—no association with the latter, nefarious politics). Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith argue that “However arcane this idea might seem today—even repulsive in the wake of Nazi geopolitics—the organic state represented a considerable conceptual democratization compared with the absolutist state it succeeded” (26, 2009). In other words, geopolitics had adapted to a developing capitalist, bourgeois state—it sought a more nuanced view and left behind the brute civilization statism of the nineteenth century.

The geopolitics of the Cold War, Agnew’s third era of “ideological geopolitics,” was characterized by competition between global superpowers as the representatives of their respective political economic systems. For the US, this meant

indirect stimulation of economic growth by means of fiscal and monetary policies; commitment to a growing global marketplace based on a global division of labour; accepting the dollar as the principal world currency; hostility to Soviet-style economic planning; assuming the burden of policing political changes that could be construed as damaging to the stability of the world economy. (Agnew 2003, 103)

According to Agnew, when it comes to geopolitics “the intellectual and the political are not separable. Geopolitics has served statecraft, usually that of particular states” (127, 2003), and there is no better example of this unity than in the work, inside and outside of academia, of geopolitical theorists and Cold War American statesmen Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński (the latter of whom famously referred to geopolitics as a “grand chessboard” (1997)). Rather than just a conflict between states (as civilizations, organic entities, or political economic systems), ideological geopolitics attempts to establish a static, ahistorical world politics—a status quo to be maintained. With the end of the Cold War, this vision of ideological geopolitics has become threatened, as Hardt and Negri conclude in Empire (2000), from fundamentalisms “understood both from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences of primordial identities and values… conceived as a kind of historical backflow, a de-modernization” (2000, 146). Therefore, any resistance to global order is also seen through a global lens: “Conflicts with apparent local roots were thus read as local manifestations of the superordinate global one. Links to outside powers in the form of supplies of arms or the furnishing of advisers were read as the only causes of local conflicts” (Agnew 2003, 109).

Today, geopolitics is more directly connected to global economic systems, to geoeconomics; it is situated in a confusing web of fluctuating economies and new state roles in the market. For IR strategist Edward Luttwak, geoeconomics has, in fact, taken over geopolitics among core powers. It is a spatial neoliberalism where the geopolitical social is replaced by geoeconomics as the predominant mode of state strategizing; geopolitics remains the strategy of developing peripheral states. Others, such as Cowen, Smith, and Matthew Sparke, have complicated this shift to geoeconomics. Cowen and Smith write that “the assemblage of territory, economy and social forms that was both a foundation and effect of modern geopolitics… is currently recast by an emerging geography of economy and security that might best be captured as geoeconomics with its own attendant social forms” (Cowen and Smith 2009, 23). They see a tension, however, between the two spheres rather than a complete shift: security issues are “increasingly defined by conflicts between geopolitical territorial logics and geoeconomic market logics” (32). Conflicts arise at places like ports, where “more than 90% of global trade occurs… [and] where many key struggles over ‘security’ and ‘economy’ are being waged” (2007, 33). They argue that attempts to protect American economic investments, like the American Container Security Initiative (CSI), have effectively extended US borders, and thus geopolitical power and accompanying conflict across the globe (34). Geoeconomics has not totally replaced geopolitics, but has become crucial for understanding the latter.

Sparke, on the other hand, argues that “geopolitics and geoeconomics are better understood as geostrategic discourses” rather than periods, and through the “cultural politics of geopolitical representation … it is possible to explore how geopolitics and geoeconomics operate as alternately fearful and hopeful discourses shaping the worldviews of U.S. security strategists and their audiences” (Sparke 2007, 340). The “geopolitics of fear” is used to justify foreign wars, expansionist policies, and domestic repression, while “visionaries” of “geoeconomics of hope” tend to “fantasize about connectivity and pace” (also at the service of war, expansion, and repression (340)). Furthermore, Sparke, inspired by David Harvey (1985), writes that the confusing array of geopolitical terms can be clarified by understanding  “the ‘external’ dialectic of geopolitics and geoeconomics… as an overdetermined expression of the ‘internal’ uneven development dialectic in capitalism between spatial fixity and spatial expansion. Geopolitical economy can in turn be treated as the analysis of the relays between these internal and external dialectics” (Sparke 2017, 484). In other words, the relationship between geopolitics and geoeconomics reflects capitalists’ desire to both consolidate investments and protect space, and expand for new accumulation and markets, and is similarly “shot through with contradictions” (487).

