> More importantly, they're helpful if Keynes's psychological assumptions are
> insightful, if, for example, they provide insight into the inability to
> understand the ontological idea of "internal relations" and the limits it
> places on axiomatic deductive reasoning, into mistakenly "associating idle
> balances ... with some aspect of current saving" and into the resort to ad
> hominem when the quotations aren't helpful in these ways to you.
I'm sorry if it was ad hominem, Ted. I do think your quotation-heavy style has a use in a debate over what someone actually said, in questions about the history of thought. I understand that both Marx and Keynes are widely misunderstood, and I also get frustrated over misrepresentations sometimes and get drawn into the What Marx/Keynes Really Said game.
But I also think it is a great weakness of marxism in particular that it so often gets bogged down in textual debate about interpreting the Key Texts, and I think it's embarrassing the extent to which arguments from authority still have so much currency in marxian circles. It's intellectually conservatising, in disciplining people who strike out too far from what happened to be written in (unfinished) books composed in very different circumstances. So sometimes the endless quotation annoys me. Often what Marx/Keynes Really Said is less interesting or useful than how others have developed or engaged with their research programs.
Also, quotations are by their nature lifted out of a context, and there is always the possibility that what is quoted is not representative of the broader structure of argument.
In this case I think you changed the subject. My point was that certain post-Keynesians have criticised Keynes for neglecting the stock of financial wealth: "A number of the above work from a criticism of Keynes, that he did not pay enough attention to the stock of financial wealth." You came back with this:
> If you mean that they read Keynes as making the psychological premises to
> which I pointed and as basing his analysis of booms and busts on them, this
> isn't true.
And then a bunch of quotes about attitudes to uncertainty! Which is obviously not what I was talking about.
Despite the change of subject, though, I can't help responding that it seems to me that in those quotations, Davidson's and Minsky's approaches (which are in fact quite different) are more fruitful than Keynes's conjecture that people act as if "we hide from ourselves how little we foresee". It would be hard to understand today's financial system if we did not take account the devices and institutions deliberately used to hedge for uncertainty, and hard to understand the crises in which these devices occasionally seize up.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com