"We've been going back and forth for a century..." The Power of Ideas

Mitchell begins Carbon Democracy with the claim that ideas such as democracy are tied inextricably to materials. Yet in our imagination of the idea of democracy, it is flexible, transplantable across time and space, and universal. In chapter five he gives an example of how this divorcement of idea from material can come to be by outlining how “the economy” separated in discourse and thought from materials and goods. Because of Keynes’s thought (and the expedience of his thought in the control of oil resources globally), economics ceased to focus on goods and resources and became “the sum of all the moments at which money changed hands” (136). In the case of “the economy,” Keynesian ideas produced and influenced material systems, including “the emergence of large-scale, techno- scientific governmental practices based upon the vastly expanded administrative machinery” (137) and divisions within "the economy" based on geopolitical boundaries. According to Mitchell, Keynesian economics worked to limit market competition much as colonialism had in earlier years.

As an outside resource I dug up a rather silly dramatized rap battle between Keynes and F.A. Hayek, whom Mitchell only briefly mentions as leading the newly emerging neoliberal movement in the postwar years. Though Hayek, like Keynes, argued financial stability was tied to managing key commodities, he argued against nearly all government interference in markets, including the kinds of government interference that propped up oil company trusts in the name of security, development, democracy, or any of the other ideas used by companies and governments to justify interference. The end of the video shows a quote from Keynes’s The General Theory, which reads, “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Next it quotes Hayek's opposing position: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

At the heart of Carbon Democracy, and of critical importance to the Keynes/Hayek debate, lies the question of the relative power of ideas and materials. At times Mitchell appears to argue that ideas like democracy, rather than existing and having power beyond materials, only exist and have power in their relation to materials. And yet he outlines many times how ideas like development and democracy were more powerful than materials in motivating the actions of individuals and governments and creating new systems.

In the end, I suppose both Keynes and Hayek are correct: ideas like democracy, development, “the economy,” and security have power beyond what we realize, as Keynes argued (though he specifies the ideas of economists). But Mitchell and Hayek – who would disagree with each other on much, but agree on this – argue that materials, resources, and the desire to control them, control the ideas that take shape and how these ideas are used. Perhaps most curious of all is the fact that, in the imaginary of the public, it is still Keynes’s economy, Keynes’s ideas of ideas, that wins today. That may be why Carbon Democracy is such a shocking and necessary read.

To watch a rap battle between two dead economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk