Contemporary economics is a corrupting process. Attempting to tame uncertainty itself, it infiltrates as a rationality veiled in science which trends towards a self-interested neoliberalism that combines with a jingoistic sovereign state. This mixture shuts out the possibility of unconditional hospitality, making humanity the personification of competition. Ethics now constrained, the Other is left in a permanent state of hostility, the subject of death itself.

Humans have the capacity to transform the world for moral purpose. That is economics at its moral core; activity designed to enhance the material conditions indicative of the good life, to move from the actual given to the possibly better, and to do so with and for ourselves and with and for others. We work together or apart, we share the world as constructed by others, and we are responsible for far more than our own welfare simply because our economic products shape the lives of others, just as the products of others construct our own lives. To return to Kant, the “real force” of economic power is often ephemeral, difficult to locate, but always subject to the question of its relevance to others. This essay seeks to nudge our understanding of economic life closer to a hermeneutical horizon where hospitality and welcoming might provide the scope for understanding economic responsibility in a new ontological and moral key, a key in which the damage that we do might be lessened and the good we seek enhanced.

Modern economic thought, particularly after it turned its back on political economy and divorced itself from normative questions, shares with many other social science disciplines a preference for parsimony as it works to “tame” uncertainty and chance. We can glimpse with Stephen Toulmin how the ambiguity and uncertainty out of which we living breathing humans do in fact construct our lives and ourselves as historical beings in community with others is not so easily tamed, despite the epistemic and scientistic “virtues” that have turned our humanity away from the humanities, a turning we must remedy: We can reconcile the twin legacies of the exact sciences and the humanities only by a change of direction; and, for that, we must first see clearly how the agenda of “modern thought” over-reached itself. By now, it will be clear that we need to balance the hope of certainty and clarity in theory with the impossibility of avoiding uncertainty and ambiguity in practice. But the received view of Modernity rested not only on the Quest for Certainty and the equation of Rationality with a respect for formal logic: it also took over the rationalists’ belief that the modern, rational way of dealing with problems is to sweep away the inherited clutter from traditions, clean the slate, and start again from scratch (Toulmin 1990: 175).

At the core of Toulmin’s critique stands Modernity’s agenda. That “received view” plays itself out in modern economics through a range of attributes of relevance to this essay. Among those attributes are (1) the effacement of the history of political economy, both in theory and in practice, in favor of an economics of the simple, the “scientific,” the “model,” and the “rational”; (2) an elevation of the self and its interests to the apex of values as each of us becomes a “moral monarch”; (3) a gloss over the difficulty of pursuing harmony, equilibrium, and peace; (4) a similar gloss over the particularities of the local and the contingent; and, (5) a preference for a morality of norms and rules grounded in subjective utility rather than a morality of intersubjective life, prudence and praxis. Alike with moral philosophy, there is a “thinness” about all of this that leaves out too much of living, breathing, experience; too much of “the world,” its moral richness and its complexity: This world has lots of good qualities. But one of its drawbacks is a tendency to narrowness on certain questions. And one of the most marked sites of this narrowness was in moral philosophy. The narrowness concerns more than just the range of doctrines considered, though it also consists of that. But, more fundamentally, it has restricted the range of questions that it seems sensible to ask. In the end, it restricted our understanding of what morality is. I have tried to sum this up by saying that Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy has tended to see morality as concerned with questions of what we ought to do and to occlude or exclude questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love (Taylor 1996: 3).

