Even three hundred years ago, there was no such thing as “the economy,” at least in the sense of something people could talk about as an entity unto itself, with its own laws and principles. For the vast majority of people who have ever lived, “economic affairs” were just one aspect of what we’d call politics, law, domestic life, or even religion. Economic language has always been—and still is—fundamentally moral, even when it insists that it is not (as in the cutthroat realpolitik of the Axial Age, or the “rational” cost-benefit analysis of economists today), and a genuine economic history
...more
