Ethical Economic Engagement in a World beyond Control

Abstract

Political projects are often grounded in theoretical analyses that present themselves as adequate to the world they hope to transform. This is true of many projects on the right as well as many on the left. In contrast, J. K. Gibson-Graham refuse any such notion of adequacy. Their refusal substantially complicates the ethical dimensions of academic practice, especially for those scholars who seek to promote projects of economic emancipation and justice. Gibson-Graham's practice provides a challenging vision of how we can engage ethically a world we cannot control. It is a practice based on what theologian Sharon Welch calls an “ethic of risk” rather than an “ethic of control.”

Key Words:

• Discourse
• Diverse Economy
• Epistemology
• Ethics
• J. K. Gibson-Graham

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Noelle Frampton and Patrick Sutherland for research assistance on this project; to Jonathan Diskin, Esra Erdem, and Ceren Özselçuk for exchanging ideas; to Esra and Jonathan for also providing comments on a previous draft; and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Relevant work in the antiessentialist Marxian tradition includes Resnick and Wolff (1987), Ruccio and Amariglio (2003), and many contributions to this journal.

2. It is not difficult to misinterpret Gibson-Graham's exuberance for the local as reflecting an errant ontological privileging of the local over all other sites of transformative politics. That would be a grave mistake. In the theoretical domain their goal is to rescue the local from its marginalization in structuralist accounts of the economy and politics. In the practical domain it is a self-aware project of limited scope, scale, and effect. It does not seek nor can it hope to achieve the full range of aspirations that the Left values. But neither, it bears emphasizing, can any other transformative strategy, no matter how large, militant, or epochal. From Gibson-Graham's perspective, all interventions are terribly limited, partial, and contradictory in their effects.

3. Alternatively, the very same networks may instead starve new initiatives through judgmental scientific accounts that render them invisible or, where visible, unviable.

4. The current Anthropocene epoch is one “in which humankind is foregrounded as a geological force or agent”; the epoch “is defined both by the heating trend … and by the radical instability expected of future environments” (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 320–1).

5. Some of the following draws on DeMartino (2011).

6. Here and elsewhere, McCloskey draws on Hayek's insights regarding the inability of government planners to have access to the localized and tacit knowledge that is widely dispersed among private economic actors. In McCloskey's hands these insights generate a powerful critique of modernist economic theory.