That “tendency to narrowness” is just as true for contemporary economic thought as it is for moral philosophy. As Taylor notes, one casualty of such narrowness is the demise of inquiry into what it is good for us to be and good for us to love. Harmony and harmoniousness come to mind. But harmony has too often been romanticized and simplified within what some term “the metaphysics of presence,” an unfortunate thing since approaching the genuinely harmonious requires sticking with what John Caputo terms “the original difficulty of life,” a difficulty certainly strikingly obvious in contemporary economic life: The point is to make life difficult, not impossible – to face up to the difference and difficulty which enter into what we think and do and hope for, not to grind them to a halt. Indeed, it is the claim of radical hermeneutics that we get the best results by yielding to the difficulty in “reason,” “ethics,” and faith,” not by trying to cover it over. Once we stop trying to prop up our beliefs, practices, and institutions on the metaphysics of presence, once we give up the idea that they are endowed with some sort of facile transparency, we find that they are not washed away but liberated, albeit in a way that makes the guardians of Being and presence nervous.… Curiously enough, the metaphysical desire to make things safe and secure has become consummately dangerous (Caputo 1987: 7).

Under the cover of “science,” modern economics, particularly in the US and in its capitalistic garb, has not “faced up” to this difficulty. It sought a “positive” economics as it jettisoned questions of norms (except for those like efficiency and property rights that it is fond of). It divorced itself from its birth-mother political economy and reduced what it means to be a person to what Dierdre McCloskey terms that “great stick of a character,” homo economicus. It narrowed the Aristotelian scope of human rationality and indeed human nature to the pursuit of self-interests. It gave communication and political life over strictly to strategic rationality and strategic discourse, rendering human intersubjectivity an exercise in “how to win.” In this strategic world, intersubjectivity and ethics take only those forms which “benefit” the relevant parties in their “exchange” of increments to self-interest, with private property rights and liberty understood as the freedom to pursue subjective utility maximization as the key “moral” accoutrements to economics. To the extent it bothers with welfare economics at all, and in a post-Keynesian world it doesn’t bother much, it has relied upon welfare arguments adapted from Wilfredo Pareto (to whom Mussolini gave a medal as “the father of Fascist economics” and whom Karl Popper referred to as “the theoretician of totalitarianism”). This sort of economics seems rather indifferent to a world it helped create, a world ravaged by unbridled greed, indifferent at best and biased at worst to questions of economic justice, incapable of reconciling some putative economic “progress” through “growth” to the ever-expanding gap between the rich and the poor (see Piketty 2014), and, perhaps worst of all, at the brink of murdering that most gifted phenomenon of all, that tiny little sliver of cosmic “splendor” we call the Earth. The notion of economy has become consummately dangerous; a big part of the problem, not of the solution. We don’t even have the economic words to deal with this.

In this essay, I will not be bound to modern economic thought and will raise different sorts of issues and questions. I will adopt a phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective focused on ordinary life, the “to and fro” of our breath, our sustenance, our language, our sociality, and our self-understandings. With a casual relation to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and with a flirtatious glance toward non-Western ideas, I follow the idea of an economy grounded in a for-the-other hospitality rather than a for-the-self competitiveness. I do not offer a practical, implementable “system” or “structure” for such an economy; I offer ideas to help us think differently and, through those ideas, to act differently.

2 A Hospitable Economy

A well formulated approach to the future … does not depend on finding ways to quantify and extrapolate current trends: that we may leave to enthusiastic weather forecasters, stock exchange chartists, or econometrists. Rather, the questions are, “What intellectual posture should we adopt in confronting the future? What eye can we develop for significant aspects of the years ahead? And what capacity do we have to change our ideas about the available futures? (Toulmin 1990: 2).

I am suggesting here that the idea of a presumption of hospitality provides one such valuable intellectual posture as we answer Toulmin’s questions. Certainly, recent events suggest that hospitality hardly registers in economics, politics, ethics, and the sovereign State, where competition, survival (and thus death), winning, jingoism, “border control,” and neoliberal promotion of selfishness are ubiquitous, as is the hate-riddled “post-truth” autocratic (or indeed plutocratic) politics of recent emergence. These ideas are embedded in some old ones. Thomas Hobbes gave us a moral ontology grounded in a self-interested nature that, unchecked, inevitably leads us into conflict and war. Immanuel Kant viewed perpetual peace (and thus harmony) as derivative of something akin to Hobbes state of human nature but “a crossing over” from it. Of most relevance to this paper, the ongoing politics of the border defines the state and the market by counting those within and discounting those without, by the granting of rights and freedoms to some and granting silence (or worse) to others. We seem to be living and breathing the antithesis of [Kantian] hospitality; that is, “… the right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (Kant 1795/1970: 105). Those strangers are both inside and outside of the border, citizens though they may be.

Yet this notion of hospitality as the refusal of hostility has some corollary in the idea of a transactional economy governed by competition and strategic modes of interaction. If, for example, it was possible to presume, experientially, a transaction between those of equal competence and power, with each oriented toward the satisfaction of his/her preferences through trading, then the absence of intersubjective “hostility” seems a reasonable assumption. If, as it usually does, this sort of interaction transpires between those of unequal competence with asymmetries of power, then that economy is not hospitable. The exercise of power over others for one’s own benefit is certainly a “hostile” act since “power” is never called upon without its object, that “who” or “what” it targets and that “who” or “what” it acts in the name of. But the power goes much further. A transaction takes in a broader context than a context formed by the “subjects” who enact it—the “thing” of trade, the commodified thing, which is of course an embodiment of so very many other “things” that may be produced and appropriated in a manner “hostile” to them—the earth, those who labour, unborn others, innocent victims of history, and plants and animals all come to mind. Do they all deserve hospitality, a presumption in their own favor that would open the door for them?

Hospitality, as a welcoming, is a welcoming into something, an inside, a home, a premises, a place which is always and already identified, owned, an asymmetrical market of what is not of the stranger who is welcomed in; that is to say, into an economy. The one who offers hospitality is the one who welcomes the stranger into that which is not the stranger’s. As Leung and Stone state, quoting John Caputo, “[A]ny act of hospitality contains within it the trace of asymmetries of power, ‘the welcome of the guest, is a function of the power of the host to remain master of the premises’” (2009: 196). This calls forth the question of justice as it bears upon the legal questions of property as, for example, over the question of retributive justice with regard to the violence that defines the history of the acquisition of private property and rights to it. Thus, as with the writing of both Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, the “host” is always and already implicated in the guilt of history that surrounds the presentistic question of the border (ownership, statehood, citizenship, etc.). That guilty implication does no damage to the imperative of hospitality; rather, it reminds us of the difference between a “pre-ethical” obligation to unconditional welcoming and the factical life within the historical, ethical, and political space of an economy within which the inhospitable governs unless and until hospitality pays off for me.

This raises both the ontological question of universalism and the ethico-political question of cosmopolitanism. There is a rather strange aporia at work in the hospitality of welcoming into a home presumed universal, an incontrovertible “harmony” of all with all. But a universal home is no one’s home, no bordered place about which hospitable welcoming can be “hosted”; a universal economy of welcoming would have no place, no goods, no “home.” It may emerge from a harmony of something spiritual, something “noneconomic” which all are presumed to share and of which none are the author/owners, but then the necessary move to “linguistify” that which is universal is deconstructed from the outset by the quite simple fact that there is no language—and thus no economy—which can “deliver the goods” independently of history, despite the relentless urge to “purify” danger. This is the core issue in the postmodern cultural politics of difference, of resistance to the idea that ways of living, ways of believing, ways of economizing, can be contained within the modern cosmopolitan ideal that we are all, somehow, of the same and that such sameness (any sameness) provides the knowable key to “harmony.” Harmony certainly can be, but it cannot stand outside of the local ecologies (and economies) which give it a history and which seek to enact it as part of their own unfolding through time. It is not “pure,” not of a “post-human” claim to something that is both human and transhistorical, though the history of religion anxiously and always advances that claim.

Within the anthropological and historical context which Toulmin so aptly describes, I wish to speak of an economy of hospitality, not of a transcendental idea of hospitality: Once the significance of “traditions” and “forms of life” is conceded, of course, one must abandon Descartes’ move in the Discourse on Method, in which he required us to ignore traditional ideas in favour of ones whose “clarity and distinctness” to all reflective thinkers made them cultural universals. The questions, whether people in all cultures and epochs have access to the same neutral “basic conceptual framework” equally; and, if so, to what extent and in what respects, is a question of fact that we can face with intellectual honesty only if we are ready to take anthropology and history seriously (Toulmin 1990: 189).

