(1) Mark Blaug, The Methodology of Economics: or How Economists Explain, viii. Empiricism may be defined—roughly and provisionally—as the philosophical standpoint based on the contention that all knowledge originates in experience.
(2) Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 84.
(3) Douglas Long and Jon Wisman refer to the continuity and change in European cosmology and its consequences for economic thought. Douglas Long, “Taking Interests Seriously”; Jon D. Wisman, “The Renaissance of Natural Law Cosmology: Free Markets and Fettered Minds,” 26-37.
(4) Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, wrote that a state of emergency is the rule rather than the exception in bourgeois existence.
(5) David G. Green, The New Conservatism: The Counter-revolution in Political, Economic and Social Thought.
(6) Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
(7) Adam Swift, Global Political Ecology; Paul R. Erlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Gretchen C. Daily, “Food, Security, Population, and Environment.”
(8) Marc Lavoie suggests that chaos theory shows that “one cannot know the whole through the sum of the parts, which leads to a rejection of atomistic individualism” (“Towards a New Research Programme for Post-Keynesian and Neo-Ricardianism,” 78). Furthermore, “the finding that optimal paths may be chaotic reinforces the complexities inherent to neoclassical optimal behavior, and justifies the adoption of bounded rationality" (Ibid.).
(9) Formism, based on the writings of Plato and Aristotle, was perhaps the first world metaphor. In its various guises, formism held sway until the rise of mechanism around 1600 AD. Its explanations were based on matter being pulled toward ideal forms. Its penchant for classifying showed an ordered world of forms.
It is notable that the original Greek formism was intended to support the image of a natural cosmos that could be known by human reason. Formism arose against the backdrop of an established mythological view of a world governed by temperamental and erratic Gods. Greek philosophers such as Plato emphasized the human ability “to know” in reaction to the sense of human impotence that came from the mythological view. Aristotle believed that through formistic explanation and ordering, human knowledge would very shortly reach completion.
(10) Parenthetically, with this rendering history becomes nothing more than extension.
(11) Alexandre Koyre, Galileo Studies; Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science; Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity.
(12) René Descartes explained his conception of the structure of human knowledge by comparing philosophy to a tree, “of which the roots are Metaphysics, the trunk is Physics, and the branches emerging from this trunk are all the other branches of knowledge" (Principles of Philosophy, xxiv).
Thus, if we wish to acquire useful, practical knowledge it is necessary to begin with metaphysics and proceed by rigorous deduction to the construction of physics. From physics we proceed by further deductions to, for instance, the principles of economics. “Now, just as it is not from the trunk of trees that one gathers fruit, but only from the extremities of their branches, so the principal usefulness of philosophy depends upon the parts of it which can only be learned last" (Ibid.).
(13) Imre Lakatos noted that excessive or premature insistence on rigor, i.e., the application of advanced mathematics, can impede the progress of science. See Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery.
(14) Quoted in Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 92.
(15) We have perhaps too readily categorized Smith, for in truth one cannot disregard his remark that “In a civilized society man stands at all times in need of the co-operation of and assistance of great multitudes … man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren.”
(16) Adam Smith, “The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the history of Astronomy.” That Smith's was a mechanical cosmological view see: G. Tyler, “Laboring to Counterbalance Concentrated Capital,” 4-12. Also see Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 145-6.
(17) G. Sebba, “The Development of the Concepts of Mechanism and Model in Physical Science and Economic Thought,” 269.
(18) Challenging Smith's pronouncements on his Newtonian method, Deborah Redman argues that the view that Smith patterned economics after Newton's method is misplaced. See Deborah A. Redman, “Adam Smith and Isaac Newton,” 210-30.
(19) Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental phenomenology.
(20) Blaise Pascal, Pensée, 73.
(21) The fuller ontological dimensions of our metatheoretical discourse will be examined in chapter 2, under the heading “Ontology, Reality, and Society.”
(22) The political significance of the Cartesian interest in certainty has chilling implications; for history bears easy witness that when we are certain on religious or scientific grounds of where the truth lies and what the future portends, we either ignore human suffering in the short run or when necessary kill with impunity. Where there is no doubt, there can be no moral dilemma of dirty hands. It is for this reason that ethics must precede ontology. (See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror.)
