CIAO DATE: 3/99

Reluctant Campers Too Far From Home: The Enigma of Australia and New Zealand at the Close of the Twentieth Century _*

Michael McKinley

The Australia National University
Department of Political Science

International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999

Abstract and Prefatory Note

This paper is an attempt to psycho-pathologize neo-liberal economics, and neo-liberal economists through the literary device of satire. The argument is quite simple: neo-liberalism is a proven danger to the health — indeed, the lives — of the great majority of people who live on this planet. Since mainstream political-economic, and strategic discourse have proven themselves inadequate to the task of critique, this paper, with a little inspiration from Lewis Lapham, suggests another way — to send “humour on a moral errand,” to commit the crime of intellectual arson with the object of achieving or promoting “death-by-ridicule.” Though the empirical foci required by the panel in which this is presented are the neo-liberal regimes in Australia and New Zealand, the case being made, inevitably, is one applicable to neo-liberalism, per se.

It is, however, a long paper, and in the reasonable expectation that whoever reads it might not want to engage it in its entirety, may I suggest this guide. Part I (pp. 1-6) is merely an introduction which sets out both the organisation of the paper and a brief apologia for its form. Part II, The Antipodes in Cameo (pp. 7-40) establishes the presence of the insanity which masquerades as scientific rationality in Australia and New Zealand at the levels of modern consciousness (pp. 7-10), former colonies in modernity (pp. 10-21), and Antipodean political-economic theory and practice (pp. 22-40). Essentially this no more than sets out the intellectual framework which results in grievance, and which in turn provokes satire; for readers who have a knowledge of these areas, or who might be bored with the detail, some or all these pages can be skipped on the way to Part III.

In Part III, Economics-as-Mental-Illness (pp. 40-64), the national patterns of thought and deed symptomatic of insanity which were documented in Part II are interwoven with not only the various self-disclosures of madness in economics (pp. 43-49), but also with the various general and specific categories of madness (pp. 49-55), most especially the defining symptom of scientism, manifest in the envy of Newtonian physics and the appropriation of mathematics (p. 55-64) so as to produce the conclusion that economics / neo-liberalism, and mental illness / moral insanity are indubitably and positively correlated.

 

I. Introduction

For many years I have accepted as an article of faith that, in a full life one should wholeheartedly attempt everything at least once — with three exceptions: incest, line-dancing, and economics (defined as being, talking to, or thinking like, economists — which is to say becoming a subscriber to the discourse of neo-classical economics, regardless of whether this was the result of academic or professional instruction, or avocational bent). The reasons for the first two were always obvious but the proscription against the last mentioned eluded me. Until recently. And then, with the enlightening and liberating force of the metanoia, it, too, became obvious: they, and it, are, within the Galenic psychiatric tradition, ₁ and in differing degrees, autistic, compulsive, delusional, emotionally withdrawn, hallucinatory, isolate, obsessional; in a word, mad. Indeed, according to this tradition, it is now mandatory to preface any serious discussion of economics and economists with the form of words “let us assume a continuum of insanity.” ₂

Conceded immediately is the charge that such an approach breaches the principal criterion honoured in the best tradition of high scholarship, namely, that it should be unobtrusive. ₃ But equally, it must be understood that the charge is disingenuousness: it implies that unobtrusive scholarship will be accorded its merits. And perhaps it is, because it is generally the case in politics, global and domestic, that it is ignored. And if it bothers no one, why should it not be accorded the same status as, for example, conversational Latin — a subject dimly understood to reflect the lustre of historical, but certainly not current, relevance. Conceded also, is the risk which Gary Mongiovi outlines in the following terms:

The folklore of the market has so deeply penetrated our collective intuition that to doubt the rationality, desirability or inevitability of capitalism it to identify oneself as a naïve — or dangerous — eccentric. ₄

For all of that the particular nature of this inquiry is emboldened by the need to ask questions which mainstream international relations / global politics scholarship routinely ignores. At issue is the need to explain the perplexing and mysterious persistence — the enigma — of the economics community in general, and that of Australia and New Zealand in particular to proclaim the salvational ideology of neo-liberalism in the face of evidence that it is inimical to the interests of the great majority of citizens globally, and by extension, in both countries. Other, related, questions follow closely: why is that, in the midst of the immiseration that is occurring untrained, stupid people are getting rich while educated, trained, and skilled people are being laid off, in many cases never to work again; what does this tell us about the study, and pursuit of, wealth? Why is it that, in the midst of this immiseration, one of Australia’s leading advertising agencies, Lintas, developed an advertisement calling for recruits into the industry which featured the message you only need half a brain to get into advertising. ₅ (The significance of this claim in relation to economics will be dealt with below, in the discussion of schizophrenia). And why is it that I find more insight into the political-economic travails of Australia and New Zealand in the writings of Lewis Lapham, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Ellis than I do in the myriad offerings within the “unobtrusive” tradition?

At issue, therefore, is the need to psycho-pathologize economics in the hope that a more compelling understanding of the overall neo-liberal project which it serves might emerge. As (hopefully) indicated, the mode selected for this is satire, or at least it trends in the direction of satire — that which, through, sarcasm, irony, ridicule, and humour seeks to expose prevailing vices or follies. But it goes further, as Lewis Lapham has eloquently outlined. By provoking the “not-so-gentle smile” it seeks, variously and progressively, to send “humour on a moral errand,” to commit the crime of political arson, and ultimately, to effect “death by ridicule.” ₆ At the same time the particular nature of the satire employed owes much to the exemplum of the Middle Ages, a brief narrative or oral presentation intended to convince an audience; it uses rhetoric and narrative effects for the purpose of seizing the imagination on an important topic (then, salvation). In turn, it can amuse, but more often than not, it dramatises and terrifies, to impart a salutary lesson that change is imperative. In short, it fashions the weapon of speech into a thing that affords instruction, example, and moral reflection on matters of everyday life in an innovative way. ₇

Nor is this out of place today. Originally, the exemplum was directed the Albigensians (Cathari), who, in the name of purity of spirit, were opposed to the material world in a way strikingly similar to one of the Manichean divisions between modern economists. Thus we should note that the medieval heretics of southern France were hierarchically organised into “the perfect” (who practised a rigidly ascetic way of life and had direct entry into heaven upon their deaths), and the “believers” (who lived under less severe discipline), and that cotemporary economists — in particular econometricians — have found this a most desirable precedent. From within the profession, the respected econometrician, Edward E. Leamer, has emphasised the broad, unambiguous identification with religious belief and the clergy in his own area of specialisation, and, of more significance in the context of this paper, the no less clear dichotomy between a “celibate priesthood of statistical theorists (the “perfect” whose professional advancement is assured), on the one hand, and a legion of inveterate sinner-data analysts, on the other (whose professional status is somewhat problematic).” ₈

From these brief prefatory remarks it will be apparent that satire, even humorous satire, has a serious purpose which is at once derived from, and directed against, the lived reality of everyday life as experienced and otherwise known by the writer. After all, in the absence of religious disputes, fashionable travel literature, and the pretensions of the Royal Society, Gulliver’s Travels would most likely have gone down in literary history as merely a (perhaps) funny work of fantasy. It is, because of this, a dangerous recourse, as Swift’s biographies make clear: he is, today, seen as immoderate and simply too indignant, and the fact that ended his days under the care of guardians appointed by the Irish Commission of Lunacy is thought to be no less than his unnatural outrage at the governing conditions of his time guaranteed.

Accordingly, this account begins with a brief description of that reality in contemporary Australia and New Zealand; it presents, via three cameos, the intellectual and material conditions which give rise to the grievances which make the satirical turn necessary in the first instance. To this end, and first, Australia and New Zealand have to be understood as existing in a state of post partum anxiety based on a sense of aggravated dependence and uncertainty. In common, they share the fright brought on by the double bind of modern consciousness following Copernicus, Descartes, and Kant, expressed by Pascal as the “terror [of] the eternal silence of these infinite spaces,” ₉ and the susceptibility, under certain circumstances, to delusional behaviour. This, of course, is not peculiar to the antipodes.

At the same time, and second, Australia and New Zealand are, literally and ontologically, former-colonies-in-modernity whose fate, it seems, has been to experience further separations which exacerbate the above disposition beyond that initiated by the revolutionary trinity of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Not only have they undergone a post-colonial estrangement from Britain, but they have also found that, successively, in the aftermath of both the Cold War, and the Keynesian consensus which accompanied it, their place and role in global politics is, to say the least, unclear, where it is not obvious that it is, and will be, a reduced one. In brief, in a globalising economy, Australia and New Zealand are in the position of being nominally sovereign, independent countries that have recently discovered their irrelevance to the mega-trends of late-twentieth century regional, and world, politics, and conversely, the relevance of these trends to them.

The realisation that this is the case in no where more starkly presented than in the antipodean embrace of neo-liberalism — a demarche which constitutes the third and final contextual sketch and the perceptible indications of a (clinically) disordered mental state, albeit masked by denials that anything is amiss. Among the earlier, mundane symptoms of the conditions which will be diagnosed below was the process by which, in the late 1980s, the then Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, appropriated a suggestion by the then Japanese Minister of Trade and Industry, Hajime Tamura, that a regional forum for technical cooperation on economic issues be established along the lines of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), by transforming it, against the wishes of the South East Asian nations into a process for a future free-trade area. When subsequently the United States supplanted Australia as the principal advocate of a free trade bloc in what became known as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), despite a continuing lack of support bordering on hostility towards it, successive Australian governments maintained their essentially bipartisan position all the way through to, and beyond the political-economic disaster which is the on-going Asian Financial Crisis. ₁₀

Of greater concern is the now chronic susceptibility to advanced, doctrinaire neo-liberalism which, in both Australia and New Zealand, is symptomatic of a range of neuroses and psychoses of which denial and delusion are the most prominent symptoms. What is so often witnessed is the phenomenon, described by Carterette and Friedman, as the “Cocktail Party” Effect in which unwanted messages are rejected by the ears through a process which distinguishes signals by the locality and/or quality of the voice, the latter including, for example, the gender of the speaker. ₁₁ Accordingly, the documented pathologies of neo-liberalism — wasting effects, morbidity, and ultimately terminal nature — are ignored, and the behaviour patterns associated with them remain unreformed in spite of the advances in treatment which afford favourable prospects for remission.

As obviously warranted by the schedule of symptoms, the analysis then proceeds to locate them within the appropriate clinical categories of mental illness. Effectively, this is to return us to a reconsideration of the debilities of modern consciousness, almost as though, at each parting from certainty, whether it be from God and the Church, the Mother Country, the Cold War, or the Keynesian consensus, a form of fractalization occurs: the antecedent condition is equivalent to the dominant condition; it might not exactly replicate the dominant condition, but it will have the same general features no matter from what perspective it is examined. By this path we can take the insanity of economics seriously.

 

 

II. The Antipodes in Cameo

 

Modern Consciousness

To begin, we might understand that economics is not being singled out prejudiciously by this approach for the simple reason that, as a self-defined modernist discipline, it inescapably assumes the characteristics of that which called it into being. And because, under certain circumstances, insanity is an integral condition of modern consciousness, it is only appropriate that such a genealogy be acknowledged. To this end two of the more persuasive accounts of modernity are deployed here in the manner effected by Richard Tarnas. In the first instance he approaches the intellectual condition of modernity through the concept of the Post-Copernican Double Bind, which he says “brought forth what was perhaps the pivotal insight of the modern Mind:”

The Copernican shift of perspective can be seen as a fundamental metaphor for the entire modern world view: the profound deconstruction of the naïve understanding, the critical recognition that the apparent condition of the objective world was unconsciously determined by the condition of the subject, the consequent liberation from the ancient and medieval cosmic womb, the radical displacement of the human being to a relative and peripheral position in a vast and impersonal universe, the ensuing disenchantment of the natural world...... ₁₂

Moreover, because the Copernican revolution extended beyond astronomy, into philosophy and religion, it was, simultaneously, a “primordial event” and the “epochal shift and of the modern age..... world destroying and world constituting.” ₁₃ Where Copernicus initiated the estrangement of modern consciousness from a previously reassuring cosmology, Descartes’ ontology, expressing philosophically the “experiential consequences” of this divorce, provided the bridge between the former’s relativised universe and Kant’s epistemology which culminated in the “relative and unrooted” nature of human knowledge. Result: “the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with these compounded by the post-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence.” ₁₄

At this point, Tarnas, and this paper accordingly, suggest a “striking resemblance” between this state of affairs and the condition that the anti-psychiatrist, Gregory Bateson, also describes as a double bind, defined as “the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic.” ₁₅ [Bateson’s work was centred on the proposition that “family processes” — a schizophenogenic parent, for example, whose verbal assurances of love and care to her/his child are betrayed by the nonverbal context (hostile eyes, rigid body) in which the assurance is conveyed — can drive a child in the family to bizarre and incomprehensible behaviour]. Adapted to the plight of modern consciousness, the Batesonian formulation of the four basic premises necessary for the construction of a double bind are as follows:

(1) The human being’s relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to access the nature of that world accurately. (2) The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific metacommunication. (3) Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world. (4) Existentially, the human being cannot leave the field. ₁₆

Crucially, as Bateson discovered, serious psychopathological consequences follow from the pressure upon the human being to distort his/her perceptions of both inner and outer realities in order simply to cope. What impedes its remarkability is the fact that it is “less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal.” ₁₇

When the inner reality is distorted via the repression or denial of feelings, the resultant condition ranges from apathy to psychic numbing; if they are inflated, the emergent form is one of narcissism or egocentrism. Alternatively, the outer world will be accepted as either predominant and capitulated to as the only reality, or seen as an objectified foil for self-assertion. The strategy of flight provides a third escape — through, inter alia, the quite familiar avenues of compulsive economic consumption, cults, ideologies, alcoholism and drug addiction. And, where avoidance mechanisms prove unsustainable, a comprehensive catalogue of mental disturbance is required to detail the ensuing state(s):

... anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimization, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self-negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full-blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self-destructive violence, delusional states, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism.

