«Economie encastrée»
(embedded economy) Series

By Jean-Marie Harribey

In these series books are in the prospect of rehabilitating a critique of political economics at a time when the economical, social, political and ethical failure of capitalism is breaking out. After the resounding failure of 20th century’s revolutions, which abusively claimed to be representatives of socialism, we are now experiencing the disaster brought by the complete commodification of human activities, using up man and nature. All the speeches that tried to give credit to the capacity of the market to be an omniscient organizer of society, or to the accuracy and efficiency of profit to direct collective choices, are now brought into disrepute and they clearly seem to express the interests of the sole ruling classes. Economics exclusively turned to the accumulation of capital have now crossed the limits for they thought they could do without collective rules. Global crisis is the crisis of globalisation. If we want to leave this behind we need a home economy re-embedded in social relations, different than those set by the needs of accumulation.

As a material reality, economy can no longer lay its market measures down on society. As a discipline, it can no longer be thought independently. Therefore, “Economie encastrée” is doing its best to give a voice to authors from various disciplines in order to cross-connect the views of economists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians with an invisible object : society. Reflections and theoretical research founded on Marx, Keynes, Mauss, Polanyi, Braudel and many others that can be fruitfully cross-connected. There is also room here for innovative experiments and practice within the economical and social fields ; bearing in mind that understanding the world is a long-drawn-out job that will never come to an end but it makes sense if it helps transforming it



Jean-Marie Harribey is an Economic and Social Science professor at Bordeaux University. He has also been joint chairman of Attac France since 2006. He published L’économie économe (L’Harmattan, 1997), Le développement soutenable (Economica, 1998), La démence sénile du capital (Le Passant, 2002 et 2004), Raconte-moi la crise (Le Bord de l’eau, 2009) and is in charge of several collective works.