> the way macro has been
> dealt with by radical thinkers until now hasn't been very fruitful.
>
> (1) People "criticize" it. But not in the sense of -- say -- Marx's
> critique of political economy, which involved appropriating the most
> influential intellectual traditions of the time, "rubbing them against
> each other" (to use David Harvey's apt metaphor), and thus forging a
> higher understanding of the world we grapple with in our daily lives.
>
> And (2) people avoid it. Somehow, they decide a priori,
> pre-rationally, that it (macro) is false, wrong, or useless, when that
> is precisely what needs to be established. And the way to establish
> it is by developing its negation. How?
>
> Well, this is David's punchline precisely. By "doing it right" --
> that is, while anchored in a radical opposition to the status quo, by
> taking up its method, subject matter, issues, etc., engaging with
> them, rub that stuff against other existing intellectual traditions,
> and taking all that to its conclusion.
This misinterprets Marx's relation to classical political economy.
Marx claimed that classical political economy contained substantive truth content, truth content he claimed to "sublate" in his own political economy, a political economy rooted, however, in ontological and anthropological ideas very different from those of classical political economy.
For instance, Smith's idea of the "invisible hand" includes the idea that motives derived from a mistaken view of the good life can, without conscious intention on the part of those so motivated, produce positive consequences when these consequences are judged in terms of a true conception of such a life. Kant, Hegel and Marx all "sublate" this feature of Smith's idea in the role their philosophies of history assign to the "passions," in Marx's case to the capitalist "passions," in history understood as a set of "stages in the development of the human mind."
Marx also credited classical political economy with a relatively realistic view of these "passions."
"Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” [23] Therefore, save, save, i.e, reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus- value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. [24] But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm>
One criticism he makes of the classical treatment of these "passions" is that it fails to take account of the role played in them by an irrational love of money, a role he claims was more adequately taken account of in the forms of political economy, the "monetary system" and "mercantilism," that preceded it.
So it wasn't the fact that classical political economy was the "dominant" theoretical view that led him to take it seriously. It was the fact that it contained substantive truth content.
He explicitly contrasts it from this perspective with the utilitarian ethics and psychology from which the theory dominant in modern economics derives, a theory in which Marx's idea of the capitalist "passions" plays no role.
Marx and the tradition to which his ideas belong make ontological, anthropological and psychological assumptions very different from those that have dominated the idea of "science" since the 17th century. They can't be understood, let alone evaluated, in terms of the latter. The same can be said of Keynes.
Among other things, these assumptions involve a radically different view of "experience" and "empiricism" from that now dominant. This is the basis of Keynes's critique of the misidentification, in contemporary economics, of "empiricism" with "econometrics," and of the related misidentification of "reason" with axiomatic deductive reasoning.
Putting these assumptions in question, however, proves to be almost impossibly difficult. Ironically, this is a serious problem for Marx's own understanding of the process of human development. It ignores serious psychological obstacles in the way of this development. On this question, Keynes is more realistic than Marx.
Ted