> We're in a post-Keynesian age as much as post-Marxist.
This is true in the sense that the ontological, anthropological and psychological frameworks bequeathed to us by Marx and Keynes are incomprehensible to most modern minds, including to the minds of Post Keynesians and many self-styled "Marxists" (e.g. to the oxymoronic "analytical Marxists"). It's not true, however, in the sense that these frameworks no longer provide insight into reality.
"Credible evidence," for instance, is only accessible to minds relatively free of delusion. This rules out the kind of mind dominant in modern economics, i.e. the mind that finds axiomatic "rational choice" theory to be a self-evidently true account of human knowing, willing and acting and awards one of its "Nobel" Prizes to the "game theory" version of these axioms worked out by a mind afflicted with paranoia, a paranoia so serious as at times to take a psychotic form. To a mind actually open to credible evidence, it's "self-evident" that a mind so afflicted is incapable any significant degree, let alone a Shakespearean degree, of insight into human knowing, willing and acting.
Keynes, having constructed a rational critique of Benthamite economics (e.g. of its mistaken attempt to base economics on the "atomic hypothesis"), made use of the psychoanalytic psychology on which his own economics was based to explain the immunity of such economics (the "Bedlamite" economics of "remorseless logicians" such as Hayek) to rational critique.
He found "credible evidence" in his experience to ground both the critique and the psychological explanation of the immunity, but his conception of "credible evidence" and "experience" is radically different from the conception dominant in modern economics, a conception which, as he points out, mistakenly - and for the same psychological reasons that lead to the mistaken identification of "reason" with axiomatic deductive reasoning - identifies "empiricism" with "econometrics." The identification of evidence relevant to understanding the human mind with "experimental" evidence involves the same ontological error of treating the "atomic hypothesis" as self-evidently applicable in "psychics." The credible evidence on which Shakespeare's insights are based is neither "econometric" nor "experimental."
Whitehead shows that the "atomic hypothesis" in the form of Hume's mistaken identification of "experience" with atomic sense data leads as a matter of logical necessity to the radical skeptical conclusion: "solipsism of the present moment," i.e. to the conclusion that experience so conceived is unable to provide "credible evidence" on which to base any belief other than belief in one's own existence now. To the extent that Humean ideas about experience continue to dominate, talk of "credible evidence" is empty of content.
Hume himself missed seeing that his assumptions about experience could justify at least this belief, claiming in the Treatise to be unable to find any "credible evidence" in his own experience on which to ground belief in the existence of his "self" now (<http:// www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/pi.htm>), a delusion consistent with the psychological fact that he suffered a breakdown ten years prior to the publication of the Treatise.
Ted