Embodiment, Political Economy and Human Flourishing

Frédéric Basso is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His academic work aims to apply, develop, and extend the literature on embodiment to understand and change economic life.Carsten Herrmann-Pillath is Professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. His transdisciplinary research covers economic philosophy, evolutionary, ecological and institutional economics, semiotics, and Chinese studies. His recent books include the volume edited with Jens Harbecke ‘Social Neureconomics. Mechanistic Integration of the Neurosciences and the Social Sciences’ (2020). A summa of his work was published in 2023 (co-authored with Christian Hederer): ‘A New Principles of Economics. The Science of Markets’.

• Introduction.- Chapter 1.The ills of disembodiment and abstraction in economics.- Chapter 2. The Hayek paradox of abstraction and embodiment.- Chapter 3. Principles of embodiment.- Chapter 4. Embodied agency in the economy.- Chapter 5. The embodied approach to institutions.- Chapter 6. Abstraction and embodiment in the core institutions of capitalism: Money, property, labor.- Chapter 7. Embodied market utopia: Human flourishing in economic life.