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

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