The genesis of disciplinarity and the universalistic aspiration of creating knowledge unembedded in specific contexts is primarily the act of service of knowledge to the purpose of administration and power. Kaul’s treatise excavates the construction of knowledge in the field of economics, the rise of universal theory with the modernist freeze-frame technique and deconstructs it advancing a politicist critique of the seemingly depoliticized invariant and scientific discipline. Imagining Economics Otherwise is not a critique of the discipline from within, it aims to challenge at its roots—the enlightenment epistemology upon which the whole edifice of modernist knowledge is built. The first two parts comprising of three chapters of the book exposes how the evolving of a discipline was in close correspondence to the rise of modernist construction of knowledge and in the last section in the four chapters the author elaborates how this modernist constitution of knowledge is uncomfortable to the notion of identity and difference.
The author poses the possibility of a new discourse on the economic which is unshackled from ‘economics’, capable of recognizing difference and can bridge the disciplinary disconnect between economic and culture. The exposition is an excellent endeavour of invoking anti-essentialist and anti-reductionist theory of the economic and unlike any other postmodern critique argues for a relativist and politicized reading of the economic.