Mirowski uses this line, but I'll give you three guesses for who he's quoting here. Would you believe Carl Schmidt? I've got to say that seems sort of unprecedented in itself-who has quoted Carl Schmidt since the fall of the Reich?
He argues that NTC understands that 'you can't go home again.' Also 'To preserve the Regime the conservative must reconstruct he Regime.' The argument is that what he calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC) fights a much better fight than its opponents, partly because Left wing opponents who hope that 'a better world is possible' mostly have not this faintest inkling about how debt and vast the NTC really is
For many of us who wonder why for instance the American people believe so many schizophrenic totally contradictory things-the classic moment still being the Tea Party woman who wanted the government to keep it's hands off of her Medicare his answer is for one thing a very effective program of agnotology-ie, the deliberate fostering of ignorance, where only the market of Hayek's Spontaneous Order knows very much.
For a look at how contradictory so many Americans beliefs are see here
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/yes-gop-tactics-are-awful-but-do-they.html
For previous posts on Mirowski please see here
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/neoclassical-econ-microfoundations-and.html
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/mirowski-on-emh-resistance-is-futile.html
As you can see from the two links from previous posts on him, Mirowski is very critical of many attempts to critique Neoclassical Econ, largely because in his view the only way to correct grossly erroneous ideas like the EMH and DSGE is to accept that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater-that is to say, that the only way to truly get free of such Zombi ideas is to give up NC itself. The real problem is NC microeconomics and the requirement that you can't tell any kind of Macro story about the economy that doesn't pass a kind of performance review in Micro NC.
As I've mentioned before, there's a lot going on here, part of it not just on the content level but also in terms of form-in this sense it's also a Waite-y book (Geoff Waite). He starts out on the first page with a reference to Neoliberalism as personifying Nietzsche's Eternal Return. He later refers to Nietzsche as the Philosopher of Cruelty-in reference to the treatment of debtors by creditors-the student loans that literally follow you the rest of your life for starters.
Overall, he is pretty critical across the board. He makes it clear that he sees New Keynesians like Stiglitz and Krugman as more part of the problem than solution. However, he's also very critical of the would be anti Wall St. Left as well.
He has little good to say about Occupy Wall St. arguing the failure of the Occupy protests was thanks to them embracing the long discredited view that you can have sustained political action with no theoretical guidance or hierarchical organization of short to long term goals. Seems to me that this is part of what OWS took pride in-not having any theoretical basis and being truly 'leaderless.'
He also points out that OWS was the brainchild of Adbusters and its founder Kalle Lasn who described the OWS project as trying to sell 'ideas rather than products' and that 'the purpose of life is not to find yourself but to lose yourself.'
In many ways OWS saw itself as a 'cultural' movement but he argues that culturally they were much more Neoliberal themselves than they realized.
Overall, I certainly agree that the Right wing opposition-the NLers for Mirowski-are much more formidable than most so-called leftists realize. It certainly does seem that 'we can't go home again' in any easy way. As conservatives are the ones who ostensibly want to go back to the past, that's a pretty impressive insight for them.
UPDATE. I guess I should link to Mirowski again though I have in previous posts.
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Serious-Crisis-Waste-Neoliberalism/dp/1781680795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380054208&sr=1-1&keywords=mirowski
He has some great lines regarding OWS: 'Disparagement of government was one script pratically plagiarized from the Tea Party. '
He argues that NTC understands that 'you can't go home again.' Also 'To preserve the Regime the conservative must reconstruct he Regime.' The argument is that what he calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC) fights a much better fight than its opponents, partly because Left wing opponents who hope that 'a better world is possible' mostly have not this faintest inkling about how debt and vast the NTC really is
For many of us who wonder why for instance the American people believe so many schizophrenic totally contradictory things-the classic moment still being the Tea Party woman who wanted the government to keep it's hands off of her Medicare his answer is for one thing a very effective program of agnotology-ie, the deliberate fostering of ignorance, where only the market of Hayek's Spontaneous Order knows very much.
For a look at how contradictory so many Americans beliefs are see here
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/yes-gop-tactics-are-awful-but-do-they.html
For previous posts on Mirowski please see here
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/neoclassical-econ-microfoundations-and.html
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/09/mirowski-on-emh-resistance-is-futile.html
As you can see from the two links from previous posts on him, Mirowski is very critical of many attempts to critique Neoclassical Econ, largely because in his view the only way to correct grossly erroneous ideas like the EMH and DSGE is to accept that we must throw the baby out with the bathwater-that is to say, that the only way to truly get free of such Zombi ideas is to give up NC itself. The real problem is NC microeconomics and the requirement that you can't tell any kind of Macro story about the economy that doesn't pass a kind of performance review in Micro NC.
As I've mentioned before, there's a lot going on here, part of it not just on the content level but also in terms of form-in this sense it's also a Waite-y book (Geoff Waite). He starts out on the first page with a reference to Neoliberalism as personifying Nietzsche's Eternal Return. He later refers to Nietzsche as the Philosopher of Cruelty-in reference to the treatment of debtors by creditors-the student loans that literally follow you the rest of your life for starters.
Overall, he is pretty critical across the board. He makes it clear that he sees New Keynesians like Stiglitz and Krugman as more part of the problem than solution. However, he's also very critical of the would be anti Wall St. Left as well.
He has little good to say about Occupy Wall St. arguing the failure of the Occupy protests was thanks to them embracing the long discredited view that you can have sustained political action with no theoretical guidance or hierarchical organization of short to long term goals. Seems to me that this is part of what OWS took pride in-not having any theoretical basis and being truly 'leaderless.'
He also points out that OWS was the brainchild of Adbusters and its founder Kalle Lasn who described the OWS project as trying to sell 'ideas rather than products' and that 'the purpose of life is not to find yourself but to lose yourself.'
In many ways OWS saw itself as a 'cultural' movement but he argues that culturally they were much more Neoliberal themselves than they realized.
Overall, I certainly agree that the Right wing opposition-the NLers for Mirowski-are much more formidable than most so-called leftists realize. It certainly does seem that 'we can't go home again' in any easy way. As conservatives are the ones who ostensibly want to go back to the past, that's a pretty impressive insight for them.
UPDATE. I guess I should link to Mirowski again though I have in previous posts.
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Serious-Crisis-Waste-Neoliberalism/dp/1781680795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380054208&sr=1-1&keywords=mirowski
He has some great lines regarding OWS: 'Disparagement of government was one script pratically plagiarized from the Tea Party. '
No comments:
Post a Comment