A few more questions.
*What do people make of the Max Adler/Otto Neurath debate noted in Nancy Cartwright, et al 's book on the latter?
*Doesn't Richard Miller attempt to link positivism to the critique of radical politics in general, not simply the critique of clerical fascism? It's been a long time since I read his book on Marx.
*Perhaps more interesting than the critique of caricautred positivism is the analysis of statistic reasoning carried out by Andrew Sayer in his Bhaskarian Method in Social Science and Alain Desroisieres in his Bourdieu inspired Politics of Large Numbers?
*I think there is a new book out from Yale Univ Press by Bruce Maszlich on the human sciences; a chapter is devoted to positivism. Saw it in Barnes and Nobles yesterday.
*as for the inapplicability of universal laws to the historical and social world, it seems that Marx's insistence on the principle of historical specificity in social research--as Karl Korsch called it--was strengthened by his careful study of Richard Jones. I was looking through histories of economic thought and Blaug, Schumpeter, Eduard Heiman, Robert Heilbroner, Robert Lekachman all pay almost no attention to this empirical and inductive thinker who had a keen sense of the historicity of modes of production. Only Guy Routh in his Origin of Economic Ideas recognizes the importance of Jones. Grossmann also emphasized Marx's debt. There is a thesis by Nai Tuan Chao Richard Jones: AN Early English Institutionalist, his dissertation for Columbia University in 1930. Not much on Jones since, it seems. It's funny, the thinkers who most interest me, like Jones or Charles Babbage, get almost no attention in histories of economic thought.
yours, rakesh