Finally, despite the aforementioned state absolutism, naturalization of geopolitical hierarchies, and geopolitics’ association with chessboard-views of the world, one should not draw the impression that geopolitics is necessarily militaristic or expansionist. The intellectual and political aspects of geopolitics continue to be closely related; the discipline is a site of politics, and any claims to total positivism are ahistorical and unfounded. According to Toal, new imaginations might fall under the umbrella of “critical geopolitics,” the “general gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that characterize modernity” which includes a skepticism toward the objectivity of texts, a challenge to “state-centric readings of world politics,” and critical histories of geopolitics in order to recover it from militarism and nationalism (2010, 316). A new vision of geopolitics can break from the game-like, colonial tradition which defined the previous eras, while providing both analyses of and practical responses to issues surrounding globalization, demographic changes, security, and resource scarcity.

(see Biopolitics, Capitalist State, De/Reterritorialization, Empire, Nature, War)

Bibliography

Agnew, John A. Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997. 

Cowen, Deborah, and Neil Smith. “After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics.” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. 

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 

Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography. New York, NY: Scribner, 2015.

Montesquieu. “The Spirit of the Laws.” Essay. In The Great Political Theories, edited by Michael Curtis, 425–40. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. “Opening Remarks” from “New Directions in Critical Geopolitics: an Introduction.” Edited by Laura Jones and Daniel Sage. GeoJournal75 (2010): 315–25. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9255-4. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers97, no. 2 (2007): 338–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00540.x. 

Sparke, Matthew. “Globalizing Capitalism and the Dialectics of Geopolitics and Geoeconomics.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space50, no. 2 (2017): 484–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518×17735926.

Sparke, Matthew. “Geoeconomics, Globalisation and the Limits of Economic Strategy in Statecraft: A Response to Vihma.” Geopolitics23, no. 1 (2017): 30–37.
 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1326482.

NATURE

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Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Nature refers to the natural, or material world, the physical substance and its order which constitute reality. In relation to political economy, a given concept of nature inevitably leads to particular views of politics and/or economics. “Nature” might imply an entity separate from, the same as, or related to culture/society, the naturalization of social constructs or historical phenomena, or the existence of a pre-political “state of nature,” and thus provide a particular lens with which to view today’s environmental and political-economic crises. Our conception of nature influences both systems and subsequent analyses of political economy. Conversely, political economy has a great effect on nature. Nature can both encompass political economy and be subsumed by it; nature both defines and is defined by political economy. This keyword entry will first survey the idea of nature in politics and political economy throughout Western history, then discuss contemporary debates over the concept.

Amongst the Ancients, the physikoi or “students of nature” were concerned with nature, or physis, and stood in contrast to Sophists who emphasized nomos, convention or law (a predecessor to “nature vs. nurture”). Aristotle sought to explain the natural world and moral philosophy in tandem, and famously declared “that man is by nature a political animal” [sic] (Politics 1.1253a), raising the ever-present question regarding our human place in nature, and the potential for a unique human nature. He also criticized profiting from interest and the use of money as an end rather than as a means, claiming that was “not by nature” (Politics 1.1257a-1258a). The connection between nature and politics would be more pronounced in Hellenistic Greece and Ancient Rome (our English word comes from the Latin natura, meaning “birth”) which prescribed a natural order to politics and household management.  Medieval views of nature largely built off of Aristotle and the Christian nature as creation, while Renaissance views of nature harkened back to the Ancients. Dante, for one, echoed Aristotle by  placing usurers in the “hottest part of hell (circle 7) because they [make] money not from the  productive sources… Nature or Art, but from speculative changes in interest rates” (Mazzucato 2018, 64).

