The geopolitical economy of the original condition

Abstract

Placed outside theory, the ‘original condition’ provides theory’s unquestioned foundation. For the discourses explicated as geoeconomics by Mallin and Sidaway, the points of departure include a capitalist economy on a world scale, and a set of states constituted around the pursuit of profit for private enterprises in turn understood as comprising the national economy. In this commentary I highlight how this version of the original condition has been assembled from discourses such as the political economy in the tale of Robinson Crusoe and the philosophy of a racialised homeland in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This interrogation offers an alternative genealogy to the study of the circulation of the term ‘geoeconomics’.