Theoria

In 1968, Alexandre Kojeve, then one of the chief planners for the European Common Market working the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, was asked what the students in the streets of Paris should do. Kojeve’s answer was “learn Greek.” It is only in recent years through Giorgio Agamben’s work that we’ve come to understand what Kojeve meant.

While I don’t claim to be nearly as smart or clever as Kojeve, it would be my suggestion, given the current financial crisis, to return to the classics of political economy. Turning to contemporary “analytical political philosophy” or, for that matter, contemporary “continental philosophy” will not reveal the answer. Although one would be better served, I think, reading Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition or Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria than G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense or John Roemer’s Analytical Marxism collection.

Therefore, I strongly suggest that everyone run to the library immediately and pick up the following: Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation; John Stuart Mill’s The Principles of Political Economy; and, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (all three volumes), the Gundrisse and his Theories of Surplus Value. Additionally, there are worse things one could do than read Max Weber’s General Economic History and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; likewise, Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is well worth the time. Once down with those, readers should immediately turn to Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, George Bataille’s Accursed Share (first volume), and Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death. The anthropologically inclined will surely want to read Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics.