(1) Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 9.
(2) Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough.”
(3) Edgar Morin, Method: Towards a Study of Humankind, Volume 1. The Nature of Nature, 315.
(4) See Manfred Bienefeld, “Capitalism and the Nation State in the Dog Days of the Twentieth Century.”
(5) See Alain Lipietz, “De L'Althusserisme a la `Theorie de la Regulation’”; Robert Boyer, “The Transformations of Modern Capitalism By the Light of the `Regulation’ Approach and Other Political Economy Theories”; Idem., “The Convergence Hypothesis Revisited: globalization But Still The Century of Nations?”
(6) Following Geoffrey Vickers (see Freedom in a Rocking Boat, 102), the author shall use the word “appreciation" to describe the collective enterprise that we call “knowing" and which, all too casually, we imagine to be a separable value-free cognitive enterprise. “Thinking" is not detached reflection, but part of our basic attitude to the world—one of continual purposeful action.
(7) Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?
(8) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method.
(9) Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.
(10) We need to remind ourselves of Marx's warning against mere intellectual criticism. Marx became increasingly impatient with vague talk about the promise of critique, and turned his attention more and more to the specific analysis of capitalism. Marx scorned the conviction of young Hegelians that somehow the intellectual criticism of society would automatically lead to revolutionary changes of material conditions. But through his successive transformations and self-criticisms, Marx never significantly wavered in his belief that the proletariat would be the agent of revolutionary change, and that this would be both the vindication and the validation of critique. In a similar vein, Karl Korsch was to later write: "Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow are...inseparable activities, not in any abstract sense but as a concrete and real alteration of the concrete and real world of bourgeois society."
(11) Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 215.
(12) With Kant philosophy still had a sovereign role in relation to science, and was the basis for understanding and assessing the various forms of ß, i.e., knowledge. The “critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself" (Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 3).
(13) The author has chosen to hyphenate “informing,” rendering as “in-forming,” to give emphasis to the structuring role of information. This returns us to an original, i.e., Aristotelian, and neglected, understanding of the term.
(14) Power has the capability of being able to mask a substantial part of itself. This kind of secrecy “is not in the nature of an abuse: it is indispensable to its operation. Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just an indispensable to the latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit ... leaving a measure of freedom—however slight—intact" (Michel Foucault, The history of Sexuality, an Introduction, 86).
(15) Kenneth M.Stokes, Critique of Economic Reason.
(16) Kenneth Arrow, “Oral history I: An Interview,” 233.
(17) For an operationalist definition of theory see Percy W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, 5.
(18) Let us note here that the author's use of the term “paradigm" should not be construed as an unqualified concurrence with Thomas Kuhn's understanding. The term has become a generic expression descriptive of “a way of thinking about problems,” or alternatively of “the problematizing of science.” However, the term conveys the idea of a common core that accepts variants, but within certain limits. It is in this generic sense that the author shall use the term “paradigm.” To avoid the intricacies of the philosophy of science debate, the author shall use Kuhn's less obtrusive term “disciplinary matrix" or “reference image" as appropriate. Kuhn used the former term to connote the constellation of shared beliefs and practices, structuring the scientific activity of an “invisible college" of scientists (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 182).
(19) Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 337.
(20) By “scientism" let us understand science's belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science. More dangerous than ethnocentrism, scientism, an ersatz religion, is proudly championed. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 4.
(21) The term and concept of “identarianism" obtains from Theordor Adorno's essay “Subject and Object,” 497-511.
(22) Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism.
(23) Yanis Varoufakis, “Freedom within Reason: From Axioms to Marxian Praxis.”
(24) I am indebted to Professor Thomas Sekine for this clarifying distinction. See Thomas Sekine, “Socialism as a Living System.”
(25) Richard Swedberg, Schumpeter: A Biography, 23.
(26) Leon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, 65-8. Walras also says that “only a moment's reflection is necessary to convince anyone free from sectarian prejudice" that the theory of exchange is science while the theory of production is art" (Ibid., 60).
(27) Ibid., 79.
(28) Ibid., 76.
(29) Marx was aware that political economy could not show capitalism as “capital in the totality of its relations.” Marx sought to move across the conceptual boundary from Capital—as an abstraction of political economy—to capitalism, that is, the whole of society conceived as an organic system whose articulations and relations are not only the concern of political economy. Only a broadened appreciation, i.e., historical materialism, which could bring all activities and relations within a coherent view could accommodate the totality.
(30) For an appreciation of political economy in the broad sense that approaches our own see Thomas Sekine, “General Economic Norms and Socialism—From Uno to Tamanoi”; and Idem., “Socialism as a Living System.” Wu Dakun also uses the phrase, but in, shall we say, a conventional manner, that is, using it as a device for introducing a short discourse on the Asiatic mode of production. See Wu Dakun, “The Asiatic Mode of Production in history as Viewed by Political Economy in Its Broad Sense.”
(31) Refer to Bienefeld, “Capitalism and the Nation State in the Dog Days of the Twentieth Century.” Our heterodoxy explores the futures of globalization and cautiously surveys regionalist responses to a retro-liberal globalizing imperative.
