October 2011
6 posts
16 tags
The Trouble with Economics
Economics, the most influential social science, suffers from flaws that limit its insight and compromise its authority. The narrowness and shallowness of its contributions to the debate about the recent economic crisis and the subsequent weak recovery have made these flaws manifest.
Watch the full video of this lecture here
1 tag
The Relationship Between the United States and...
Post four in my series on the relationship between the United States and Left.
How can a community survive the full creative expression of its individual members?
This faith in self-construction goes together in the contemporary religion of humanity with a faith in human solidarity. At its extreme limit, it is the visionary conviction, belied but not destroyed by the terrors of ordinary social...
18 tags
Misusing Keynes
What did Keynes really teach? The influence of vulgar Keynesianism on academic orthodoxy as well as on practical discourse has been so great that it threatens to obscure the distinctive core of Keynes's developed economic theory. Fortunately, the theory is unencumbered by the toy mathematics that has served so much subsequent economic theorizing as a surrogate for causal explanation. I...
1 tag
The Relationship Between the United States and...
Post three in my series on the relationship between the United States and Left.
How do you design a social structure that accommodates the need for a “permanent rebellion” against its own present form?
No institutional and imaginative ordering of social life accommodates all our strivings. The next best thing to such an all-inclusive order is the recombination of experimental pluralism —...
4 tags
Religion of Humanity
The “religion of humanity” that makes up the historical aspiration of the Left begins with the premise that we possess an infinite capacity within us to transcend the forms of the world we inhabit:
The religion of humanity presents the self as transcendent over context: incapable of being contained within any limited mental or social structure. Not satisfied occasionally to rebel, it...
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The United States and the Left
In this 9th chapter of my book The Left Alternative, I argue that “no country identifies more completely” with that “religion of humanity” “at the center of the historical aspirations of the Left,” than the United States. What is this “religion of humanity” and how is it engendered in United States, a nation that is said to have no living Left at all? Over the next few posts I...
