Η μικρή ιστορία του οικονομικού ανθρώπου

Αντιγράφω από το Chartbook του Adam Tooze (14 Μαρτίου 2026):

The Autopsy of Homo oeconomicus

“A fairy story: ‘Once upon a time there was a Man who lived in Scarcity. After many adventures and a long journey through Economic Science, he met the Affluent Society. They married and had lots of needs.’ ‘The beauty of the economic man,’ as A. N. Whitejead remarked, ‘was that we knew ecactly what he was after,’ That human fossil of the Golden Age, born in the modern era, from the happy union of Human Nature and Human Rights, is endowed with a heightened sence of formal rationality, which leads him to:

1. seek his own happiness without the slightest hesitation;

2. prefer objects which will provide him with the graetest satisfactions.

The whole discourse, lay and academic, on consumption is articulated upon this sequence, which is the mythological sequence of a folk-tale: a Man ‘endowed’ with wants or needs which ‘lead’ him towards objects which ‘give’ him satisfaction. Since man is, nonetheless, never satisfied (he is, indeed, criticized for this), the same story begins over and over again, with the sterile self-ebidence of old fables.”

Source: Jean Baudrillard, The consumer society, (1970).

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