Title: RE: [PEN-L] Jurriaan on the term "capitalism"
[was: RE: [PEN-L] Jurriaan on the term "capitalism"]
 
Barkley wrote:
>     I would also note that it was not from the German Social Democrats that
M&E got the idea that they should be "scientific" about their socialism.  If
anything it went the other way, from M&E to the German Social Democrats.< 
 
of couse: not believing in rational expectations, I reject ideas about future events and ideas causing past ones. But I thought I said something about the German Social Democrats (or at least their intellectual wing) being more positivistic than Engels. Engels, though more positivistic than Marx, was never the type to pretend he was a white-coated scientist, value-free and all that. He was a bit too impressed by chemistry for my tastes, but Kautsky and the like took this much too far.  In other words, the words "scientific socialism" had different meaning for Engels than for later generations. For Engels, the first word was more like "soft" or "social" science. For later generations, it veered toward attempts at being "value free" and like the "hard" sciences.
 
Jim

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