After calculation? Reflection on critique of economic reason by André Gorz

Abstract

This essay outlines the central themes of Gorz's Critique of Economic Reason (1989) and raises a number of critical issues in relation to them, particularly regarding the prospects for a “green accounting”. Like many other social theorists, Gorz oversimplifies the nature of economic calculation (and therefore accounting). Accordingly, accounting theorists have much to contribute to the project of determining the proper limits of technologies of quantification. Against utopian and romantic rejections of calculative rationality, it is suggested that accounting is not sufficiently well understood for its environmental potential to be dismissed.