PPE for Embodied Creatures on a Finite Planet

Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission.

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PPE for Embodied Creatures on a Finite Planet 

There is much to applaud in Hedoin and Paniagua’s views on what PPE scholars should do. I appreciate their emphasis on an integrated, methodologically reflexive approach that embraces methodological pluralism and is committed to studying political and economic institutions both empirically and normatively. I agree that the classical political-economy tradition can offer a lot of inspiration, and that the question of “what ethical, political, and economic foundations can sustain a peaceful, free, pluralistic, and prosperous social order?” should be at the core of the PPE endeavour (though I would urge to add “democratic” to this string of adjectives, given how much democracy is currently under pressure…).

And yet, as someone who grew up, intellectually, in this tradition*, I’ve come to see that it has so many blind spots – and that there is a risk of perpetuating those in today’s PPE scholarship. Over the years, I have learned more and more how parochial, Eurocentric, and insufficiently realistic the frameworks and methodologies used in the PPE disciplines can be if they do not overcome these blind spots. Let me list four, without a claim to completeness.

1) Gender and race (and their intersection). The PPE disciplines have, historically, not exactly been trailsblazers of gender equality, and up to today, many PPE scholars are not familiar with the literature on gender and race. My point is not only that PPE schould take seriously topics such as embodiment, vulnerability, unpaid work, oppressive social norms etc. as specific topics of research. It is also that these perspectives matter for understanding the “normal” PPE topics, e.g. the justice of institutions. If certain institutions only work for white male bodies and biographies, or if the fact that all human beings need care from others, at some point in their lives, is ignored, we mischaracterize many PPE research questions and deliver distorted answers. This doesn’t mean that class – as a social category more likely to be found in the PPE literature – should be neglected, on the contrary: these categories of privilege and disadvantage are all intertwined.**

2) The environment. The classics of political economy were written before the impact of human behavior on the environment took the form it has today. A lot of economic thinking, in particular, still includes an implicit assumption that growth can continue forever. Of course, there is a lot of research on climate justice and climate economics these days, and some of it is seeping into PPE territory. But again, my point is: we need to consider the planetary boundaries and the value of non-human life in all PPE research we do. For example, traditional questions of distributive justice look very different if there is no possibility of “growing the pie” because we have weighty normative reasons to enter a steady state or even a path of reducing material consumption.

3) The global dimension. Rich societies currently externalize many injustices or social or environmental harms to poorer countries (think about textile production, for example), and Eurocentric assumptions are, arguably, omnipresent in PPE thinking.*** Global justice is both a value in itself, but also a matter of stability, and is thus highly relevant for many PPE questions. And the dialogue with thinkers from different philosophical traditions can open up new perspectives on many of the core concepts that PPE scholars work with.

4) Transdisciplinarity. To answer their research questions, PPE scholars need to take seriously the fact that not all forms of knowledge come out of the academic ivory tower (which, against, has to do with facts about embodiment, local variety, etc.). There are multiple other forms of experience and inquiry that can stand up to scrutiny and that matter for understanding how institutions function. In political theory, the movements towards an “ethnographic sensibility” and “grounded normative theory” provide arguments and methodologies for integrating qualitative empirical work into normative theorizing, and/or theorize together with oppressed groups, social movements, or social innovators. Such approaches tend to be at home in fields such as sociology, ethnography, or human geography, not the core PPE fields. But that doesn’t mean that they should not be integrated into the PPE landscape as well.

Critics might raise two objections to my call for a widening of PPE along these four dimensions. First, doesn’t it all get incredible messy, normatively speaking? For example, how to deal with different notions of autonomy in different cultural traditions? What to do if too many competing understandings of justice come to bear on a question? And secondly, how on earth should one scholar learn about all these different literatures and methodologies? Isn’t this overburdening researchers in a field that is already quite demaning in wanting to integrate three disciplinary angles?

My response to the first question is that the normative core of PPE inquiries is a form of moral egalitarianism that takes the dignity and autonomy of each individual, no matter where they are positioned in the global web of interdependent economic and social relations, to have equal moral weight. Of course, one can quibble with lots of things here (isn’t the notion of autonomy itself too Eurocentric and individualistic? What about the moral status of animals?, etc.). But our current economic institutions and practices are at such a distance from that moral vision that it can nonetheless provide a solid basis to work with.

My response to the second question is: well, no researcher is an island! We can, and often should, work in teams, bringing together people with different perspectives and skill sets. Hedoin and Paniagua rightly point to the importance of epistemic humility, the ability to recognize the limits of one’s own disciplinary perspective.

When I look at the academic landscape, I see many projects and approaches that move in this space, using innovative methodologies and forms of collaboration, bringing non-Western thinkers into the discussion, exploring “real utopias” (to use Eric Olin Wright’s famous term) of citizen assemblies, worker cooperatives, or other alternative models of organizing. I am very optimistic that overall, things are going in the right directions, with more recognition for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches.

What I am currently less optimistic about is how all this research can be translated into public discourse and policy advice – not because scholars wouldn’t try, but because the political climate is not very open to it, with more and more capture by rich elites, and a (social) media landscape (much of it owned by the billionaire class) that is not very conducive to ideas about fundamental reforms of the economic system. Writing papers about economic democracy, in a time in which economic power is more and more concentrated, feels like writing messages in a bottle for future generations, with the hope that at some point, there will, again, be more openness for such ideas. Let’s hope that the period in between does not get too dark!

*My first book was on Adam Smith and Hegel.

** One of the problems of rightwing populism is precisely that it plays out different forms of oppression against each other, thereby dividing those who might have shared economic interests.

*** See here for a recent paper in which we explore what it means to “decolonize value”.