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One curious aspect of the postivist/antipositivist debates within the social sciences is that they cut across a lot of other ideological differences within the social sciences. Among Marxists, such debates have been going for over a hundred years. Bukharin, for instance wrote a treatise on historical materialism that was explicitly positivist in his approach. Antonio Gramsci famously wrote a review that panned that book, in which Gramsci took a strongly antipositivist stance, as did Lukacs. Likewise, among non-Marxists, similar debates have been going on for a long time. People like Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim, all defended positivist approaches to social science, While people like Dilthey, and Weber were more or less critical of positivism in the social sciences, as have people like Scheler, Levi-Strauss, and Geertz. You can see these positivist/antipositivist debates going on in different social science disciplines and within different ideological camps. Thus, within economics, Milton Friedman was a notable defender of a positivist approach to economics, whereas, some of the members of the Austrian School, like Ludvig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were notable antipositivists. Yet, Friedman, Mises, and Hayek, all shared similar political outlooks. At the same time, the British socialist economist Joan Robinson, a famoust Left Keynesian, in her 1962 book, Economic Philosophy, used positivism to ground her critique of mainstream economics. Both von Mises and Hayek, were originally reacting against the writings in defense of socialist economic planning that were penned by the socialist economist Otto Neurath, who was also one of the founders of the Vienna Circles of logical positivists. For Hayek, in particular, the critique of positivism in economics and the social sciences generally was a crucial part of the struggle against socialism. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt School, which was Marxist, was also very notably antipositiivst. For them, positivism was one of the fundamental props of contemporary capitalist ideologies so for them, the critique of positivism was necessary for the struggle against capitalism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/ https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedman.htm http://people.stfx.ca/jcook/2010-11/The%20Scientific%20Conception%20of%20the%20World.pdf https://archive.org/details/counterrevolutio030197mbp http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2012/01/lukacs-on-bukharins-theory-of.html https://archive.org/details/EconomicPhilosophy Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math ____________________________________________________________ Wall Street Daily Peter Schiff: China Just Armed its Financial Missile http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/57084da9ce7914da916f3st01vuc _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
