Richard Sobel

Remarx: Necessity and Liberty in the Communist Utopia: André Gorz's Rereading of Marx

What relationships can be formed between labor and liberty when labor is no longer necessarily experienced as the social indicator of alienation from liberty in the economy? It was Marx who first painstakingly developed these issues, formulating the theory of two reigns, that of necessity and that of liberty, within the context of the communist Utopia. Nonetheless, his positioning of the problem entailed a whole series of ambiguities. In basing ourselves on André Gorzs analyses, we will demonstrate the dependence of all thought about liberation on a philosophy of liberty that assumes, or fails to assume, a certain irreducible depth of any human collective, an inevitable heteronomy of the human condition.What relationships can be formed between labor and liberty when labor is no longer necessarily experienced as the social indicator of alienation from liberty in the economy? It was Marx who first painstakingly developed these issues, formulating the theory of two reigns, that of necessity and that of liberty, within the context of the communist Utopia. Nonetheless, his positioning of the problem entailed a whole series of ambiguities. In basing ourselves on Andre Gorzs analyses, we will demonstrate the dependence of all thought about liberation on a philosophy of liberty that assumes, or fails to assume, a certain irreducible depth of any human collective, an inevitable heteronomy of the human condition.

Arendt and the Social Question: A Post-Marxist Analysis:

With the help of the regulationist theory of the wage-labor nexus and the historical sociology of the wage system, this article questions the limitations of Arendt’s concept of the “social.” To provide a fully relevant political theory, Arendt is missing the idea of institutional and collective supports for the effective exercise of democracy by the greatest number, which is precisely the subject which Castel’s historical analyses stressed with the concept of “social property.”

Formal Economy, Substantive Economy, and Economism: A Critical Interpretation of Karl Polanyi’s Distinction

Polanyi analyzes the historical deployment of a “formal” economic science starting from the “market-scarcity-instrumental rationality triptych.” This triptych, and the knowledge associated with it, is shown to be more than merely a “substantial” economic science’s interest in the triptych “need-nature-institution.” While we must agree with Polanyi that economism is ill-suited to the first triptych, we hesitate to accept his suggested alternative, a heterogeneous mixture of naturalism and institutionalism, essentialism and historicism.

‘Corporate Social Responsibility’: A New Regulation of Capitalism? An Institutionalist Interpretative Framework of CSR, Based on the French Experience

The Fordist wage compromise may resemble an attempt to macroeconomically establish ethico-political rules governing the conflicting cooperation between capitalists and employees (Aglietta, 1998; Boyer, 1993). The question of the relationship between ethics and economics is, thus, not contemporaneous with the CSR movement. It is particularly misleading to see this recent movement as a fundamental break with the era of relationships between capital and labour, or even, as a definitive and modern break with the old ‘conflicting’ form of productive relations. The Fordist compromise represents a very subtle and substantial means of linking ethics and efficiency, but it is situated at the macro-social level, in contrast to the CSR movement.

Towards a Heterodox Theory of the Economic Actor : the Contribution of Two French Institutionalist Schools.

The analyses produced by the French ‘regulationist’ and ‘conventionalist’ schools of economic theory both complement and contradict each other. Adherents of the regulationist school fear that convention theory’s ‘soft consensualism’ will cause it to lose its Marxist-Keynesian radicalism, while the conventionalists, on the other hand, seek to persuade the regulationists that they alone hold the microeconomic key to the relative theoretical impasse in which the latter are said to find themselves. It is absolutely essential for heterodox economics to have at its disposal an alternative theory of action with which to counter the homo oeconomicus of neoclassical economics, which underpins the dominant mode of economic theorizing. Such a theory is lacking in both the regulationist and conventionalist schools, and is ultimately the missing piece in the heterodox jigsaw puzzle, without which radical institutionalism is condemned to remain a theoretical archipelago without any real power in the face of the neoclassical continent. We will investigate how, without always fully accepting it, these two schools point towards a common theory of economic action, for which we will attempt to prepare the ground.