The Enlightenment and scientific method brought new mechanistic conceptions of nature, and new political and economics ideas regarding sovereignty and property. René Descartes’  mind-body dualism is often cited as a reflection of the split between nature and society under emergent capitalism. Nature (body) became divorced from active history, merely “stuff” to be acted upon or taken advantage of by a society of colonial powers (mind). Nature also appeared in Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s respective atomist philosophies and concepts of the “state of nature.” Hobbes argued for a supreme sovereign, or “Leviathan,” to repress a state of nature where there was “war of all against all” and where life was “nasty, brutish, and  short” (Hobbes 1839, 113, 117). Locke on the other hand, saw pre-political humans living together in reason, without a common judge. We supposedly gave up this place in nature to create a political sphere for the public to flourish; Locke used this to justify a natural right to property. Where Aristotle saw politics as a part of nature, both Hobbes and Locke saw the political world as supplanting a prior theoretical state of nature (although they hold two very different conceptions of that nature). In the eighteenth century, coinciding with the formalization of capitalism, the discipline of political economy, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, nature continued to largely be viewed as passive stuff for exploitation, but not without significant pushback. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson idealized nature and wrote positively of its inherent good. Nature had a vital aspect which influenced the organic attributes of their political-economic thinking, opposed to the mechanistic nature and political economy of capitalism.

Among political economists of the early modern period, physiocrats like François  Quesnay viewed nature, specifically land, as the source of all value. According to Mariana  Mazzacuto, Quesnay understood “the economy as a ‘metabolic’ system… Contrasting sharply  with the prevailing mercantilist thinking that gave gold a privileged place… Nature actually  produced new things: grain out of small seeds for food, trees out of saplings and mineral ores  from the earth from which houses and ships and machinery were built” (35- 36). “Productive” work involved bringing these natural resources into society, while everything else (no matter how necessary) was classified as “unproductive.” For Adam Smith and David  Ricardo, on the other hand, labor was the source of wealth, not nature. However, Smith’s famous work is after all an inquiry into the “nature” of the wealth of nations, and here we might also locate the origins of longstanding maneuver to naturalize capitalist political economy. Smith used the term “natural price” to describe a price equal to the cost of production (Smith 1776,  83). The market had natural qualities.

Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx’s political economic writings appear to offer a  distinctly “promethean” or anti-ecological view of nature (Bellamy Foster 1999, 372). He writes that “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature” (Marx 1939, 14, as cited by Harvey 2019, 147). The means of production are human products both in and over nature, but labor remains the source of value. Nature transforms itself through humanity. However, against those who claimed that Marx wore “ecological blinders” John Bellamy Foster locates the theory of a “metabolic rift” in Marx’s work, writing that Marx was aware of the ecological crisis of his day (diminishing soil fertility), the “extreme separation of town and country under  capitalism,” (2002, 6) and “took into account the coevolution of nature and human society” (1999, 373). According to Bellamy Foster, Marx saw capitalism as unable to  successfully replenish and maintain its necessary natural environment. Capitalism had effectively destroyed a metabolism with nature inherent in the labor process (Bellamy Foster 1999, 381). While not overtly concerned with political economy, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection brought nature back to the center stage of history. Darwin greatly influenced  philosophical contemporaries like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Some thinkers perverted his work through “social darwinism,” culminating in the twentieth century with Nazi Germany’s infamous  trope of “blood and soil,” the natural relationship between peoples, their productive capacities, and specific lands. This concept of nature is prevalent in some strands of right-wing economic nationalism today.

The term nature is often taken for granted: nature is a reservoir of resources, a thing “out there” which we utilize, maintain, and confront as the climate changes. However, many theoretical questions surrounding the term still concern political economy: can we talk about a determined nature? Do we separate or create a hybrid between nature and society? And is capitalism within nature? These theoretical questions help us frame empirical inquiries regarding resource extraction, climate politics, and management of the commons/public trust. Regarding a determined nature or socially constructed natures, philosopher Kate Soper writes  that “it has become increasingly obvious that the reference to ‘nature’ is no more than a kind of  shorthand: a convenient, but fairly gestural, concept of ecopolitical argument whose actual meaning (or meanings) in this context are slippery and far from clear” (1999, 47). On the one hand, (deep) ecologists point to a definite, singular nature which precedes and remains distinct from human culture. On the other hand, some critics emphasize nature’s “culturally constructed or purely discursive status” (1999, 48). Noel Castree, for example, writes that “what we call ‘nature’ is shot through with the interests, aims and presuppositions of what we usually take to be its opposites. This means that claims that nature is not socially constituted, in significant measure, are part of the war of persuasion… Making sense of nature is itself explicitly participating in it” (Castree 2014, 142). Soper thinks we must reject both the determinist  nature, which places “all human beings as equal enemies of nature” and abstracts from the social relations and sexual division of labor responsible for ecological abuse” and the constructivist view which hurts “the possibility of transnational ecological agreements”  (53). On the one hand, the determinist nature ignores the unequal responsibility and geographic effects of climate change. On the other hand, the view which emphasizes ideas of nature might hinder political organization, and at its worst, imply that climate change is also merely an “idea” (Malm 2017, 26). 