(23) René Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in Philosophical Writings, 157. If this does not suffice to convince, perhaps Descartes’ Discourse on Method and the Meditations of Descartes better conveys the conviction: “Those long chains of simple and easy conclusions used by the geometricians for obtaining their most difficult proofs made me think that everything within the ken of man is interlaced in this same manner and that, if only we refrain from accepting as true what may be not true and from upsetting the order required for deducing one thing from the other, there can be nothing so remote that it will not finally be reached nor so hidden that it will not be discovered" (part II).
(24) Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, v.
(25) Ibid., xii.
(26) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, xi-xii, xiii. According to Heidegger, when Kant speaks of “science,” he means Newton's physics.(“Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,” 255).
(27) Absolute idealists and mistresses of the arts of Hegelian and Bergsonian dialectics have usually subscribed to the equally erroneous view that all relations are internal.
(28) Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophic Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 19.
(30) René Descartes, Meditations, Vol. 1 of Philosophical Works of Descartes, 149.
(31) René Descartes, Descartes: Philosophical Writing, 75.
(32) The term “reality" is based on the word “res,” meaning “thing,” and it is the thing that is known. The word “res" is based on the word “rere,” meaning to think, and the thing is what you can think about essentially.
(33) Descartes, The Philosophical Works, I: 73.
(34) Descartes, see the sixth Meditation. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations of Descartes.
(35) Descartes, The Philosophical Works, I: 191.
(36) Claude Javeau, “La sociologia e la crisi del positivismo: per un'antropologia ontologica.”
(38) J.R. Commons, Institutional Economics—Its Place in Political Economy, 150.
(39) C.S. Pierce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, Vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, 156.
(40) John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, 97.
(41) Alfred-North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 82.
(42) Alfred-North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 204-5.
(43) Ibid., 211.
(44) The expression “Cartesian Economics" was one used by Frederick Soddy in his Cartesian Economics: The Bearing of Physical Science Upon State Stewardship.
(45) Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft, Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne.
(46) In other words, the formism of which we spoke earlier is an example of essentialism.
(47) Among the critics of this viewpoint was Karl R. Popper who contended in The Open Society and Its Enemies, that essentialist views add nothing to scientific theory. It was from this posture that he admonished progressivist Marxist essentialism. As we shall see, for Popper “science" had a particularistic meaning and was not without a programmatic intention.
(48) It is important to note that this traditional interpretation of essence (and essentialism) is distinct from a procedural understanding of things themselves. That is an understanding of things themselves as a Process Beings rather than the Eleatic Being of pure presencing. Here essence is no longer static, but something that emerges or unfolds into existence. Note that aspects of this discussion are developed in Chapter 2.
(49) S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Economics: Marxian versus Neo-Classical, 46.
(50) This is not to say that Marx was, in fact, a doctrinaire economic determinist; for as some of his carefully crafted correspondence indicates his was a nuanced position. See Karl Marx, “Letter to Vera Zasoulich.”
(51) It is worth reminding ourselves that already in the 1830s the French physicist Ampere devised a grand classificatory system of human knowledge. He designated one branch the realm of “noological sciences,” with a subrealm of politics, wherein the science of cybernetics was referred to as the science of governance.
(52) Robert H. Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics.
(53) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.
(54) We casually use the term “culture" to refer to the “higher" arts as opposed to popular or everyday practice. Culture is often used to signify that which is “superstructural" as opposed to that which is the “base.” However, we also use the term “culture" to signify that which is “symbolic" as opposed to that which is “material.” These various binary distinctions are not comparable, although they all seem to point in the direction of the vintage philosophical distinction between the “ideal" and the “real,” or between the Cartesian duality of “mind" and “body.”
(55) Andrew Kopkind, “From Russia with Love and Squalor.”
(56) John C. Oliga, “Power in Organizations: A Contingent, Relational View.”
(57) Robert M. Unger, Knowledge and Politics, 125.
(58) Jan Smuts, Holism and Evolution. Especially from the 1920s, holism became a keyword in many fields of science. Informed by the notion of self-regulating, self-sustaining whole, ecology emerged as a discipline in its own right. Its subject matter is the systems of nature.
(59) Louis Dumont, for instance, referred to holism critically as a concept that privileges the group over the individual. See Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: the Genesis and Triumph of Economic Thought.
(60) It must be clarified that conceptually neither holism nor totality are uniquely European and for that matter “Hellenic.”
(61) See F.E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. There is a reciprocal relation between one's apprehending—the process of disclosing or the Logos—and Paramenides’s One.
