[Was: Time for Economics] Re this exchange:
>Rob writes:>it's Marx who is the institutionalist par excellence.< > >absolutely! I wish the folks who try to reduce Marx to neoclassical >economics would see this. > >Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] >& <http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine>http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Obviously Marx closely studied the historical development of capitalist and pre-capitalist institutions. But in his theoretical treatment of surplus value and its surface appearances as profit and interest, he intended his analysis to be as stringently institution-free as any (neo)classicist might desire, taking as given only the defining elements of the capitalist mode of production--and those, only in their "purest," hypothetically most fully developed form. Thus he writes in the _Resultate_: "Classical economics regards the versatility of labour-power and the fluidity of capital as axiomatic, and it is right to do so, since this is the tendency of capitalist production which ruthlessly enforces its will despite obstacles which are in any case largely of its own making. At all events, in order to portray the laws of political economy in their purity we are ignoring these sources of friction..." [K.I, Appendix, Penguin ed., p.1014] Correspondingly, in the final footnote of Ch. 5, Marx indicates his intent "to observe the phenomenon of the formation of capital on the basis of the exchange of commodities in its purity..." [K.I. p269] And similarly in K.III he says "Important as the study of frictions of this kind [i.e., those which inhibit the equalization of wages and working hours across production sectors] is for any specialist work on wages, they are still accidental and inessential as far as the general investigation of capitalist production is concerned and can therefore be ignored. In a general analysis of the present kind, it is assumed throughout that actual conditions correspond to their concept, or, and this amounts to the same thing, actual conditions are depicted only in so far as they express their own general type." So far as I know, only this self-consciously and stringently *non*-institutionalist aspect of Marx's analysis has ever been investigated in "neoclassical" terms. making.
