Monday, August 24, 2009

Marxist Mondays

New York Times:

Among [Adam Smith's] more radical observations was that legislators tended to defer to those “masters” of industry, even when their aims would hurt the citizenry.

"Radical" is the observation that is not socially useful for the ruling class, Marx might say.

1 comment:

TM said...

He lost me at "indispensable". If Leonhardt could get beyond seeing intellectual history as an extended edition of Crossfire, he might mention that the Invisible Hand also appears in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's History of Astronomy. It's a metaphor for any obscure, unobservable, even merely presumed chain of causes. It's not "free market capitalism"-on-a-rope.