Animality And Ideology In Contemporary Economic Discourse

This article is an attempt to classify the creature known as Homo economicus . Despite its name, Homo economicus ' line of descent through classical and neoclassical economics indicates that it is barely an evolutionary relative of Homo sapiens at all -- that, in fact, it has been traditionally understood less as a living organism than as a machine. Under the pressures of an increasingly hostile intellectual environment, however, Homo economicus is undergoing, if not extinction, then a strange mutation. This mutation once again bypasses the human, at least as conventionally understood: it is a metamorphosis from machine to animal, evident in fields ranging from a resurgent Keynesianism to behavioural finance to ‘neuroeconomics’ to theories of ‘adaptive markets’, and also registered in a number of prominent contemporary fictional narratives concerned with financial markets. While this ‘animal turn’ is to be welcomed for the challenge it poses to complacent claims for markets' infallible rationality and efficiency, as well as for the weight it (albeit unknowingly) lends to attempts in the field of animal studies to break down artificial species boundaries, it is nonetheless liable to critique for its tendency to re-inscribe, not merely normalized, but in a very literal sense naturalized , understandings of historically contingent, ideologically determined forms of economic behaviour.