Abstract
The Western claim to global leadership and the legitimation of its dominance relies on the argument that the West is a rational, democratic, science-based civilisation. This chapter briefly traces the history of the Western claim to rationality, embedded in scientific inquiry and the development of secular democracy, both based in free critical discourse. The principle of quantification is the pivot of scientific rationality, as the development of the scientific method means switching from judging to measuring. Economic rationality is a derivative of scientific rationality, and its ontology of numbers is therefore difficult to challenge. The historical and ideological foundations of market-based capitalism are discussed. Finally, the use of GDP as a measure of progress of the affluent society is examined.
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- 1.
Usually defined as the period from the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD) to the Renaissance and the ‘Age of Discovery’ that started in the fifteenth century.
- 2.
The population of Florence is currently under 400,000. At its largest in 1971, the city was home to 460,000 people.
- 3.
Cristobal Colon En Las Américas by Sicilian sculptor Ugo Attardi (1923–2006) was installed in Plazoleta Provincia de Tucumán, at the intersection of Avenida 9 de Julio and Avenida Santa Fé in central Buenos Aires on 12 October 1992.
- 4.
For example, the US prison for terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay established in January 2002. In December 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released key findings and the executive summary of the 6000-page ‘Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program’ (covering the period 2001–06) revealing widespread use of torture (‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) on the detainees. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump advocated the use of special interrogation techniques where justified. See https://fas.org/irp/congress/2014_rpt/ssci-rdi.pdf. Accessed 18 June 2017.
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Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle (1850) wrote in a pamphlet of ‘respectable professors of the Dismal Science.’
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The prize in economics is actually the ‘Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,’ first awarded in 1969, and it is not directly linked to the Nobel Foundation.
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Jevons is nowadays best known for the ‘Jevons paradox.’ Its meaning and contemporary significance can be illustrated by the case of the automobile in the US. The introduction of more energy-efficient cars in the 1970s did not curtail the demand for fuel because decreased costs led to an increase in driving and the number of cars on the road. Similarly, technological improvements in refrigeration led to more and larger refrigerators. In the capitalist context, improvements in technology do not lead to savings but to growth—an ever-larger productive output.
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John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was a philosopher and economist, and also a member of the British parliament (1865–68), a philanthropist and one of the rare plausible male feminists.
- 9.
The Road to Serfdom is the title of Friedrich von Hayek ’s (1944) book in which he argues against government regulation of economic affairs, and especially against centralised planning, which, according to him, inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
- 10.
Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) was an influential Austrian-born economist. He worked in Austria and Germany before becoming a US citizen in 1932. He popularised the term ‘creative destruction’ to describe the process of continual renewal in capitalism .
- 11.
More recently, Akerlof and Schiller (2009) have written extensively about ‘animal spirits’ in their book of that name.
- 12.
Although GDP is the most quoted measure, two other measures are preferred by some analysts: per capita gross national income (GNI) and net national income (NNI). More details at http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-factbook-2011-2012/national-income-per-capita_factbook-2011-20-en.
- 13.
Including the purchase of an existing property into GDP would lead to double counting since the property was included in GDP when it was first built.
- 14.
The full speech is available at https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx. Accessed 26 June 2017.
- 15.
The HDI is based in the intellectual legacy of Amartya Sen.
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Colic-Peisker, V., Flitney, A. (2018). A Rational Civilisation?. In: The Age of Post-Rationality. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6259-9_2
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