Michael Williams wrote:
My attempted analogy was technical, not
>political. On the other hand, I do not think orthodox economists are all
>talking nonsense all the time, so I do not mind (critically) appropriating
>their insights. (Nor is this meant to impute any view to you, one way or
>another, on the 'scientific' value of orthodox economics.)
Thank you for your comment. I have the same sort of view as you do. One way
of thinking about this matter is to consider where Marx got his ideas from.
And he got them, in the field of political economy, from the best bourgeois
thinkers that preceded him ("I did very little that was new", said Marx). I
don't really see why that process of critical appropriation should stop
necessarily with Smith, Hegel and Ricardo; surely Wassily Leontief and
Joseph Schumpeter are also great innovative economists to mention a couple
I have read in the past (there are many others - personally I am not so
keen on Keynes, I think Kalecki's work is much more advanced). Of course,
then we can get into questions such as what is eclecticism, but maybe we
don't want to do that now.
Comradely
Jurriaan
PS - to be completely explicit, when I talk about fuzzy concepts I am not
referring to fuzzy hair, for example. People with fuzzy hair can have
crystal clear concepts.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 27 2000 - 15:27:09 EST