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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Page 38 of 38
What makes an economist left wing, I have been saying, is dissatisfaction with the legal framework of capitalism. The mainstream economists are not wrong to treat the Marxists, most of the Post-Keynesians, and the Institutionalists, as marginal to the profession, because these maverick minorities in the final analysis do not want so much to participate in normal science within the dominant paradigm as they want to change the paradigm. The paradigm is defined by property law and contract law. The Argentine economist Jose Luis Coraggio is right to say that economists who are devoted to paradigm change are really not doing economics anymore, but practicing a broader discipline he calls socioeconomics. Socioeconomics regards as changeable parameters that mainstream economics assumes.
Socioeconomics does not assume that the prevailing jurisprudence stemming from the Roman maxim pacta sunt servandum, i.e. contracts should be enforced, which defines the obligations of buyers and sellers in a commercial society, is to be regarded as a source of paragons demonstrating what social norms ought to require of citizens, and would require of them in a good society. It does not assume that the good is defined or served by an ideal of freedom that prescribes that each is to look only to his or her self-interest. It does not assume that in a good society the social norms governing access to resources would follow the Roman law of suum cuique, to each his own. What Coraggio calls socioeconomics explores the construction, reconstruction, and recovery from older traditions of a variety of social norms prescribing mutual obligations. It does not assume the eternal validity of the individualistic norms prescribed by contract law.
I suggest that what it means to be a left wing economist today is to work to democratize property ownership, and to work to strengthen good non-market relationships. This focus on basic cultural structures (i.e. on the constitutive rules that that define property and exchange, on what Marx called Verhaltnisse, relationships) sheds light, I believe, on how to cope with all of the difficulties and issues that are mentioned at one point or another above. However, I will not here say how, because this paper is already too long.
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