reading outside your circle

Michael McIntyre mmcintyr at depaul.edu
Mon May 6 10:18:33 PDT 2002


Here's a couple:

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. Out in 1985, this book sort of got lost in the PoMo wave, despite the fact that it is resolutely materialist and incorporates an interesting reading of Marx.

Joseph Stiglitz, Whither Socialism? I included this book on a syllabus because I thought I had to. In a course called Alternatives to Global Capitalism, this was supposed to be the socialism-is-dead book. Stiglitz does mouth that conclusion in a couple of places, but the argument runs in a completely different direction: Lange-Lerner style market socialism won't work because, in aping markets, it apes all of the forms of market failure. Ninety percent of this work is a destruction of neoclassical economics from within. John Roemer praised it in NLR a few years back, but then half took it because Stiglitz wasn't neoclassical enough for his taste!

Michael McIntyre



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