Political Economy as Theodicy

Book excerpt: Political Economy as Theodicy: Progress, Suffering and Denial proposes that political economics operates within a theological symbolic order that dictates modern sociopolitical and economic life as a whole. This book revisits the work of key figures in the history of political economy and economic thought – primarily Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, W. Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall and John Bates Clark. Theodicy is a constitutive element of an international political economy (IPE) that often disavows moral evil, while it conversely redefines such evil as an actual good within economic life. Beginning with the Enlightenment thinkers and continuing through to the modern neoclasscial economists, this book traces the initial emergence of a natural theological basis for political economic thinking and concludes with a discussion of its application in modern IPE. Relying upon a postcolonial framework, the author seeks to provincialize economics, creating space for alternative modes of being and doing. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of IPE, political theology, international relations and postcolonial studies.