Social Suffering: A New Reference Framework for Economic Analysis

Jerome Ballet and François-Regis Mahieu

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2022, vol. 54, issue 3, 281-297

Abstract: Social suffering has become a recurrent theme in various disciplines (sociology, social psychology, anthropology), but remains absent from economic analysis. The aim of our article is hence to reinstate the role of social suffering in economics. We first define the scope of the concept, which should be interpreted as a form of suffering generated by economic systems, particularly the current capitalist system. We then dismiss the objections to this conception of social suffering. In particular, we dismiss the attempt to reduce social suffering to a set of categorical phenomena that can be interpreted independently of the functioning of an economic system. Finally, we point out that lowering social suffering should take precedence over the pursuit of happiness. JEL Classification: B40, P46, A13

Keywords: social suffering; neoliberalism; negative utilitarianism; well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134221087495 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:54:y:2022:i:3:p:281-297

DOI: 10.1177/04866134221087495

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().