This puts us right at the doorstep of E.F. Schumacher’s desire for the “welcoming” and the “harmony” which attaches to local economy, the small, hospitable economy where “neighbours” (human and nonhuman) interact. This stands in contrast to the “universalization” of something like a “global economy” which seeks saturated markets and assumes that somehow the value of efficient growth is exempt from the issues that would be raised by anthropological (or cultural) difference. In that global world, in E.F. Schumacher’s words, “[N]either buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself” (Schumacher 1973: 44). Hospitality in this economy is at best a shaking of hands before the fighting begins; and, at worst, a luring into the hollowed-out lair of exploitive enactments of power by one over the other, even if such enactments yield a rather orgiastic self-aggrandizement of exhaustion, something like the heavy-breathing terminus of a sporting match. The fittest win, and winning is everything. This ethic piously announces itself in the name of “human nature,” a term which stops conversation and seems to ignore the “better angels” of our natures, angels with equally valid claims to our putative “nature”. It is just that the warrior-like appeals to our animalistic “natures” oriented toward survival/death seem to have dominated, but such is the way of phallocentric reason. [In any case, whatever our “natures” might be, as reflective and moral beings we always have the capacity to refuse those “natures”; they do not control us, nor is it necessarily desirable to act in a manner consistent with them.] Given the disharmonies and destructions of modern economics, we need, to recall with Toulmin, “a change of direction” in our intellectual attitudes. This essay now turns toward a few modest ideas about just such a change of direction.

Following Paul Ricoeur and many others, we can understand “welcoming” as a necessary, almost pre-ontic, condition without which the trust essential to any nonviolent mode of intersubjectivity (and speaking and listening are the best examples) would be impossible. At the outset, welcoming is a given. This welcoming, this originary hospitality exists sans justification, hospitality-as-hospitality, as the there is of hospitality, as the prelinguistic, pre-existence existing of a thing (often a human) outside of whatever use we may have our eyes on putting the thing to (use as economic, as social, as ethical, as political, as religious, as spiritual, as spoken; ad infinitum). “There is”—anonymous and impersonal, without our always construed “identities” and “desires” to deform it: Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. This indeterminateness of this ‘something is happening’ is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive.… This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is ‘being in general’ (Levinas 1989: 30).

To name it only because we have no choice but to name it if we are to write at all, “there is” stands at the door—un named, un known, un speakable, Ur elemental, immune to our urge to name, to know, to speak. The “there is” standing in front of us is the first and most profound moment of harmony. It is not a harmony derived from our language—That is rather than There is, the naming of things (even God)— not derived from our interests, rationalities, ethics, desires, and sociality or our “use” of the there is. The “there is” informs a hospitality that is exactly opposite from the hospitality of modern economics which always requires that we “know” the other at least well enough to know whether there is “something in this relationship for me.” It is in this way that I will speak, with Levinas, of the “elemental,” the precondition of the unconditional, the presence out of which imaginary moments of economy turn into real ones. Those moments emerge from an unjustified hospitality, a welcoming of that about which we know nothing and for which we have no “use,” no “instruction” to give in the right and proper and good and true modalities of economic life together, no “principles,” no “values,” no “faith” that would tie the knot of harmony without recognizing the givenness (and the toxicity) of the rope and its reciprocity. In Jacques Derrida’s terms, that harmony begins with a respect at the core of what is about to emerge as a “violence” of metaphysics, of the speaking of. … The widow, the orphan, the corpse simply stand in front of us to be either in or out of the hospitality that we “control” through the power of recognition (or killing). These are elemental things which we transform as economy and to which we attach economic ideas. Relatedly, and usually we are silent about this, they are also the things that make an economy even possible, and the things that “make economy possible” are to be protected from unbridled economy lest we lose the possibility of an economy at all.