The most important change brought by

The most important change brought by the modern episteme was that “time” took on the privileged position, which was previously ascribed to “space” (table). With this new outlook, which delves vertically and deeply and within things, which led to seeing labour as the foundation of all economic laws, wealth shall be considered as the result of a process, namely the labour process. The workings of the economy were established to be temporal; they spread out in a linear sequence of successive events. This is precisely why the modern episteme was called “the age of history” by Foucault. “History” replaced “order” as the main condition of possibility of knowledge; it became the things’ new mode of being. To disclose temporal successions becomes a new mode of thought in the production of knowledge. Above all, Foucault claimed that there was an anthropologisation of knowledge in the modern episteme. Man occupies the most important place in the conditions of possibility of modern thinking. When he became the subject matter of those empirical sciences (biology, political economy and philology), man became the object of knowledge, since the study of life, labour and language required the study of man. This meant that man also became the philosophical basis of knowledge, or as Foucault wrote: the transcendental certainly of it. Foucault used the term “anthropology” not to refer to the specific science of man, but literally as “a logic of man”: “anthropologism” became the philosophical foundation of all human sciences. Thus, as Lemert and Gillian (1982, 128) synthetised, man replaced God (pre-classical episteme) and logos (classical episteme). Man, whilst established as the transcendental condition of knowledge in the modernity, carries with him an aspect that is fundamental with respect to what is related to time, his finitude. This finitude has elementary consequences for the knowledge that is in the process of construction, particularly for the political economy.
The modern episteme consequences for political economy From the emergence of the modern episteme onwards, Foucault identified three specific consequences as the result of this new historical configuration for economic thinking: The idea of temporal sequences, which organise events in terms of antecedents and consequents, shall determine the making of economic theories. The mental frame that allows this new form of organisation results from the understanding that labour is the very source of value. Hence, this source, labour, is a phenomenon organised primordially in time. Foucault explained that: The second consequence relates to the notion of scarcity in political economy. This new knowledge brought the scarcity to its core, considering economic phenomena through the idea that there are a perennial miserly in nature, what is a result of man and his finitude. Foucault ([1966] 1970, 257) avowed: “nineteenth century economics will be referred to an anthropology as to a discourse on man\'s natural finitude.” According to this, political economy examines labour, because it is through labour that man will be incessantly fighting against his demise, his death. Foucault then claimed that homo economicus: “is the human being who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death.” (Foucault [1966] 1970, 257). He does this through labour as the basic process of political economy. Once again, Foucault differentiated the meaning of “scarcity” in the modern episteme from the concept possessed in the days of the classical episteme – as in Galiani\'s raritá. In the classical episteme, scarcity was strictly linked to man\'s needs, which were fulfilled by the generosity of land – as in the Physiocracy – and were the essence of value – as with the utilitarists. From the period of Ricardo onwards, scarcity became a sign of fundamental insufficiency. In that context, population growth was to be apprehended by this perennial facing of natural scarcity, and concepts like the theory of diminishing marginal returns would become an emerging possibility. According to Foucault: “At every moment of its history, humanity is henceforth labouring under the threat of death: any population that cannot find new resources is doomed to extinction; and, inversely, to the degree that men multiply, so they undertake more numerous, more distant, more difficult, and less immediately fruitful labours.” (Foucault [1966] 1970, 256).