The question which follows, where (or if) to draw a line between nature and society, is often compared to the Cartesian model. Today, a split is broadly rejected, and scholars often adopt a hybridity where nature and society are no longer (because of capitalism), or never were, distinguishable. According to Andreas Malm, “Much contemporary theory cannot get enough of proclaiming that society and nature have become impossible to tell apart because in fact they are one and the same thing” (44). Malm believes that this hybridity (best exemplified by Bruno Latour) merely regurgitates the Cartesian model because a “unity” still implies two underlying elements. Instead, Malm offers us a clarifying view of substance monism but property dualism, where nature and society are made up of the same stuff but have different properties (65). Here, natural properties affect social properties but not the other way around. Everything is within nature (including society), but society cannot alter the constraints of nature (like gravity). 

The broad question of capitalism’s place in nature is largely defined by how one chooses to answer the prior questions. Looking back to Marx, who saw humanity as both in and over nature, we see that there are no capitalist social relations without nature, but nature is also the object of capitalist domination. Jason W. Moore offers one notable addition to this with his concept of “capitalism in the web of life.” Moore rejects the Cartesian duality, places capitalism in nature, and describes capitalism as a way of organizing nature (Moore 2015, 30). Another notable conception of capitalism and nature is provided by Neil Smith, who also builds off of the hybrid view and argues that capitalism’s goal of producing nature “was written into the DNA of capitalist ambition from the start”; where the production of nature in prior societies was “incidental,” it is inherent in the capitalist system (Neil Smith 2007, 22). Throughout the history of capitalism, the commodification of nature has generally “involved harvesting use values as raw materials for capitalist production” (17). In the neoliberal era, however, a

new generation of ecological commodities … are simultaneously excavated (in exchange value terms) from pre-existing socio-natural relations and as part of their production they are reinserted or remain embedded in socialized nature – the more ‘natural’ the better… [financialization] radically intensifies and deepens the penetration of nature by capital.  (17)

What was once a mere pool of resources to be pillaged, nature is now a “biodiversity bank,” a lens which should ostensibly help us care for it (19). However, environmental legislation and the “ecological commodities” of “allowable natural destruction” end up helping financial capitalism expand, and are developed unevenly across the United States and the globe. According to Neil Smith, green capitalism seeks to more carefully destroy and co-produce nature, and this has only accelerated and expanded with financialization: “When the price of ecological credits changes, investment priorities do too; when the weather changes, the price of pollution credits changes as traders anticipate greater or lesser generation of electricity; when interest and currency rates change, environmental policies are directly affected by capital moving in or out” (Neil Smith 2007, 25). What was once considered in social terms (the preservation of nature) is now calculated through the logic of the market. Capitalism expands into and through nature; nature is a new “accumulation strategy.”

Finally, while this keyword entry has been highly theoretical, we should remember that nature is also of immediate concern to political economy in the context of extraction, conservation, and climate change. However, the comparative political economy of resource extraction, the management of natural resources, and (transnational) responses to climate change depend on coherent conceptions of nature, and we would therefore do well to take a critical approach toward the use of the word nature in political economy.

(See Accumulation, Biopolitics, De/Reterritorialization, Extractivism, Fossil Fuels, Primitive Accumulation)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Politics. The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 

Castree, Noel. Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy. Routledge, 2014.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction.” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 2002, pp. 6–16., doi:10.14452/mr-054-04-2002-08_2.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2, 1999, pp. 366–405.,doi:10.1086/210315.

Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse: Notebook VII – The Chapter on Capital.” Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.html.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. 3: Leviathan. Edited by William Molesworth, vol. 3, John Bohn, 1839.

Locke, John. “Property.” Second treatise, §§ 25–51, 123–26. University of Chicago, 1689. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s3.html.

Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World Verso, 2017.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything Making and Taking in the Global Economy.  Allen Lane, 2018.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Electric Book Co., 1998.

Smith, Neil. “Nature as Accumulation Strategy.” Socialist Register, 2007: Coming to Terms With Nature, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, vol. 43, Merlin, 2007, pp. 1–21.

