Sahlins

[Charles Brown]

Actually, Sahlins was a specialist in economic anthropology. In a way Sahlins does some of what Rakesh discusses in _Stone Age Economics_ and _Culture and Practical Reason_. Big surprise. The rational man , Robinson Crusoe/ homo economicus as the natural human economic unit is bourgeois culture (or structure)  not actual human nature. CPR has a chapter "Les Pensees Bourgeois" suggesting some Levi-Staussian structures of bourgeois culture.

I guess Rakesh or Mattick Jr. are talking about the ethnology or structures of economists. I don't know. The structure of bourgeois economists reproduces itself, including its contradictions. I would expect that the structure of the classical economists (Smith and Ricardo) was modified in neo-classical structure because of the intervention of Marxist structure. :>)

Charles Brown


>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 03/11/99 07:04PM >>>
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


>By the way,  I have quoted from Mattick Jr's book Social Knowledge on the
>need for an anthropological investigation of the discourse of economics  as
>conceptually incoherent, internally contradictory, and empirically
>disconfirmed but still so vital in the reproduction of a certain form of
>social life that its absurdity is systematically not questioned.

Yes, someone should definitely do this. Any volunteers here?

Doug