Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: WSJ on teaching economics

[Brad DeLong <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Well, both of those are things that I have been accused of
> misunderstanding myself, not least by you, so I am inclined to give
> W a large margin of error in his readings. There is room for
> difference of opinion on these topics...

There is room here for much more than a mere difference of opinion.
For someone to claim that they have the *correct* interpretation of a
book others have misunderstood because of "...Hegelian language...
his refusal to give a summary" or say "what levels of abstraction
he's going to be working at" it is pretty clear that *correct* has
lost all meaning. There are various rational reconstructions of what
Marx *ought* to have written: Devine's, Wolfson's, Elster's, Cohen's,
Althusser's, et cetera. But none of them is "correct."

Rational reconstructions are not *correct* interpretations, they are
*corrections*.


Brad DeLong