-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Samir Amin: "Pure economics is a parascience" Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 09:47:37 -0300 From: "Roland Chrisjohn, Ph. D." <rchrisjo at StThomasU.ca> Reply-To: marxism at lists.panix.com To: marxism at lists.panix.com
At 06:51 PM 6/27/00 -0400, you wrote:
>(Final chapter of "Spectres of Capitalism")
>
>Pure Economics, or the Contemporary World's Witchcraft
Once again Lou demonstrates why this is such a productive list to be subscribed to. I have only one issue with the abstract cited, and that is that Amin offers parapsychology as the parascience of psychology. I assume he only does this because he hasn't delved very far into psychology. Psychology is in its foundation the same expression of methodological individualism that economics is, and is thus just a different form of parapsychology (say, like Catholicism is a respectable form of cult thinking). In fact, it was my intense dissatisfaction with the explanatory and methodological pretensions of psychology that led me, by various routes, back to Marx. All the issues Amin identifies with parascience in economics are present in psychology as well, and even some of the same names pop up. My copy of William Ryan's "Equality," a full-frontal attack on methodological individualism in education, has a publisher's blurb touting it as "A necessary balance... for Milton and Rose Friedman's 'Free to Choose.'"
Where the parascience of economics wants to "found" the picture of its enterprises on the rational choice of individuals, psychology wants to found the behavior of individuals (rational choices among them) on the inner contents of each individual (genes, memories, "reinforcement histories," traits, egos, and so on). The earth is no firmer there, and for the same reasons.
For those interested in having a look at psychology's foundation of sand, I suggest Richard Miller ("Methodological Individualism and Social Explanation," Philosophy of Science, 48, 1978, 387 - 414), Rajeev Bhargava ("Individualism in Social Science," Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992), and Robert Wilson ("Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds: Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind," Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), and, of course, Ryan. The centrality of this for marxist thought is covered in Lou's own "Analytical Marxism vs Historical Materialism" grouping on his web page (thank you Lou!), Marcus Roberts' "Analytical Marxism" (Verso, 1996), and Julius Sensat ("Methodological Individualism and Marxism," Economics and Philosophy, 4, 1988, 189-219.
Religion used to be the opiate of the people, but nowadays it's psychology.
Roland Chrisjohn