That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connexion between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once.
I'm new on this list, living in fare away Berlin. I came to this list because I translated a piece of Doug for a german jounal.?Surely I don't understand many things written here, because the context and prehistory of many reactions are not so clear to an outsider. But it seems to me a little bit misplaced to mobilize the authority of Marx in defense of?more ore less radical constructivism. In a letter to Engels (London, 10 October?1868) Marx wrote: -- Political economy can only be turned into a positive science by replacing the conflicting dogmas by the conflicting facts, and by the real antagonisms which form their concealed background. --
Marx surely tried to turn political economy into a positive science.?Yes, we know, many people found Marx lacking an appropiate understanding of his method. Possibly?Marx was to positivistic in this remark in a private letter. In any case the "Capital" is not in first line a?deconstruction of the language?of political economy. The marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky put the underlying problem?this way:
-- Criticism is on the same level as what is being criticized; it proceeds fully within the given discipline; its goal is exclusively critical and not positive; it wishes to know only whether and to what extent some theory is correct; it evaluates and judges, but does no research. -- In doing research we have change?our questions sometimes, we will have to try new instruments and new concepts.?But we will have to go into the water, if we want learn swimming: I think, that's the difference between?Foucault - often mentioned in this debate - and Pierre Bourdieu, not mentioned. Foucault tells us that we are all everytime already in deep water - and so he took away the difference between his position as a professional philosopher and the position of many others, not at all professional philosophers.?And he took away the need to deal with boring statistics. Bourdieu on the contrary was quite aware of his?privileged position as an observer. He was sure too, that from this privileged position things could be seen, invisible for those under the every day pressure of necessity, in deep water indeed.?He prefered?empirical social research, including reflection about the position of the researcher. In this case I take the side of Bourdieu.
And the conceptual problems? "The matter stands on the same footing as the making of material tools, which might be argued about in a similar way. For, in order to work iron, a hammer is needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in order to make it, there was need of another hammer and other tools, and so on to infinity. We might thus vainly endeavor to prove that men have no power of working iron. But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tolls, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, with small expenditure of labour, the vast number of complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom."?We may not, like Spinoza,?try to reach?the summit of wisdom. Even in our minor undertakings we are better off with his advice, I think.
sebastian
-- "We want a somehow more sophisticated radicalism. Not only this coarse-grained either-ore." Rosa Luxemburg -- sebastian gerhardt am treptower park 24 berlin, 12435 phone +4930/530 27 695 mob. +49176/24 04 28 95 www.hausderdemokratie.de www.lunapark21.net www.jungewelt.de
-
________________________________________________________________________ Bei AOL gibt's jetzt kostenlos eMail f?r alle. Klicken Sie auf AOL.de um heraus zu finden, was es sonst noch kostenlos bei AOL gibt.