(62) The crucial difference between the neo-Platonic and Marxist normative totalities lay in the former's belief in an undifferentiated whole.
(63) Aristotle, Politics, para. 1253a.
(64) Ibid. It suffices to note that organic theory based on the analogy between the state and a living organism provided one vital source of later holistic thought.
(65) See Aristotle, Topics, para. 150a, 15-21, 634-636.
(66) Cited in John Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 29.
(67) Reductionism, from a methodological point of view, refers to the tendency to “look down" from the whole to the parts, to work through “analysis,” and to explain the properties and the behavior of an entity as a result of the properties and the behavior of its components. Symmetrically, we can say, from a methodological viewpoint, that systems theory means “looking up" from the parts to the whole, to proceed by “synthesis,” to consider the properties and the behavior of the components as being always due to an effect of the properties and the behavior of the whole. However, for positivistic science, Beings in their totalities simply do not exist. This is primarily because all Beings are reduced to their smallest component parts. In an ontoepistemological conception of reductionism phenomena are not regarded as transcendental wholes.
The analyst can, of course, reduce uncertainty and ambiguity once he/she denotes him/herself to the detailed study of a small sector, limited in space and time, that is, once he/she forgets the system as a whole, which then becomes a vague environment. However, “what can be readily elucidated and freed of ambiguity becomes of quite secondary interest because the essential has been eliminated, that is, self-organizational complexity that attaches to Being”(Edgar Morin, “Complexity,” 572).
(68) See Kenneth M. Stokes, The Empire of Reason.
(69) Immanual Kant, “Was ist Aufklärung,” 85.
(70) Blaise Pascal, and in our century, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, argued that the concept of prejudice is central to knowing. In this connection the reader is invited to refer to the sections titled “Political Economy as Science" and to “Lobster Pots, Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Surrogate Reality.”
(71) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 825.
(72) Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Environment, 13-14.
(73) Notably, Herder, a primitivist, an exoticist and a critic of the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, extolled Hindu civilization. See Amartya Sen, “India and the West,” 27.
(74) Vico is sometimes omitted from the Enlightenment when it is narrowly defined.
(75) Isaiah Berlin presented Vico as the creator of a science of man radically different in substance from the predominant mechanicalism. See Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability. For a recent conservative perspective of Vico and his influence upon Marx, among others see: Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of the Anti-Modern.
(76) Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 36.
(77) The Marxian “making" of history, insofar as it obtains from Vico and is a distant echo of Aristotelian holism, suggests a quaver of the aesthetic. The aesthetic creation of history is possible only when man is free. Unfree man is condemned to “make" a history not freely chosen. The aesthetic process of creation is poetic. It is a process of poiesis, a revealing or disclosure of the hidden essence.
(78) José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays Towards a Philosophy of History, 182.
(79) Louis Althusser, Politics and history: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx.
(80) Stokes, Man and the Biosphere; Idem., Paradigm Lost: A Systems Theoretical and Cultural Critique of Political Economy.
(81) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
(82) Attila Agh, “Totality Theory and System Theory,” 120.
(83) Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
(85) Rousseau's notion of an unauthentic life as a source of personal angst that presented ethical confusion was embraced by Karl Polanyi and finds expression in his Die Lehre von Lebensweg.
(86) J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 32.
(87) Quoted in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, 173.
(88) J.L. Talman, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy.
(89) For Karl Polanyi, the socioethical impasse of the bourgeoisie and the destructive aspect of complex society was the self-regulating market system, introduced in society by state power. It that created isolated and competitive individuals and undermined the communitarian dimensions of human life that is the matrix of human well-being. The damage caused by the self-regulating market was above all cultural! By uprooting human livelihood from its embeddedness in social relations, the free market tore apart human cultural bonds—the values and the inherited institutions—by which people constituted their cultural identity. The new economic system created a devastating anomie, that seriously damaged the humanity of labor and affected the whole of society and its relation to the physical environment.
