Raymond Geuss

This essay argues that the economic failure of neo-liberalism should be seen as demonstrating in a particularly striking way that the way of forming preferences is an inherently political process, which needs to be controlled by agencies that stand outside the economic process . A number of concepts that have played an important role in recent economic and political theory, such as ‘freedom’, ‘welfare’ and ‘neutrality’, need to be very seriously re-examined. Furthermore it is argued that giving up the idea that there can be a fully free-standing, autonomous ‘economic’ theory is fully compatible with accepting that efficiency, parsimony, and the satisfaction of needs are important human values, which need to be socially institutionalized

Abstract There has been a strong tendency in economic thought to try to take human wants, desires, and preferences as the basis for deciding how to act. This essay argues that ?needs? constitute a distinct category which cannot be reduced to preference. The reductive strategy is partly connected with a philosophical mistake about the relation between the subjective and the objective. The distinction between needs and wants must be central to any continuing form of human action, but it may also not be understood in such a way as to posit some purely objective (perhaps biological) needs that can be specified independently of people's wishes and desires; nor can those desires be specified outside the context of an account of the various ways in which they arise out of, are embedded in, and are directed to ?objective? features of our world