[lbo-talk] "Theory's Empire," an anti-"Theory" anthology

[shag]

At 02:22 PM 6/2/2008, Voyou wrote:
>On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 13:41 -0400, Jerry Monaco wrote: > 1) Economic 
>theory, political theory, & legal theory, along with the > institutions 
>that support them, are the main "enemies" of > theory-skepticism and 
>anti-theory critique. Political theory mostly involves sitting around 
>reading Machiavelli, or Marx, or Rawls. It has much more in common with 
>literary theory than with economics. Perhaps you are confusing 
>political theory with political science? I doubt anyone who studies 
>political theory or literary theory would disagree with your contention 
>that "economics, politics, history, law, literature, are humanistic 
>endeavors and are not ready, and may never be ready, for scientific theory 
>making." This makes your "anti-theory" position in this thread seem like a 
>non-sequitur, at least to me. Your objection seems to be to the scientific 
>pretensions of present-day social science; but I don't see what that has 
>to do with "theory" in the sense it's used in "Theory's Empire," which is 
>a phenomenon of the humanities and the less scientistic parts of the 
>social sciences.

i'd definitely agree with that. in fact, i was thinking that, if anything, 
what jerry's saying reminds me of the wars in sociology and political 
science, even economics, where there is an awful lot of insistence that, to 
be worth anything, we must mimic the natural sciences.


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