Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life

Works like a Charm addresses a simple question: Why are "incentives" everywhere now? From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, "incentive" names a general theory of motivation--according to economists, we are incentive-driven creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. Works like a Charm applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives: To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing "incentive" from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.

Author: Robert O. McDonald
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 08/01/2023
Series: Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Liter
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781438494098

About the Author
Robert O. McDonald is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas.


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