The Economy as Utopia

Keynes, Bourgeois Socialism, and the Promise of Abundance

Bibliographic Data

ID13085545
AuthorsNicolae Bîea (University of Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume11
Issue2
Pages219-255
Publication date2024-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2326-4462 • E-ISSN: 2326-4470
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/732184
OpenAlexW4405466352
LanguageEN
References cited16

Scholars have remarked on the recent date at which we began to speak about “the economy” as a definite item. Through an analysis and critique of John Maynard Keynes’s interwar writings, this article revisits the emergence of the economy as a discursive object and reveals it as a site not merely of measurement and administration but also of political attachments. The economy, I argue, was constituted through a specifically perverse utopian promise: that of its own disappearance as the result of technological progress and generalized abundance. I suggest Keynes’s utopianism is the most significant instance of what Marx termed “bourgeois socialism”: the fantasy of a world in which the proletariat has vanished and the sole remaining class is the bourgeoisie. The failure of Keynes’s forecast concerning the end of the economic problem is, at the same time, the failure of a utopian project of reordering the class structure of capitalist society

Abundance (ecology · Biology · Bourgeoisie · Economics · Keynesian economics · Market economy · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Utopia · Economic Theory and Institutions · Economic Theory and Policy · Political Economy and Marxism · Ecology

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