An undisciplined economy

Reforming capitalism after the pandemic

by Gaël Giraud and Felwine Sarr

Emi, 2021

The crisis is there for all to see: it is social and ecological, it is expressed in planetary inequalities and in the unsustainability of a predatory economic model of the environment. What caused this?

In the close dialogue between Gaël Giraud and Felwine Sarr, two intellectuals capable of wisely ranging from current events to philosophy, from theology to economics, the answer emerges clearly: everything derives from "that deadly utopia of integral privatization of the world and reduction of every resource to a capital », or the post-liberal ideology that has conquered our imagination and colonized political practice. Instrumental reason, the two authors denounce, has completely occupied economic science, reducing it to an asphyxiated accounting practice of a rationalistic nature, which does not take into account other variables: cultures, peoples, thoughts, desires ... Leaning on thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur and Christoph Theobald, drawing on the wisdom of the great religious spiritualities, in these cultured and exciting pages Giraud and Sarr draw another map of the economy.

A more disordered map than that studied in university faculties, often a slave to an instrumental type of knowledge typical of homo homini lupus, but much more necessary for the reality in which we live. Marked by a pandemic from which we can only start with a new imagination.

Gaël Giraud, a French economist and Jesuit, works at Georgetown University in Washington where he teaches economics and directs the Environmental Justice Program, which he founded. Fellow of the International Energy Agency, he is research director at CNRS in Paris, where he is also a professor of political theology at the Center Sèvres. Former chief economist of the Agency française de développement, he published Transizione ecologica (Emi 2015), winner of the Prix Lycéen du livre économique and the Biella Literature and Industry Prize.

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese economist and writer. You teach African philosophy at Duke University in North Caroline. A multifaceted character, he is considered one of the most brilliant African intellectuals: French President Macron has appointed him responsible for the return of African works of art stolen from France during colonialism. Co-founder of the Ateliers de la Pensée in Dakar, he published Afrotopia (Edizioni dell’Asino, 2018), winner of the Grand Prix of Literary Associations.

Aurora Antonucci

NP Maggio 2022