The Lost Forms of Economic Knowledge: On the Balance of Living Beings(The France Chicago Collection)

Traces the early history of economic knowledge developed by thinkers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Tracking the pre-history of economic thought starting in the sixteenth century, The Lost Forms of Economic Knowledge investigates its origins prior to the emergence of political economy as an autonomous discipline in the late eighteenth century. French historian Arnaud Orain reconstructs the "lost forms" of economic knowledge that led to a world very different from our modern system of numerical abstraction and market regulation. As Orain shows, older approaches to the economy defined it as a relationship between humans and the environment. These earlier forms of economic thought relied on and sought to advance vernacular knowledge from figures such as naturalists, artisans, farmers, and merchants on how to harness the environment to our advantage. Nonetheless, the goal was not to maximize profit, but to satisfy our needs and live in harmony with nature. At a time in which natural resources are fast depleting, Orain argues, we could do worse than to consider alternative approaches to "economics" that lie in our past.

Introduction
1: The Tinkerer and the Observer
2: Science: A Description of the World and Local Truths
3: A Dialogical and Democratic Economic Science
4: The Oeconomy of Nature and the Science of Oeconomy
5: Oeconomic Physics: The French Case until the Revolution
6: Oeconomic Physics: An Applied Science
Conclusion. The Age of Possibility in the Twenty-first Century: The Crisis of Modern Science

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index of Names

Arnaud Orain, an economist and historian, is directeur d’études at the Centre des Recherches Historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of The Politics of Utopia, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and Neoliberalism Is Over. Alexis Pernsteiner is a French translator and language coach based in Marseille.

“With immense learning and sensitive ethical imagination, Orain shows readers how the eighteenth-century contribution to present-day economics is not, inevitably, ecologically irresponsible productivism.”