CONFLICTS, COMPROMISES, AND THE ECONOMY

Abstract Understanding today’s conflicts and compromises requires addressing the entanglement between material processes and the viewpoints of a variety of collective actors: how they understand themselves and the economy within which they act, what objectives they perceive it affords to them, and what constraints it imposes. The structural approach to economic analysis, which builds on the traditions started by Physiocracy and classical political economy, offers a vantage point to understand material processes. The paper proposes three directions to generalise it, thus making it more suitable to address the entanglement between such processes and the emergence and viewpoints of collective actors.