As I noted yesterday, I’ve finished Varoufakis. Having now read three introductory economics textbooks, and six general-readership introductions to economic thought, I’ll say that Foundations of Economics: A Beginner’s Companion is by far the most careful, critical, evenhanded, and accessible introduction to the field that I’ve encountered. While I was a little disappointed by his ultimate outing of himself as a Marxist (not that I have anything against Marxists; it’s more that I wanted to see someone from the neoclassicist camp making such a strong and apparently fair-minded critique of mainstream economic assumptions), I have to say that he’s a lot more evenhanded than most of the Marxists I’ve read, and he’s very clearly got a deep familiarity with neoclassicist chapter and verse.
For a last quotation, I’ll offer his indictment of the individualist underpinnings of freeper economics, which dovetails nicely with the ways some folks (including me) have begun to problematize the rhetorics of individualist working-class authenticity:
“what the new dominant, pro-market theory of society is telling you is that you have one option: to adapt yourselves and your ideas to the world around you. Abandon all notions of altering society by bringing people together and asking them to campaign so that a collective agency, such as the State, can take steps to limit exploitation, oppressions, poverty, illness, etc unless no one is to lose any privileges in the process. Collective action is out. The only option is private, individual pursuits which recognise the right of the rich and powerful to remain so unless they choose not to” (288). I’ve protested elsewhere that, despite my fundamental agreement with Marx’s critique of capitalism, I don’t consider myself a Marxist. Here, I suppose I ought to acknowledge that, despite my fundamental agreement with the critique Varoufakis offers of the supremacy of individualism, I can’t really name myself as belonging to either of the camps that one would think might be etymologically opposed to individualism: “communism” or “socialism”. I’m not sure where that leaves me, save for the observation that the strongest symbol of strength in solidarity is the Roman fasces. A good reminder to be careful about going too far with critiques of individualist philosophies.
I’ll be taking a break from the economics stuff for a couple weeks: I’ve got to write the paper (“Empire and the Dissipation of Public Discourse: Some Lessons from Tacitus for the World Wide Web”) that I’m presenting at RSA in Austin at the end of May, which means reading a lot more Tacitus — yes, there was a reason for that reference to the fasces in the previous paragraph — and reading, also, Hardt and Negri. While it’s not quite directly connected to my dissertation, the economic imperialism and Web theory stuff are close enough to help me do a little bit of different thinking about the economies and literacies of class in the wired writing classroom.
And if you don’t already love the Romans, I’m hoping you’ll bear with me. They’re a supremely weird culture, but the most unsettling part about reading them is that they’re also so damn familiar. We might idealize classical Athenian democracy, but Americans — when we look in the mirror — know that we’re much, much closer to Rome’s deeply conservative commercial-agrarian society and all its terrible excesses.
And Britain plays Greece to our Rome?
This tangentially reminds me that I need to look for something on how the US Founding Fathers thought about the slavery of antiquity, and whether it affected their lawmaking at all.
Actually, no, and it’s interesting that you bring it up: Edward Gibbon deeply wanted to believe in Britain’s parallels to the fading glories of Rome, and others have suggested correcting him by drawing the parallel you draw, but if we’re going to go that far, I think Britain would be the Etruscans — the assimilated ancestors — of our Rome, and the part of Greece, the weaker nation that Rome viewed as deeply effeminate and yet somehow culturally superior, the nation of more radical politics, the nation whose language was spoken by the aristocracy, the nation from whom came many of the intellectuals of the age, would be, of course, France.
But that’s the problem in drawing these parallels, as I’ve been doing: they only go so far, and it’s really kinda silly to say, “Look, the US is just like Rome.” Which makes me ask: sure, we can learn from history — but how much? How far should the drawing of historical parallels go?
I would be considering the accuracy of historical parallels, but for petty political reasons I am reveling in France’s ascension instead. Aw, that’s a cute line, and the kick in the tail is that France has so little joy to expect from it.