(90) By “the practical,” wrote I. Kant, “I mean everything that is possible through freedom" (Critique of Pure Reason, 828). Practical reason is not goal-oriented and manipulative but a hermeneutic knowledge of appropriate norms for social action. Theoretical reason is bound to “observe" the “laws" that effectively govern the phenomenal world of experience, while practical reason is free to determine the laws which—according to its own judgment—ought to govern our social world of intercontextual relationships. While the purpose of theoretical reason is to mediate disputed claims regarding the empirical validity of theoretical propositions (hypotheses), the intent of practical reason is the mediation of disputed claims concerning the normative validity of practical propositions (assertions of norms, recommendations for action). Moreover, it is the task of practical reason to decide upon the societal acceptability of disputed value premises or life-practical consequences of actions with respect to the consequences of all those affected in the satisfaction of their needs (See Werner Ulrich, “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice and Practical Philosophy: A Program of Research,” 140). Social knowledge directed by practical reason strives for consensus as to the ethical values and goals of a just society. In this connection, practical philosophy is the philosophical effort to come to terms with the problem of practical reason expressed in the question: “How can we rationally determine and justify the norms of action contained in recommendations or plans for action?” Moreover, practical reason cannot be reduced to, or derived from alleged “value-neutral" instrumental reason, but must be grounded in a critically reflected interest. For Kant “an 'interest' is that by which reason becomes practical—that is, a cause determining the will" (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 122n).
(91) Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,” 119.
(92) Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant.
(93) Ibid., 36.
(94) Ibid., 105.
(95) G.F. Hegel, Philosophy of history, 104.
(96) Positing that since there is no source of meaning outside of life, and meaning depends on a knowledge of the whole, Wilhelm Dilthey asserted with Hegel that the meaning of history is discernible only from its end. In order to effect this turn, Dilthey maintained that the totality of life must be given to consciousness. See Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, 314, 331.
(97) Darwin ended Origin with a ringing defense of the same thought.
(98) G.F.Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: a Translation of the Jena Lectures.
(99) Ibid.
(100) Engels considered the Kantian theory of evolution as a starting point of modern scientific evolutionism.
(101) Agh, “Totality Theory and System Theory,” 122.
(102) Ibid., 121.
(103) G.B. Kerferd argues that “[t]he history of the study of Greek philosophy has been profoundly influenced in modern times down to and including the present by the treatment adopted by Hegel in his Lectures on the history of philosophy" (The Sophistic Movement, 6).
(104) Ibid., 121.
(105) John Bednarz, “Complexity and Intersubjectivity: Towards the Theory of Niklaus Luhmann,” 56.
(106) Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
(107) Engels in Agh, “Totality Theory,” 124.
(108) See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
(109) Agh, “Totality Theory,” 124.
(110) Ibid.
(112) Karl Marx to Heinrich Marx, 10 November 1837, quoted in D.R. Kelley, “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young Marx,” 355.
(113) Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, 356-7.
(114) The bourgeois transit from partial rationality to irrationality was at the center of Lukács's Destruction of Reason.
(115) Agh, “Totality Theory,” 127.
(116) Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 159.
(117) Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 28.
(118) Ibid., 250.
(119) It may be argued that Martin Heidegger's search for a “Third Way,” was a pursuit of a totality, one grounded ostensibly on the basis of a revisionist reading of Hellenic philosophy. Heidegger's philosophy of history was a doctrine of “errancy.” Like Oedipus, who disregarded the warnings of the seer, and sought the source of his kingdom's troubles by returning to his own obscure origins, Heidegger turned back the pages of the history of the Cultural West. His project involved a movement back toward the primal “source" (Ursprung) of history and a going-forth into a new historical beginning.
(120) Marx, The German Ideology, 28.
(121) Ibid., 125.
(122) Marx's phrase “Critical Criticism" in the subtitle of “The Holy Family” refers to Hegel and the so-called “Young Hegelians.”
(123) Karl Marx, Selected Writings, 134.
(124) Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 198.
(125) Ibid., 27.
(127) Ibid., 105.
(128) Karl Polanyi in Christianity and the Social Revolution, 382. The author has taken license to insert “totality" into the quotation; for it is his contention that Polanyi's concept of a reembedded society meant the invention of a totality within which the full potential of personality is actualized.
(129) It is necessary to distinguish the more conventional appreciations of systems theory—what has been referred to as “hard" systems theory—from “soft" and critical systems thinking. In this connection the interested reader may refer to: Peter Checkland, Systems Thinking, Systems Practice; Robert L. Flood, “Critical Systems Thinking and the Systems Sciences”; Idem., “Liberating systems theory: Towards critical systems thinking”; Robert L. Flood, and Michael Jackson, eds., Critical Systems Thinking: Directed Readings; Ramses Fuenmayor, “The Roots of Reductionism: A Counter Ontoepistemology for a Systems Approach.”
(130) Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 27.
(131) Edgar Morin, Method: The Nature of Nature, 114.
