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Paper short abstract

Developing an ‘ideational performativity’ framework, this paper shows how mainstream economics performs and stabilizes contemporary economic imperialism by embedding transnational capital’s interests in its theories and calculative devices, illustrated through the case of New Development Economics.

Paper long abstract

Mainstream economics, through its considerable influence within corridors of power and its close association with the neoliberal zeitgeist, plays a key role in enabling contemporary economic imperialism. This article unpacks that idea through two main contributions: First, a novel analytical framework is introduced by bringing together performativity (a techno-cultural approach to study markets) and Marxian political economy. For salient ontological and epistemological reasons, a revivified version of Neo-Gramscianism rooted in critical realism is deployed in this synthesis, giving rise to what is termed ‘ideational performativity’. The developed framework offers the analytical capability to interrogate how, and to what extent, the assumptions embedded in economic theories and their attendant calculative devices are shaped by ideas advanced by the prevailing historical political-economic bloc, and how, in turn, these devices function to reproduce and stabilize that historical bloc.

Second, the framework is applied to explore the mutual constitution of economics imperialism (the disciplinary overreach of mainstream economics and its calculative devices) and economic imperialism (the material reproduction of global hierarchies) through a critical examination of New Development Economics (NDE) and its two constituent research agendas: new institutional economics of development divergence and poor economics of development. The article traces the ideational-performative effects of tenets of NDE back to the intersubjectivities (serving the interests of capital) and the ideological foundation underpinning them, highlighting how NDE’s calculative devices, couched in the positivist epistemology of economics, tend to entrench the interests of the prevailing transnational neoliberal bloc and function as technologies of imperial governance in periphery.