Introduction to an Embodied Approach to Economic Life

The economy deeply affects the body in myriad ways, often inflicting pain and suffering, while serving bodily needs and creating desires. Yet, standard economic theory presents a disembodied view of human beings and the market, both of which are usually conceptualized as information processors. This book challenges the prevailing intellectual status quo in economics and its recent developments, such as behavioral economics, which maintain a principled normative reference to rationality and have deep intellectual roots in the Western oppositions between body and mind, emotion and rationality, or community and society. This introduction, provides an overview of the book’s chapters and presents an argument for a radically different approach in which embodiment grounds and bounds economic life, presenting embodied economics as political economy.