(132) The contemporary American malaise of chronic drug abuse, unwanted teen pregnancies, illiteracy, investment swindles, etc., may be seen not as separate from, but as culturally correlated phenomena. Dag Ryen, “Victimization,” 4-7. For a deeper and more philosophic appreciation see Marshall Berman in his All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity affirms this postulate.
(133) Unger, Knowledge and Politics, 48.
(134) David Campbell, “Introduction to Nonlinear Phenomena,” 13.
(135) Ibid., 18.
(136) Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 55-56.
(137) Errol Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking.
(138) Edgar Morin, Science and Conscience.
(139) R.E. Zimmermann, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle: Philosophical Implications of Self-Reference.”
(140) Kevin Kelly, “Deep Evolution: The Emergence of Postdarwinism.”
(141) C.H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes.
(142) Edgar Morin extends the founding aphorism and proposes eight related, conjoined, conflicting, and antinomic principles which help lay the foundation for a greater understanding of a critical holism.
In these complementary and conflicting aphorisms, Morin constructs new understandings of emergence and reflexivity complementary to our project of conceptualizing a coevolutionary political economy.
(143) Contextualism has been presented as an acausal alternative philosophy of science, related to symbolic interactionism and stands in contrast to mechanistic approaches. The current intellectual climate may be characterized as a confrontation between the objectivist attempt to identify an invariant basis for all judgments of validity and a new relativism that takes the form of an anthropologically and sociologically informed contextualism. Here the notion of phronesis is engaged, on the one hand, as a useful corrective against a formalist mediation between objectivism and relativism, and, on the other hand, as a socioethical root for addressing the haunting problem of much of contemporary thought—the issue of value judgment. See Roger A. Straus, “The Theoretical Frame of Symbolic Interactionism: A Contextualist, Social Science,” 261-272; Steven Pepper, World Hypotheses; Alessandro Ferrara, “On Phronesis,” 246-267.
(144) Lenin's remarks constituted a break with Marxian evolutionism and with that version of historical materialism that conceived history as a series of modes of production succeeding each other in a preordained sequence in response to the level of development of the productive forces. The class struggle acted merely as the executor of the laws of history. Backward countries, such as Russia, were fated to pass through a capitalist stage of development: only thus would the material precondition of socialism be created. Moreover, once established, capitalism would beget its overthrow “with the inexorability of a natural process.” This belief in the inevitability of socialism was shared even by Marx and Engels, though they rejected the notion of an inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism. Capitalism, by bringing together large numbers of workers in single units of production, provided the material basis on which class consciousness could develop. Experience of their common exploitation would lead workers to band together against the employers and in defense of their economic interests. From these elemental class battles, and the organizations they precipitated, would develop a united proletariat that, as a revolutionary “class-for-itself,” would seek the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Lenin's break involved three propositions. First, class struggles do not have an inevitable outcome. There are always alternative paths of historical development. Second, the contradictions, which load history in a particular direction, are not purely economic: they depend, that is, not only on the relations and forces of production but on the political and ideological relations with which they are bound up. Third, the conditions of social revolution will not arise automatically, as a result of the expansion of the productive forces, but require the active, conscious, and organized intervention of revolutionaries.
(145) Kant's phenomenalist critique is posited in his notion of transcendental idealism—by which we can, through cognition, have objective knowledge of objects.
(146) See J. Donzelot, “The Poverty of Political Culture.”
(147) See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power.”
(148) Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1319.
(149) By way of clarifying the meaning of the unity of theory and practice, it may be argued that theory aims at the production of thoughts which accord with reality. Practice aims at the production of realities which accord with thought. Therefore, common to theory and practice is an aspiration to establish congruity between thought and reality.
(150) This proposition appears to be consistent with the requirement for knowers and actors to reflect on the limitations of their knowledge and on the practices attendant on this “knowledge.”
(151) Gramsci does not break from Hegel's historicist matrix, for he subordinates rationalism to historicism. Here the real and the rational coincide in the unfolded totalitized historical process. History justifies what human action decided to justify. Thus, whatever has existed is rational since it has found its own historic usefulness. For Gramsci the concept of “historic bloc" refers to a specific unity between the “base" and the “superstructure" in a given social formation that is, simultaneously, a form of thought-in-action such that “popular beliefs acquire the solidity of material forces" (Prison Notebooks, 869).
(152) Parenthetically, for Gramsci, the objectivity of hegemonic truth-claims cannot be tested independently of historical praxis whose interest is in their realization.
