FIXING THE ECONOMY

Abstract

‘Fixing the Economy’, shows how the modern understanding of ‘the economy’ as the totality of the relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region arose in a mid-twentieth-century crisis of economic representation. The economy, represented as an autonomous domain, participated in the (largely post-Second World War) re-imagining of the nation-state and the postcolonial international order, and provided a concept of development without political upheaval. In considering the economic life of an Egyptian village, however, Mitchell demonstrates that market and domestic production and consumption are irreducibly hybrid and that the practical foundations of the economy as representation make it impossible any longer to see its imagined referent as the very type of the non-discursive and the material.

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