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Abstract
This dissertation examines how human finitude came in the twentieth century to be interpreted as an economic problem. Its aim is to trace, in particular, the dialectical connection between utopian political promises of generalized abundance and the economization of various dimensions of human finitude (temporality, mortality, natality, plurality, interdependence). Chapter 1 revisits the emergence of the economy as a discursive object in the first half of the twentieth century, revealing it as a site not merely of measurement and administration but also of political attachments. It does this through an analysis and critique of John Maynard Keynes’s interwar writings and of his plans for a postwar global economic order. The economy, the chapter argues, was constituted through a specifically perverse utopian promise: that of its own disappearance as the result of technological progress and universal abundance. The failure of Keynes’s forecast concerning the end of the economic problem must, in consequence, be simultaneously understood as the failure of a utopian project of reordering and transforming capitalist society. Chapter 2 shifts to the postwar boom and discusses “automation,” a word coined in this period, as a political technology. The project of automation, including that of constructing artificial intelligence, was, the chapter argues, shaped by the fantasy of unfree, perfectly rule-bound and obedient labor. The chapter describes how narratives of the imminent obsolescence of “menial” labor due to automation served as the condition of possibility for political promises of democratic classlessness and general prosperity. It concludes by suggesting that affluent nations’ increasing reliance on non-citizen workers – both through offshoring and the use of migrant labor – has been mediated by earlier promises of the technological obsolescence of the working class. Chapter 3 deals with the difference between the post-industrial economy as a utopian vision of the early postwar decades and as it subsequently came to pass. The chapter investigates a shift in the tenor of economic thinking, beginning in the 1960s, away from promises of abundance and towards various reassertions of the necessity of scarcity – whether in the form of the finiteness of time, of the ecological limits to growth, or of the persistence of human interdependence. What connects these disparate reassertions of scarcity, the chapter shows, is their integration of human finitude into the scope of economics in an attempt to account for the limits of industrial abundance. The chapter insists on the ambiguity of this economization of human finitude, which serves both to chasten human ambitions and to push in posthuman directions.