> Moishe Postone argues, rather convincingly, that Marx produced a
> Critique of Political Economy, NOT a Critical Political Economy. In
> other words there is no Marxian Economic Science, ther eis only a
> historical critique of capitalism in the abstract. (That abstraction
> bites*, but it is an abstraction, andalways embodied in athick
> non-capitalist comples: Daily life, the family, the state, education,
> etc.
I think he was trying to do both. Certainly he was showing how the phenomena political economy studies emerge out of a broader set of social relations, which are historical and not eternal. But he was clearly not denying the real existence of those phenomena or saying that studying them was worthless. The critique was constructive, and Marx often took sides within political economy rather than dismissing it.
I like what I've read of Postone. But some people take this line about Capital being a critique etc. to imply that economics is a monolithic discipline which is hopelessly ideological. I don't think that's true at all, and I think this attitude gets in the way of learning an awful lot of useful stuff from the 150 years or so of economics since Marx drafted Capital. It also gets in the way of understanding Capital itself. It ignores the fact that many of its points of emphasis and even its structure were determined in large part by classical English political economy circa 1860, just because of what Marx took to be the important 'stylised facts' he had to account for.
>And if Marx didn't produce a "scientific economics" who in the hell did,
>and just what kind of a discipline _is_ economics.
It's a social science, and society is an inherently open and unpredictable, but still structured, system.
> Dou is insanely empirical, which ma be why he makes such a damned good
> economic journalist. He has no scientific pretensions, and scientific
> pretensions are fatal in economics.
>
> I'm tentatively suggesting that in the quoted paragraph you in effect
> say the same thing. Economics is a strange sort of guessing game, on
> which historical experience gives a lot of light, but is also at some
> pont utterly undependable.
Well my point was actually about the problems of empiricism. Empirical regularities are a poor guide to the future if the complex structure that generated them changes. Milton Friedman was an arch empiricist and his arguments about the money supply and inflation made heavy use of supposed historically stable relationships. As soon as the money supply was targeted by central banks, the regularity failed. See Goodhart's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
A certain amount of rationalism is a vital part of social science, including economics. Marx, at any rate, was certainly no empiricist.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com