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Post-Autistic Economics Network
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THE
PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT
Unreal,
man In the process it has
highlighted the self-perpetuating elite that runs the most influential
academic body in the subject, the American Political Science Association.
This counts among its luminaries Henry Kissinger and president George Bush's
foreign affairs adviser, Condoleeza Rice. The revolt has spawned scores of
email guerrillas, inspired by "Mr Perestroika", who protested
against the stranglehold of the rational choice theorists on academic
journals - and hence on hopes of tenure and promotion. But most operate
anonymously for fear of jeopardising their hopes of promotion and tenure. Rational choice theory -
the hottest thing in the social sciences - derives from neoclassical
economics, which political scientists cannot help but notice grabs lots of
Nobel Prizes. The theory deploys a set
of simplifying assumptions about human behaviour that boils down our
complicated lives and societies to prioritised "rational" choices
that we presumably make in order to maximise our "utility" in any
given situation. Rational choice, and
mathematical models that accompany it, undeniably have merits when used with
a bit of humility, especially in studies of collective action. But its
critics argue the results are often trivial or else fail to display even a
nodding acquaintance with reality. Last June, in France, a
"post-autistic economics" movement erupted in protest against the
excesses of formal economics discourses. Over 800 university economics
students and 150 professors signed a petition demanding reform of the
curriculum to incorporate a "plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity
of the object studied". Mathematics had become an end in itself,
resulting in an "autistic science with no relation to real life". In fierce counter-attacks
the leading figures in the discipline perceived, or tried to portray, this
revolt as doltish opposition to statistical techniques. The French government
appointed a commission to examine the issue. The movement quickly
spread to Spain and across much of continental Europe, and is making inroads
in the UK. French insurrectionists Gilles Raveaud and Ioana Marinescu
appeared at King's College, Cambridge University at a workshop chaired by
Professor Tony Lawson, whose book Economics and Reality is a favourite among
these dissidents. "The mathmaticisation
of economics is happening everywhere, and students are voting with their feet
and going elsewhere," says Lawson. The movement's aim was "greater
pluralism". Rational choice
practitioners quickly became notorious for forming potent coteries that
expanded their influence within departments in Britain. "The governing
principle in most sensible political science departments is that rational
choice theorists should be on tap but not on top," says the chair of a
top UK politics department, who prefers diplomatic anonymity. "They
should exist, be permitted to flourish, but never be permitted dominance.
Once dominant they are incapable of appointing other than their own: the more
vulgar they are the more this is true." In the United States the
movement ignited in political science, which has been eagerly aping economics
in its fondness for mathematical modelling. The American Political Science
Association had been taken over by rational choice exponents and its journal,
which is often a vital publishing outlet for aspiring academics, reflected
their views. The top echelon of the
association may write about democratic politics - but they don't practise it,
according to the dissidents who are now linking the dominance of rational
choice in political science to the absence of internal democracy in their
association. Under a cosy arrangement
an annually chosen president appoints his (80 times "his" versus
only twice "her") ruling council who pick the next president who
picks the next ruling council, and so on in a self-perpetuating process. "In an era that
values transparency, this looks like a glaring instance of a closed
process," observes Lloyd Rudolph, professor of politics at Chicago
University. Keep in mind, if national
security advisers are anything to go by, that the APSA gave us Henry
Kissinger, who remarked that the Chilean people had no right to elect a
socialist leader, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who cheered democracy so long as
the unlettered masses obeyed their betters and now Condoleeza Rice, who is of
much the same bent. The membership stayed in
line, although many alienated political scientists quietly dropped out, until
a clarion call came last November in a mass email. "Mr Perestroika"
- probably a junior faculty member - lashed out against "poor
game-theorists who cannot for the life of me compete with a third-grade
economics student" yet are allowed to crush "diversity of
methodologies and areas of the world that APSA 'purports' to represent".
Mr Perestroika became the scarlet pimpernel of the reform movement. Within a month of the
emailing, a movement of several hundred insurgent professors crystallised,
led by a committee of eminent scholars whom the association dared not ignore.
By January 222 tenured faculty mem bers had signed a milder perestroika
petition for reform, crafted by Yale's Roger Smith. This included 24 with
named chairs - ranging from Yale political ethnographer James C Scott to
Chicago University security specialist John Mearsheimer to Penn's semiotician
Anne Norton. The revolt transcends
familiar categories of conservative, liberal and leftist. "It's a wicked
coalition," says Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, distinguished service professor
at Chicago University, with a wry smile. "It is about getting pluralism
back into political science. Why does the Association of Political Science
Review seem so intensely focused on technical methods at the expense of the
great substantive political questions?" In a written response to
the perestroika manifesto, APSA representative Ada Finifter revealed her
belief that only personal ambition was at stake. She could not imagine why
signatory dissenters were griping since they are twice as successful as
anyone else at publishing in the review. She appeared oblivious to the
ominous ambiguity of claiming that all is well so long as scholars provide
"high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research
problem" - as if the definition of thoseappropriate methods were not a
major issue. A conciliatory APSA
recently announced the selection of a Perestroika-backed candidate as
president, Theda Skocpol of Harvard University. Even this move is viewed with
some suspicion. Might the APSA leaders calculate that Skocpol, despite being
renowned as no pushover, might be most easily co-opted into the
business-as-usual "East coast Brahmin" network and preserve the old
undemocratic mechanisms? (In a body where everyone has read their
Machiavelli, it is harder to be successfully Machiavellian.) Most dissidents are
willing to wait and see if Skocpol will carry out reforms that, as Mr
Perestroika put it, dismantle "the Orwellian system that we have in the
APSA and that we will see a true perestroika in the discipline". It speaks volumes that
many junior scholars are worried about revealing their identities in a
profession that purports to prize vigorous and open exchange. Yet APSA deputy
director Robert Hauck expressed great surprise that they needed to shield
themselves from reprisals. Perestroikans certainly
do not oppose formal methods or mathematical models, Susanne Rudolph
stresses, but rather their consecration as holy devices, squeezing out and
denigrating cultural, historical and psychological understanding. Like
Finifter, she agrees that the objective is to support "high-quality work
using methods appropriate to the research problem", but like fellow
Perestroikan Margaret Keck, and the Cambridge realist workshop, she believes
that the "problem should dictate the method", not the other way
around. The
ultimate aim is to improve democracy at large as well as within the
organisation. |