The modern world, according to Tarnas, “knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and its social life is notoriously so determined.” Worthy of special mention in this context is the dominant university stream of analytical philosophy, which, accurately enough, he describes as “a severe obsessive-compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it right...” ₁₈ What is worse, and this is where Tarnas’s adaptation of Bateson is contributive to both a wider and more profound understanding of the psychiatric double bind, is the complicity of the modern human being in her/his own condition. This is to say that, unlike the helpless child who was Bateson’s focus, the modern human being has relentlessly pursued his/her emancipation from, and control of, nature through what is known as the scientific method. Explanations of nature are, therefore, required to be concretely, predictive, and thus, impersonal, mechanistic and structural. Extending these requirements further, the explanations on offer are necessarily “cleansed” of all human qualities. For all of that — indeed, because of all of that — the world remains uncertain and incomplete, an intellectually justifiable narrative based on the sanction of the intellectual tradition of the last 300 years, which is to say, according to the specifically modern cast of mind. ₁₉

 

Former Colonies-in-Modernity: Anxiety and Insecurity

Australia and New Zealand are not the same place; in geographical terms, twelve hundred miles of ocean separates them. At the same time, they are very much alike, even for people who live in, or observe, them at close quarters. The impression given, therefore, is sometimes one of closely related strangers in a relationship in which attraction and aversion are challenging each other continuously because neither geographic proximity, common historical experience, nor mutual affinity is able to overcome essential differences in identity. Thus, there are times when the dominant views in each country, particularly and recently on security questions, are shaped less according to the centripetal forces of being close together in the vastness of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and more by the defining dissimilarites afforded by the intervening Tasman Sea. In the context of this paper, however, it is the awareness of relatively identities rather than differences that most clearly come through.

Both countries, we should understand, share the Pascalian terror of the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces,” Pearson capturing it in a stark passage:

... caught between the mountains and the sea, never far from the silence of the bush and the stars, we are in the bland frightening witness of the infinite, and we haven’t created a social convention strong enough to reassure us. We live, as Anna Kavan said, “like reluctant campers too far from home.” ₂₀

Though also proclaiming themselves as variations of “God’s own country,” their mental state, both as colonies and post-colonial independent states, has seldom, if ever, given the lie to Kavan; rather, it has given rise to what Bill Pearson acutely identified as a “fretful sleep.” ₂₁ As colonists the dominant Anglo-Celtic populations experienced the triple estrangement of modern consciousness in ways unknown to the colonising power: cosmologically, they lived no longer at “home” but in a re-arranged universe; ontologically, they were neither inhabitants of the mother country, nor indigenous to their new land — they were colonists economically and politically compelled to settle and inhabit a foreign place; and epistemologically, that place was increasingly the perspective which revealed the world to them. They could console themselves that they resided in Utopia, but they were only etymologically correct: for all their contrivances that they were creating the perfect location, they were distant, isolated, and did, in fact, occupy no place. Had not Australia been described as terra nullius ? And had Samuel Butler, portrayed New Zealand as Erewhon (Nowhere backwards) in his satire on moral stagnation and hypocrisy? Australians and New Zealanders lived, therefore, (to borrow a term from an older colonial experience), “outside the Pale,” and they had, and could take, liberties accordingly. But this was because life beyond the Pale was essentially lawless, and colonists, though they were subjects, were not there afforded the protection of the realm. In all, advantageous conditions for the emergence and promotion of a more or less normalised paranoia within the compass of Samuel Johnson’s damnation:

Solitude is dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue.
Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, possibly superstitious and probably mad.

The clearest, general evidence that this was indeed the case took the form of trinity of hostilities — towards the indigenous peoples, the land and environment, and the surrounding region of Asia-Pacific. Put simply, the peoples were to be assimilated into the Anglo-Celtic culture (and in many cases were), the land was to be exploited (and was, in many cases to its lasting degradation), and the region kept at bay, used as a frontier, or, in later years constructed as a convenient, expedient market of last resort (as APEC was and remains). Standard imperial practice, bequeathed by Britain, and reinforced by a sense of isolation from the seat of empire, became the norm in the antipodes, indicating the habit of delegating to the reigning metropolitan authorities the nature and type of response to what were specifically local questions. Once learned, the reflex was seemingly incurable and little attempt was made to formulate legitimate and distinctly local methods of achieving an accommodation with either the world within, or the world without.

And this was a substantial tradition. As John Brewer’s paean to the “fiscal-military state,” The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788, illustrates, the country which colonised Australia at the close of that period was, by definition, war-like. ₂₂ In the 1740s the Royal Navy’s shipyard population alone (around 40,000 men) was greater than that of any contemporary British city with the exception of London. It was an establishment easy to understand: of the 127 years which separated the Hundred Years War from the Battle of Waterloo (1688-1815) Britain was at war for more than seventy. And, as Linda Colley observes, this was probably not surprising:

It was, in the main, exceptionally profitable war. Victories were won; invasions repelled; markets captures; and so many colonies seized that by the 1820s London controlled, at least in theory, one quarter of the world’s population. ₂₃

In the subsequent period (1816-1980) Britain fought 19 international wars, or more than one every decade and incurred nearly 1.3 million battle deaths. Put another way, the average intensity of Britain’s international wars, measured in soldiers killed, was 24 per cent higher than the total number of US dead in the Vietnam War (68,000 v 55,000) yet the former resulted from wars of an average length of only 22 months. ₂₄ Such was the “war-prone-ness” of one of the dominant powers in the international system as it sought to maintain or achieve its position, and such was the belligerent nature of Australia’s first “protector.”

Absent introspection, as the empire of Britain declined, no notable diminution in the enthusiasm for empire, per se, nor for subordinate behaviour, was in evidence. To the contrary, the record confirms an unbroken pedigree from 1863, when volunteers from New South Wales and Victoria were formed into regiments of the Waikato Militia to fight the Maori in what are now known as the New Zealand Wars, through the Sudan campaign, the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, Konfrontasi, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War. So successfully had the imperatives of empire been ingested that, on the occasion of the 1899 debate on the New Zealand government’s proposal to send a contingent to the Transvaal to fight against the Boers, an eminent Maori politician, Wiremu Pere, supported the motion despite the fact that he was convinced that Britain was in the wrong. His rationale was that, in national interest terms, this was the lesser of two evils, the greater being the possibility that Britain’s enemies, if successful in South Africa, might ultimately turn upon New Zealand. To this end, furthermore, he vowed to go the “assistance of my protector” with a privately raised force of five hundred Maori soldiers if the approval of the (predominantly European) parliament was not forthcoming, and subsequently, as a token of his personal commitment and conviction named one of his sons Baden Powell Mafeking Pere. ₂₅

Evidently, the mobilising power of empire that its claim upon body, soul, spiritual resource, and not least, the mind, was total. Where Ezra Pound would say of the dead in the Great War that they died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilisation,” ₂₆ and the greatest English language poet since Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, would question his the national myths and values he had celebrated with the question: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” ₂₇ Antipodean introspection was an irrelevancy, as J. D. Burns’ poem, “For England,” written upon the outbreak of World War I indicated:

“The bugles of England were blowing o’er the sea,
As they had called a thousand years, calling now to me;
They woke me from dreaming in the dawning of the day,
The bugles of England — and how could I stay?” ₂₈

Even after the war had claimed 64,000 killed, and 150,000 sick and wounded, many of them as a result of some of the most outrageous examples of military incompetence, the Returned Services League tried to have banned such “nauseating muck” as Robert Graves Goodbye to all That.

