Dear John  
  
        Re: "I doubt the term "hegemony" exhausts the relationship.   
        And, as it is in one's marriage, so I suspect it is also with  
the relations with      one's children, one's relatives, one's  
community, one's university, and all of         one's social relations;  
neither contract nor hegemony will exhaust the relation,        and the  
attempt to do so merely results in a naive reductionism."  
  
It seems to me that you are, in the above quote, objecting to all  
theory, because all theory involves reductionism or abstraction.  In  
other words, all theory is abstractionist or reductionist by definition.  
  
The key question is: Does that reduction, that theory, tell us something  
useful about the whole of reality?  Viewing marriage as a contract does  
do so (it is at least a contract, or it is nothing - you could simply  
live together, as many do; and, insofar as it is a contract, it involves  
certain contractual or legal obligations in additions to the  
"obligations" of mere mutuality entailed by simply living together...).  
  
If you agree with the above, you will no doubt see that what is "useful"  
is itself an interesting question, and this is where I think you raise  
an important question for our profession.    
  
The profession often seems to define what is "useful" in terms of what  
will enhance the profession itself - its status, funding, and so on.  
  
You seem to insist on a rather more rigorous notion of "useful" - useful  
in terms of real life.  
  
What is "useful" to the profession does often (perhaps even usually? -  
thankfully!) intersect with what is useful in terms of real life.  
  
Dogmatic or "fundamentalist" defenders of the profession will take the  
line that the discipline is always (ultimately?) useful in terms of real  
life.  
  
Critical defenders of the profession (among whom I certainly number  
myself - and perhaps you do too?) will always draw attention to the  
distance between aspiration (intersection with reality) and the current  
or historical state of the profession (those instances where it fails to  
intersect with reality).  
  
This raises the question of the criteria we use to evaluate the history  
of economics.  Are we to evaluate our history from the viewpoint of the  
current orthodoxies of our profession?  Or from a wider, human,  
viewpoint?  
  
A matter that we have discussed earlier and will no doubt discuss  
again...though you are, I sense, inviting us to take it more seriously  
than we have done so far.  
  
  
Prabhu Guptara