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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:46 2006 |
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I must have missed the fun. Why do we care about schools?
It seems that one could study an author, an idea, an era or an area, of
which the first and last would bring distractions while the second and the
third would bring attraction. An analogy of a theater may help see my
objection. The middle ones would be interested in the drama itself
involving the story and its message, while the few viewers will miss the
story and note the actors (the author) and try to get irrelevant personal
data such as where the actress slept (area). Looking for a master of a
school sounds like looking for the ring master of a circus, and missing the
magic of the performance itself.
If we were to get some scholarly output from a historian, I would expect him
to disregard arbitrary clannish identities, so that even Marx would not seem
to be sufficiently Marxian or Keynes would not be a proper Keynesian. The
fruitful attraction I am looking for is the study of how an idea evolved and
how it was shaped by the events of the era during which it emerged, trying
to link ideas to experiences, disregarding the individual whose pen wrote it
down and absolutely not giving any relevance to where the author made home.
Does the Austrian School have anything to do with Austria; or is American
institutionalism in any way American? The most influential authors of
course become attached to their ideas not so much as a school identity but
as shorthand for an idea whose abstract name may be unwieldy. Thus it may be
simpler to talk of Malthusian population theory than invent a long name for
the same theory.
Unless we are clamoring for economic history as another version of the
Peoples magazine, we would be more interested in the economics, namely the
ideas. If we cared to study the ideas, we would hope to learn something, and
find useful insights that could show us ways to advance the science. Or else
we could simply be like the paparazzi taking photographs of the famous
People, and who they mixed with, all the time missing the thing which made
them famous: the stories they told.
Hence I am not applying to join any school or even recognize one.
Mohammad Gani
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