INTRODUCTION: FOUR TYPES OF EXPERIENCE

We speak of ‘experience’ in everyday life in a myriad of contexts. We speak of sexual experience or urban experience. We speak of tourist experience in, say, Venice or Macau. We speak of immigrant experience or gendered experience or how we experienced art and music, of museum experience in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall or the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) or the Venice Biennale. Each of these types of experience involves perception or feeling. It also implies a particular point of view: say black female sexual experience, or transgender experience in the armed forces. But the notion of experience in the human sciences, to start with in philosophy and then later throughout the social sciences, presumes no particular point of view at all. Experience makes its most emphatic and influential, indeed foundational, impact with the phenomenon of objective experience. This is found neither in Greek antiquity nor in ancient China or India, but this type of experience from a general, human point of view, is a modern and Western phenomenon. It emerges in the wake of Galileo’s and Newton’s physics. We had always and everywhere encountered, perceived, registered and acknowledged things and phenomena. But only now with this modern, Western objective experience is there the emergence of a subject. That is, a subject that is independent of any particular individual. Only then do we have an object that is different to any of the myriad of particular things.

This objective experience, and associated subject–object thinking is the basis of modern knowledge whose benchmark formulation was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1929 [1781]). Kant’s subject was ‘transcendental’ to any particular individual; his object was located in a space and time that was the time-space of Newtonian physics. It, too, was no particular place or any historical time. Kant’s trinity of subject, object and time-space was joined by a fourth element: and this was cause or causation. On the paradigm of Newton’s mechanics, the general and objective subject obtained knowledge through the causative action of objects upon one another in this time-space. These four elements – subject, object, time-space and causation – of Kantian experience became the foundation for now more than two centuries of thought across the human sciences, including philosophy, as well as politics, sociology, economics and even often history. It took and takes its inspiration and assumptions from Newtonian mechanics, hence from natural physical science. This objective experience is still, perhaps more than ever, dominant in the social sciences: it is neo-Kantian and is most often described as positivism. This objectivist experience is pervasive in economics, and through economics’ homo economicus world view pervades not just the social sciences, but the assumptions of perhaps the majority of us in everyday life, even everyday life has often assumed away our particular experience, in the assumption that each and every one of us is homo economicus.

Not much later at all, and again in Germany, this time associated with Romanticism, a contrasting, rather opposite notion of experience began to raise it head. It is visible in Hegel and the young Karl Marx, and before in the thought of the poets, of Goethe and Hölderlin. It opposed the mechanistic assumptions of physics. Through this critique of mechanism, this contrasting mode of subjective experience began to enter the human sciences. This idea of subjective experience was given a name by Wilhelm Dilthey (1883), who called it Erlebnis (Caygill 1997; Jay 2005). This was opposed to Erfahrung, the word Kant had given to objective experience. The leben in Erlebnis means to live, or life, and Erlebnis is normally translated as ‘lived experience’. So, the new mode of experience is subjective in that it is the way we as particular individuals encounter things. Moreover, it contrasts life, both human and biological life, to the mechanistic assumptions of objective experience. Thus, there is subjective and lived versus objective and mechanistic experience. There is desire, drive, energy and the body in this mode of subjective and lived experience that the human sciences encounter repeatedly, perhaps paradigmatically in Nietzsche and Freud. After all, your psychologist or psychoanalyst or counsellor is not interested in objective experience but in your subjective experience.

This book addresses this tension, this dialectic between objective experience and subjective experience in some detail and depth. This conflict and opposition between subjective and objective experience runs through the length of this not very long book. It is a social and cultural theory book, but one of its main pivots is methodological. Objective experience became a main methodological paradigm in the social sciences, while subjective experience became the preferred method in the humanities, in literature, art criticism and history. If there was one debate that encapsulated this objective-versus-subjective tension that is as much as ever with us, it took place again in Germany, its essence captured in Max Weber’s famous methodological essay on objectivity in the social sciences (Weber 1949), that is addressed in some depth in Chapter 4 of this book. Here, Weber makes his benchmark methodological distinction between erklären or explanation, on the one hand, and verstehen, or interpretation, on the other. Weber argues that studies in the social sciences – and I think the human sciences – need to draw on both in order to be fully fruitful. In this context, objectivity is about erklären (explanation) and works primarily through causation, and subjective experience is about verstehen: about interpretation and, not so much cause as instead meaning (Sinn). Hence, for Weber, method in a given social science study needed to be Kausaladäquat – that is, valid on the level of objectivity or cause – as well as Sinnadäquat, or suitable or valid on the level of meaning.

