The emancipation of economics from morality

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees

Bibliographic Data

ID3095986
AuthorsLouis Dumont (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, corresponding author)
Year1975
Volume14
Issue1
Pages35-52
Publication date1975-02-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science Information (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0539-0184 • E-ISSN: 1461-7412
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/053901847501400103
OpenAlexW2030082334
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited3

The following essay is part of a study in intellectual history bearing on one aspect of the configuration of ideas and values characteristic of modern civilisation or, as the author calls it, "modern ideology" *. This system of ideas and values has the category of "the economic" as one of its major categories, one of its basic dimensions or reference coordinates. Yet the economic category has not always been there, and it is possible to isolate some of the stages or changes by which it became what it is. A new category, if it is to attain a separate existence, must in particular be emancipated from the old categories which had hitherto dominated the ideological field and prevented its independent assertion. It must get disentangled or, as Karl Polanyi would have said, dis-embedded from the configuration that still ignored it. In this case, emancipation was necessary in two directions, in relation to politics on the one hand, to morality on the other. Locke's Two Treatises of Govemment contains a choice expression of the first aspect, while the second can be documented from Mandeville's Fable

Aesthetics · Art · Assertion · Civilization · Emancipation · Epistemology · Fable · Ideology · Literature · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Economic Theory and Institutions · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy

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