Embodiment, Political Economy and Human Flourishing: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Economic Life

by Frederic Basso, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath

This book presents embodied economics as a foundational alternative to behavioral economics and other projects integrating economics and psychology inspired by the computational paradigm. The 20th century witnessed the disembodiment of economic models through the intensification of mathematization and formal abstraction in economics. Even proponents of an embodied approach to cognition, such as Hayek, paradoxically championed the abstract market order as a disembodied superhuman intelligence. In the wake of groundbreaking perspectives in cognitive and social sciences, which have helped to rethink the fundamental building blocks of economics, agency and institutions, this title takes a radical turn towards embodiment. Reinstating economics as political economy, embodied economics motivates a critique of capitalism based on the analysis of disembodiment through abstraction and reactivates key critical insights into the anthropology put forward by the young Marx about contemporary economics and its conceptualizations of money, property, and labor. Based on this analysis, the authors envision a concrete utopia for an economic order centered on human dignity and care for life on Earth. This book contributes to recent discussions about behavioral, experimental and neuroeconomics and addresses a transdisciplinary audience in the social and behavioral sciences, philosophy, and the humanities.

613 pages, Hardcover

Published May 12, 2024