On Sat, 2 Jan 1999 13:02:01 -0500 (EST) Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes:
>I would like a little more bibliographic information the Meszaros and
>Bunge analyses cited here.
I remember seeing Bunge's remarks in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer probably from 1992. Most likely he has presented his critique in a more developed form elsewhere, although at the moment I can't provide a citation.
>
>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?
Last time I skimmed the Cartwright book, I noticed that there was at least a chapter devoted to Neurath's relations with the Austro-Marxists but regretably I skipped by it.
>
>*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.
Miller analyzed positivism as representing the viewpoint of politically moderate people. Thus he emphasized that most of the logical positivists were social democratic reformists (with the exception of Neurath). He argued positivism had been historically associated with reformist rather than revolutionary politics, citing the example of Hume, who as an opponent of slavery favored a gradualist appproach to abolition as compared to some of the religious opponents of slavery who favored more extreme measures. Therefore, in Miller's opinion positivism tends to be the philosophy of people who will be opponents of fascism and other forms of reactionary politics but who will seldom be revolutionaries in their own right.
At the same time, he is most careful to distinguish his position from the Frankfurters who tended to identify positivism in all of its forms with technocratic consciousness and with the rationalization of domination. He clearly rejects the Frankfurter's view of the matter. He points out for instance that the positivists concern with the prediction and control of phenomena is one that should be shared by progressives and should not be automatically viewed as symptomatic of a technocratic consciousness.
Jim Farmelant
>
>*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
>
>
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