Keynes / Foucault: Retrofitting "Henwood before Butler"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Nov 4 22:33:04 PST 1999


Doug:
>I've never been retrofitted before;
>it's a dizzying experience.
>
>>Lately I've been wondering what happened to Doug. Is this a fad or an
>>Althusserian 'epistemological break'???
>
>I wouldn't repudiate anything I wrote in the passage. I'd express it
>a bit differently, for sure, but I'm not rejecting it.

Excellent. Now, ready for another dizzying experience of retrofitting?

Keynes/Foucault, queer 'renegades,' the 'foundation' and limits -- (dis)solution -- of social democracy:

***** from Henwood, _Wall Street_

[Keynes] thought the _General Theory_ had solved "the" economic problem, in both theory and practice. With that single shot, he claimed, he'd killed both Ricardo _and_ Marx. To Keynes, both belonged to the "self-adjusting school" of "classical economics" (quoted in Behrens 1985), failing as they did to grasp the doctrine of liquidity preference and the drag on investment exerted by high interest rates. Here Marx and Ricardo are joined in their sunniness. But elsewhere he joined them in gloom: "Marxism is a highly plausible influence from the Ricardian economics, that capitalistic individualism cannot possibly work in practice." In both cases, the equivalence is as strange as Foucault's (1973, p. 262) declaration that the struggle between Marxians and Ricardians was "no more than storms in a children's paddling pool," since they both shared a common dream of an end to History....

Behrens, Rolf (1985). "What Keynes Knew About Marx," _Studi Economici_ 26, pp. 3-14.

Foucault, Michel (1973). _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences_ (New York: Vintage Books).

(p. 213) *****

Yoshie



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