Economic rationality could not begin to express itself until the traditional order had decayed to such an extent that economic reasoning could free itself from the externally and internally imposed limitations of the customs and commandments of religion. Until then, in so far as it did exist, it was enslaved: forced to cope with alien or even contrary requirements and to serve ends assigned to it by political or religious authorities.
Capitalism has been the expression of economic rationality finally set free of all restraint. It was the art of calculation, as developed by science, applied to the definition of the rules of conduct. It raised the quest for efficiency to the level of an ‘exact science’ and thus cleared the factors of moral or aesthetic criteria from the field of decision-making. Thus rationalized, economic activity could henceforth organize human behaviour and relationships ‘objectively’, leaving the subjectivity of decision-makers out of account and making it impossible to raise a moral challenge on them. It was no longer a question of good or evil but only of correct calculation. ‘Economic science’, insofar as it guided decision-making and behaviour, relieved people of responsibility for their acts. They became ‘servants of capital’ in which economic rationality was embodied. They no longer had to accept responsibility for their own decisions since these were no longer attributable to them in person but were the result of a rigorously impersonal calculation procedure in which individual intentions had(apparently)no place.
What Husserl said of mathematized ‘natural sciences’ equally applicable here. Mathematization renders a certain type of lived relationship with the world into formalizations which: ‘represent and disguise’ (vertreten und verkleiden) this relationship and free us from the need to maintain it through our own intentions. The procedures of calculation acting as a sort of surrogate intentionality functioning in a quasi-automatic and autonomous way, ‘it is because of the disguise of ideas that the true meaning of the methods, the formulae, the ‘theories’, remained unintelligible and, in the naive formation of the method, was never understood.’ To put it another way, what is really at stake and the meaning of‘economically rational’ decision-making are removed from all possibility of rational examination and criticism by the fact that economic rationality itself is formalized into calculation procedures and formulae inaccessible either to debate or to reflection. We are left with debates between experts, quibbling over technicalities of method not with the substance of the debate, or at least only concerned with the substance in so far as it is the unspoken hidden agenda of a technical debate on method.
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