Just a quick note tonight. I’ve got an old friend in town this weekend, so posting may be intermittent. (And she brought her dog, so Zeugma and Tink are very unhappy, although the dog is friendly and meek.)
The essential insight I’m taking from the first chapters of Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers is one foundational to the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham: the market system — and, so, capitalism — is contingent rather than inevitable. It’s a social phenomenon, dependent upon but not a natural and inevitable outgrowth of such “agents of production” (Heilbroner 25) as land, labor, and capital. Now: this changes everything, and yet it’s elemental. It’s an insight that runs contrary to much of current economic thought. So my question is if that I’m looking at current economic thought and how it plays out in the discourses of composition, what do I do about such an insight? Kind of a rhetorical question, really; the obvious answer is to just keep it in perspective.
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