Motivation

My scholarly work is guided by one question: How can economic theory be placed on new foundations so that it truly understands the economy as a nexus of social relations?

In my view, mainstream economics has reached an impasse. The reason lies in its subject-centred approach. Its point of departure is the individual subject, who commands objects, sets goals and selects the appropriate means to achieve them. This dyadic mode of thought—subject and object, ends and means—appeared to enable economics to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences and to employ mathematical methods.

My criticism is not directed against mathematics. Mathematics is an excellent instrument, provided that its forms are appropriate to the subject matter. The insistence on mathematical representability has, however, contributed to reducing the economy to relationships that can be formulated dyadically. Whatever cannot be captured in this way is excluded from view. What is lost in the process is precisely the social nature of the economy.

The economy and society are organised not dyadically but triadically. Human beings relate not only to things, but to one another through things. The elementary structure is therefore not human being–thing, but human being–human being–thing. This structure becomes immediately apparent in exchange: two autonomous individuals relate to one another through objects, practically equate things that are unequal, and thereby create a social relationship. Money generalises and stabilises this form of mediation.

Human beings are social beings. Their individuation and their sociality do not stand in opposition to one another; they are mutually constitutive. Individuals can realise their freedom only within a society constituted through voluntary interaction among people. Conversely, a free society can emerge only when people freely enter into relationships with one another. Freedom and order are therefore not opposites. They emerge together—and can also be lost together.

Adapting a formulation by Yuval Noah Harari, we might say that the modern Prometheus sits within the network. Yet this network is not merely a narrative that can be replaced at will. Money, too, is not merely a narrative, but the institutional embodiment of exchange relations, without which a modern society could not exist. The immense forces that arise from this network, and that frequently overwhelm the individual, spring neither from a central will nor solely from the characteristics of individual actors. They arise from the relationships among people.

This is precisely why triadic thinking is necessary. A subject-centred theory abstracts from the social nature of human beings and reduces them to their relationship with objects. It is therefore unable adequately to grasp the forces arising from the relationships through which modern society constitutes itself. The relationship is not something subsequently added to the individual. It is constitutive of what human beings are as social, free and spiritual beings.

Dyadic thinking may suffice when individual means–ends relationships are examined in isolation. It is insufficient for understanding the economy as a social system. It fails to grasp both the emergence of society’s productive forces and the institutional conditions under which those forces unfold. It therefore cannot adequately explain how the dynamic generated by modern society can be shaped politically and restrained in its destructive effects.

The transition to the triad therefore requires numerous economic categories to be reformulated: money and scarcity, value and price, capitalism and socialism, as well as the relationships between the state and the economy, and between freedom and order. The theory of the economy thereby becomes a theory of economic society.

Many oppositions that appear irreconcilable within dyadic modes of thought can be redefined and, in some cases, resolved on a triadic basis. This also applies to antagonisms bequeathed to us by neoclassical economics, Marxism, the Austrian School and other theoretical traditions. At the same time, economics becomes capable of engaging with philosophy, sociology, history and the other human sciences. Conversely, it can provide these disciplines with an economic foundation that has hitherto been lacking: an explanation of how autonomous individuals form a society through exchange, money and other institutions.

Politically

Politically, my concern is to overcome illusory conceptions of modern society and its money. Dyadic thinking is incapable of adequately grasping the social significance and power of money. It therefore fosters both the notion that money is neutral and the hope that it can be overcome. The first notion is naive; the second is dangerous. Those who seek to abolish money do not thereby eliminate society’s problems. Instead, they eliminate the form of mediation through which autonomous individuals can form a society based on the division of labour.

When I place money at the centre of the analysis, it is not because I see the salvation of the world in further financialisation. On the contrary: precisely because money is constitutive of modern society, its institutional order must not be surrendered to private interests and to a dynamic left to its own devices.

I understand modern civil society as a historically evolved form that must, at the same time, be consciously shaped. It owes its distinctive character to the free exchange relations among autonomous individuals. These relationships release immense productive forces, but they depend upon a state order that preserves the conditions of their freedom and limits their destructive effects.

The state therefore does not confront civil society as an external antagonist. It is one of civil society’s necessary institutions. Its task is neither to replace the autonomous relationships among people with a central will nor to withdraw from those relationships. It must shape the form of society: safeguarding the freedom of its citizens, guaranteeing the unity and reliability of money, and restraining the forces that modern society generates from within itself.

This is where my scholarly and political motivations converge. Modern society must be understood in terms of the relationships among people if it is to be shaped rationally. Triadic thinking makes both possible: it reveals how society’s forces arise and identifies the institutional conditions at which political action must be directed.