Value, man, and markets in modern economic discourse

• Main Author: Garnett, Robert Frederick
• Language: ENG
• Published: ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst 1994
• Subjects: Economic theory|Economics
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420627

This dissertation examines the role of humanism in classical, neoclassical, and Marxian theories of value. Previous studies by Althusser, Foucault, Cutler et al., Amariglio, and Callari have identified pre-analytic visions or philosophies of Man within each of these theories. This dissertation strengthens and extends these prior claims through a systematic, comparative examination of these three theories and the variable forms, degrees, and consequences of their respective humanisms. Humanism is found to inform each theory in several ways: (1) shaping theorists' basic conceptions of economic value and the market mechanism; (2) enabling theorists to efface their very deployment of humanism by allowing their adopted visions of Man to be cast as objective truths of "human nature" rather than as products of their own, subjective philosophical commitments; (3) enabling theorists of each school to pose their particular theory of markets as universal, i.e., as the general theory of market price determination and market-based economic order; and (4) helping to (re)produce the Cold War folklore of markets--generic, stereotypical images of "the market" as either the savior of economic man (Smith, Ricardo, Walras) or his nemesis (Marx), either way allowing theorists to proclaim the essential compatibility or incompatibility of "the market" with "human nature." In addition, this dissertation reexamines Marx's value theory in Capital, Volume One and finds it to contain important departures from this modern-humanist approach. Marx's arguments are shown to include not only the humanism of the traditional "labor theory of value," but also a pointed and far-reaching critique of this humanism. These two strands are shown to be indissociably linked in Marx's arguments: (1) the modern/humanist strand exemplified by his vision of Man as a social-laboring creature and his concept of value as a self-regulative, "natural law" phenomenon; and (2) the postmodern/anti-humanist strand displayed in his pointed efforts to denaturalize value, to theorize it not as a natural expression of Man the homo faber but as a fully social construct, the "overdetermined" effect of particular economic, political, and cultural processes. Marx's value theory is thus argued to be both modern and postmodern and as such to both exploit and radically challenge the grand, liberatory pretenses of modern economic discourse.