(32) The author shall use “reason" throughout this work in two senses. The first refers to the ordering power of human consciousness when it reflects the reason (or noös in the Aristotelian sense) inherent in all things—that is, as both the force and criterion of order. The second sense uses reason as a metaphor for responsible decision-making in the public arena, where experience plays the key role in the proper exercise of judgment.
(33) Selected dimensions of the concept of coevolutionary political economy were introduced by Kenneth M. Stokes in Man and the Biosphere: Towards a Coevolutionary Political Economy. It is sufficient to note at this time that an early biological appreciation of the concept of coevolution was already present in Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species where he wrote of “co-adaptations of organic being to each other.” Theoretical biologist Alfred Lotka, in “Biased Evolution,” noted: “It is not so much the organism or the species that evolves, but the entire system, species plus environment—the two are inseparable.” Biological coevolution may be referred to as the co-adaption and co-creation or reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species. Biological systems achieve a “lock-in,” that is a tightly coupled evolution. Every step of coevolutionary advance winds interacting species more inseparably, until each species is inseparable from the evolution of its environment.
In spite of the multiplying complaints that people and systems are increasingly autonomous, that there is a demise of interpersonal relationships, our lives are, in fact, increasingly more co-dependent. Politics today no longer relates to the polis, it is global, a highly complex nexus of mirror-like reciprocation. In this richly interconnected environment all evolution, including the evolution of the technosphere, is coevolution. In evolutionary time, the instances of coevolution have increased as sociability in life has increased. The more copious life’s social behaviors, the more likely they are to be engaged in mutually beneficial interactions. The more mutuality there is in the global political economy, the greater the coevolutionary articulation.
Systems that achieve a coevolutionary “lock in" dance around each other in a crazy ballet moving beyond the forms and relations that might have otherwise evolved. In the same manner that a milkweed and a butterfly have coevolved to the point of apparent inseparability, the weapons systems industry has achieved a coevolved lock in with defense departments. As irrational as it may be an obligate cooperation emerges in which it is against the interests of either party to eliminate the enemy. Coevolution to a possibly precarious state far from equilibrium can generate absurdities. And yet the persistent coevolutionary disequilibrium is stable in its own way. Paradoxically, persistent disequilibrium appears to be the signature of living systems. They remain poised in an Escher-like state of descending without being lowered, poised in the act of collapsing. (See the Escher-like figure on the cover.) The central property of living systems, including human livelihood, may well be characterized by reproductive instability, rather than reproductive invariance. It is error that keeps the coevolving systems from binding too tightly into a runaway spiral, into chaos. Yet it is the near collapse into chaos that keeps life proliferating.
(34) It is worth recalling that the root of the word “discipline" (discipere) means to take in something mentally, to grasp it apart from the whole. The etymology suggests that a disciplinary approach is partial.
(35) As we shall see hermeneutics is generally regarded as hostile to the Cartesian tradition of analytic philosophy and the program of mechanical reduction. See Raymond Benton, Jr., “A Hermeneutic Approach to Economics: If Economics Is Not Science, and If It Is Not Merely Mathematics, Then What Could It Be?’"
(36) Thus we can refer to a “post-methodology" that is sharply distinguished from anti-methodology or an intentionally bewildering Dadaist montage.
(37) The term “theory of knowledge,” or “epistemology,” was coined only in the nineteenth century. However, the subject that it retrospectively denotes is the subject of modern philosophy in general, at least until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The theory of knowledge, according to its philosophical claim, is an enterprise directed at the whole. It is concerned with the critical justification of the conditions of possible knowledge in general. It cannot renounce radical, that is unconditional doubt. In this connection see Arnold Cornelis, “De Krisis in de Sociale Wetenschap: Het Probleem der Vooronderstellingen.”
(38) Edward Said, Orientalism.
(39) Ernst Gellner, Legitimation of Belief, 28.
(40) There is a curiously contemporary methodological point which Aristotle made long ago when in his Nicomachean Ethics, he said that every science should adapt its method to its object, that the object under study should determine the method of studying it(see para. 1094a25 and elsewhere).
(41) In opposition to the traditional and still dominant view of reason as essentially theoretical-instrumental (scientific-technological), Gadamer defends (not as a substitute for the former but as something more basic than it), what could be called a communicative-critical conception of reason or rational praxis.
(42) Don Lavoie, “The accounting of interpretations and the interpretation of accounts: the communicative function of `the language of business’,” 95.
(43) Suffice to note here that such a methodological conception of truth can only be justified in terms of idealism.
(44) Michel Foucault, “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” 8; Idem., “Questions of method,” 11-13.
(45) Ranson Baldwin, “Warren Samuels: The Absolute Relativist,” 845, 843.
(46) Frank Kermode, History and Value, 132.
(47) Daniel Bell, The Coming Post-Industrial Society, 51-4.
(48) The early Lukács's for whom “the primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science,” and for whom the proletariat was the absolute subject-object of history in History and Class Consciousness may be regarded as a philosopher of a centered totality. It was against this concept of totality that Adorno reacted.
(49) Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, 1385.
(50) Percy W. Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist, 544.
(51) K. Klapphok and J. Agassi, “Methodological Prescriptions in Economics,” 60-74.
(52) Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-organization and Selection in Evolution.