Knowledge, Class, and Economics
Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees
surveys the
“Amherst School” of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years
on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring
tensions. The volume’s 30 original essays refect the range of perspectives
and projects that comprise the Amherst School—the interdisciplinary com-
munity of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing
to interrogate and recast, the anti-economistic Marxism frst formulated
in the mid-1970s by Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their economics
Ph.D. students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The title captures the defning ideas of the Amherst School: an open- system
framework that presupposes the complexity and contingency of social-
historical events and the parallel “overdetermination” of the relationship be-
tween subjects and objects of inquiry, along with a novel conception of class
as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surpluslabor.
Readers encounter novel discussions of overdetermination and class in the
context of economic theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, continental
philosophy, economic geography, economic anthropology,psychoanalysis,
and literary theory/studies.
Though Resnick and Wolff’s writings serve as a focal point for this
collection, their works are ultimately decentered—contested, historicized,
reformulated. The topics explored will be of interest to proponents and
critics of the post-structuralist/postmodern turn in Marxian theory and to
students of economics as social theory across the disciplines (economics,
geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology,
political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, among others).
Theodore Burczak is Professor of Economics at Denison University and
author of
Socialism after Hayek
.
Robert Garnett is Associate Dean and Honors Professor of the Social Sciences
in the John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University, USA.
Richard McIntyre is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics
Department, University of Rhode Island, USA.
Economics as Social Theory
Series edited by Tony Lawson, University of Cambridge
Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics.
Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social
studies and of the types of method, categories, and modes of explanation
that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientifc study of social objects
are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the re-
lationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest
of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a
renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, com-
petition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organi-
zation, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth,
uncertainty, value, etc.
The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In con-
temporary economics the label “theory” has been appropriated by a group
that confnes itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical “mode-
ling.” Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the “Theory” label, of-
fering a platform for alternative rigorous but broader and more critical
conceptions of theorizing.
Other titles in this series include:
What Is Neoclassical Economics
Debating the Origins, Meaning and Signifcance
Edited by Jamie Morgan
A Corporate Welfare
James Angresano
Rethinking Economics for Social Justice
The Radical Potential of Human Rights
Radhika Balakrishnan, James Heintz, and Diane Elson
Knowledge, Class, and Economics
Marxism without Guarantees
Edited by Theodore Burczak, Robert Garnett, and Richard McIntyre
Knowledge, Class, and
Economics
Marxism without Guarantees
Edited by
Theodore Burczak, Robert Garnett,
and Richard McIntyre。