Forwarded message:
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Sep 10 03:14:46 1996
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 06:13:42 -0400
Date-warning: Date header was inserted by rfd.oit.umass.edu
From: Herbert Gintis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Lingua Franca and all that
X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Unverified)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: Samuel Bowles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
X-Status:
X-UID: 2741
Dear Michael,
Someone told me that there had been some discussion about me on pen-l, and
I might want to look into it. Since yours appears to be the original
posting, I'm writing this note to you, though I think I've looked over it
all--at least all I could find. You can repost this to pen-l if you wish.
Lingua Franca is doing a piece on Sam and me. It was not at my prompting,
but theirs. Nothing about pen-l was ever discussed between me and the
people at Lingua Franca. The subject simply never came up.
I didn't say history is made by elites. I said that revolutionary
movements are spearheaded by relatively well-off, well-educated people.
This is why dictators always close down the universities, and why education
and communication are so important. Of course, all the great historical
struggles have be mass struggles by brave, valiant, and resourceful people
from the oppressed and dominated classes.
I am not conservative at all, in my estimation. I am progressive. But I'm
not part of the left or the right. I like lots of traditional left ideas
(gender/racial equality, partipatory democracy, the goal of a society where
all have the possibility of achieving dignity and developing their
potential), but I like lots of right ideas as well (free choice, school
choice, minimizing wasteful government, curbing monopolistic practices,
such as protectionism, making people responsible for their actions). I
think the old right-left stuff is anachronistic, and we should be thinking
of new ways to achieve our goals, and we should in part change our
goals--e.g., to value choice and responsibility more than the left
traditionally has).
I am very sorry for being so rude and insulting on pen-l. All I can say is
that I wasn't used to the electronic format, at it took a while for me to
learn to use the internet in an adult, responsible way. In my defense,
however, I might note that the response to me was also rude and insulting,
rather than informing me of how to behave in internet discussions. As soon
as I left pen-l, I found out how to do it right. In my post-keynesian
discussions after that, I never acted the way I did on pen-l, and though
many disagreed with me (most), I don't think there was any rancor. Also, my
poor behavior on pen-l NEVER extended to ad hominems, but rather to
denigrating the positions of others (which is bad enough).
In fact, I now think that news groups are reasonable in limiting
discussions to people who basically agree on certain basic issues. I am not
part of pen-l because I don't agree with these issues, and my insistence on
bringing them up again and again naturally raised people's hackels, and
rightly so. I should have been asked to move on, or just lurk.
I am on cordial terms with Wolff and Resnick, but our intellectual
projects are almost wholly disjoint. There was a time when we both read
Althusser, but we took different things from it, radically different
things, I believe (Sam and I took the notion of practices and sites, which
we used in our book Democracy and Capitalism, whereas Resnick and Wolff
took epistimological notions).
I often take positions not because I believe them, but because I want to
try them out. People often don't understand this. Most such positions I
drop when they are roundly criticized, but some survive. These I keep. This
is what some have called 'shooting from the hip.
Cordially,
Herb
Herbert Gintis
Department of Economics Phone: 413-586-7756
University of Massachusetts Fax: 413-586-6014
Amherst, MA 01003
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis/
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
