I don't want to push this too far. I once spent a sabbatical in Paris. It was 1978. Leftists were everywhere. On television, in academia, and in the government. So if politics had been determined by the intelligentsia, France would have been socialist.
During the Depression, many academics in the United States moved to the left. With the rise of McCarthyism, the best of the bunch was driven out, while the others became far more conventional. Even so, by the 1960s, the typical economist was a liberal.
Over time, the profession became increasingly doctrinaire, in part because students had to work so hard to learn the techniques that they had little opportunity to learn to understand what economics was about.
I just read Howard Zinn's review of the Wheen biography of Marx. He said that in the New York Times review of the book that the reviewer said that Marx was obsolete. His proof was that no economics department of repute had a Marxist.
Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> So, in a sense this leads to the question of why bother to worry about
> the fallen status of academic work in the social sciences? As far as I
> know they were never virgins.
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu