Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks

Watson, Matthew

doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417367

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In a recent article, for instance, Watson connects Crusoe's maximization of individual gain to his enslavement of Friday to make the point that the abstract, selfdetermining economic man theorized by mainstream economics is always already plugged into raced market institutions that yoke their participants to one another in unequal relations of power. 5 In a similar vein, an essay collection edited by Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson traces the myriad ways by which the invisible labor of women and the enslaved allows Crusoe to work "seemingly unencumbered by physicality and social ties." 6 Like these scholars, this essay complicates commonplace understandings of the homo economicus by attending to Defoe's complex portrayal of Crusoe and, in doing so, seeks to demonstrate that characterizations of Crusoe as a free-wheeling, independent economic agent are flawed not only because they fail to take into account Crusoe's implicit reliance on others, both on and off the island, but also because they neglect his explicit efforts to seek out community in order to survive.…”

Section: Fragile Communities In the Crusoe Trilogymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fragile Communities in the Crusoe Trilogy

Peh¹

2022

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

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Section: Fragile Communities In the Crusoe Trilogymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fragile Communities in the Crusoe Trilogy

Peh¹

2022

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

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“…Dominant conceptions of the economy centre practices of marketised exchange, understood as comprised of equal individuals with different bundles of resources and needs trading things of equivalent value according to our pre-given utility curves. Inhabitants of this sphere are conceived as neoclassical homo economicus, a character so wilfully abstracted from social context that many economics textbooks start their reasoning from Robinson Crusoe (Watson, 2018). On this understanding, the economy is constituted by market exchanges (along with the practices of production and consumption that keep these exchanges ticking over) and the resources accorded supposedly a-cultural financial value by these exchanges.…”

Section: A Non-dualist Proposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against economy–culture dualism: an argument from raced economies

Kaplan

2020

Feminist Theory

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In this article, I argue that a mistaken economy–culture dualism underlies the pitting of identity politics against class. I propose we be ‘non-dualists’ instead, viewing economic distributions and cultural representations as importantly co-constitutive, since this non-dualism lets us best theorise the intersections of injustices like class and race. I argue that the most sophisticated dualist attempt to transcend class versus identity debates – Nancy Fraser’s ‘perspectival dualism’ – inadvertently instantiates ‘methodological whiteness’ and struggles to illuminate the intersections of race and class, overlooking how culturally specific representations and understandings importantly constitute economic structures and distributions. Jodi Dean’s contemporary restaging of the class versus identity debate, I suggest, repeats some of Fraser’s dualist missteps. To end, I propose a non-dualist approach which understands the economy as an ideological objectification of certain practices – an objectification which naturalises relations of raced, classed and gendered domination. Building on social reproduction currents of thought, I suggest a counter-hegemonic understanding of the economy – one informed by anti-racist, feminist and socialist rethinkings of what constitutes labour and who constitutes the ‘public’ of the economy’s imaginaries of public value.

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“…A typical mainstream textbook in the core curriculum will assume atomistically individual rational agents optimizing some objective function subject to constraints. These individuals can be aggregated unproblematically into generally amoral and indifferent equilibrium systems (Watson, 2018). All of this is best theorized using a type of mathematical formalism (Chick and Dow, 2001): mainstream economics insists on this approach (Lawson, 2003, et passim).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%