[lbo-talk] Does "Economics" have a Subject?

[Mike Beggs]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> There are many pseudo-disciplines the subject of which cannot be identified.
> My own field is an example. "Literature" does not name a coherent domain of
> study; in effect, there is no such thing. The discipline of economics seems
> to assume that there is a distinct entity, "The Economy," but this is
> obvious nonsense. It is an arbitrary abstraction from ongoing social
> relations, not one of which is a pure instance of an "economic
> relationship." To speak of economics as a separate entity is to violate
> Socrates' caution re the bad dialectician who breaks the bones rather than
> separates the joints.

So where is the Physical, as distinct from the Chemical? Are
biologists foolish to study that arbitrary abstraction biology? All
sciences abstract and they all blur with other disciplines.


> "Economics" is most interesting and useful when the text under consideration
> would better be described as _history_. The same seems to go for the other
> pseudo-sciences such as Sociology, and Political Science. None has a
> distinct object of study, and work in each is intelligible only when it is
> quote obviously "something else."

If it's a historical object that makes something fall short of a
science, biology, geology and astronomy fall short. It sounds like by
'psuedoscience' you mean 'social science'. There's a large literature
on the distinction between social and natural sciences. They are
different enough for various reasons (especially the reflexivity of
the discipline on the object of study and the creativity of human
actors) that you might want a new word. On the other hand, you still
might want to distinguish between good and bad social inquiry in a way
that raises the question of method, so you would end up with a
replacement word to distinguish social science from social
psudoscience.

Mike Beggs