This paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or ‘institutions for collective action’. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself.

/pdf/commons-and-the-nature-of-modernity-towards-a-cosmopolitical-1wsmwt1x82.pdf

Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991

Commons and the nature of modernity: towards a cosmopolitical view on craft guilds

Les approches geographiques des risques sont marquees par des preoccupations politiques et culturelles qui influencent le regard des sciences sociales a partir des annees 1960. Depuis les annees 1990, la question environnementale mondialisee devient hegemonique et performative. Dans un meme mouvement d'ouverture politique et culturelle intensifie par la mondialisation et qui accompagne les recompositions de la modernite, les territoires tels qu'ils sont compris par la geographie sociale francaise offrent un regard localise et pluriel sur les risques entendus comme une construction sociale, a la fois de faits et de sens. L'idee politique et culturelle de la notion de territoire constitue une proposition epistemologique et une opportunite methodologique pour l'analyse des risques. A une epoque ou la question environnementale requiert d'etre contextualisee, articulee a differentes echelles, et politisee, la definition de la territorialisation des risques, de leurs ressorts, de leurs implications pour la realite sociale et des enjeux qu'ils recouvrent renouvelle la pertinence et le mandat de la geographie pour l'etude des defis socio environnementaux contemporains et les interactions entre societes et environnement.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00719896/document

Une approche territoriale des risques

Many authors have repeatedly argued that in order to start solving the complicated problems of science and other forms of knowledge in the contemporary world, it is necessary to go beyond conventional claims to the universality of scientific knowledge and introduce into the analysis the dimensions of power and domination. The power to narrate, or to block the development or emergence of other narratives, has proved very important to culture and to political domination, and it is one of the main links between them (Said, 1994). Throughout its history, science has fashioned a very powerful narrative that has been instrumental in delegitimizing other descriptions of the world, while consolidating its own position as the preeminent form of knowledge.

The Hybridization of Knowledge: Science and Local Knowledge in Support of Sustainable Development

The profession of economics does not fulfill its social function to provide people a correct understanding of economic phenomena. In other words, the institution of economics does not work properly. George Soros makes this conclusion in his lectures at the Central European University (Soros, 2010). He sponsored the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) with the objective to change this situation in economics. However activities of the INET are not oriented to change the institution of economics and most of participants in its activities are mainstream economists. This short paper summarizes my ideas in what way it is necessary to change the institution of economics. First, in order to make the profession of economists socially useful, it is necessary to reconsider the methodology and history of economics. At present the former leads the profession in a wrong way and the latter to a great extent justifies this wrong way. Secondly, it is necessary to reform the institution of economics. I define the notion of institution in the following way: an institution is a set of formal and informal rules, and also beliefs, that stand behind these rules, that orient the behaviour of members of a certain community. The rules of the institution of economics relate to the community of university professors and students of economics. These rules provide a framework for developing curricula and syllabi, as well as for the organization of examinations. They define the procedures and directions of economic research, and the criteria for publication of articles in academic economic journals. These rules include formal and informal rules of functioning of professional organizations of economists, such as the American Economic Association. Beliefs that underlie the rules of functioning of the community of academic economists are expressed in different answers to such questions as: What does it mean to undertake economic research? What is the purpose of economic research? What should economists study? How should they carry out the study? In what form should the results of the study be presented? What does it mean to teach economics? What kind of economics should we teach? The answers to these questions, along with formal and informal rules of behaviour based on the answers, together constitute the institutional knowledge of professional economists. Candidates for admission to the profession acquire most of this knowledge during the preparation and defense of PhD dissertations that many do in the framework of post-graduate studies. If someone becomes a member of the profession and does not have this knowledge, or refuses to follow its instructions, then sooner or later she/he will be rejected by the profession. To reform the profession of economists means to reform the institution of economics, i.e. to change their rules and beliefs. I think that the only way for economics to become a socially useful science is the transformation of economics from a kind of applied mathematics (mainstream economics) or social philosophy (heterodox economics) to something similar to social anthropology with its ethnographic method justified in the framework of the constructivist discursive methodology. The methodology that I prone can be expressed very shortly in the following way. The social-economic regularities result from the fact that people behave according to certain socially-constructed rules, and these rules are explained, justified, and kept in mind by telling themselves and others some stories. Taking this statement into consideration, we must agree with the fact that for the identification of social-economic regularities, we must explore and analyse these stories. Modern economics does not study the discourses of economic actors and thereby deprive itself of the ability to understand and predict economic phenomena. The study of discourse is not a deviation from the academic standards which are built into natural sciences, but rather an approximation to it, since almost all social interactions are mediated by language.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/48482/1/MPRA_paper_48482.pdf

Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991

Citations

Commons and the nature of modernity: towards a cosmopolitical view on craft guilds

Une approche territoriale des risques

The Hybridization of Knowledge: Science and Local Knowledge in Support of Sustainable Development

How to make the economics profession socially useful? (A reaction to George Soros’ lectures and INET’s activities)

Éticas indígenas en discursos coloniales de los Andes y de Quebec : análisis, interpretación y perspectivas

Related Papers (5)

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society

Du mode d'existence des objets techniques

Les mots et les choses : une archéologie des sciences humaines