Economic Anthropology : Lectures at the College de France, 1992 - 1993 (Hardcover)

Editorial note


Lecture of 1 April 1993
Preamble: rethinking the problems of economics - The theory of rational action - The dehistoricization of economic universes and behaviour - The case of the gift - The phenomenological approach to the gift (Derrida) - The anthropological analysis of the gift - Reintegrating lived experience and creating theory of practice - The destruction of time in science - The scholastic point of view

Lecture of 8 April 1993
Questions from the audience: the audacity of philosophers - The error of projecting the counter-gift into the gift - Overcoming the subjectivist and objectivist visions of the gift - Three differences - Discouraging the spirit of calculation in pre-capitalist economies - Economic dispositions and collective repression - Enchanted economic relations - The foundations of collective misrecognition - The nostalgia for lost paradises

Lecture of 29 April 1993
Obeying? the rules and? self-deception - The economics of symbolic wealth - Forgetting the historical and economic conditions of economic behaviour - The rise of calculability

Lecture of 6 May 1993
Symbolic revolutions and the overthrowing of categories - The co-genesis of the economic world and economic discourse - The universal falsehood of the calculating mind - The model of exchange - Challenge and? attack by contempt - Collective expectations (1) - The gift and power - Collective expectations (2)

Lecture of 13 May 1993
The symbolic economy and the limitations of economic economics - The construction of lasting relations through symbolic exchange - Permanently recreating belief - The myth of the imperialism of the market and resistance to commercialization - The symbolic dimension of economic relations, the example of the labour contract - Symbolic logic in consumption - The economic conditions of rational behaviour

Lecture of 27 May 1993
Sociologists and economists - An a-historical reductivism - A double dehistoricization - For a historicist rationalism - The definition of the market - The historical conditions of pure theory

Lecture of 3 June 1993
The impossible definition of the market - Economic theory against itself - The economic field as a field of forces - The immanent tendencies of the economic field - The effect of distinction and competition

Lecture of 10 June 1993
The notion of the market in Max Weber - The indirect conflict - Harrison White’s model - Homology and second-degree choice for consumers - A three-fold break with Weber - The State creates the market: the example of the market in private housing

Lecture of 17 June 1993
Questions from the audience - Classification struggles in the economic field - The three postulates of homo oeconomicus - First alternative: the individual and the collective - (Socially) limited rationality - Second alternative: purposiveness and mechanism - The purposive illusion - Third alternative: the micro and the macro


Situating the lectures on ‘The social foundations of economic action’ in the works of Pierre Bourdieu
Julien Duval


Postface: Economics and the social sciences
Robert Boyer


Appendix: Summary of the lectures as published in the Annals of the College de France


Notes
Index