Re: Foucault and 
 
>******************************** 
> 
>    Remember, I am an historian of thought, not a theorist or 
>politician.  I ask questions to expose intellectual history, not to 
>propose anything. 
> 
>    P.R. Saul has stated, `After twenty two years of policies that 
>have governed the persistant relative decline of North America, the 
>source of those policies, the University of Chicago, has been awarded 
>eight Nobel Prizes.' 
> 
>   [The words are not exact, but I put them in quotes to indicate that 
>the statement is not an assertion of mine, or even, in the first 
>instance in this discussion, an assertion of truth.  The statement is 
>data for analysis.] 
> 
>QUESTION.  Can the signs we use, the instruments of discourse, become so 
>disassociated from realty that they become disfunctional? 
>Alternatively, is there an EPISTEME, corresponding to postmodern 
>technical and informational circumstance, that is not expressible in 
>traditional economic discourse? 
 
(a) it has always seemed to me that whether one sees continuity or an 
"epistemological break" between Cantillon's 
_Essay_on_the_Nature_of_Commerce_in_General_, Smith's _Wealth_of_Nations_, 
and Mill's _Principles_of_Political_Economy_ is mainly a matter of one's 
taste and purpose. It is inadequate both to claim that all three live in 
_exactly_ the same theoretical universe, but that the later ones have a 
better understanding of it. It is similarly inadequate to say that they are 
talking past one another--some problems in Newtonian electrodynamics (the 
frame of reference of the ether) are non-problems in relativistic 
electrodynamics, but the later theory has a view on why the earlier 
theory's "puzzle" is badly posed... 
 
(b) Chicago people do not think that their policies have been those of 
America's governors; they think that America's governors have used small 
and selected pieces of their ideas, but not that they have been "in power" 
in any sense... 
 
Brad De Long 
 
 
 
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing 
the quantity theory of money] is probably       | 
<[log in to unmask]> 
true.... But this **long run** is a misleading  | Brad De Long 
guide to current affairs. **In the long run**   | Dept. of Economics 
we are all dead.  Economists set themselves     | U.C. Berkeley 
too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous  | Berkeley, CA 94720 
seasons they can only tell us that when the     | (510) 643-4027  376-1362 
storm is long past the ocean is flat again."    | (510) 642-6615 fax 
                                --J.M. Keynes   | 
http://econ158.berkeley.edu/