Generative Relational Economics - Chapter 1: Historical Conditions of the Contemporary Economy

This chapter develops the historical-material background for Generative Relational Economics (GRE). It examines how economic categories, subjects, institutions, and dominant modes of analysis emerge under particular material, productive, administrative, scientific, and epistemic conditions rather than functioning as historically invariant objects. The discussion traces the formation of modern economic subjects and entities through industrial production, wage labor, property, firms, administrative classification, and entity-centered allocation. It then examines the expansion of relational production through organizational networks, globalized production, digital intermediation, data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence. These transformations alter the configuration of scarcity, productive capability, economic participation, representation, and institutional power. The chapter distinguishes entity-centered, relational, and generative levels of economic analysis. It argues that contemporary developments increasingly expose economic processes in which internal and external relations, higher-order configurations, delayed effects, path dependence, changing capacities, and future generative conditions become analytically significant. At the same time, advances in network science, dynamical and complex-systems analysis, computation, longitudinal evidence, and adaptive institutional forms make such processes increasingly tractable. The chapter also emphasizes the limits of relational knowledge and governance, including partial observation, model dependence, boundary and scale sensitivity, administrative reification, normative plurality, and unequal control over observation and classification. GRE is therefore presented neither as an historically inevitable successor to existing economics nor as a universal replacement for entity-centered analysis. It is introduced as a historically situated and revisable research programme whose contemporary possibility arises from the conjunction of new economic problems and new capacities for studying them.