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It is arguable that the single place where -- more than any other -- 
contemporary economists learned the word 'neoclassical' was Paul 
Samuelson's mega-best seller _Economics_.  It was Paul Samuelson, indeed, 
who gave us the 'neoclassical synthesis'.  Now Samuelson's work may be a 
hodge-podge of inconsistent and unworkable ideas, but for whatever defects 
that may lie inherent in that work, one thing cannot be said, that is, it 
cannot be said that this in not neoclassical economics.  It is indeed, the 
very stuff of which most folks learned to use the very word.  So we do 
have some neoclassical economics, contained between the covers of a 
textbook which has been on the bookself of most economists in the later 
half of the twentieth century.  We may not be able to construct a very 
good or coherent 'essence' out of this thing found in Samuelson's book -- 
but then that is not so unusual.  We don't have a very good essential 
definition of continental philosophy or interpretive sociology either.  
For all that the words have work they do, and they do pick out different 
things in the world.  The stuff in Samuelson's textbook is not the 
economics of Hayek or Marx, and using the label of 'neoclassical' which 
Samuelson claimed for his own -- with a multi-million reader megaphone -- 
to label the less well know work of Marx or Hayek can only deeply mislead 
all those folks who first learned the word as it was taught to them at the 
knee of their first economics professor out of Samuelson's textbook.  
We've got a word, lots of folks learned it and came to identify it with an 
incredibly influential set of ideas.  These ideas are quite obviously 
different from those of folks like Marx and Hayek.  I don't see what the 
trouble is in using the word.  And the term does not have to be used 
normatively.  Calling Samuelson a 'neoclassical', using Samuelson's own 
language for his own ideas, doesn't necessarily have to be a disparaging 
remark.  (It is worth noting that Samuelson is also the person from whom 
so many first learned the term 'mainstream' economics -- this refered to 
Samuelson's own economics, of course.) 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
MiraCosta College 
UC-Riverside 
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http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm 
 
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