What is less well known, and for this book as important, is the context of Weber’s intervention. Again, this is about method and was known as the Methodenstreit, the methods dispute, which was about positivism versus interpretivism – that is, it pitted objective against subjective experience – but it did so in the context of economics. Though Weber saw both sides, in the dispute, he was on the side of the economics’ objectivists. This debate was at the origins of neoclassical economics and its paradigm of utility maximization. If there is a dominant ideology today, if there is a dominant ideology in today’s capitalism, it is that we are homo economicus; that is, that we are utility-maximizing animals. These assumptions are so pervasive that we take them as natural and do not even bother to formulate them. The domination in our societies of objective experience plays itself out in our homo economicus assumptions. Hence, we are calculating, strategic, self-interested, instrumental animals. And it goes without saying. This is taking on the assumptions of objective experience fully. The point for Weber’s methodological thinking – and for most thinking today in regard to objective experience in the social sciences – is that not just the social-scientific observer, but also the individuals he or she studies, are objective, are engaged in objective experience. Weber was allied in this methods dispute with Gustav Menger, one of the founders of neoclassical economics. Thus, Weber and a very important dimension of positivism in sociology and political science and media studies understands not just the social-scientific observer as undergoing objective experience, but also those s/he studies as being engaged in objective experience. This homo economicus involving objective experience of both actor and observer was at the heart of J.S. Mill’s positivism, and Weber was very much influenced by Mill. Weber was only partly positivist in method, but to the extent he was, he understood humans as Mill’s utility-maximizing homo economicus, which Weber called zweckrational action that is, mean-ends, instrumental or best utility-maximizing action.

If Chapter 4 – on methods and economics – addresses objective experience, this book deals with subjective experience most fully in Chapters 3 on William James and 5 on Hannah Arendt. Objective experience, as we mentioned, is based in a Newtonian temporality: a temporality of mechanical causality. William James gives us a polar-opposite temporality of, instead, the stream of consciousness. We see such a stream-of-consciousness temporality in the novels of James Joyce and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Interpretive human science, from sociology to anthropology to philosophy and psychology, gives us such a stream-of-consciousness temporality. So will the Freudian unconscious, and in philosophy both Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson. The operative term for this kind of experience, in the interpretive as distinct from objectivist, human sciences is indeed consciousness. If objective experience gives us subjects that encounter objects, then in subjective experience, subjects are replaced by consciousness and objects by appearances. If the subject is universal and general and is indeed no particular subject, then consciousness is particular and very different from one individual to another. This is how Heidegger on death and time can be understood. Heidegger is writing, despite disclaimers, in this subjectivist phenomenological time. In generalized Newtonian time of objective experience, death is general and abstract and the death of no particular person. In Heidegger’s temporality, my death is ‘mine and only mine’. In phenomenology in the broadest sense, there are equivalents of such a consciousness–appearances juxtaposition. For Freud, these appearances are in dreams. Thus, we have James’s stream-of-consciousness psychology of subjective experience, in which events – in what he calls his ‘radical empiricism’ – are joined not by the causes of Newtonian mechanics but instead by conjunctions, by ‘ands’ and by disjunctions.

