An Economic Turn: A Hermeneutical Reinterpretation of Political Economy with Respect to the Question of Land

The philosophy of economics has been largely guided by analytic philosophy. Even Marx has been appropriated without much scandal by economists who separate his scientific contributions from his politics. In this article, I place hermeneutics (i.e., Heidegger and Ricoeur) in dialogue with the conventional understanding of land as a factor of production. The history of political economy misunderstands land as an entity classifiable as property and capital. I argue instead that land’s ontological role, deriving from Heidegger’s concept of earth, suggests that economics needs to account for it in a new way according to David Ricardo’s notion of land rent.