On “Rule of Experts”

In contrast to accounts made by Michel Foucault and Karl Polyani, Timothy Mitchell argues that the emergence of “the economy” as an object of knowledge and sphere of social practice occurred in the early 20^th century rather than the 18^th and 19^thcentury. Using Egypt as his case study, Mitchell wants to highlight how the history of colonialism was formative of “the economy” through the development of technical knowledges (i.e. statistics, maps) necessary for colonial administration. In particular, he highlights how four techniques that precipitated “the economy.” First, maps led to a territorially bounded space of economic exchange. Second, the discourse of political economy organized exchange around a single commodity, which led to the measurement of economic standing of a territorial bounded space. Third, national currency enabled a exchange to be imagined as territorially bounded. And fourth, colonialism was the condition of possibility for these techniques insofar as delinked space from international exchange. These knowledges did not lead to absolute division of exchange for every nation-state but rather produced a sphere knowledge/power that constantly needed to be regulated. For that reason the contemporary uses of these knowledges by non-governmental and transnational organization for managing “postcolonial” states mark the enduring afterlife of western colonialism. Besides the explicit intervention in historiography on the “economy,” Mitchell makes two inter-related theoretical interventions. First, he critiques social constructivist thought for an underlying reproduction of a material-symbolic dichotomy. Rather than conceiving of them to be apriori distinct, the critical question is to analyze their particular historical bifurcation as a symptom of shifting relations of power/knowledge. Second, he critiques Marxist political economy for attributing to capitalism a coherence and logic it does not have, which, in doing so, obfuscate the “non-capitalist” elements necessary for its reproduction.