James was, along with John Dewey, a central figure of pragmatism. And pragmatism is such an empiricist challenge to rationalism’s and positivism’s a priori thinking. Positivism always starts with an a priori, such as assuming we are utility-maximizing actors, or say with a notion of abstract justice that we see in a priori politics from Plato to John Rawls. Pragmatism starts from not such a universal, but an empirical and particular fact, a particular event. It starts from a particular experience, from a particular event, and works towards a universal, say in John Dewey (2012) in the constitution of public opinion, or of public spheres. We address such public spheres with Hannah Arendt in Chapter 5. Public spheres in Rawls and Habermas start not from experience but from an a priori, for Rawls (1971) the ‘original position’, in which people choose a social contract from the position of total lack of information regarding, for example, their class, status, gender, ethnicity and income. The society that would be chosen from this position – in which the strategy would be a game-theory type ‘maximin’, which would maximize the benefits of the least advantage, and would also include primary social goods of both basic rights and equity – would yield a just society. Rawls (and Habermas) do not proffer a mathematical a priori based on an axiomatic, but a normative a priori harking back to natural right and natural law theory in Hobbes and Rousseau. Habermas wrote on public spheres very early in his career in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]). Roughly some 20 years later he wrote The Theory of Communicative Action (1986 [1981]). Combining these, we see that a just public sphere has its foundations in reaching an agreement through reasoned communication and public justification. This starting point is an a priori universal of what Habermas calls discursive will formation and communicative action. Rawls and Habermas give us normative a prioris. Aristotle divided human reasoning into episteme, praxis (phronēsis) and technics. Episteme is about cognition, on the model of geometry and pure a priori thinking of axioms generating theorems. Praxis addresses ethics and politics and hence can involve normativity. Technics is about making.

Classically, the a priori comes not from the normative and praxis but instead from episteme; that is, mathematical thinking in Euclid’s Elements and implicitly in Pythagoras. At stake in public spheres and politics is instead a normative a priori. This was for Rawls and others a revival of social contract thinking, in which this new a priori of original positions or reasoned communication displaced the state of nature in Hobbes and Rousseau.

Dewey and especially Arendt start not from a normative or other a priori but from political experience itself, from a particular event or experience. Working from the universal to the particular is a priori thinking, while starting from the particular and working towards the general is an a posteriori method of research. Arendt does this not once but twice. In the Human Condition, she gives us a politics based largely in the virtues of Aristotle’s polis. Her idea of politics and political action is on the lines of Aristotle’s praxis. If episteme works a priori, then Aristotle’s and Arendt’s politics or praxis instead starts not from universal principle but from experience of a posteriori events. It is thus grounded in experience. But Arendt has also given us a modern public sphere. If antiquity was Greek, modernity for Arendt is also fundamentally Christian, as inscribed in Augustine’s free will. Humans – like any other beings – in ancient Greek philosophy were understood as caused – in Aristotle’s four (material, formal, efficient and formal) causes. Only from Christianity and Augustine were they understood as free. The Abrahamic God was the uncaused cause and He created man in his image as also given free will. The Augustinian free will in Arendt is the basis of modern experience and modern politics. Arendt’s modern public sphere combines the virtues of the Greek polis with Augustine’s free will. This free will is a necessary condition of both objective and subjective experience. For both objective and subjective experience, it is Kant who is the translator of Augustine’s free will. For objective experience, this is Kant’s First Critique, The Critique of Pure Reason. Arendt’s modern public sphere is not based on this but instead in the subjective reason of Kant’s Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment. It is based thus in Kant’s aesthetic critique.

Chapters 2–5 juxtapose classical and modern experience, addressing the classical in Chapter 2 in Aristotle’s technics and in Chapter 5 in Arendt’s polis. Chapters 3 and 4 address subjective and objective experience, Chapter 4 foregrounding economic thinking, capitalism and homo economicus. And Chapter 5 with Arendt puts together the ancient and the modern in an experienced-based reconstruction of the public sphere. So thus far there are three modes of experience: classical, objective and subjective. Chapters 6 and 7 change registers sharply to give us a fourth type of experience. This is technological experience. And it, too, could have implications for method. If both the observer and the observed are now either technologically mediated or technologically constituted, often as objects themselves, the implications can be vast. If subjective and objective experience in the human sciences are with us since about 1800, technological experience is very much a twenty-first-century phenomenon. A phenomenon of digital media, user-generated content and social media, of the internet of things. The domination of the experiencing subject is also challenged by the rise of the global South and especially China in world geopolitics and of the Western Greco-Christian individual. This sort of technological experience is addressed in ‘object ontology’ and the new materialisms.

