Economic abstractions are historically determined, not universal or extra-historical

Evidence

On MS. p. 266 Gramsci defines economic man as “the abstraction of the economic activity of a particular form of society, that is of a particular economic structure”, and he goes on to say (MS. p. 267): “it can be said that such an abstraction is by no means necessarily extra-historical and is by no means of the same nature as economic abstractions. Homo oeconomicus is the abstraction of the needs and of the economic operations of a particular form of society, just as the ensemble of hypotheses put forward by economists in their scientific work is nothing other than the ensemble of premisses that are at the base of a particular form of society.” And on “determined market” [mercato determinato ) (MS. p. 269): “Determined market in pure economics is an arbitrary abstraction, which has a purely conventional value for the purposes of a pedantic and scholastic analysis. For critical economy on the other hand it should be the ensemble of the concrete economic activities of a determined social form, activities subsumed according to their laws of uniformity which are abstract laws but not such that the abstraction ceases to be historically determined.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2660

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines homo oeconomicus and ‘determined market’ as historically grounded abstractions of a specific social form.
• XREF: Connects directly to how ‘the Other’ and racialized categories in Islamophobia discourse are often presented as natural rather than historically constructed abstractions.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between ‘pure economics’ arbitrary abstraction and critical economy’s historically-determined abstraction is a methodological hinge applicable to any ideologically-floating category — including race and culture.