(153) James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory.
(154) Concerned with the negative influences of fetishes and idols as much as he was with the positive contributions of science, for Marx, bourgeois life was regarded as one steeped in fetishism and idolatry, guiding behavior and filling in the gaps in our knowledge. The entire economic existence of the bourgeoisie is permeated by the fetish of exchange value, that which interprets the working relations among men as quantities of things. Indeed, the “fetish character" that Marx attributed to economic objects in the epoch of commodity production is but a particular case of the general fate of bourgeois culture that generally extends to its nonreflective intellectuality.
(155) In one of the best known passages of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks he compared civil society to a system of fortresses and earthworks standing behind the state. Civil society had become far more complex in advanced capitalist countries than it was, for instance, in Tsarist Russia before 1917, where society was allegedly dominated by the state and where the ruling class relied much more on force and much less on hegemony, than was the case in the West. Thus, in Russia, he contended, a frontal attack, a “war of movement" could succeed, but in the West, a different revolutionary strategy was required, a “war of position.” Gramsci's “war of position" required the building of alliances. Thus for Gramsci the basic problem of revolution was not political insurrection, but “how to make a hitherto subaltern class believe in itself a potential ruling class and credible as such to other classes.” For a discussion of the Gramsci legacy refer to A.B. Davidson, “The Varying Seasons of Gramscian Studies”; and E.J. Hobsbawm, “The Great Gramsci.”
(156) For further discussion of this point turn to the section titled “Facticity-of-the-Given, Reification and Hyperfactualism.”
(157) Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 293.
(158) Ibid.
(159) Althusser's proposition is laboriously disputed by E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory.
(160) The term “historical bloc" was used to denote unities of nature and spirit, superstructure and substructure, and subjective and objective moments of the historical process. But as with much of Gramsci's terminology, the expression “historic bloc" had several meanings. It was also used to refer to a counter-hegemonic group seeking to circumvent the privileging of one dimension of totality over an other. Importantly it presupposes the unity between objective and subjective forces so that “man himself may be conceived as an historic bloc" or the political party as subject of history or collective personality that acts 'progressively' or 'regressively' in relation to the historical movement (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1338). What should be stressed is that there is no automatic formation of historic blocs. Ideas are not born automatically out of ideas, nor do men passively accept them forming thereby historic blocs (Ibid., 1134). Man creates historic blocs by his conscious activity, hence historic blocs are also praxially determined. It is the locus where ideas and historical reality unite and where the former acquire the strength of “material forces" (Ibid., 869). Thus, in order to think of reality creatively, for Gramsci, it is necessary to “historicize" thought. Thought's creativeness is measured by its effect on society. Creative thought becomes a matrix whereby reality is grasped while at the same time being part of reality itself.
(161) C. Mouffe and E. Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics; Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.”
(162) Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimension Man, 40.
(163) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1313-14.
(164) For George Sorel, social myth, a powerful form of collective subjectivity, would obstruct reformist tendencies. In this connection see Sorel's discussion of myth and the “Napoleonic battle" in the letter to Daniel Halevy that introduces his Reflections on Violence.
(165) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 322-3. Where Machiavelli looked to the individual Prince, Gramsci looked to the Modern Prince: the revolutionary party engaged in a continuing and developing dialogue with its own base of support.
(166) Can one speak of the politics of truth only as if the word “truth" had slipped into quotation marks, to become a mere passing-for-true that is really false? Foucault insisted that “truth is not outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and function would repay further study, truth is not the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power" (Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 131).
(167) In this regard Foucault is not the sole Nietzschean; for Imre Lakatos noted: “truth lies in power" (See Imre Lakatos, Philosophical Papers, 10).
(168) Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 133.
(169) Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 208.
(170) Foucault, History of Sexuality, 89.
(171) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 222.
(172) Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144.
(173) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 367-8.
(174) Ibid., 310.
(175) Ibid., 137.
(176) Ibid., 1242.
(177) Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci.”
(178) Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 221.
(179) Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 81.
(180) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27.
(181) Marx considers classical political economy's gateway concept of population as the basis for its analysis of production, exchange, and distribution. However, for Marx, the method of political economy, serves to deceive us insofar as political economy's basic analytical categories provide an illusion of analytical rigor. He suggests that the emphasis on population is a deceptive abstraction because it excludes class.
