What can Economists Learn from Deleuze?
Abstract
Listening, seeing and reading Gilles Deleuze has had an influence on my thinking more than most of the economic writings I have consulted over the past quarter of a century. This discovery and furtherance of knowledge enriched my reflection and also allowed me to go beyond the general philosopher, as a philosopher opening the way to new horizons. It makes the researcher aware that the most important thing is not the philosopher man but the man philosopher, i.e. the one who writes something that touches a human being at his deepest level and concerns him in his life every day. New generations of economists should meditate on this by going beyond the chapel quarrels coming from the Schumpeterian dichotomy ‘science versus ideology’. To quote one of Deleuze’s main ideas, no thinking against anything has been important over a long period; what counts are thoughts for something new that affect people’s lives, and which are produced with rigor. This opens the way to a thought for life and not against life, which is in line with the progress of research in methodology, where it is a question of giving more importance to social ontology as a level of analysis and not focusing solely on epistemology in the narrowest sense.