HPPE Seminar 15 January – Julian Wells on “Clockwork, blind machines wound up”? Marx and the (econo-) physicists’

Dear all,

Next Wednesday, on January 15th, Julian Wells will be presenting at the HPPE seminar on the topic ‘“Clockwork, blind machines wound up”? Marx and the (econo-) physicists’.
The seminar takes place in the East Building EAS.E168 at 1 p.m. at the London School of Economics. Everyone is welcome.

Abstract:
I have two objectives in this contribution. First, to show that Marx is a precursor of a particular current trend in heterodox economics, and secondly but more fundamentally, to show how Marx, as a champion of human self-determination and self-realisation, thought nonetheless that in our pre-historic human epoch there were law-like social regularities on which to ground social science.
In my title I bracket off “econo” for two reasons:
1. to emphasise that among the econophysicists there are, besides the economists, actual
physicists
2. because I shall show that Marx discussed physicists doing physics, albeit in classical antiquity rather than in his own day.
To Marx, the capitalist economy was a dystopia under the rule of \Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham"; freedom, because alienated agents are constrained only by their own free will, and Bentham “because each looks only to himself” (Capital, vol.I, Ch.6). A physicist might translate this, verbally and conceptually, into the observation that the economy consists of a vast mass of uncoordinated atoms, and begin to think about the statistical mechanics pioneered by Maxwell and Boltzmann.
Precisely this step occurred to two marxist scientists, the mathematicians Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover, who implemented it in their 1983 book Laws of Chaos. They addressed various issues in marxist economics, that I do not need to detail here, by recasting the relevant variables as random ones and considering what their distributional properties might be.
However, they did not coin the “econophysics” label. That was done, and the approach popularised beyond the regrettably small circle of those who read Farjoun and Machover, in 1992 [check] by the group around H. Eugene Stanley at Boston University. Thus there is now a growing literature investigating empirical distributions in economics and attempting to theorise possible generating processes.
The end-point of the present paper will thus be Marx's mature political economy as precursor of this literature. The starting-point lies among his very earliest productions - a word I use advisedly, since we shall in fact begin by considering his unfinished verse tragedy Oulanem, the work from which our title quote is drawn.
Along the way we will refute the notion that Marx's political economy is determinist, in any sense, and we will also question the suggestion of an epistemological break separating his early writing and his mature work.

Julian Wells is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Kingston University.

More information about the seminar is available at : http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/HPPE/HPPEMT2013.aspx or by contacting Gerardo Serra ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Raphaelle Schwarzberg ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).

Best wishes,
Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg

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