Julio Huato wrote:
At this stage, without serious research on the matter, it will be your
opinion against mine. But my personal impression of professional fads
(AEA), top grad school tendencies (curricula, courses, teaching), and
broader hiring practices in academia is that the so-called Chicago
school "ideological hegemony" is nowhere to be seen. And the wider
"ideological hegemony" of "NC econ" is, effectively, of the
Let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom type -- an unintended consequence of the
fact that economists are human beings living in society.
From the "inside," things don't look the way you describe *at all*.
If there has been any ideological shift to register in the last
decade, it's been precisely one in the opposite direction. And this
is not surprising given the persistence of poverty and inequality in
the globe, the emergence of China and Asia in general, the iffy
conditions in the U.S. economy, and the military/foreign policy fiasco
of the country under Bush. These things have a strong effect even on
the economists.
Alternatives to the ontological and anthropological foundations of
"NC econ" are not even recognized let alone given space to "bloom."
Thus Marx and Keynes, whose political economy belongs to a tradition
in thought embodying the most important of these alternatives (for
which "internal relations" is an essential concept), are
misinterpreted as themselves sharing these foundations.
The "internal relations" constitutive of the "society" - particularly
the academic "society" - within which contemporary economists live is
associated with a form of "individuality" for whom this alternative
has proven largely incomprehensible.
By the way, supporting interpretive claims about and elaborations of
these alternative ontological, anthropological and psychological
foundations with textual evidence is neither scholasticism nor an
argument from authority.
Ted
