On 4/5/2011 8:43 AM, Evelyn L. Forget wrote: > Responding to the invitation of Roger and Roy, I think the phrase > merits all kinds of attention, and what draws my eye is neither the > "founding" aspect nor the "gender" aspect which was, as we all know, > ubiquitous. > > What interest me is that a "father", like a "mother", implies a > "family". "Families" have members and non-members. Who gets to be part > of the family of political economists? Whose contributions will we > consider those of insiders? Is Adam Smith the point in our history at > which the economic insights of "ordinary people" start to count for > less than those of the adepts? > > Just to push the metaphor a bit-- check out the language of 19th > century socialism, particularly that of the utopian socialists. The > "family" is fundamental to all the imagery, sometimes in really > intriguing (not to say bizarre) ways. > > How is it that a discipline founded on the rhetoric of families > manages to marginalize families in most of its analysis and for most > of its history, pretending instead that we are all more or less > rational adult creatures who can make independent decisions? This is a salient observation, given that "oikonomia" means "household management." What we call "economics," Aristotle would have labeled "chresmatike," "The pursuit of wealth for its own sake."John C. Médaille / //A dead thing can go with the stream... Only a living thing can go against it. -G. K. Chesterton// //Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective/ <http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist/dp/1935191810/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280082231&sr=1-2>/ //The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace/ <http://www.amazon.com/Vocation-Business-Social-Justice-Marketplace/dp/0826428096/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280082193&sr=8-1>/ //The Distributist Review/ <http://distributistreview.com/mag/>/ //The Front Porch Republic/ <http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/>/ //The Remnant Newspaper/ <http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/index.htm>/ /