Soper, Kate. “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress and Ecology.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 10, no. 2, 1999, pp. 47–70., doi:10.1080/10455759909358857.

ORDOLIBERALISM

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Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Boyeong Kim
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Ordoliberalism, like neoliberalism, is a body of thought and a mode of governance. The idea began to germinate with the debates of the Freiburg School founded in the 1930s at the University of Freiburg and further developed through the journal Ordo (the Ordo Yearbook of Economic and Social Order) established in 1948. Although its origin can be traced back to post-WWII Germany as a specific European social market economy (Foucault 1979; Leiva 2021), ordoliberalism is more than a part of the German economic history (Beck and Kotz 2017; Horn 2021; Havertz 2019) that is still being witnessed in the current ordoliberalization of Europe (Biebricher 2019), or even globally, with what Slobodian (2018) has called ordoglobalism. Contemporarily, ordoliberalism has gained attention especially in its relationship with neoliberalism, for similarly going beyond the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century by seeking to create a new institutional framework to make free markets work. Whether it is a variant of neoliberalism (Brown 2019; Biebricher 2019; Slobodian 2018) or not (Jessop 2019), for both bodies of thought it is important that juridico-political institutions create space for the economy. Despite the striking commonalities, mixtures and overlaps between ordoliberalism and neoliberalism addressed in recent works (Slobodian 2018; Biebricher 2019), in this definition we focus on distinctive features of ordoliberalism.

In his 1978-79 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault identifies two streams of ideas that have provided a basis to contemporary neoliberalism: German ordoliberalism (1948-1962) and the Chicago school of economics (1970s/80s). The question that the liberal thinkers of ordoliberalism (or the Freiburg school) such as W. Eucken, F. Böhm, A. Muller-Armck, and F. von Hayek strived to answer was “how to link together the legitimacy of a state and the freedom of economic partners, while accepting that the second must found the first, or serve as its guarantee” (Foucault 2011, 105). The idea of ordoliberalism diverts from eighteenth century liberalism inasmuch as its main concern has not been about freeing the market but about how the market could be a guiding principle of state and social organization. An important mutation of ordoliberalism from the traditional liberal projects is that while the latter saw that the market principally serves as a space of exchange, ordoliberals has emphasized competition as the essence of the market, which has been a “historical objective of governmental art and not a naturally given” (Foucault 2011, 120). The free market is never something that naturally occurs, ordoliberals argued, rather it has to be actively produced, revealing laissez-faire as nothing but a naïve dream.

Ordoliberalism aims for a strong state based on an ethical and juridical-political order to ensure that competition happens smoothly in a capitalist, free market society. The Freiburg School used the word “ordo” as a reference to medieval theology (Slobodian 2018), in which the idea of “functional and humane order” (Horn 2021) as a mode of social organization was emphasized as more than merely a mode of configuration for market exchange. Thus, the ordoliberal mode of social organization involves ethico-political commitments and a specific legal order (Jessop 2019) that Eucken and Böhm called an “economic constitution” to be the central task of the ordoliberal project (Miettinen 2020). That the economic constitution does not refer to a literal legal document, but a desired legal order (Slobodian 2018), implies a certain image of a moral economy where the legal and ethical rules protect the political order and free competition from unhinged personal interests within market activities (Jessop 2019). To that end, ordoliberalism assumes that the state plays an important role in securing economic order, ensuring the competition of a free-market society and avoiding the possibility that economic forces increase their power in society (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998; Vatiero 2010). Thus, ordoliberals argued that a “strong state, a government with the courage to govern” must be created  (Röpke 1950 as cited in Biebricher 2019, 72).

The epistemological and political drives that were at the center of ordoliberalism are related to historical events alongside the crisis of liberal thought at the beginning of the twentieth century. After examining different political regimes and their economic programs such as Nazism, England’s the Beveridge Plan in the UK, the Soviet Union’s planned economy, and the American New Deal, the liberals of the Freiburg school concluded that state intervention that resulted in destructive effects, while the market economy itself had no intrinsic defects. Therefore, they proposed a reversal: “a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state” (Foucault 2011, 116). The correct form of (strong) state intervention, guided by the market, would be the key to overcoming the crisis of liberalism.

