When the West gave up on Marx it tried to save it through Freud. The critique of pollical economy survived as critique of ideology, and this turned into socioanalysis. Socioanalysis needed a subject to work upon. Psychoanalysis replaced society for “the subject”. The economic dimension lost its material reference and was translated into an economy of desire. The materiality of human existence as well as its structural character was built anew in and as language. Finally, material economy was substituted by a so-called libidinal economy. This displacement was fully justified. Freud’s oeuvre constantly frames libido and desire in economics terms. This is no surprise. He was shortly preceded by the birth of the Austrian school of economics. He studied in a conservative empire, where a new formulation of economics was taking shape to counter communism. This new school opposed the objective explanation of the source of value, held by classical political economy. For them value is the result of the amount of labor it contains. Austrian economics offered a subjective theory of value and methodological individualism. The change is not minor: they claimed that the source of value is desire. But they knew nothing about desire. They had no idea about subjectivism. They could have developed a more solid theory had they read something of classical German philosophy.
But they hated the German tradition, especially the so-called historicist school, represented by figures like Schmoller. A key figure in Austrian economics, Carl Menger, attacked Schmoller virulently which meant, mutatis mutandis, an attack to right-wing Hegelianism. Later he and the whole Austrian school would direct their criticisms to Marx and left-wing Hegelianism too. They went no further. But the real continuation of the economic problematic discovered by the Austrian school can be followed in Freud. He showed, without knowing it, that economy was already structuring the psychic apparatus. Freud’s “libidinal economy” is the proper elaboration of “desire” as the source of value. It is also proof that the subject of capitalism not only introjected economy in his soul but that it turned his existence into a market. Freud was no economist and he relied basically on anthropology to bridge his methodological individualism with his interests in society in general. What remained to be done was to bridge social and material with libidinal economics.