Abstract
The chapter explores boundlessness as an enduring fiction powering the American variety of capitalism. It first establishes the part played by space in America’s mythical representation of itself and in Americans’ relation to land through the territory’s history. It then examines the transposition of this foundational mythology to the economic sector through a plotting of the development of US capitalism as a story of growth. The story is not without a few major blind spots, the author shows. Nevertheless, the shift of the fiction of boundlessness from space to time, embodied in a special relation to the future, has ensured the performative effectiveness of the boundlessness narrative to this day, even if the current presidency seems mostly intent on raising barriers.
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Keynes in The General Theory of Employment (1936, p. 214) stresses that economic future means radical uncertainty that eludes a probabilistic representation. Hayek considers that human beings form expectations based on their cognitive systems, the system of rules to which they adhere. Frames provide regularities which preserve social order over time.
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Arnaud, P. (2020). The Boundless Economy: An Enduring Performative American Fiction?. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_6
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