Peter Nielsen

From mainstream economics to the boundaries of Marxism

In this paper, we explore Marxism and critical realism by addressing Ben Fines Addressing the Critical and the Real in Critical Realism. We outline and address Fines main arguments—that critical realism is insufficiently critical, and that it is insufficiently realistic—before turning to analyse the relation between critical realism and Marxism. Taking Fines argument as a starting point gives us the opportunity to clearly define the parameters of the Cambridge-based critique of mainstream economics, and to highlight some of the problems particular to that critique. It also provides an opportunity to interrogate the significance of the formation of discursive boundaries for the way we challenge conceptual credentials and claims.

No new revolution in economics? Taking Thompson and fine forward

The basic thesis of this paper is that Ben Fine and Grahame Thompsons 1999 exchange on economics imperialism illustrates two positions that talk across each other. Fines approach to understanding the field of mainstream economics combines methodological analysis of theoretical innovation and a broad critical sociology. Thompsons response to Fine combines methodological analysis of practical and theoretical problems that currently inhibit the mainstream with a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position. Analysing each position provides a useful way to develop the issues at stake in the debate – specifically, what are the potentials and ramifications of mainstream economics? We argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion. Its discursive constitution is dualistic (defining its limits but with an insignificant outside) and knows no genuine boundary. It has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasized the very concepts that seemingly form the basis of current innovation. This implies that the basis of innovation cannot simply be one of a realization of explanatory failure resulting in a positive transformation of the field that also happens to be conducive to imperialism in an even more effective way than prior imperialist tendencies have afforded. At the same time, whether mainstream economics and its imperial tendencies are negative remains an open yet determinable issue, one we illustrate through an analysis of information-theoretic economics.

The Political Economy of European Social Democracy

This book addresses the following question: Why do social democratic parties support European integration when such integration is predominantly neoliberal? In order to shed light on this seeming paradox, a brief historical summary of the development of European social democratic parties is first sketched out. The author identifies two major tendencies: ‘traditional’ social democratic goals, such as Keynesian macroeconomic management, welfare expansion and fiscal redistribution, and ‘new’ social democratic programmes such as workfare and the prioritization of low inflation over full employment. From the 1980s onwards countries across Europe have witnessed a significant shift from ‘traditional’ social democratic policies towards ‘new’ social democratic policies and this has taken place corresponding with a turn to ‘Social Europe’ by social democratic actors. Whereas ‘traditional’ social democratic policies are increasingly seen to be impossible at the national level, these policies are increasingly projected onto the European level. However, the realization of traditional social democratic policies at this level is severely limited by the nature and path-dependency of the European institutions. David J. Bailey analyses this enigmatic development in the cases of the UK, Sweden, France, Italy and Spain, and finds that despite the quite different trajectories of these countries, the overall development is similar: tensions and crisis tendencies arising from ‘traditional’ social democratic party relations prompted a turning towards ‘new’ policies that involved a shift from

Reorienting (Critical Realism In) Economics

Taken together, Tony Lawson’s Economics & Reality1 and Steve Fleetwood’s edited Critical Realism in Economics: Development and Debate 2 played a large part in defining the project critical realism in economics, which also delineates a particular identity within the project of critical realism in general. The defining features of critical realism in economics are a general ontological critique of mainstream economics for its deductive method, formalism, and closed systems modelling and also a broad constructive (and generally nonpartisan) approach to key heterodox traditions, focused on thinkers such as Veblen, Hayek, Marx and Keynes. Critical realism in economics is significantly different from, firstly, critical realists engaged in other areas of social study such as sociology and, secondly, critical realists that focus on one ‘economist’ and line of thought in particular such as Marx and Marxism. Both these two other strands of critical realism can be seen as other projects within critical realism that share a number of arguments, tenets and insights with critical realism in economics but differ in emphasis, research interests and identity. Two important books were published within critical realism in economics in 2003. The first one was Tony Lawson’s Reorienting Economics 3 and the second one was Paul Downward’s edited Applied Economics and the Critical Realist Critique. The purpose of this review essay is to discuss the latter book in the context of critical realism in economics and its recent development where the former book is a major sign post.4 Tony Lawson’s recent Reorienting

Empire Meets No Logo

also the website: http://www.nologo.org/ and also Tom Mertes on No Logo in New Left Review 4 2000, online at: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR23813.shtml. For a critique see Economist 6th September 2001 ‘Who’s wearing the trousers?’ by Samina Ahmad. Available at: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770992. 2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. EMPIRE MEETS NO LOGO

Underlabouring in Empire

Abstract Is the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri compatible with critical realism? In this article I argue that their book Empire is not, whereas Multitude is. Critical realists should be interested in this question because the passage from Empire to Multitude can be reconstructed as a case of critical realist underlabouring and, as such, exemplifies an openness to critique and changing political circumstances that critical realists prescribe for themselves but unfortunately tend in practice to ignore. Highlighting the concepts and practice of underlabouring, of judgemental rationality and epistemological relativism, I argue that Hardt and Negri can also underlabour for critical realists, in that their work demonstrates the need for underlabouring to proceed in a non-philosophical as well as philosophical vein. Thus, striving for a new science and human emancipation in critical realism can assume a theoretically as well as an empirically informed content, and a historically situated commitment.

Finnish object case a unified description of multifunctionality in a sign contrast

Abstract I examine the complex semantics of the two object cases in Finnish, the accusative and the partitive, and describe three core domains of distinction marked by the case contrast: quantitative boundedness, aspectual boundedness and actuality. The multifunctionality of the case selection is then analysed from various theoretical perspectives: the theory of the linguistic sign, Functional Grammar and some cognitive, evolutionary and cross-linguistic approaches. It seems that the functions of the case selection are at the same time clearly distinct and unified, and I propose a description of this phenomenon based on the instructional conception of the semantics of linguistic signs: the case contents are invariant, abstract and underspecified instructions which are designed to cooperate with the linguistic context.