A contribution to the critique of economics: Essays on theorizing the economic order

The main problematic of the dissertation involves a reflection upon mainstream economic discourse within the perspective of a critique. The critique borrows much from Kant, from the notion of critique that he outlines in his Critique of Pure Reason. The critique, in other words, goes beyond the negative connotation of the word in its everyday usage, and rather interrogates mainstream economic discourse in terms of its limits, those beyond which it encounters its space of impossibility. This space is conceived in particular with respect to the discursive construction of the economy as an object of analysis in the so-called general equilibrium theory. Using Foucault's theory of discursive formation, the dissertation aims to analyze how the discursive construction of the economy as a non-historical realm of allocation makes mainstream economics possible, and how this construction at the same time brings with it two important impossibilities: First, the impossibility to theorize the capitalist economy historically, in its historical existence and second, the impossibility to conceive of the capitalist economy as a totality in movement, i.e. dynamically.Having established the limit beyond which mainstream economic discourse encounters its terrain of impossibility, the dissertation moves on to go beyond this limit itself by speculating upon ways to conceive of the capitalist economy in its historical existence and in its movement. The problem of historicity is analyzed under the general heading of the materialist theory of knowledge. To this end, Marx's critique of political economy is read as the critique of the non-historical nature of the categories and concepts of political economy. It is in particular argued that a materialist theory of knowledge is distinguished, not by the adherence to the idea that the material world exits out there, but by constructing and defining historical concepts which, in this sense, have a concrete, a material existence in the realm of thought. To deal with the second problem, the conception of the capitalist economy in its movement, the dissertation argues that any attempt to capture the capitalist market economy dynamically should take the managerial and the entrepreneurial function seriously as parts of a theoretical framework. Unlike the literature in management science, which offers descriptive analysis of these two functions, the dissertation endeavors to undertake a theoretical analysis, incorporating the manager and the entrepreneur into the main framework of a theory of firm. Schumpeterian entrepreneur and Marshall's concept of external economies are utilized, and developed upon, as congenial theoretical settings to study the capitalist economic order as a dynamic and evolving social phenomenon.