Magnitudes in Badiouʼs Objective Phenomenology and Economic Consumer Choice

In the background of our investigation we will succumb to a provisional thesis, which will also act as the proximate aim of this article: The “marginalist revolution” does not resemble the Copernican type of a revolution – an absolute modification of the scientific field. The change from classical to marginalist economics is by far more a mere shift in doctrines – it is an intra-theoretical parallax view from production and distribution to exchange – rooted in a back-then dominant philosophical worldview of utilitarian principles. In our interpretation, Badiouʼs undertaking offers an enhanced, and more importantly monolith, solution, whilst upgrading his set-theory ontology with category theory. In doing so he introduces a more robust logical framework that allows him to subsume the ʻprimitiveʼ belonging-to-situations multiplicities to a logico-relational framework of categories in a world. What is most crucially expounded with this gesture is a call for a continuous, unified and coherent bottom-up framework – one having the potential to serve as a more suitable transitional scheme for a shift in economic doctrines, instead of opting for an apologetic rendition of the discipline. Put more concretely in the context of our present discussion: A critical economic science should rather reiterate Marxʼs ʻdialectics of the value formʼ underlying commodity exchange, in a way as to further accommodate also for the subjective aspirations and magnitudes of desired objects, by means of an immanent structure capable of handling the categorical breadth.