 
John R Commons, 1862-1945. Clarence Ayres, 1891-1972.
Great progressive economists of the early and mid-20th century.
My last comment on the explicitly anti-democratic nature of mainstream ("neoclassical") economics might have left the impression that all economists line up on the political spectrum somewhere between the reactionarily tedious and the oligarchically venal. While this is undeniably true for the vast majority, there are very important exceptions. I am proud to have been among some of the outstanding exceptions last week at a conference of Post-Keynesians in Roskilde, Denmark (13-14 May, with papers and proceedings viable on the conference website:
http://www.ruc.dk/en/departments/department-of-society-and-globalisation/forskningen/samarbejde/kienet/fifth-dijon-post-keynesian-conference/.)
From the beginning of the conference when James Galbraith (University of Texas-Austin, my alma mater) gave the keynote address, it was obvious that this was not a gathering of pandering apologists for the free market system. On the possibility that it may have escaped our attention, Galbraith reminded us that a central behavioral characteristic of the global financial crisis was fraud, lies and deceptions marshalled in the interests of finance capital (aka "financial innovation").
Providing the theoretical sophistry for such criminal behavior would garner the Nobel Prize in economics (in 1997). Why this was possible was indirectly explained by Marc Lavoie's depressing narrative of the degeneration of the teaching of economics at the University of Ottawa (crushing my illusions that Canada might be a haven of economic sanity). It would appear that North American economics departments are Keynesian-free zones (north of the Rio Grande, at least, with the exceptions of the American University in Washington, DC, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Missouri at Kansas City, the University of Utah, and the New School University).
In the European Middle Ages the dogmas of the Catholic church enforced daunting barriers to scientific inquiry. The pernicious effect of neoclassical economics is far worse and considerably more powerful ideologically. It is a virus of the mind. Once implanted in the mental processes, it systematically destroys the ability to conduct rational thought. As an intellectual method, it does not render the exoteric into the esoteric (explaining what we observe by what we cannot observe but theoretically infer), which is the function of science. Rather, it renders the complexities of what we observe into ahistorical and anti-social (amoral) trivia.
The obviously social nature of human existence is rejected by the neoclassicals in favor of the absurdity that each person is an isolated individual (I recommend that the progressively minded not use the word "individual", but "people" and "person" in its place). Bereft of the hopes, fears, anxieties and feelings of personal responsibility that make us human. These "individuals" are driven by pure personal greed. The goodness of greed is defined as "rational" behavior. This individualized, irresponsible greed allegedly results in the general welfare. It is difficult to image a doctrine either more vulgar or more flagrantly in the interest of capital.
 
Joan Robinson, 1903-1983 John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006
Great progressive economists of the mid to late 20th century.
Adam Smith, who lived in a largely pre-capitalist society dominated by the reactionary vestiges of feudalism, can be forgiven for embracing this defense of raw capitalist greed, but neoclassical economists of the 21st century cannot. During the first half of the 19th century people who identified themselves as political economists actively debated the fundamental questions of capitalist society: distribution, growth and human welfare. They fiercely debated trade policy, monetary policy (including the nature of money), public debt, and regulation of conditions of work.
The re-branding of the discipline and its members, from political economy to "economics" and "economists" (W S Jevons, 1835-1882), marked a major step towards a systematically reactionary and intellectually intolerant dogma. Jevon's contribution became sacred writ in the next century with the distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics. This distinction is frequently attributed to Milton Friedman, though it can be found at least two decades before his famous article (for example, in the work of the neoclassical founding father and nominal Keynesian, Paul Samuelson).
By the 1950s the professional guidelines were clear. When acting "scientifically", economists reached conclusions that were "value free". Being a member of the professional was contingent upon accepting this conclusion. For example, an economist was free to be supportive of trade unions in private life, as long as he/she accepted that trade unions caused unemployment and/or inflation. The vast majority of policy-oriented (and usually more progressive) economists accepted these guidelines because they did not appear to weaken the de facto hegemony of the neoclassical Keynesians.
A few committed progressives challenged the intellectually vacuous positive/normative distinction. They sought to shift the profession from its acceptance of the moribund "microfoundations" that were little more than mathematical elaboration of the Jevonian marginalist banalities. These progressives (among the prominent were Joan Robinson and John Kenneth Galbraith) fought a lonely struggle largely ignored within the profession, though of they had considerable influence outside its dogma boundaries.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, as politics in the Anglo Saxon countries shifted decisively to the right, the neoclassical fundamentalists made their move: if the profession accepted the validity of self-adjusting, general equilibrium full employment, wasn't it time that the true believers took control of the profession? In ideological terms, the subsequent purge of all non-neoclassical tendencies, no matter how mild, closely tracked the Spanish Inquisition.
Trial in the Auto-de-fe, about 1490.
Like the central purpose of the Inquisition, the consolidation of the Spanish nation state (through purging of Islamic and Jewish influence in Iberia), the neoclassical purpose was to create a reactionary, pseudo-intellectual bastion in defense of capitalism, in its most vulgar and anti-social form. The transformation of the economics profession from a field of intellectual inquiry into a closed, dogmatic servant of the status quo is unprecedented in academia. This transformation would be equivalent to Creationism taking over the field of genetics.
The fundamental mission of Post-Keynesians and all other heterodox economists (and a mission it is) is to recapture the discipline and re-establish rational inquiry. Experience shows that success in this mission requires a return to a more progressive political context. In the meantime, conferences such as the one held in Roskilde keep rational inquiry alive in anticipation of better times.
[The topic of my next comment will be the conference of the International Initiative Promoting Political Economy, in Istanbul, 20-22 May.]
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