Epistemology and Political Economy: From Philosophy to Social Theory

Abstract

With the growing rationalization and fragmentation of the academy in the past years, with the separation of the humanities from the social sciences, philosophy from sociology, there has been a corresponding separation between 19th- and 20th-century social theory. Getting back to the classical period is getting correspondingly more difficult with the passage of time, resulting in a loss for everyone. The previous chapters on the relationships between the social theory of Karl Marx, 19th-century German epistemology, and modern philosophy of science have revealed the need to rethink the relationships between areas and disciplines and ultimately, the nature of the liberal arts education itself. The contemporary divisions within the academy are no longer tenable, if they ever were. Questions about subjectivity and objectivity, concepts and reality, science and truth, freedom and self-realization, and class inequality and social justice have shown us that they are all fundamentally questions about the nature of social interaction and social structures with central emphasis on political economy. That is, the central concepts of Western philosophy from the time of the Greeks to the present cannot be viewed as separate from the more historical and sociological questions about the nature and structure of society.