***** Another Day, Another Book Seventeen and counting for radical economist [A photo of Perelman with his bicycle: <http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/photos/Perelman_Michael.gif>.]
If worthwhile sociological insight can be gleaned from analyzing famous people's trash, then it's high time someone took an informed look at faculty offices. Particularly in spaces where decades of thought and reading material have flourished undisturbed, like an old-growth forest, the atmosphere assumes an almost eerie multidimensionality.
A prime example can be seen in 601A Butte Hall, for 32 years the campus think tank of radical economist Michael A. Perelman....Jam-packed bookcases upstage more bookcases. A ragged honor guard of books and papers line a shrinking footpath to the desk, its outline softened by amorphous piles of printed matter. Overall, the effect, heightened by Perelman's soft-spoken and shrewd presence (part White Rabbit, part Cheshire Cat), is refreshing. Here's a scholar -- a Marxist scholar -- of the old school, whose views of how the world wags haven't changed much since his Ph.D.-earning days at the University of California at Berkeley.
Perelman characterizes radical economics as a "predisposition" rather than a formal discipline. ("Some economists would say it's an undiscipline," he observed.)...It implies, he said, a "skepticism that markets will give you the right decision; skepticism that the environment will be treated in a rational way; skepticism that people will be treated humanely."..."Economics is subject to fads," he added. "From the 1930s through the 1950s, it was fairly progressive, and from the 1970s till today it's gotten increasingly more conservative. If you look at any campus in the country, you'll probably find a more conservative center of gravity in economics than any other discipline. Major universities especially grow more doctrinaire every year." These days, he says, the tendency is to view market economies as perfect, self-regulating mechanisms, which doesn't leave much room for progressive, let alone radical, activism in the field.
However, as a longtime theorist, Perelman still finds plenty to say. Unbeknownst to many at California State University, Chico, he'll soon publish his 17th book, Scarcity, Extraction, and Value in Economic Theory. "There's one person in the history department who says he reads my books," he acknowledged, "but I don't think many people have an idea of what I write. I get much better reactions off campus." Three of his books have been translated into Chinese, others into Spanish. Last year's effort, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity, is doing "OK," though his most popular book, one that languished for 14 years in the editing offices at Duke University Press, is The Invention of Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive Accumulation.
An organized daily routine coupled with the latest scanning and voice-recognition technology are key to Perelman's productivity. He spends several hours a day reading and taking notes on whatever currently interests him. This information is methodically transferred into a labyrinthine filing system that, during his long career, has achieved cyberspacial proportions. "My biggest fear," he admitted, "is that something will happen to me and no one will know what to do with my notes." With the aid of an index program, he can navigate this intellectual galaxy and construct books fairly quickly. He estimates that he's compiled a good 50 books' worth of notes.
Though disciplined, his scholastic life isn't compartmentalized. "Teaching and writing are the same for me," he said. "I don't distinguish between them. It's what keeps me alive -- the ability to go into a classroom with something fresh to say." The classes he's taught reflect his varied interests and have included history of economic thought, United States economic history, economics of the future, environmental economics, and a class on Karl Marx....
Taran March
<http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/02_another_day.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
