Abstract
An idea has creative power. We see what we want to see. However, what we want to see is dictated by our ideas. Postmodernism attempts to widen our sight. Hermeneuts, Foucault, and Derrida want to cure people of naive realism. For them history is not dead. It is rather a kind of equivalent to the scientific laboratory. As such, history enables us to test different solutions invented in the past. History helps us to grasp things long forgotten. This function creates an opportunity to follow the way from human emotions to their rationalisations, and in consequence an important opportunity to learn something about human arrogance. In 1953 an economist W.S. Vickrey wrote: ‘Economic theory, in its purest and most abstract form, can be treated as a system of logic, having no more immediate ethical content than a proposition in Euclidean geometry’ [27]. The majority of economists are still thinking about economy as a logical play in which people calculate their activities with the accuracy of a robot. My proposal is to seek an antidotum to this attitude in the history of economic thought. This social science shows that in the past people used to think about economy in quite a different way.
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Rosicka, J. (1999). Scarcity Versus Fertility Two Ways of Thinking About Economy. In: Aerts, D., Broekaert, J., Weyns, W. (eds) A World In Transition: Humankind and Nature. Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0856-3_18
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