Tomáš Sedlaček | Ways to other Economies

"Anything goe" - a quote from Austrian scientific philosopher Paul Feyerabend is in the header of the book The Economics of Good and Evil. It is no accident because it precisely characterizes Sedláček's method of writing. A hardworking collector gathers together everything that is useful for his introductory thesis on ethical economics. A thinner or thicker storytellers' net is then woven from the material gained. This "handyman's method" is frequently attributed to postmodern thought, but is much older, as postmodern icon Jacques Derrida recalls in one of his papers. The handyman or bricoleur is a certain cultural type. He has no clear structure beforehand, so he considers nothing unnecessary. He wants nothing postponed and nothing thrown away, because a piece of the truth could be hiding in every piece of "garbage." The opposite of the handyman is the engineer, who constructs ideas and the world according to a given method, approach and standard constructions. The handyman seeks out and converses with the world. An engineer such as Frisch's Homo Faber thinks up and governs the world.

For some time contemporary economics has been going through a phase of revelation, awakening from a dream that everything could be caught, described and predicted with utter precision. Economists have had come to terms with the fact that their science cannot be replenished by the strict rational criteria previously ascribed to the natural sciences, in short because, from the point of view of truthful certainty, even the natural sciences are not what they used to be. Even here the element of uncertainty is in play, which must be counted on, even if it cannot be completely governed. In economics, one more requirement previously considered unimportant enters this more general situation: Freed of the paradigm of "neutral rationality," economic decisionmaking is suddenly forced to take other views into consideration, such as ethics, which is expressed in the world today in such ways as the already-commonplace corporate social responsibility. Morality and moral maxims are returning to economics, suddenly turning the entire field in a completely different direction.

There is a certain self-reflexive development in the Czech Republic which has been perceptible in the world for decades. It is doubly surprising because in the postrevolutionary euphoria of 1989 the notion was being created (possibly psychologically understandable) that western abstract economics or the theory of the free market in the form of the dogma of the pure patterns of supply and demand and the perfect efficiency of the market, offered newly-built democracies the manifest truth of its kind. Tomáš Sedláček's book, The Economics of Good and Evil, which records all of these topics into a multiplex historical viewpoint, is extraordinarily important for this reason, because for the first time ever in the Czech environment, it summarises the historical view of the role of moral assumptions of economic actions .

The majority conception of economics until now as a reliably exact and in a certain sense almost impersonal science ("it is the science of sciences, a science par excellence," argues economics professor and Czech President Václav Klaus, for example), is shown to be erroneous in this mirror of history. Morality – on issues of social and other justice – has been completely forgotten in relation to economics, despite economics as a social science being created as a specific field of practical philosophy. The historical overview Sedláček offers in the book instructively describes lines neglected in modern times, or those that have been intentionally overlooked and covered up, for numerous stated and unstated reasons. The author connects theoretical considerations, based on the unique concept of the philosophy of science, founded on a certain concept of language. Tomáš Sedláček quotes Wittgenstein here, in whose viewpoint every science appears as "wordplay" with its specific – and never universal – rules. It is something of a construction of its kind, which reflects only the world "for us," and never the world as it is. And this is how we must also take this construction called economics.

For a philosopher, such a simplified use of one direction for an argument of historical truth would be unacceptable. What's more, the author also does it with other schools of philosophy, including the stoics or Cartesian philosophy. So as the most rigid myth of modern thought commands - in Sedláček's reading as well - the world is torn into "vast things" (the external world, res extensa) and "thinking things" (man and his understanding, res cognitans) and with it the way was opened to the mathematisation of everything around us, and even to the mathematisation of human issues, which is exactly what economics tries to do (in reality, Descartes' efforts led to the exact opposite; it tried to maintain a purely theoretical, speculatively divided world in practical unity). But Sedláček's simplifying and selective approach, based on the things he as an authorhandyman happened to have at hand at the moment, has a clear popularising and expository sense, and it also simply and easily resists deeper and more general criticism. After all, what is more important in popular work: Philosophical depth and precision, or an intoxicating ability to address and inspire the greatest number of readers, who otherwise would not read a subject as dry as economics?

The division of the world, the Kantian-Hegelian distinction – here is the "world unto itself," here are our ideas and ourselves – is of course the greatest problem in Sedláček's work. Put more precisely: What is problematic is the way the author unconsciously works with it. We will never attain the world unto itself (the Kantian Thing Unto Itself, or the famous "Ding an sich"), and we are therefore left to the projection of the "world for us," which will always remain "fictitious," thought out, imperfect, imprecise, dogmatically and ideologically tinted. Economics also belongs to this projection. In the entire book, Sedláček does not develop this at all, but merely states, which is not a great discovery, considering that these delicate circumstances have been discussed for hundreds of years (several decades in the limited horizon of postmodern criticism), and also offers a way to handle these fictions.

Even economics is a "useful fiction," which can be well accepted from the standpoint of orientation in the world, but only on the assumption that we rid ourselves of demands of its absoluteness and take into consideration additional layers of our "fictional reality." In any theoretical and practical slice, the world is always multiplicity, manifoldness, and economics must take this into consideration. Just as an economist does; one who lives practically aside from his theories. It is on this field that it would be good to hear clearer words from an economist who is not afraid of reviving the idea that economics without an indicated theory of morality is a similar brutalization as politics embracing a supposedly pure technology of power. Unfortunately, Tomáš Sedláček leaves readers in the lurch in these issues. The recommendation we have to use economic theories according to which problem they are best for is not enough, even if it is beautifully "postmodern," as the author pleasedly says. The logical conclusion of the book's general historical preparation would, after all, only be a more detailed answer to the question of how to handle the findings of a "different economics," and how it is possible to combine them and connect them in a creative way with other scientific fictions.

The Czech Republic has been a bit delayed in this field, but even in the local environment, mere research on the topic of "what" is not enough for ovations, success and the coerciveness of popular scientific work, but also a clearer word in the area of practical though, or "how." The Economics of Good and Evil is a beautiful and easy read, but maybe also because beforehand it rids itself of the burden laid in the ambiguous word "to answer." It is said that in philosophy, it is more important to discover new questions than to offer clear and simple answers, but economics lives under a completely different ethos. In the end, it is also well evident in the main thesis of Sedláček's book on The Economics of Good and Evil, which states that economics does not exist without morality, and therefore without a practical act. And a practical, economic act is again not only expressed by courageous, humourous and readably-presented approach (this is what I mean, this is where I stand), but in readable and courageous acts (and therefore this is how I act, or this is how I may act).

Petr Fischer, Hospodářské noviny
19 července 2009