Why economic logic no longer explains politics

The near knee-jerk assumption that economic logic provides the foundational basis for social life and contemporary political conundrums is increasingly wearing thin.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

One of the predicaments of contemporary debates on society and world order is growing analytical laziness.

This trend is visible across the ideological spectrum. The long dominance of economy-first frameworks, be they Marxist, liberal, or technocratic, has much to do with this, particularly the reflexive tendency to place economic factors or class struggle at the centre of every argument, whether in society or even politics.

The near knee-jerk assumption that economic logic provides the foundational basis for social life and contemporary political conundrumsisincreasingly wearing thin. Meanwhile, politics isreduced to merely one variable among others. This economic framework (which scholars, intellectuals, and ordinary commentatorsare drawn to) explains less and less of the world we inhabit. If anything, it now obscures more than it reveals. Given the transformations in political life, both nationally and globally, the time has come to invert this hierarchy that treats the economic logic as foundational and politics as subordinate.

The argument to bring primacy back to the political is nota rhetorical flourish but an analytical correction. And it mustbegin witha basic proposition that contemporary commentaries have worked hard to forget: societies are not held together by markets alone. They are ordered by decisions about authority, legitimacy, obligation, power, and the use of force. These decisions, at one level, precede the economic exchange, while at another level, they make it intelligible.