As Foucault (2011) referred to this historical period as a field of adversity that ordoliberals sought to address, Biebricher (2019) similarly contends that ordoliberalism, like neoliberalism, was a reaction to the crisis of liberalism, where the main problem was political rather than economic. The crisis of liberalism during the first half of the twentieth century was related to the fact that individual freedom and the freedom of the market were challenged by state power and economic institutions (Vatiero 2010; Biebricher 2019).

As a result, ordoliberals sought to reduce the political and economic power of states, thus expanding the notion of liberalism, while simultaneously re-embedding the economy in society, and challenging the myth of laissez-faire and market fundamentalism attributed by Polanyi (Slobodian 2018). Ordoliberals believed that liberal economy is not a spontaneous reality or a natural result of laissez-faire; market freedom needs an economic order provided by the state (Horn 2021). In this sense, ordoliberals took a moderate position by rejecting classical laissez-faire liberalism (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009). Indeed, Hayek, who is considered an ordoliberal, referred to laissez-faire as one of the mistakes and aberrations that cause harm to the liberal cause (Biebricher 2019).

While ordoliberals of the Freiburg School tried to redefine economic rationality, the Chicago School’s attempt was more radical: they attempted to exert economic rationality into every inch of human life. The reorganization of society under the principle of “competition” and “entrepreneurship” led to a new governmental mechanism that differed from modern disciplinary power and created a new subject, an ‘entrepreneur of self’ that voluntarily invests themselves, manages their own risks, and internalizes market principles and desires. Some scholars have pointed out that although ordoliberalism is seen with negative connotations related to neoliberalism, ordoliberalism comes in a number of varieties, and it seeks a strong state to contain the power of the market, making a good contrast to the Chicago School of liberalism (Beck and Kotz 2017). Others claim that Eucken’s competitive order is a good way to reach (social) justice (Wörsdörfer 2013). Still others present more complicated pictures. For example, recent work reveals how the ordo-neoliberal version of social market economy carried out in Chile resulted in an interventionist state which watched over the economic order of market competition, and commodified and financialized social rights (Leiva 2021). Hence, concerns about alleged self-regulating markets and new types of political endeavors are notable in current political debates. If the early twentieth century was the end of the liberal era (Slobodian 2018), the twentieth first century could be the beginning of a post ordoliberal/neoliberal era, or as Biebricher (2019) has pointed out, the beginning of an authoritarian liberalism. Regardless, the theory and practice of ordoliberalism remains important in contemporary political economy.

(See Accumulation, Capital, Varieties of Capitalism, Variegated Neoliberalism, Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Beck, Thorsten, and Hans-Helmut Kotz. Ordoliberalism: A German Odddity? CEPR Press, 2017. 

Biebricher, Thomas. The Political Theory of Neoliberalism. Stanford University Press, 2019. 

Boas, Taylor C., and Jordan Gans-Morse. “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44, no. 2 (2009): 137–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-009-9040-5. 

Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University Press, 2019.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Havertz, Ralf. “Right-Wing Populism and Neoliberalism in Germany: The AFD’s Embrace of Ordoliberalism.” New Political Economy 24, no. 3 (2018): 385–403.
 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2018.1484715. 

Horn, K. “Ordoliberalism: Neither Exclusively German nor an Oddity. A Review Essay of Malte Dold’s and Tim Krieger’s Ordoliberalism and European Economic Policy: Between Realpolitik and Economic Utopia.” The Review of Austrian Economics, 2021.
 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-020-00536-3. 

Jessop, Bob. “Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalization: Governing through Order or Disorder.” Critical Sociology 45, no. 7-8 (2019): 967–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519834068.

Leiva, Fernando. The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile. SUNY Press, 2021. 

Miettinen, Timo. “Ordoliberalism and the Rethinking of Liberal Rationality.” Political Economy and International Order in Interwar Europe, 2020, 269–95.
 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47102-6_10. 

Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 

Vatiero, Massimiliano. “The Ordoliberal Notion of Market Power: An Institutionalist Reassessment.” European Competition Journal 6, no. 3 (2010): 689–707. https://doi.org/10.5235/ecj.v6n3.689.

Wörsdörfer, Manuel. “Von Hayek and Ordoliberalism on Justice.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35, no. 3 (2013): 291–317. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1053837213000199.

Yergin, Daniel and Joseph Stanislaw. “Ordoliberals.” Adapted from Commanding Heights. 1998. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_ordoliberals.html