Economic Equilibrium Between Natural Science and Theology
Pavel Gordok –Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin (Yekaterinburg, Russia).Year: 2026
journal: Vestnik GU 2026 part 3
UDK: 14:[330.8+33.018]
Pages: 148–158
Language: russian
Section: Philosophy
Keywords: general equilibrium, neoclassical economic theory, “invisible hand”, economic theology, modern European science, oikonomia, non-relation
Abstract
The article continues Giorgio Agamben’s project of the theological genealogy of economy and government by examining how neoclassical economic theory preserves and reproduces a theological remainder within its fundamental structure. The author demonstrates that the central concept of contemporary economic mainstream, the theory of general economic equilibrium, represents a secularized form of providential oikonomia. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s analysis of modern European science, the paper shows that the mathematical formalization of economics is possible only because it is already “mathematical” from the very beginning (already at the stage of classical political economy) (Gk. τὰ μαθήματα): formalized economic theory is inscribed in the modern European project of nature as a closed equilibrium system of point masses. In turn, mathematical tools contribute to the naturalization of economic order at the subsequent stage of economic knowledge, in neoclassical theory. Further, by appealing to the not on of fundamental uncertainty in Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, the structural disproportionality of the market is revealed; the disproportionality that equilibrium theory retrospectively masks, turning it into a regulative fiction. The psychoanalytic (Lacanian) perspective allows the “invisible hand”, the central metaphor of classical economics, to be interpreted as a mechanism operating through the mobilization of non-relations and the constitutive impossibility of the coincidence between individual and collective plans. Ultimately, neoclassical economic theory appears as a version of equilibrium order in which immanent harmony is achieved precisely because it can never be fully achieved, in other words, as an effect of the presumed constitutive disproportionality.
