postmodernism and neoclassical economics

[Doug Henwood]

Michael Yates wrote:
>Friends,
>
>In a review of "In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern
>Agenda" (edited by Ellen Wood and John Foster, Monthly Review 1997),
>economics professor, Yanis Varoufakis of the Univ. of Sydney, says,
>
>"Come to think of it, the asymptotic limit of postmodern fragmentation
>is the neoclassical general equilibrium economic model.  In both cases,
>the only admissible social explanation springs from differences in
>preferences (and if identities are freely chosen, in identities) which
>are constructed in such a manner that they ban any comparison across
>persons.  As for social relations, these are reduced to interplay,
>voluntarism and exchange.  Freedom is defined in negative terms, and
>structural exploitation is axiomatically rendered meaningless.  Above
>all else, both neoclassicism and postmodernity espouse a radical
>egalitarianism that is founded in the rejection of any standard by which
>the claims of one group (or one person) are more deserving than those of
>another.  Moreover, both fail to provide a principle that promotes, in
>the context of their radical egalitarianism, respect for the other's
>difference or utility.  If indeed postmodernity is analytically
>indistinguishable (at least in the limit) from neoclassical economic
>method, is there any doubt about this book's pertinence?  After all, the
>whole purpose underpinning the emergence of the neoclassical economic
>project, at a time when Marx's "Capital" was beginning to bite, was to
>rid economics initially, and social science later, of history."

The claim that "postmodernism" is against history is itself pretty strange,
to anyone who thinks of Foucault as "postmodern." But this formulation
pushes postmodernism's birth back to the late 19th century, which is a bit
of a stretch, no? You could argue that neoclassical economics is almost
high modern, in the sense of Eliot or Schoenberg, in its devotion to rigor
and abstraction from the quotidian. Supply-side economics is more
postmodern - an ad hoc, devious invention scrawled on a cocktail napkin, so
wacky it *had* to be ironic.

Doug