History of Knowlege, Economic Analysis, and Power Struggles By Jakob Tanner

https://www.academia.edu/44057778/History_of_Knowlege_Economic_Analysis_and_Power_Struggles?email_work_card=title This article outlines what the history of knowledge can contribute to a problemsensitive analysis of the economy, which is understood not as a well-defined and separated subsystem, but as a blurred reality, entangled with every aspect of the tightly interwoven social life. From this vantage point, the problem of any economy appears to be less about the optimal allocation of resources through pricing systems or planning techniques but rather about communication processes and the use of knowledge. In this respect, there is an affinity to the question posed by Friedrich A. Hayek in his famous 1945 paper "The use of knowledge in society," who criticized an understanding of economics as a fully transparent reality with given "data" that markets of bureaucracies can process in order to come up with a "rational economic order." 2 However, instead of focusing on the adaptive function of "dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess" in complex social systems (as Hayek suggested), 3 in this article the social fact of power asymmetries is at the center of the analysis. How can knowledge generate power? A striking answer to this question emphasizes the intrinsic uncertainty of any economic activity and argues with the concomitant volatility and intricacies of expectation building. This draws attention away from the continuous incremental transformations and discoveries in normal times to the discontinuous and conflict-laden changes in economic booms and crisis periods. It becomes then evident that the statistical predictability of forthcoming events resp. the calculation of risks gives way to an awareness of imponderable contingencies that may break up historical continuums by thwarting the aspirations of all actors concerned. In particular, we come to see the capitalist dynamic, which has reshaped the world over recent centuries, as fueled by "imagined futures" and driven by "fictional expectations." 4 These terms are taken from the title of a seminal book by Jens Beckert who captures this phenomenon conclusively by exploring the knowledge-power-nexus and emphasizing the de facto potency of imaginary projections into the future. In this approach, the exertion of power consists in the capacity to coin and influence the expectations of other actors (or "third parties"): "To have power means: My expectations count!" 5 diaphanes eTexT: Beleg_Jakob_Tanner / 28.09.2020 ...