----- Original Message ----- From: <bhandari at berkeley.edu>
I meant to say Marx appear as a positivist or scientist and revolutionary, the former when giving his invisible hand explanations and the latter as a political fighter.
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The problem is that once we set out to explain invisible hands -they as explanandum rather than explanans- or, rather, to delimit what they refer to, the term falls apart. What are the mechanisms by which invisible hands emerge?
Tracing the origins of invisible hand narratives/explanations takes us back at least to the Stoics and, gulp, early xtian theories of the holy ghost. I'm sure you're familiar with the ongoing discussion of the issue in reaction to Emma Rothschild's book; the one question I have is why KM would be merely content to engage in a Hegelian appropriation of the term for his own uses -showing the malign aspects of co-ordination failures/unintended consequences of competition between capitals etc.- rather than, well, "historicizing the thing" and showing it to be a chimera. That he coupled invisible hand narratives/explanations to the post-Laplacean determinisms on offer -"iron necessity"- was unfortunate. Does anyone see "iron necessity" in the Enron debacle or in Iraq or the last 8 years of the investment/gdp ratios of the G8?
As for the response from ? Marx's explanation is not teleological; Marx does not intuit the goal history is supposed to reach. I find these one line challenges pretty cheap. It's one thing wrong with the internet.
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Coming from you I'll take that as a compliment :-)
To attempt to assert that KM did not use teleological rhetoric and successfully avoided all the pitfalls of functional explanations is laughable; we won't even go into what many of his followers did when constructing narratives of their historical circumstances.
How modest should theory be?
Be Nietzschean--be a bit suspicious about your modesty. Reflexivity alert. Big time.
Rakesh
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What's modesty got to do with anything you or I wrote?
Ian