In this workshop, we want to build on these insights and pursue the idea of economics as political theory. Political theory is traditionally understood as the discourse anchoring claims to sovereignty. Today unquestionably, it is economics which has come to represent the political theory par excellence. Thinking through the politics of economics, how the sovereign and the political is implicitly constructed in these models (e.g. of development or public choice), involves not only a reflection on the social context that frames the work of economists, but also a sociology of the economic field that refracts these political concerns in distinct ways. In particular, we look for approaches that deal with:

 

1. The performativity of economics and how to move beyond
2. Sociologies of the economic field
3. The advent and transformative power of the economic profession
4. Textual contextualisation from historians of economics theory that locate economic ideas within the broader development of the discipline
5. Economics and questions of hierarchy, power, authority, expertise