Keith Tribe. The Economy of the Word

For almost forty years, Keith Tribe has written penetrating and postmodernist accounts of the history of economic discourse. Economics has for the most part been confined to print rather than being used, as are some physical sciences, for building instruments or discovering novel laboratory phenomena. There is nothing as radical in the history of economics to compare to the discovery of the photoelectric effect or the double helix for DNA. In fact, since capitalism emerged in the sixteenth century, the core phenomena and terminology identified in the discourse of economics—prices, money and credit, markets, trade, taxes, and so forth—have remained remarkably the same, at least in name. Moreover, and partly because words are cheap, the discourse is immense; eighteenth-century France alone spawned about four thousand publications on economic subjects. The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics is not a monograph as much as a set of loosely conjoined essays partly drawn from earlier publications. The organizing theme is reflected in the book’s title; a single word can have an economy of its own. Over a few centuries, a single word diversifies and diffuses; there is a complex interplay of meanings that are traded back and forth, beholden to economic ends such as autonomy and parsimony while at the same time producing layers of ambiguity (externalities). Ironically, there is no better word to illustrate the merits of this philological sensibility than the word “economy,” the genealogy of which unfolds in the first section of this book. The second section focuses on Adam Smith’s use of “trade,” which Smith posited commenced with our prehistoric use of language. The last section conjoins Karl Marx with Léon Walras and traces the complex interplay of “property” and “value.”

Economics · Economy · Linguistics · Philology · Political science · Terminology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy