Mike Beggs wrote:
>
> O
> I don't see how you can doubt that economics is a discipline, unless
> you think disciplines are platonic bodies of knowledge rather than
> historical, socially constructed divisions.
>
Let me try a preliminary analogy. When my younger daughter was in the
7th-grade she had a course called "English Language Science." That was
absurd, of course: Linguistics may be a science (or _discipline_) but
not any particular language.
My argument, then, is that what is called "Economics" is a construct which cuts arbitrarily from the whole field of human social relations a set of relations which are essentially meaningless: that is, no useful abstractions can explain that set. It seems to me that "Marxist" economists on this list and on pen-l spend a good deal of their time and energy in exploding the pseudo-abstractions of "economics." Roberet Albritton (and I'm wrting this from vague memory since I can't check the text) suggests three "levels" in respect to economic activity. There is Critique (as in Marx) of the "ideal average" of capitalism; there is mid-level theory (as in dealing with a particular form of capitalism (as with British 195h-c liberal capitalism) and there is HISTORY, which deals with present economic activity. The discipline of Economics arbitrarily extracts from history just as my daughter's 7th-grade "English Language Science" arbitrarily extracted from language to form a pseudo-discipline. Such pseudo-disciplines can accumulate huge piles of data and generalize somewhat sloppily in regard to it, but they cannot arrive at the abstractions which characterize and real discipline.
Carrol
> By the way, Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis came out a couple of years
> ago with a great two-volume history of the transition from 'political
> economy' to 'economics' and subsequent relations between 'economics'
> and other social sciences.
>
> Mike Beggs
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