Not even betrayal in the course of World War II could provide adequate grounds for reconsideration. In the context of Australia and New Zealand’s vulnerability to Japan should the fortress of Singapore fall, Britain assured both that they would be “covered” by the Royal Navy. Indeed, in August 1940, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs sent what the historian David McIntyre described as a “remarkable document” to Wellington:

If... contrary to prudence and self-interest, Japan set about invading Australia and New Zealand... I have the explicit authority of the Cabinet to assure you that we should then cut our losses in the Mediterranean and proceed to your aid, sacrificing every interest except only the defence of the safety of this Island on which all depends. ₂₉

Similarly, as regards Australia, it is sufficient for current purposes to note that, in return for Australia’s commitment to Britain’s defence in 1939, the latter promised to defend Australia from any Japanese attack with little concern for the possibility of it ever being implemented. When, however, it was required to be implemented Churchill not only tried to prevent substantial American forces being set to the Pacific but even attempted to delay the repatriation of Australian troops to a country that was basically defenceless before the advancing Japanese forces. To the Australian (Labor) Government of the time the British decisions of 1942, which determined the fall of Singapore, and thus the peril, which Australia faced, were on “inexcusable betrayal”. ₃₀ To General Douglas MacArthur, the abrogation of British promises to the Dominion also comprised a betrayal. ₃₁

Betrayal, nevertheless, would seem to have been policy for Great Britain. According to papers captured from the British steamer Automedon by the Germans after they had sunk it off the Nicobar Islands in November 1940, the British War Cabinet had already abandoned any hope of saving Singapore and Malaya in the event of a Japanese attack and were communicating this to the Commander-in-Chief, Far East, Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. Churchill was not only aware that this secret would soon be passed to Japan but decided that the loss was so sensitive that it, too, was a secret, and so allowed Australia to continue pouring reinforcements into Singapore. ₃₂

Imperial folly, therefore, was even less likely of effecting a disinclination to serve imperial orders. The Anglo-French invasion of Egypt was supported by Australia and New Zealand with the former’s Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, advocating the use of force against Egypt, notwithstanding the opposition of the United Nations, and the latter’s Prime Minister, Sidney Holland, saying that New Zealand would stand by Britain “through thick and thin.” He added, “New Zealand goes and stands where the motherland goes and stands;” to which the soon-to-become Minister of Defence, Phillip Connolly, provided redundant reinforcement with the declaration: “It is good at times that the roar of the British Lion should be heard.” ₃₃

But Connolly was confusing “roar” with a last, anachronistic, nostalgic hurrah. Britain, since the fall of Singapore, and almost venerably so by 1956, was being commemorated on both sides of the Tasman as the first Antipodean-god-that-failed. Progressively since that failure, punctuated by the progress of the Japanese Army (many of them on bicycles) down the Malay Peninsula in just 55 days, Australia and New Zealand had entered into a security relationship with another Great Power whose international history, though not as extensive as Britain’s, was remarkably similar in character. To state the case most boldly the United States was then, as it remains now, “a country made by war.” ₃₄ Notwithstanding the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the US, by 1942, had established its credentials an enthusiast for the international system and its practices by its role in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and World War I. By 1980 the United States had managed to participate in eight international wars at a cost of nearly 700,000 dead. On average each war lasted longer (33 months) than those of Britain and resulted in a higher average of lost lives (83,000). ₃₅

Even if allowance is made for the analytical advantages which extensions of time permit, a pattern was discernible in the proneness to, and consequences of war for Australia’s protectors at crucial junctures in the country’s history — 1914, 1965 and at all times since 1945 in the case of nuclear deterrence and the Cold War. Thus there was an availability of historical data which to a lesser, but not a significantly lesser extent, confirmed the findings of a recent study of power, system membership, and patterns of war:

for the categories of all nations, major powers and minor powers, no statistically significant relationships were evidenced between past and subsequent war duration or war severity: the probable duration or severity of a nation’s next war is unaffected by the duration or severity of its last war......

....irrespective of the characteristics of past or current war behaviour, in the long run: a nation that fights a war has more than a one-in-three probability of fighting for over two years and sustaining over 15,000 battle fatalities; major powers are more likely to fight moderate wars....; major powers and minor powers have roughly equiprobable chances of fighting wars at short, moderate and long duration levels. Hence, it is concluded that a nation’s aggregate capability (ie power status) not its antecedent experience — is a determinant of the scale of its wars. ₃₆ (Emphasis added)

To interpolate the above, once committed to a war, states forget the past and need to learn anew the costs it will involve. Wars, in any case, tend to be long and expensive in human terms, and wars fought by major powers are particularly long and particularly expensive. From which it follows that minor powers aligned with major powers share the risks and eventually the significant costs of conflicts that are, at root, derivations from a status that is beyond them.

So it was that, just over a century after the first foreign military adventure, the tradition continued with the Australian desire for worthiness being manifest in initiatives which saw the Royal Australian Air Force fly missions into Laos and Vietnam long before a combat role for Australian forces had been authorised, the government urge the United States to escalate the war against North long before the US political leadership thought such a course necessary, and the insistence on Australian combat forces being involved in Vietnam without the governments of South Vietnam and the United States believing this was necessary or desirable. ₃₇ When Australia was appeased with a request to provide the troops that it had been begging to be asked for, the subsequent period in Australian foreign policy became notorious for the Prime Minister of the day’s encapsulation of it as: “All the way with LBJ.”

In one hundred and two years nothing, effectively had changed: Australian and New Zealand governments asserted the indivisibility of Australasian and British, and, from 1941 onwards, Australasian and United States, interests; the protector was to be served, at all times by practising its theories — balance of power, alliances, deterrence — and, when these failed, by the force of arms which was integral to them. It was as though the species of leaders in the two countries had, not by lobotomy but by an extraordinary ability to habitually neglect both critical and locally generated input, ensured that the cerebral cortex generated a totalising model of the world and the range of responses to it. An example of the effect of this upon the cognisance of spatial relations occurred in the course of Prime Minister Keith Holyoake’s 1969 justification for New Zealand’s minimal contribution to the Vietnam War on the grounds of the “logic” of geography; as was quickly pointed out by David McIntyre, it was curious reasoning indeed that allowed the country’s front line to be placed in South East Asia:

It is helpful to remember that London is closer to Hanoi than Christchurch is. Even Disraeli, who said that the “key of India” was Constantinople, never claimed that the outer defences of the Straits of Dover stretched to the Gulf of Tonkin. ₃₈

Embarrassing as public derision of this type could be, albeit for only a short time, the consolations were always at hand. Doubts and uncertainties were, for the most part, assuaged, at least to the extent that independent foreign and defence policies were foregone. So, too, were the needs to define a sense of purpose and to assume a humility in international affairs befitting two small powers in the South West Pacific. Strategically, culturally, and economically dependent as Australia and New Zealand were, they were afforded the chance to be loud in the company of preponderant power and seized it on every available major opportunity. ₃₉ Concomitantly, at no time did they learn that, in so far as the United States was concerned, they still occupied Utopia. Though they demonstrated their dependent and subordinate status heroically, their democratic character could induce a capricious intolerance in Washington: following the election of the Whitlam Labor government in Australia in 1972, the senior CIA analyst in Saigon was advised by his superior to treat his Australian counterparts “like North Vietnamese collaborators;” ₄₀ similarly, in the mid-1980s, when the Lange Labour government in the New Zealand implemented its non-nuclear policy, the country was, at the behest of the United States, suspended from the security guarantees of the ANZUS Treaty. ₄₁

