Do you think Heidegger would have appreciated Hubert Dreyfus' use of him to illuminate the possibilities opened up by the Woodstock Music Festival? Did Hannah attend? I would like to have heard them all converse about whether Jimi's use of the electrical guitar was the release of Dionysian urges without the destruction of technology (well did he smash the guitar at the end of the anthem?) By the way, Karsten Harries makes a good and very stimulating case that Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man is the realisation of Heidegger's critique of technology, popularized and simplified for the hoi polloi of course. See Harries in a book he edited called something like Heidegger, Technology and Something.
Doug, yes, i will track down Ross' comments--I think they are in Donna's office who seems to have forgotten about her debts to LBO and has not been reading along for some time. My other point is that no matter how much life is commodified and relations individualized, neo classical economics still cannot be a realistic description of capitalist reality, though of course the concepts of utility and equilibrium and so forth could be the ones people nonetheless use to understand bourgeois society.
Christian and Dennis, I am begging off defending my nasty comments about the left conservative Bourdieu, though I do agree that there seems to be something to Ranciere's criticism; also liked Calhoun's in the Bourdieu Reader and Postone's regarding the static nature of Bourdieu's theory of practice in Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination. But David Shwartz's Power and Culture, an intro to the thought of Bourdieu, is really excellent. Of course Bourdieu's micro studies of how people are allocated and allocate themselves to reproduce the class structure in several different fields behind the backs of oppressed and oppressor alike are a true scientific breakthrough, a contribution of the first order including most of all the concepts (habitus, structuring structures/structured structures, schemata, etc) he has developed in the course of his empirical studies of it as a natural process. Homo Academicus includes many breathtaking analytical insights. And Bourdieu's use and development of correspondence analysis, in place of multivariate analysis, may be the future of statistical analysis in the social sciences. Etc.
Jim F you mention that Cohen uses the deductive nomological mode of explanation from Hempel to defend Marx's theory of history. But what I have not seen is the use of Hempel's distinction between theoretical and observational terms to make sense Marx's theory of *value*, accumulation and crisis. Do tell me if anyone has done this. Justin would reduce Marx's project to a series of ad hoc explanations compatible with a broad understanding of historical materialism. That is a lethal project, not a salvaging of Marx's critique of political economy.
Jim F I also don't like the idea of anti racists joining hands with anti scientists just because the Bell Curve or the G Factor has the appearance of science, though as Lewontin said their techniques would not pass standards in journals of animal breeding.
all the best, rakesh