On Production: An Ontology
Abstract
In the economic realm, production is the primordial phenomenon – that which is revealed as the
foundation. Indeed, so profound is the role of production in economics, that if economics as a
field is to have real meaning, it must ask the foundational questions of what production is, and
why production hapens.
This paper argues that production is the teleological morphogenesis of the human material realm.
It further argues that economics needs a richer understanding of the human motivation to
produce: Adam Smith said we need money for ‘other occasions’, Alfred Marshall knew we have
a ‘higher nature’, Carl Menger spoke of ‘our inner drives’, and Keynes sensed what he called our
‘constructive impulses’, but all these expressions merely touch on the deeper nature of mankind
without specifying what that nature is.
This paper finds that both the ancient understanding of taking-care-of and attending-to,
summarised as caritas or agape, and contemporary psychology’s identification of the search for
security, are the wellsprings for human material action. Thus, production is an instinct.
Governmental policies which interfere with the natural impulse to take-care-of though production,
or which interfere with the processes of production, will reduce production, and in strong-form
cases, cause shortages.
The paper contains interesting ideas, although they are expressed in an unrefined way. Asking to understand the human motivation to produce in general and without further spatial and temporal qualifications is overly simplistic. People did not have the same motivations through the centuries, except for their initial common denominator, survival. Even the attempted definition of production suffers from ahistoricism. Saying that production is “the human decision to combine materials to make a new thing” (p.2) mostly characterizes the industrial era. In a society of farmers, shepherds and fishermen, production meant work and favorable climate conditions. The fact that craftmanship has always existed is not sufficient to describe production across all epochs. My suggestion would be to change the title to something like “What is production today? An ontology.”
Having made this suggestion, I wonder if endless production -i.e., continuous growth- is not the real problem. As for the motivation of producers today, there is no equivocal answer: it is seeking profit! Moreover, it is not true that Smith “failed to address the question of motivation” (p.3). Both his Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations discuss human motivation.
Collingwood’s analysis of human motives emphasizes the significance of taking care of others as the primordial motive for producing things. Starting with ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and moving through 20th-century philosophers such as Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger, Collingwood seeks to demonstrate the narrowness of the ontological perspective in neoclassical economic analysis. From British Romanticists (Burke, Carlyle, Dickens) to 19th-century utopian writers (Owen, Sismondi, Proudhon) and Christian Socialists (Maurice, Ludlow, Kingsley), to Thorstein Veblen, economic analysis has repeatedly and strongly been criticized for its narrow understanding of human nature. Sociologists and social anthropologists have offered the same external criticism more recently, and it continues today. Let me add: rightly so!
Unless an economist adopts a Panglossian view of the world, it is commonly recognized that economics offers an abstract, partial, and inexact knowledge of reality. The list of economists who have pointed out this fact is long, ranging from John Stuart Mill to Kenneth Arrow and Ronald Coase. Reminding us of the limits of economic knowledge is always useful, and Collingwood makes a valid point if he wishes to reiterate this criticism. However, this must be done more skillfully and without mixing factual and normative arguments, as he does. Looking at the list of references, which is messy, incomplete, and contains draft notes, only demonstrates that Collingwood’s attempt is not yet finished.
Michel Zouboulakis, University of Thessaly, Greece.