(182) The monological epistemology embraced by PENS is one that admits a technocratic and hegemonic interest in the construction and thus prescription of public opinion.
(183) Thus, to take the classic and still-influential argument of Milton Friedman (see “The Methodology of Positive Economics”), as an example, a theory's adequacy or “significance" depends chiefly on its predictive value, on whether “experience" proves the predictions it generates. This approach must, of course, presumes that while theories differ among people, “experience" is accessed singularly (identically) by all. The different theories need not and should not, in Friedman's mind, exert any influence upon how we all experience life. His positivist method or “methodological instrumentalism" (Bruce Caldwell, “Toward a Broader Conception of Criticism: Praxeology and its Critics: An Appraisal,”) depend totally on that presumption. Since we make a very different presumption, that theories and observations or experiences participate in each other's overdetermination, Friedman's methodological prescriptions have no relevance to us and to our formulation of economic arguments. His prescriptions are particular to his theoretical agenda; they are not universals (Resnick and Wolff, Economics: Marxian versus Neo-Classical, 1-37).
(184) See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. The term dialogic stresses the context of processes and coevolving relationships. To view a process dialogically is to appreciate it as a moment of/in a coevolving, contradictory and larger whole. Our thoughts are dialogical, influenced by our cultural contexts.
(185) H.R. Maturana, “Biology of language: The epistemology of reality,” 28.
(186) H.R. Maturana, “Cognitive strategies,” 464.
(187) For further discussion of how facts in scientific research can be understood to be socially contrived, see Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.
(188) See the foregoing material on the politics of truth.
(189) This claim has possibly disturbing implications for the post-modernist's claim to relativism.
(190) The term “interconnectedness" may remind one of Wilhelm Dilthey's use of the word Zusammenhang, which is a hanging-together. While the concept of life is used putatively to effect this Zusammenhang, it never achieves a level of explanatory clarity in Dilthey. See Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, 91.
(191) Keynes was aware that increased productivity gains from the Taylorist revolution would lead to a massive crisis of overproduction if there was no corresponding revolution on the demand side. To solve the thorny problem of how to organize social demand beyond competition between firms, there were three competing alternatives to free-market conservatism used by theorists, politicians and even unions: Fascism, Stalinism and social democracy—a 'left' version of what Keynes was proposing.
It may be argued that experiments with corporatism in Britain and Germany during World War I became a model for transcending social conflict that later found expression in the Keynesian social contracts of the post-World War II period. With some exaggeration one might argue that Bismarck's heritage evolved into the welfare state.
(192) Stokes's Man and the Biosphere sought to substantiate the argument for a new point of entry. Indeed, the crisis of the global Biosphere stimulates us to seek a fourth point of entry. We shall contend that the coevolutionary reference image (bio-economic and open systems analysis contending that the livelihood of man is a thermodynamic process, etc.), is a useful point of entry.
(193) Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Early Writings, 81ff.
(194) It is with the understanding that a metatheoretical discourse that fails to speak to ethics is necessarily partial that prompted the author to tender a fragment herein on socioethics and to develop the idea elsewhere. See “Concluding Remarks”; Kenneth Stokes, “Socioethical Considerations for a Political Economy in the Broad Sense.”
(195) Osvaldo Sunkel, “Institutionalism and Structuralism.”
(196) Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy.
(197) Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx; Scott Meikle, in “Making Nonsense of Marx,” finds Elster's approach problematic noting that Elster mistakenly assumes Marx was an atomist, rather than an essentialist. Also see John E. Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy.
(198) Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Extrapolating Hayek's celebrated market mentality beyond the farcical, cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler argue that if the operation of the marketplace is left to run its course, the cost of energy and raw materials relative to wages will decline to the point that humanity will become capable not only of interstellar travel, but ultimately of reorganizing the structure of the entire cosmos(John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 89).
(199) Jack Hirshleifer, “Economics from a Biological Viewpoint.” We might presume that by “rigor" it is meant the application of advanced mathematics.
(200) Frank H. Hahn, “The next hundred years.”
(201) Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Ilya Prigogine, “Time, Chaos, and the Two Cultures.”
(202) Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge.
(203) Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos; Also see G. Gemmil and C. Smith, “A Dissipative Structure Model of Organizational Transformation”; R. Leifer, “Understanding Organizational Transformation Using a Dissipative Structure Model”; Herman Haken, Synergetics: an Introduction; Idem., “Synergetics: is Self-Organisation Governed by Universal Principles?”