Complexity, oikonomía and political economy

Building on Aristotle's distinction between oikonomía (‘the art of household management’) and chrematistics (khrēmatistiké, ‘the art of acquisition’) and the associated difference between use-value and exchange-value based economic processes this paper critically discusses modern economics by employing system theory insights. It is argued that the constitution of modern economics has been, at the political and ideological level, strongly associated to the rise of capitalist free-market economy, while at the methodological level it is based on the Newtonian ideals of formal elegance and simplicity of models. These Newtonian ideals in turn underpin the universal claim of modern economics’ theories and the presumption of causal relations between objects that respond in a fully determinable mechanical way to outside stimuli. Discussing the link between modern economics methodological claims at one hand and its political/ideological legitimization of the free-market institutional arrangement of the economic process at the other, in the final part of this paper both modern economics and the free-market dynamics are discussed from the perspective of dynamic complex system's theory.