I address this first in Chapter 6 through thinking about what might be ‘technological forms of life’. Twenty-first-century capitalism is technological; as such, it is algorithmic. If power and ideology previously worked through language and were semiotic, now they work more through not letter but number in both debt and especially algorithms. Algorithm in Chinese is suanfa (算法), literally method of calculation. Correspondingly, perhaps contemporary method needs to be more mathematical, more about number, about the ordinal and the interval, about the discrete and the continuous. Perhaps so, but not exclusively. Technology may work in the register of number, but forms life work instead through language and meaning. The new materialism and object ontology, it seems to me, tend to forget this. Technological forms of life see us humans as two-sided, as about the fusion and sometimes even the implosion of forms of life into technology. But forms of life – even though technological – still persist. Here forms of life are like Wittgenstein’s language games that are not themselves speech acts but form a background for our various modes of peformativity. We are thus not so much objects, or even technical beings, as this fusion. We are thus more like, though I do not like the term, cyborgs. These are fusions of number and letter, of matter and meaning, that operate through a sort of technological phenomenology.

This book and its theoretical and methodological implications are interdisciplinary, and, I think, may have implications for anthropology and literature studies. It ends with a turn towards sinology and China where I have been engaged in research for nearly fifteen years. Chapter 7 addresses aesthetic experience, not through Kant but through a quite eccentric prism. Experience has always been a question of viewing, and Chapter 7 is about the view, starting with Orhan Pamuk’s enigmatic observations in My Name Is Red. The setting is with miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the seventeenth-century and the juxtaposition with ‘Venetian’ culture in the West. In this context, we find in Islam and Islamic art a ‘view from above’, in Renaissance and Western art a ‘view from below’, while in China the view is ‘trapped in an infinity’. With Francois Jullien, we conceive this infinity as the unboundedness of the Dao: with the formless energy of qi, and its subsequent forming in li, and most of all in the resultant of the myriad of things, the wan wu (Zhuangzi) or the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things are in an important sense 10,000 objects, and if we look at classical Chinese landscape painting, we see that the things – the mountains and streams and trees and clouds – are not only to be viewed but are themselves doing a considerable portion of the viewing. The ten thousand things are a myriad of objects who themselves are viewing. They are not only in the space of what is experienced, but themselves are experiencing. This takes us back to Walter Benjamin’s fascination with Chinese mimetic culture, and Benjamin’s own ‘object ontology’ in his essay ‘On Language’, in which there was not only the language of man, but also the language of things, of things that are in effect experiencing us. Benjamin’s essay is also about communication, which is rendered in German as mitteilen, or sharing with. Communications technologies are at the heart of our technological forms of life, of our technological experience. Let us hope that they can escape the logic of command and control, of friend and enemy, and enter instead this register of mitteilen, of sharing with.

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How to Read This Book

Some readers may want to skip straight ahead to Chapter 4 and objective experience, the Methodenstreit (methods dispute) before proceeding on to Arendt on politics and the final two chapters on technological and object experience. They can then go back and read Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 1 is a more detailed laying out of the book and addresses experience in general. Chapters 2 and 3 in a sense lay foundations for the rest of the book. Chapter 2 is about Aristotle and technics, and more broadly about the background in classical thought against which experience, which is a modern phenomenon, can be understood. Modern experience and modern politics, we see in Arendt, are dependent on Christianity and Augustine’s free will. With the Greeks, freedom was not a question of the ‘I will’ but instead the ‘I can’, in the sense that not being a slave was a condition of freedom. In antiquity, there is no free will in the sense that man himself was caused. Man was a substantial form, a substance. Hence man has material and formal, among other, causes. For Christianity, God is the prime mover, the uncaused cause. Man, made in God’s image, is also uncaused as the free will. In modernity, formal and final cause disappear into the freedom of man’s will, in which also man’s cognitive faculties put an ordering onto the world. Material and efficient cause are absorbed by the mechanism of Cartesian extended substance and Newton’s physics. This is the modernity of objective experience. This, however, is only one side of the modern. In subjective experience causality disappears and is reconstituted as meaning. As objective observers (Kant), we put causal order onto the objective world. Causes are connectors between events. As subjectively immersed these causes transform into conjunctions, much more ephemeral connectors of our stream of experience. The cause and effect of the subject becomes the and … and … and of consciousness: of (un)conscious experience.

