Just about everyone I know has horror stories from graduate school
about perceived scholar despots, inner cliques, "old boy networks
etc". But that level gets us no where beyond anecdotes.
A few years ago Dave Colander and Bob Coats edited a book "The
Dissemination of Economic Ideas" based on a conference on the same
subject. Dave's idea was to move toward the development of a separate
specialized area within The History of Economic Thought dealing with
specialized study of the institutions, constraints, processes,
mechanisms, interests etc through which economic ideas and theories
are introduced, chocked off, modified, replaced, superceded and
spread within the profession. It involves sort of the economics
profession looking at itself and applying some of its own "axioms",
theories, constructs (e.g. homo economicus) to itself.
What comes through loud and clear is that institutions and
institutionalized paradigms whether left, middle or right do what
they do. In other words institutions, or dynamic complexes of
interrelated values, power structures, codes, constraints,
traditions, myths, symbols, rights, privileges, regulations etc serve
to structure human interactions, reduce risk and uncertainty, define
and reinforce the "sacred" paradigms and ideas while deterring and
sanctioning perceived subversive paradigms and ideas, legitmate and
reinforce dominant power structures and relations while neutralizing
threats to those structures and relations, propagandize, create
clones of those in power etc. That is what institutions do--among
other things--whether on the right or left.
There are "left radicals" and then there are left radicals. In other
words there are those for whom being a "left radical" is a total way
of life and way of seeing the world and there are "left radicals" for
whom being a "left radical" is a kind of specialized market niche
allowing CV building through "alternative journals" (and making those
alternative journals more and more like the "mainstream" journals in
which these folks cannot get published for various reasons), careers
with caricatures of the left (e.g. well paid bureaucrats in private
and governmental agencies "serving" the poor), comfortable tenured
positions that allow course developments based on the narrow and
often narcissistic research interests of the course developers (as
opposed to on the basis of mass interests or strategic issues in need
of detailed examination) and various forms of scholar despotism
and insider clique building much like those forms for which the right-
wingers in academia are famous--e.g. The Chicago School as a clone
factory.
What can we say. Ultimately it is not so much what one says what one
is as what one does and what one is prepared to risk when the chips
are really down. On the right or the left, that tells who is who and
what is what.
Jim Craven
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