HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: DeLong: "The Economist as...?: The Public Square & Economics"
In which I defend economists against Alasdair MacIntyre, for we are the quintessential expression of his bête noire the manager; yet I think a John Maynard Keynes is vastly to be preferred to either a Leon Trotsky or a St. Benedict…
Time to hoist this from the archives!:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2016. “The Economist as…?: The Public Square and Economists”. In Desch, Michael C., ed.: Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 0268100241. Pp. 182-213. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Public_Intellectuals_in_the_Global_Arena/2FQFDgAAQBAJ>
Why is it time to hoist this? First, as a follow-up to my taking exception to Matthew Yglesias’s saying that the purpose of humanities departments, insofar as their undergraduate-education mission in American universities is concerned, should be to teach at least semi-triumphalist versions of: Hum 1 “Classics of Western Literature”; and Soc Sci 2 “Western Thought and Institutions:
And, second, because Henry Farrell on BlueSky crosses into my feed with a reference to a very interesting interview of Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre from 1991 <https://macintyrestudies.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/an-interview-with-macintyre.pdf>. And I feel like I should hoist my defense of economists against MacIntyre…
Now I should start by highlighting what Henry Farrell says, because it is 100% correct:
Agree or disagree with Macintyre, he has wonderful taste in literature (and I’d be fascinated to read him at length on Philip K. Dick)…. It’s the kind [of reading list] that makes you want to invite yourself to dinner at someone’s house so you can talk to them. Clearly, he’s not only Catholic but catholic… <https://bsky.app/profile/himself.bsky.social/post/3kkguzsexas2r>
What is the reading list? This, as his list of non-philosophical works:
Leav[ing] out the clearly borderline cases… [of] Dante, Jane Austen, Dostoievski, Kafka and Borges…. Books that I have read every twenty years or so: Redgauntlet, Women in Love, To the Lighthouse, among books that I have read more often: Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Tao-Birds, short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor and Mairtin O’Cadhain; among books without which I might well not have lasted out the last twenty years: Saichi Maruya’s Singular Rebellion, Randal Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, Robertson Davies’s Rebel Angels, Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail; among what I hope still be be reading twenty 73 years from now: The Táin Bó Cúailnge, Eileen O’Connell’s lament for Art O’Leary, Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero’, the poetry of George Campbell Hay, Sorley MacLean, lain Crichton Smith and Mairtin O’Direain; and of course a perpetual low-life diet of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, etc, etc, although perhaps reading them is still reading philosophy…
I do wish I were drinking a tenth as deeply from the Pierian Spring as MacIntyre does.
But then there are the other things in MacIntyre’s post-After Virtue writings that lead me to immediately think: BRAINWORMS! For he takes adoration of Hum 1 and Soc Sci 2 to the absolute max—to infinity, and beyond!: