Economic rationality is founded on the unknowability of the whole economic process

Evidence

Economic rationality is not only surrounded by, but founded on the unknowability of the totality of the process. Homo reconomicus is the one island of rationality possible within an economic process whose uncontrollable nature does not challenge, but instead founds the rationality of the atomistic behavior of homo reconomicus. Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It· is originally and definitively constituted from a multiplicity of points ofview which is all the more irreducible as thissame multiplicity assures their ultimate and spontaneous convergence. Economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; economics is a di!‘iciplinewithout totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility ofasovereign point ll{view qy:er the totality ofthe state that he has to govern. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1453

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core of homo oeconomicus and economics itself: rationality founded precisely on non-totalizability and opacity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that economics is an ‘atheistic discipline’ whose absence of God/totality is constitutive, not incidental, is a paradigm-shifting formulation central to Foucault’s whole genealogy.
• XREF: connects to: Economic theory is commonly assumed to map perfectly onto a constant reality — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 119; Untestable economic theories breed intellectual intolerance and absolutism. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 409; The economy is a game whose outcome no one knows — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 931 (+1 more)