2025-04-03_banger point

‘Katrine Marçal (2015) asks ‘Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?’ With this apparently innocent question, she disrupts the analytical assumptions of classical political economy, in particular its notion of the self-interested and isolated economic subject. Adam Smith’s abstract musings on this atomised subject acting in ‘his’ own self-regard – the isolated Robinson Crusoe so loved by political economy – were utterly dependent on the love and labour of his mother who acted in a way that was profoundly contrary to her ‘own self-regard’. Smith’s mother, in her concrete acts, therefore undermines the very basis on which her son’s political economy proceeds’

• The body as infrastructure, Andueza et al. 2021