Suggestively, then, it is difficult to believe that Australia and New Zealand are not troubled countries. They are so often at war that we are driven to ask whether they have been perennially under threat or, failing that, whether they are perennially aggressive countries. Yet these are questions seldom, if ever, asked. In turn, therefore, the reason for such an incuriosity needs to become a subject for speculation. The link, I would suggest, lies in the representation of them, by self and other, as dutiful, honourable allies throughout a past seen as a pageant of generally successful expeditions in great causes. Though there might once have been a time when this was to be expected, even if it was still not excusable, it had long passed by 1914. But reflex triumphed over reflection and self-doubt (if either existed), and immature nationhood. The temptation to assume an extravagant and exaggerated posture presented itself and resulted, perhaps not unnaturally, in what Peter Pierce bitingly describes as a “premature ejaculation of national prowess.” ₄₂

Other, unsettling questions come to mind at this juncture: what accounts for the refusal to learn in the face of extensive and, one would think, salutary, experience? Is it a matter of not wanting to know, or of being incapable to learn in the first place? Perhaps it is a case of only being able to learn one type of lesson? Alternatively, as intimated earlier, is it the consequence of a particular constellation of psychosocial forces, or might it be that the inquiry is more appropriately addressed within the province of medicine, and thus, understood as a matter of congenital defects in the associational areas of the cerebral cortex? To explore these questions with a view to a reaching a more reliable diagnosis than would be the case if only national insecurity is considered, it is necessary to turn to the thinking and behaviour which Australia and New Zealand exhibit at the juncture of politics and economics.

 

Further Symptoms of Mental Disorder: Antipodean Political Economy

It is, surely, axiomatic that the purpose of political-economic action by governments is the same as the purpose of political action more generally: to make things better, or to prevent them from getting worse, for the great majority of the governed. From this it follows that the adherence to theories and the pursuit of practices which do neither; indeed, which decisively achieve the opposite, give rise to a strong presumption of pathology. This is even more strongly warranted when the evidence for the efficacy of the change was threadbare to begin with, and when the behaviour in question has unambiguously passed from that which might be thought of as a reflex to certain stimuli — to that which is of a somewhat more deliberate and voluntary character.

Both possibilities may be applied to the Australian and New Zealand turn to the “new capitalism” in the 1980s, but the subsequent persistence with it indicates the seriousness with which these initiatives must be approached. Thus, notwithstanding the constellation of economic woes which beset them (and others more generally) at that time, and the consequent need for remedial theory and practice in their respective domestic economies, the “new capitalism” was, nevertheless, a strange corpus of political economic theory to turn to for them. In its skeletal form, the “new capitalism” embodies the assumptions, theories, constructs, and imperatives of neo-classical economics — inter alia, Rational Economic Man; the Market (and Marketization); Competitive General Equilibrium, Rational Expectations, the Non-Accelerating Rate of Unemployment; the necessary, positive, and universal relationship between Growth and Unemployment; Economic Forecasting; the Linearity of relationships, De-regulation, and Privatization. The scientific status of the overall understanding of these by economists being determined by their appropriation of the highest distillation of modern truth, mathematics.

Following the observations of Robert Cox, this approach is buttressed by a return to an early moment in capitalism’s past, that is, to Polanyi’s first phase — in which the state is not only “evacuated from substantive economic activity,” but also, by and large, is “reduced to the role of adjusting national economies to the dynamics of an unregulated global economy.” “Unregulated” in this context needs to be qualified so as to include the surrendering of national prerogatives regulating the mobility of capital and goods and services, but not of labour, which is to remain localised, or domiciled within the geographical territory of traditional nation states. This is the qualitative change which needs to be kept in mind when discussing the “new capitalism” as a global phenomenon: it is not that international, or global trade is without historical precedent — it isn’t — but, as Robert Heilbroner has discerned, there has been a fundamental transformation from a capitalist political world, dominated by state actors, which contained competing economies, to a capitalist economic world, in which states, though they are competing political entities, are also subordinate actors. ₄₃

Such a shift is, therefore, predicated almost exclusively on individual market rationality; as well, it is held to be desirable on the basis that it facilitates peace and the taming of the endemic anarchy in the international system; possible, because powerful, international and supranational, institutions have been established which reflect this optimism, and natural (as per the Thatcherite exhaustion), because “there is no alternative.” Unsurprisingly, the term neo-liberalism is one of those more frequently deployed to describe the theoretical and practical move to what is, undeniably, economic globalisation. ₄₄ Cox is correct, then, when he attributes to it a “distinct system of values, pattern of consumption, social structure and form of state.” ₄₅

And he is just as correct when noting its own distinctive “socially destructive consequences which are indicative of a mounting crisis in the global political economy.” ₄₆ Consider the brief, yet evocative vista of neoliberal violence summoned up by Ricardo Trumper and Lynne Phillips:

The neoliberal discourse is quite straightforward: it attempts to reinstate the discourse of the primacy of capitalism as a form of life and of economic policy. It does so by giving new breath to previously discredited theories of the advantages of unencumbered capitalism, of completely free markets, and of comparative advantages. As well, it champions the importance of reduced state intervention in the economy, the privatization of economic activities, and the cancellation of government-run social programs. It vehemently promotes the primacy and morality of competition and profit-seeking and equates freedom with freedom of ownership and business, while decrying unionization as a monopoly practice....

Put simply, neoliberalism theorizes and legitimizes the capitalist counteroffensive of local conglomerates and of neoliberalism — the rights of multinational corporations to do business anywhere regardless of borders, the welfare of the population, or environmental degradation. ₄₇

Certainly, on the one hand, it has constructed an entire discourse around the belief in the form of what Michael Pusey reports as “a Darwinist relation between system and environment.” In parallel, however, its refusal to adapt to its own assumption of scarcity with regard to the physical environment — indeed to the very environment itself — by advocating and pursuing infinite growth — creates not only a “violent rupture between nature and culture,” but the antithesis of the original, a “model of the self-destroying system.” ₄₈

But it is no different in the “inner environment” of the socio-political. It, too, is objectified, and its residual constituents from former times, such as “church, remembered inheritance, extended family, and neighbourhood,” subjected to the corrosive forces of neoliberal rationality in the assumption that their replacement, “the market,” will provide the same conditions, resources, and levels of social stability and meaning that existed previously. In all this is a virtually impossible task since it is among neoliberalism’s perverse achievements that it has managed to increase the a priori objective, wealth, while systematically reducing employment, adhering in the process to David Ricardo’s notorious 1819 absolute elevation of the former and disregard for the latter. Again, Pusey’s characterisation of this process is most salient and suggests that theory and practice require further investigation:

In setting itself into this relation between the economic system and the social environment, the state apparatus [promoting neoliberalism] takes on a form of rationalisation which looks more like aggressive nihilism than reason and which seems to endanger the reproduction of society itself. (emphasis added) ₄₉

The questions most pertinent, therefore, are not related to whether the relevant theories are being properly “applied” (since that would posit an insupportable disjunction between theory and practice); rather, the questions are these: what was, and is, the intellectual status of the theories of neoliberalism? And what consequences have been realised in their practice?

