[lbo-talk] The postmodern prince

[C. G. Estabrook]

Chomsky contrasts theory ("something with principles which are not obvious
[and] from which you can deduce surprising consequences, check out the
consequences, and then confirm the principles"), which he thinks is
possible if difficult in the physical sciences, with "smart ideas," which
he thinks is the best one can do in the "human sciences" (a phrase I'd
doubt he'd use): "Somebody could ... say, Why don't you look at class
struggle? It's interesting. Or, Why don't you look at economic factors
lying behind the Constitution? ...  Those are interesting smart ideas."

A social science that can aspire to interesting smart ideas like that would
not have much to apologize for. "There are interesting, simple ideas.
They're often hard to come up with, and they're often extremely hard to
work out ...  what actually happened, say, in the modern industrial
economy and how it developed the way it is. That can take a lot of work."

A couple of books by you, say.  --CGE

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:


> 
> This would throw, oh just to pick a random example, most of Marx's
> Capital out the window. So all the phenomenal categories of visible
> capitalism - wages, interest, profit, dividends, rent - are all you
> need to know, and their sources and uses completely transparent to the
> uneducated eye. How can such a smart man make such a deliberately
> shallow argument?
>