Economy Without Oikonomia Semantic Capture and the Disciplinary Naturalization of a Wartime Ledger

Abstract

The modern word "economy" is treated as a natural category. This paper argues that it is acaptured name. Pre-modern European lexicons maintained at least four lexically distinctregisters for what the word now covers: order-management (oikonomia), money-making(chrematistike), livelihood, and wealth-stock. Each had its own word, its own institutionalsetting, and its own normative horizon. Their merger into a single polysemous term was notsemantic drift but the residue of a datable capture — confirmed by the Chinese ■■tradition, which sustained a two-column format for provisioning and commerce across twomillennia without producing a unified concept. The paper identifies three stages. First,fiscal-military competition among states, intensified by the military revolution's costexplosion, selected for the measurement and maximization of monetized national flows;national income was invented as war-capacity estimation (Petty, 1665; King, 1696), and thecredit revolution made flow — not stock — the measure of state power. Second, thewartime formalization of national accounts in the 1930s–40s ratified the capture: theGilbert–Kuznets definitional contest installed military expenditure as final product, and theresulting format was exported worldwide through the Marshall Plan, SNA 1953, andGNI-based international governance. Third, economics as a discipline naturalized thecapture by adopting it as its own definition: the Robbins definition (1932), the construction ofmacroeconomics on the identity Y = C + I + G + NX, and the macro/micro partition thateliminated the meso-level from theoretical view each deepened the capture and rendered itinvisible from within. The paper treats polysemy itself as historical evidence and is offeredas a contribution to conceptual history and the history of economic thought.