To avoid a comprehensive survey of the critical literature — a bibliographic exercise beyond the scope of this paper — a summary review might note that it is the distinction of neo-liberalism in general, and neo-classical economics in particular, to be almost totally repudiated, on both theoretical and practical grounds derived from their respective ontologies. Despite its scientistic appropriation of mathematics and physics for a period in excess of a century, it is neither a science of human behaviour, nor even an adequate, approximate description of everyday lived reality, either within, or between, states. Worse, it is so confounded by the stuff of everyday reality — time (including the sense of history, the historical record, and the future), irremediable ignorance, contested understandings, culture, society, and the state — that it disfigures its subject matter to the point where, rather than being a humanly useful guide to policy, it is a dangerous inducement to catastrophe. It thrives, however, under the dual imprimatur of being government-inspected and church approved. ₅₀

“Catastrophe,” immediately above, is used in the legitimately qualitative sense of describing the critical relationship between the onset of neoliberal policies and the disproportionate, significant, and deleterious effects they have upon the relevant societies, economies, and states to the extent that the consequences are seemingly discontinuous with previous developmental trajectories. Two continents, Africa and Latin America, both “beneficiaries” of instruction in free market economics, are now understood within the dominant discourse as irremediable conditions rather than geographic expressions which cover a multitude of humanity whose plight is both desperate and inextricably connected to the privileges enjoyed by the relatively few in the industrially developed world.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is the dynamic nature of the global distribution of wealth within, and between countries, regions, and hemispheres under regimes of economic globalisation which are generically (and euphemistically) referred to as “adjustment” programmes. On examination they reveal that, between the economic North and the economic South, the disparities are accelerating. In 1970, the richest one-fifth of the world’s population received 30 times more than the poorest, but, in its 1992 Human Development Report, the United Nations detailed that the ratio had blown out to a factor of 150. ₅₁ As Brecher and Costello report it, “the richest fifth now receive more than 80 percent of the world’s income while the poorest fifth receive 1.4 percent. ₅₂ At the personal level, the word “obscene” is unequal to the task of describing one comparison: the world’s 358 billionaires comprise a net worth of $USD760 billion, or the total wealth at the disposal of the bottom 45 per cent of the world’s population. ₅₃ In all, it is the depressing confirmation of a decade of research on the World Bank, which, in Patrick Markee’s summary, has shown that:

... structural adjustment programmes failed to increase GDP growth or foreign investment and only marginally increased exports. What they did accomplish, however, was a radical opening of developing economies to the world market, a general reduction in wages and protections for workers, and intensified poverty. ₅₄

Nor is this likely to change. Structurally and economically, it is precisely the outcome which the “rigid and rigidly orthodox, view of free-market, infrastructure-driven, export-oriented development” determines — so much so that it requires an inversion of the conventional understandings of what is under way; in the words of one World Bank critic, structural adjustment “isn’t a development strategy, it’s a corporate strategy.” ₅₅ Attitudinally, moreover, the World Bank is unrepentant: as one of its former vice-presidents expressed it, “you cant have development without somebody getting hurt.” ₅₆

Thus we find that the more recent 1996 Human Development Report not only confirmed earlier trends towards global wealth polarisation, but also evidenced stagnation, and even an unprecedented decline over 15 years, in 100 countries with a combined population of 1.6 billion — in other words, of a longer duration, and, in some cases. a greater intensity, than those suffered during the 1930s. In 19 of the 89 countries effected by economic decline, all of them in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central, and South America, per capita income has declined to levels lower than they were in 1960. ₅₇ And, though the Report advocates the rejection of these trends and their production of “ever more grotesque imbalances and inequalities” in the future, under the WTO, according to an OECD/World Bank study, precisely this outcome is assured as well: to the industrialised world will accrue 70 per cent of the additional income which will result from the trading regime it oversees, while some regions, Africa for example, by 2002, will actually lose $USD2.6 billion. ₅₈

“Africa,” as Robert D. Kaplan has astutely observed on the basis of a wide range of economic data and reports, “is falling off the world economic map.” Though it is inhabited by nearly 720,000,000 people, 13 percent of the world’s population, it contributes just 1.2 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, and the trend is a diminishing one. Even in the extraordinarily optimistic estimates of the World Bank’s long-term projections for African economic development, it will take 40 years for Africans merely to regain their 1970s income levels; if Nigeria is excepted, the period of wait blows out to 100 years. If sub-Saharan Africa is the focus, the figures are even bleaker: population grows at double the planet’s mean growth rate, while 28 of the 46 countries in the region have declining economies. In the 1994 Human Development Report, which rated 173 countries on the basis of literacy, schooling, population growth, per capita gross domestic product, and life expectancy, 22 of the bottom 24 countries were in sub-Saharan Africa. ₅₉

Latin America, though generally better-off than Africa, is nonetheless ravaged by what is described as the “worst plunder since Cortez.” ₆₀ Per capita income in 1990 was virtually unchanged from 1980 levels, the number of those living in poverty rose from 130 million to 180 million, and income inequalities worsened in the same period underlying the fact that underemployment and unemployment are rife. Even in the 1996 Human Development Report it is noted that income distribution improved in only three countries while it deteriorated in five. Accompanying these developments are the directly-related effects of poverty, itself but the intermediate, yet central, nexus between “adjustment” and pathology: death, in what can only be described as holocaust proportions; the rise of hunger and malnutrition; the return of serious diseases — tuberculosis and cholera — once thought to have been banished by modern medicines; and the rise, or re-emergence. of refugees, the internally displaced, and intra-state violence. ₆₁

Overshadowing all, however, is the death toll in the global South from the encroachments of globalisation: 13-18 million, mainly children, according to James Gustave Speth, president of the World Resources Institute; 12 million children under five according to the 1996 Human Development Report ; and at least six million children under five, each year since 1982, according to estimates by the United Nations Children Fund and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. ₆₂

By any ethical standard worthy of the term, therefore, the plight of Africa and Latin America requires serious redress but, if the Report by the US Presidential Commission On Integrated Long-Term Strategy, and more recent pronouncements by Jacques Attali, former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, are indicative of elite views over the last decade in the industrialised North, then quite the opposite is the prospect. The former, an apparently unanimous document was produced by a group of thirteen of America’s leading experts in global politics and strategic analysis — under the co-chairmanship of (then) recently retired under-secretary for defence, Fred Ikle, and nuclear strategist, Albert Wohlstetter, and including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P Huntington, Henry Kissinger, and generals Andrew Goodpaster and John W. Vessey in answer to questions posed by “the changing security environment” of the time. ₆₃ Appropriately, it was described by Paul Kennedy as “the one of the most important public overviews of what American grand strategy should be, as seen by its intellectual and policy-influencing elite, or at least an important part of it.” ₆₄ On Africa and Latin America, host to what Discriminate Deterrence describes as either “Third World Conflicts” or “low intensity conflicts,” the matter of their tragic economic, political, and social circumstances is simply not mentioned, either in themselves, or as a constellation of causes of the insurgencies, paramilitary crime, sabotage, terrorism, and other forms of intra-state violence. ₆₅ Rather, the concern is with these effects and, thus, their causes, as permanent, implacable, security threats to “US interests” which, over the long term, will need to be managed and/or ultimately defeated in a military sense. ₆₆ The notion that their resolution lies in radical economic reform and the establishment of regimes of real political and social justice, that the predatory capitalism which has determined so much of Africa and Latin America’s misery might be an appropriate site of investigation and understanding is totally absent.

In Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order, Attali voices essentially the same anxiety, albeit in the interests of “modernity” and the “beleaguered North,” but extends the logic as he makes the categories of threat more obvious. Africa is, thus, a “lost continent” while Latin America is undergoing a transformation to “terminal poverty.” To both continents, and to the South in general, moreover, he applies the same condemnation — “millennial losers.” But they are losers whose dispossession, envy, and consequent reactions — “true world war of a new type, of terrorism that can suddenly rip the vulnerable fabric of complex systems” — recall for Attali an historical precedent — “the barbarian raids of the seventh and eighth centuries;” implicitly, therefore, their condition is seen as both beyond hope and demanding of eternal vigilance. ₆₇ And, as with Discriminate Deterrence, it is the provenance of the pronouncements that is significant: Attali, as a leading French Socialist Party intellectual and member of the European policy-making elite, is not as Walden Bello makes clear a “reactionary” so much as a “liberal” who was, with relative ease, seduced into the belief that the interests of the “rich, white North” and the “poor, coloured South” are irreconcilable. ₆₈

East, and South East Asia, which prospered under various forms of state capitalism and protectionism during the Cold War, was, until recently, the converse case. Optimism bordering on euphoria prevailed, no matter the evidence in abundant supply of: anachronistic trading arrangements from the Cold War, industrial overcapacity, fixed exchange rates, high debt to equity ratios in the banking system, and “crony capitalism” — with its distorted incentives, lack of political supervision over, and transparency in the financial institutions, and prudential regulation. When, in the spirit of neo-liberal globalisation of the early 1990s, this constellation was intensified in some key components (de-regulation), and joined by the rapid and massive influx of global speculative capital, the conditions existed for a disaster should the capital, on understanding or receiving intimations of its vulnerability, exit the region in the same manner it arrived. Which, of course, after July 1997, it did, provoking crises in both the having dire consequences for not only the region’s financial sectors, but, more importantly, its “real economies” and, thus, its social, cultural, and political structures. Moreover, in time, these effects spread into the global economy in such a way that the fullness of their depredation is yet to fully disclose itself. ₆₉

Elsewhere, and without in way attempting to equate suffering in the Third World with that in the developed/ industrialised countries of the West, the debilitating vectors in those countries which practice neo-liberalism are constant in direction, if not magnitude, as evidenced by the two countries which are its principal protagonists, the United Kingdom and the United States: diminishing levels of democratic government, pockets of the Third World in the First — impoverishment, immiseration, under-employment, and intractable levels of unemployment, decreasing levels of pay accompanied by increasing levels of work, erosion of the social safety net, increasing disparities in the distribution of wealth, indebtedness, hunger, homelessness (or inadequate habitation), crime, economically-determined sickness and morbidity, infringements of the right to organise and to a safe working environment, environmental despoliation, — in all, a ringing confirmation of Brecher and Costello’s “race to the bottom” which consummates the requirements of neo-liberalism. ₇₀

In Australia and New Zealand the trends are not, nor can they be, significantly different. In the former, any number of so-called “objective economic indicators” can be referred to as positive evidence of a successful economy in transition. Yet, at the same time, economic, political, and social research reveals that, since 1994 at the latest, successive Australian governments have abandoned, in any meaningful sense, the objective of full employment; indeed, the most favourable outcome promulgated (in 1994) was an unemployment rate of 5 per cent for the year 2000. In reality, since 1983, the figure has tended to hover around 750,000 — in current terms, a rate of 8.5 per cent. Among young people it is between 20 and 25 per cent. Those in work have, however, experienced the consequences of the structural changes to the Australian economy effected by economic globalisation: they have shifted from relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing (itself increasingly dominated by a small number of large businesses) to low-pay, part-time, non-unionised, casual positions in the service sector of the economy where they are subjected to unregulated and often exploitative working conditions resulting in rising numbers of workers suffering from stress-related illness as their work undergoes “intensification.” Their life, accordingly, is one of insecurity, personal depression, and social alienation. Conversely, Senior executive’ salaries and profits have not only risen, but in many cases, have risen exponentially as a factor of declining workers wages.

Chronically, what has emerged is a society characterised by rising poverty, inequality and a class frequently described as the “working poor.” Reflected geographically this trend has become pronounced to such an extent, and over such an extended period, that two scholars, Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter, have appropriately described it as the “ghettoisation of Australian society.” They conclude that:

Income distribution has become more unequal and the change is extraordinary. There is a significant increase in the geographic polarisation of household income across Australia. The poor are increasingly living together in one set of neighbourhoods and the rich in another set. The economic gap is widening. ₇₁

In the public sector, consistent with the tenets of neo-liberalism, and the ensuing policy of deferring to the global financial institutions and the ratings agencies, dramatic reductions have taken place in Commonwealth government spending on health, education, labour market, and social programmes, with women, indigenous peoples, and recently arrived migrants being the worst effected.

What is so striking about so many of these developments is the way in which they are asserted without apology, let alone serious critical challenge in national public life. In the global competition for investment, it is argued, it is simply unacceptable to the relevant institutions to do so, and therefore, counter-productive. Thus the current Prime Minister, John Howard, is on record as saying that the forces of economic globalisation are “irreversible and unstoppable,” but since he also believes that they will promote economic growth he saw no reason to lament this inevitability on the grounds that, in turn, it would produce “a contented community.” And, following his lead, some would be especially contented: the director of a firm of “remuneration consultants” was able to defend the seven-figure salary packages of her client-executives with the claim that “traditional Australian egalitarianism and views of fairness are not what is needed today... because the race to prosper in a more competitive world [is] endless.” ₇₂

As regards New Zealand, virtually everything in the above applies, generally, and to a greater or lesser extent, than it does to Australia. This is particularly the case as regards unemployment, poverty, inequality (and illness related to these factors), spiralling crime rates, and bitter racial divisions. In the worst cases this was no doubt due to the fact that the nature of New Zealand’s turn to neo-liberalism was similar to the structural adjustment programmes traditionally implemented at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the countries of the Third World. Appropriately, therefore, David Lange, Prime Minister at the time of the neo-liberal revolution noted its costs in this fashion:

For people who are disabled, limited, resourceless, uneducated, it has been a tragedy. ₇₃

In answer to the question “how could all of this be allowed to happen?” a charitable assessment might fall back on the type of autopsic arguments which, for instance, James C. Thomson, Jr. relied upon to explain how policy-makers who were presumably not on psychoactive drugs, yet were of “superior ability, sound training, and high ideals” could create the costly and divisive policies which defined the United States war in Vietnam. ₇₄ Transposed from a geo-strategic, to a geo-economic, setting, we would, therefore, pay due deference in the first instance, to the legacy of Keyenesianism as seen through a neo-conservative, revisionist optic which focuses exclusively on its failures, some of which undoubtedly were real, and many more which were just as undoubtedly products of the imagination. At the same time, we would also need to acknowledge the three informing perceptions in policy-oriented circles — of the world as a being constituted by a monolithic economy; of that the threat posed to that economy by any arrangements other than those of a neo-liberal character; and of the essential irrelevance to that economy of the various historical, cultural, and political differences which exist between and within states. ₇₅

