Thanks to Keith for the brilliant recap of Veblen's Business Enterprise
(which is definitely the foundation behind The Engineers and the Price
System). For anyone who hasn't read Veblen, Keith's choice phrases
occasionally quoted in parentheses are there as a writer's homage to one
of the greats -- because Veblen, in addition to be being brilliant and
angry and the founder of institutional economics, was also a
tremendously inventive prose stylist. So when I say he's the shining
beacon of radical American sociology, I do mean it!
On 05/12/2012 11:00 AM, Keith Hart wrote:
So I wonder if, instead of harking back to Talcott Parsons' dream of a
middle class division of labour where doctors, professors and engineers
are valued because they are good for society, we might revive a more
romantic vision which holds that, if the world's structures are going to
hell in a basket, there is no point in acquiring stable knowledge of
their functioning. rather, each of us should concentrate on improving
what is between our ears in the hope that it will help us to respiond
creatively to the chaos around us, even perhaps to build something new
there.
Keith, you're sounding positively Deleuzian these days! And that is a
compliment, btw.
The problem I see in the States is that we have this hugely productive
society (it still is, despite the useless waste and misdirection of so
much of it) that oscillates continually between fevers of predatory
financialism and outbursts of military aggression. So chaos is something
you can feel responsible for when you live in such a place. It's ugly,
the 1 percent are in the pilot seats, and the educated people don't know
what to do. I think you're right that neither the functionalist moralism
of Talcott Parsons nor the Hegelian ideal of the enlightened state
functionary are going to come back. However, students are now burning
their loan contracts the way the students in the 60s burned their draft
cards. The student loan is currently the foundation stone of the social
contract of education: it's the place where you sign up for an American
Dream that can no longer be realized in any way, shape or form. The
radicalization of systematically harassed graduates without any chance
of a so-called decent job -- which they now realize would be an indecent
job in any case -- is a palpable and growing reality.
Something should be done with this moment. I think education has to
acquire a new social meaning. I can't place my bets on the existing
systems to provide it, so I agitate on the edges. However, in my view
the existing system can't be just ignored. In the same way that the
neoliberal economics of science has led to a profusion of profit-hungry
start-ups sprouting like mushrooms all around the research universities,
so we radicals inspired by Veblen's institutional sociology should kick
off a profusion of alternative answers to the current deliquescent state
of "the higher learning." And in that way, like a tenacious rastafarian
collective out in a squatted building in Luton, England, in the good 'ol
Nineties, those of us who care about these things could finally say to
the barbarian establishment: "Exodus -- and we're stayin' right here."
best, Brian
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