Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 20:49:40 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: Dialectics and Science


"Mainstream economics, in its positivistic and instrumental orientation,
pretends to be principally concerned with discovering regularities and
correlations within the economic order whichmigh permit greater prediction
and control of economic phenomena. However, its uncritical stance, combined
with its pretence of ethical neutrality, has precluded attempts to
differentiate those regularities and correlations representing invariant
forms of social life from those which merely 'express ideologically frozen
relations of dependence that in principle can be transformed' (Habermas,
1971) Regularities which represent the ideological imprisonment of human
make predictions of social phenomena more likely. Indeed, the more firmly
ideology is entrenched, the greater will be the predictive power. Such
predictions can become powerful instruments for control and manipulation of
society by the state or private centres of concentrated power."

Jon D Wisman, 1991. "The scope and goals of economic science: A Habermasian
perspective". In Economics and Hermeneutics, ed. Donald Lavoie. New York:
Routledge. 113-133

Rakesh




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