致敬——’92派

这是一个群体的光荣与梦想。20年大浪淘沙,当年闻道而鸣的群体,如今似强弩末。热议之后,谁能为他们卸下枷锁?     

C. E. Ayres's Reliance on T. H. Huxley: Did Darwin's Bulldog Bite?

In David Seckler's Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists, the proposition is advanced that “Ayres out-Veblens Veblen and out Deweys Dewey”. This commonly held view of the intellectual orientation of the prominent American institutional economist, Clarence Edwin Ayres, places him as an intellectual descendent of philosopher John Dewey's pragmatism, and economist Thorstein B, Veblen's institutionalist economics. Certainly such an outlook is not incorrect, but it is also not adequate if one is to achieve an understanding of Ayres. A careful check of the indexes of Ayres's major works shows that his references preponderantly go not to Dewey and to Veblen, but to Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, Moreover, it is to the latter that Ayres turned in his effort to overturn the former. However, Ayres in interpreting Darwin relied not upon Dewey and Veblen, but rather upon Thomas Henry Huxley, the British physician turned scientist, who because of his outspoken advocacy of Darwin's evolutionary biology became known as “Darwin's bulldog.”     

Homo Economicus Meets G. H. Mead: A Contribution to the Critique of Economic Theory

A bstract .   The relation between economic behavior and morality remains a live issue within economics and cognate disciplines. The standard view among economists themselves has been that while moral positions (understood broadly) may motivate our behavior, they do not capacitate or enable it. On this view the figure of Homo economicus , representing the how as against the why of our actions, must be understood as resolutely amoral. In this article, we attempt to recover the logic of this position, as well as those of critics who would modify the standard view in some way. Although also critical of the conventional economics-and-ethics divide, we argue that Homo economicus would benefit from a more fundamental rethinking, one that takes account of the theory of the self and its acts, as developed by the social psychologist G. H. Mead. On a Meadian view the economic actor would neither have to grow additional capacities in order to coordinate with his or her fellows, as the evolutionary games theorist's agent has to do, nor depart or deviate from purposeful behavior, as does Homo sociologicus . On a Meadian view, economic capacity has to be more richly endowed than standard Homo economicus in order to do what it is supposed to do, but it is recognizably still a single, purposeful capacity.     

Scarp the C.A.P.

The abuses of the Common Agricultural Policy are familiar. Richard Howarth argues that they cannot be patched up but can be removed by abolition of the system that supports inefficient French and German small farmers.