[log in to unmask]" type="cite">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.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
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?
A dead thing can go with the stream...
Only a living thing can go against it.
-G. K. Chesterton
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The Distributist Review
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