On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:39 PM, Matias Vernengo
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I would agree that political economy does not have a founder in the proper sense of the word.  But I didn't understand the feminist critique.  For example, Rosa Luxemburg refers to Quesnay as the "father of the Physiocrats." Is that inappropriate?
>

It's not about any critique, feminist or otherwise. Rosa Luxemborg
would hardly, today, accept being enlisted in such an argument,
polymorphous libertine that she was. It's instead about what Americans
call a "tin ear", an aural blindness to the usage subtleties of the
English language.  The issue is that calling Smith "the founding
father of economics" instead of the "founder of economics" sets up a
reader's expectation that there is someone who then could be called
"the founding mother of  economics", else why introduce "father" at
all? The only point of using "father" is either insensitivity to
language or subtly to suggest that economics is itself gendered from
its beginnings. So using the language in that way, writing that way,
suggests that the rhetor is either a poor writer/speaker/thinker, or a
misogynist, alternatively either an uneducated person or what was
formally called "a male chauvinist pig".  Hope this helps, and places
Backhouse's amazed query in context.

-- 
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html