Two Pairs of Keywords: A Posteriori and A Priori; Substance and Form

In Plato’s Academy, only geometers were allowed enter, and geometry par excellence sets the paradigm for a priori thinking. A priori thinking starts not from experience or sense data but from a set of axioms. These axioms are taken as self-evidently true, as self-evident truths. The notions of a priori and a posteriori came to Western modernity through Latin translations of Euclid’s Elements. A priori knowledge is deductive knowledge, in the sense that Aristotle could understand Plato’s geometers. Anamnesis or unforgetting, mentioned in Plato’s Phaedrus, presumes that humans have innate ideas and knowledge that they have somehow forgotten. It is through Socratic dialectic that they can ‘unforget’. Aristotle, on the other hand, in his scientific work in both biology and political science, worked from the experience of a great number of cases, very much a posteriori.

Kant is the watershed for these usages in modern knowledge. Kant, whose break with pure metaphysics was occasioned by Newton and Hume, insisted on experience-based knowledge. Euclid’s and Plato’s geometry was fully independent of experience and prior to experience. Kant made a further, though parallel, distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Kant made the distinction between analytic propositions, which were independent of experience, and synthetic propositions, which ‘synthesized’ with experience to produce knowledge. Kant set the mould for modern, objective experience. Experience – on the lines of the objective observer in Newtonian physics – was so central to Kant that the Kantian and modern a priori was not a set of axioms à la Euclid, but instead the a priori conditions of possibility of experience itself. This starts as the subject, as the possibility of cognitive experience in physics, and then generalizes to very much what we understand and live as the modern subject. Thus, Euclid’s ancient axioms of non-experience become in modernity the very conditions of experience itself.

But what is the a priori in this, what are the elements of this modern a priori? They are not axioms such as ‘a = a’ of the classical a priori. They are instead an apparatus of faculties that make it possible for us to put order into the world: these are time, space, causality and the unity of the subject. We order the world temporally and spatially, enabled by (the faculty of) perception and causally through reasoning (Baehr 2006). Unifying this apparatus – these formal conditions of knowledge of empirical content – were the constancy and unity of the subject (the unity of apperception) itself. The Kantian a priori subject, with its unity and also with its axioms, has been a basis for positivism in the social sciences and neoclassical (neoliberal) economics. Thus social science and economics are not just analytic like Euclid’s geometry, but synthesize with experience in the social world. They do not start from experience – they start instead with axioms like utility-maximizing social and economic actors – but then synthesize with the empirical and experience.

A lot of this book looks to deconstruct this Kantian and positivist subject through a posteriori thinking. Thus I want, together with, for example, Foucault, to rehabilitate the empiricism in Hume (Deleuze) and Adam Smith. This radical empiricism refuses the causality and even the unity of Kant’s subject. It features not the understanding but instead the imagination, and works less with positivist homo economicus than the empirical economy. This – and subjective experience – is of a piece with phenomenology in its very broadest sense – one that stretches from Hegel to Husserl, Bergson, William James, Heidegger, Proust, Joyce and Freud and in Polanyi and substantivist economics. In each, Kant’s (and positivism’s) subject is disrupted. Objective time becomes the stream of consciousness, space is challenged by embedded place, the unity of the subject comes under pressure from disintegration and multiplicity, and cause becomes only one of many conjunctive connectors.

To recapitulate on the a priori:

The a priori of Euclid’s axiom-theorem thinking is an a priori of axioms that is not directed to experience at all. This sort of a priori stays with us in logic and mathematics, not only in the social and human sciences. But it is important in this book because the notion of technological experience (Chapter 6), or computer-mediated experience, is a question of algorithms, whose origin is in large part in Gödel’s mathematics, in which algorithms mediate between the ‘input’ of (a priori) axioms and the ‘output’ of theorems, whereby theorems are proven from axioms. What Turing does is convert Gödel’s mathematics and incompleteness theorem from the register of logic and episteme to that of technics and technology. It combines, indeed couples, with ongoing forms of life in contemporary technological experience.
Most important, the just-mentioned a priori of Kant’s First Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason.
There is a less noticed a priori in the Second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason (2017 [1788]), in the context of the moral imperative, which is ‘categorical’ in the sense that it has no conditions but is a condition of moral action. This recalls the notion of the good in Plato, which is a de facto a priori of justice in The Republic. Arendt rejects this for a politics of Aristotle’s a posteriori praxis, which instead of starting from the universal of the Platonic good, starts from particular cases and events that we encounter.
Again less noticed is what Kant called the a priori of (aesthetic) judgment in the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. If Rawls and Habermas on the public sphere start from an ethical or normative a priori, whose roots have a lot in common with Kantian moral action, then Arendt rejects this, and her modern (and not ancient) public sphere is based on Kant’s third, aesthetic-critique reasoning. In this sense, the Arendtian public sphere is at the same time classical and modern. But what Kant sees as a priori – that is, the condition of possibility of judgment – Arendt sees it as a posteriori and empirical. In Arendt, both the judger and what she judges are empirical and in that sense also fragile. While Rawls and Habermas speak of the condition of possibility of a just public life, Arendt looks at this public sphere – the rule of law, equity – as empirical and thus fragile.

