Archive for 24 March 2007
Process Explanation: What Is It, Really?
| Nicolai Foss |
As I have recounted on an earlier occasion (here), my interest in economics was, after about 1.5 years of a somewhat unsuccessful economics study, finally stimulated by discovering what may broadly be called “process approaches” to economics, particularly the work of Axel Leijonhufvud, and Austrian and evolutionary approaches. I was captivated by the claims inherent in these approaches of studying “real” market “processes” in “time,” taking account of “genuine uncertainty,” “surprises,” “ignorance,” etc. — all in contrast to the (I then thought) mindless neoclassical obsession with equilibrium states.
Clearly, the Austrian marketing effort seemed much superior to the mainstream one, much less dull and much more concerned with reality. (more…)
Pomo Periscope X: Foucault Deconstructed
| Peter Klein |
This week’s Times Literary Supplement includes Andrew Scull’s review of a new translation of Foucault’s History of Madness, the book that launched the French philospher’s public career. (HT: A&L Daily.) The first English edition, Scull notes, had the great merit of brevity, if not accuracy.
Madness and Civilization was not just short: it was unhampered by any of the apparatus of modern scholarship. What appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes that decorated the first French edition. Foucault himself had abbreviated the lengthy volume that constituted his doctoral thesis to produce a small French pocket edition, and it was this version (which contented itself with a small handful of references and a few extra pages from the original text) that appeared in translation. This could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be absorbed in very little time. Any doubts that might surface about the book’s claims could always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far weightier and more solemn — a massive tome that monoglot English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have laid their hands on a copy.
From the extended edition, published now in English for the first time, we learn that Foucault’s primary sources were narrow, outdated, and superficial. (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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