Works like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life (SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) - Softcover

McDonald, Robert O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438494084 ISBN 13: 9781438494081

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2024

Synopsis

Breaks the spell of economic thought by interrogating the widespread language and logic of "incentives" in public life from a Lacanian perspective.

Works like a Charm addresses a simple question: Why are "incentives" everywhere now? From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, "incentive" names a general theory of motivation-according to economists, we are incentive-driven creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. Works like a Charm applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives: To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing "incentive" from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.

About this title

About the Author

Robert O. McDonald is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438494084
• ISBN 13: 9781438494081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308