This book develops a frame, a method for a largely a posteriori social and human science that starts from particular cases, events, works of art, issues, and works towards, and reasons towards, the general.

Substance and Form

These terms overlap a priori and a posteriori, with form running parallel to the a priori, and substance to the a posteriori. Kant himself spoke of the transcendental (to experience) apparatus as form, in regard to which the stuff of experience was content. We may think of this content as substance. All the classical sociologists – Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel – spoke of form and substance. The closest to what Kant was proposing in regard to form and objective experience was Weber’s idea of formal rationality. Indeed, Weberian rationalization of society is formal rationalization. Formal rationalization is a process of disembedding economic and social relations (Giddens 1984). Karl Polanyi countered this with his advocacy of a re-embedding of economic activity in religion, in culture and in politics. Polanyi is in this context the founder, as it were, of substantivist economics, which so much of anthropology has engaged in. It is for Polanyi a method and a normative position. What I am suggesting is that form versus substance is about this disembedding (form) and re-embedding (substance). Polanyi opposed pure disembedded market relations. Substantivism is linked to Marcel Mauss’s gift economy and the tradition of anthropology that descends from Malinowski’s (2013 [1922]) gift, embracing Fei Xiaotong, Evans Pritchard, Marshall Sahlins, David Graeber and many others.

In the Methodenstreit, which, though Weber was involved, was primarily a debate among economists, the Historical School – notably Karl Knies, G.W.F. Roscher, Werner Sombart and arguably Simmel – proposed a substantivist economics in contrast to the formalism of both neoclassicism and classical political economy of Quesnay, Smith and Ricardo. Marx’s Capital was a critique of such classical-political-economy formalism. Marx’s notions of Wertsubstanz (value-substance) and use value (which was substantive and not utilitarian) made his materialism not formal and thus mechanical, but instead dialectical. The main point for us (Chapter 4) is that formal economics abstracts from experience while substantivist economics starts from the particulars of experience, in a given village, a given factory, a given McDonalds. The formalist a priori in economics is neither Euclid’s nor Kant’s a priori. It is, instead, an axiomatic that concerns valuing: a prism for how we value. For classical political economy, this was to do with factor-input, for Quesnay agriculture, for Smith and Ricardo (and Marx) it was labour. For Marx, the labour theory of value could give us an understanding of exploitation, but this was quantitative and abstract. It is not yet dialectical: it remains part of a formal and mechanical materialism. But the value-form of abstract, homogeneous labour and of exchange is about just one way of valuing. And this is objective value: value from objective experience. We also value subjectively. Use values are valued subjectively. If the units of exchange value are – like atoms – interchangeable, every use-value good is different from every other: use-values are singular, and they are valued as singular. Much of this was recapitulated in the Methodenstreit (Gane 2012). But in the Methodenstreit, which was in important respects coterminous with the birth of sociology, perhaps more was at stake. In the Methodenstreit it was not classical political economy that was in debate with the Historical School. It was Gustav Menger and the Austrian School’s emergent neoclassical economics. Here Weber was Menger’s ally against the Historicals. At the root of this is that the birth of the neoclassicals saw an important shift in the locus of value: from abstract labour input to utility maximization. This was also a shift from Adam Smith’s Humean empiricism to the positivism of John Stuart Mill and the Panopticon’s Jeremy Bentham. This birth of positivism – and not Smith’s empiricism – was the birth also of homo economicus. The a priori axiomatic of homo economicus – and never of labour-value – has, unforeseen, spread as a mode of valuation and indeed general belief system among the lay population in the world today.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION: FOUR TYPES OF EXPERIENCE

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How to Read This Book

Two Pairs of Keywords: A Posteriori and A Priori; Substance and Form

Substance and Form