The Complementarity of Means and Ends

Abstract

In his last two decades, Putnam turned with serious energy to reflecting upon the state of economics as an arena of inquiry. He marshalled a withering critique of neoclassical economics in terms of its confused and outdated positivist underpinnings, as well as its consequences for understanding human action. He also connected the prevailing theoretical accounts of economics to wider market forces undermining political practice in democracy. Our reading of Putnam’s critique of orthodox economics, and in particular the model of homo economicus at the base of neoclassical economics, brings to mind a diagnosis that Putnam made of an analogous but politically opposed reduction he had battled in his philosophy, a distillation of the social and political life of a society to its economic foundations. In his recent intellectual autobiography written for the volume on his work in the Library of Living Philosophers, he referred to activist fellow travelers he had been so familiar with over the course of a very politically engaged life as being tainted with the Marxist-Leninist version of this economic reductionism, and referred to the vision that grew from this ideology as a “terrifying sickness of the soul.” It is our contention that given the methodological confusions and practical commitments that neoclassical economics produces — its power in directing policy and the attendant consequences for democracy and the evaluation of our social processes — that this perspective also deserves serious consideration from a Putnamian and pragmatic perspective, to be classified as a similar “sickness of the soul.” Putnam characterizes this in two registers that give him the leverage to establish this diagnosis. First, a particular cast is given to the divorce of social inquiry — its methods and claims — from the common-sense realism of everyday life. Second, he connects this to the power of systems unchecked in their authority in democracy given this divorce and separation, specifically from coordinated practical coping among citizens in a common form of life.