In the contemporary period the explanation would be equally forgiving in its attempts to excuse on the basis of good intentions: executive fatigue, the curator mentality of the policy-originators, and the confusion over exactly how to transit to a neo-liberal society could all be adduced to this end. So, too, could the somewhat less worthy, but totally human less habits which are inescapable in any government service — wishful thinking, bureaucratic detachment, crypto-racism, and the problem of overselling the objective because it is deemed to be so desirable, this last-mentioned being spectacularly in evidence in the Thatcherite denial, “There Is No Alternative.” ₇₆

Dissent and countervailing advice from acknowledged experts are accordingly, unrealistically anticipated. Where it is culturally, politically and historically informed, it is, by definition, irrelevant to an economic (and, therefore, putatively scientific) enterprise; on the other hand, as no global neo-liberal regime had ever existed before, those in charge have no reliable record, let alone body of experience to guide them either — indeed, the record is, overwhelmingly, to the contrary in its conclusions. Dissent, therefore, has to be managed out of the prudential consideration that appearances of inclusiveness are important, and to forestall or counter the possibility that real critique might emerge from banished dissenters. For their part, dissenters are seduced by their internalization of the “effectiveness trap” whereby they remain if not personae muta, then at least in a state of domestication which allows them to maintain a sense of righteousness in the face of the mainstream consensus corresponding to the government’s sense of virtuous tolerance. Thus preserved is that “mysterious combination of training, style, and connections” which gained them entry to government as a protagonist in the first place, and the hope that, in some unspecified future, they will be returned to their former lustre and appeal. In all of this, public relations usurps policymaking.

The consequences which flow from these factors are almost inevitable. Absent the critical or resistant influences upon policymaking, the potential for persistent and repeated miscalculation on the part of those who can see only, and therefore seek only, a neo-liberal economic solution, has been realised time after time. For all of that, however, the myopia is so pronounced that no juncture, no matter how desperate it might be, it recognised as an opportunity for disengagement; on the contrary, the curatorial mentality ensures that such opportunities are represented as underlining the need for a more rigorous application of the universal principles which neo-liberalism is thought to embody. Neo-liberalism reflects nothing if not a missionary impulse to marketize the world through a radically new doctrine, and under the guidance of a new breed of ideologues see economic globalisation as a Darwinian contest. ₇₇

To accept Thomson’s account, or rather, to accept as legitimate an account which assumes “superior ability, sound training, high ideals” when these are the very attributes of policymakers which are most in doubt. is, however, not only to accord it excessive good faith, but also to be seduced by the “tragic” component of David Lange’s answer. It is to propose, in the first instance, that something other than catastrophe can result from a wilfully ignorant and dehumanised economics, and secondly, that there is something heroic about aggressive nihilism bordering on genocide (“tragedy,” in the Aristotelian sense, being the change in a hero’s fortunes as a result not of some vice and depravity, but of an error of judgement). To say the least, it is difficult to see how the executors of neo-liberalism qualify as heroes, or victims of misfortune. Indeed, if we recall Tarnas’s argument (introduced in Part II) that the modern human being (of which economic policymakers are examples) has “actively engaged and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity” that has demanded the very impersonal, mechanistic. and structural conditions which constitute neo-liberalism as a pathology, then there is scope for understanding that pathology as resident not in some externally-deferred-to reality “out there” (the bureaucracy, the market, etc.) but in the recesses of the policymakers themselves.

 

 

III. Economics-as-Mental Illness

By way of introduction to this stage of the argument, a few qualifications are in order. First, it is not asserted that all economics presents as mental illness; correspondingly, neither is it asserted that all economists — defined loosely as people (business people, academics, policymakers, market analysts, etc.) who practice the discourse of economics — are mad. Rather, rigour demands that the proposition in this paper embraces only the claim that neo-liberalism, with its core of neo-classical economics, is symptomatic of insanity, and that, accordingly, a strong presumption of insanity attaches to practitioners of this discourse. This might seem a redundant qualification, but it is a necessary one never the less because of the universalising habit of economists to allow to stand, and even to promote, the notion that the category of “economics” is exhausted by the currently globalising version of capitalist economics (which itself is currently dominated by neo-classicism). Second, for all practical purposes, and certainly for the purposes of this paper, there is no need to distinguish between Australian and New Zealand neo-liberal economists and neo-liberal economists in general: as subscribers to the same ideology their characteristics are identical.

This noted, it is also necessary to embed economics within the conditions of modern consciousness which Tarnas elaborated, and which, as I suggested earlier, can be understood as a fractal. Thus the double-bind is rediscovered in a particular form in that discipline, and virtually in front of our eyes, or at least on the basis of a short-term acquaintance. We find in Joan Robinson’s seminal work, therefore, an argument which advances the thesis of economics-as-mother: individuals, on finding themselves exposed to the unblinking scrutiny of the Market, suffer from such a post-partum anxiety from tradition that their recourse to the all-encompassing certainties of neo-classicism is to be understood as a return to the security once offered by the womb. ₇₈ Batesonian schizophrenogenic conditions are then manifest in the economists’ vital dependency on the Economy (Market) whose communications he/she must assess accurately; the contradictory or incompatible information received from the Mother (Economy) at different levels (ie the fact that reality does not conform to theory); the lack of abilities and opportunities for clarification that might resolve the contradictions; and finally, the impossibility of the economist escaping the relationship with the Mother (Economy).

One example might suffice at this point, drawn from the great exemplar of capitalism, the United States when it was undergoing continental expansion, because it is able to indicate that important developments in economic thinking were inseparable from endemic Batesonian conditions, in particular anti-intellectualism and violence, both significant precedents for neo-liberalism if ever there was one. We find, then, that John Bates Clark, the country’s metaphorical father of neo-classical economics, turned from ideas equated with socialism to equilibrium theory and the celebration of capitalism as much because of the escape it provided from both the need for worker-revolution (in his view) and the conservative reaction to leftist social thought, as he did because of its intellectual rigour. To this end his university appointments and standing were secure in comparison to others, such as Richard T. Ely and Henry Carter Adams, whose oppositional Christianity and more extended advocacy of socialism he actively discouraged and cautioned them against on pain of the harassment they duly received in their university posts until such time as they capitulated to the paths sanctioned by American Exceptionalism. ₇₉ But the condition of succour was intellectual disfigurement: as he freely admitted, in order to maintain the concordance between American Exceptionalism and an American political economy undergoing destabilising change, he put “ actual changes out of sight, intentionally and heroically ”. ₈₀

Later, Richard Hofstadter, from an historical perspective, drew conclusions which captured the contradictions in which Clark, Ely, and Adams, as ostensibly free intellectuals, were confined: “business in America at its highest levels appealed not merely to greed and the lust for power but to the imagination; alluring to the builder, the gamester, and the ruler in men, it offered more sport than hunting and more power than politics.” ₈₁ Moreover, if John Maynard Keynes is an accurate chronicler of his times, the financial sectors of the U.S. and Britain in the 1930s were little different, as Paul Ormerod reports:

Many individuals attracted to these markets, Keynes argued, are of a domineering and even psychopathic nature. If their energies could not find an outlet in making money, they might turn instead to careers involving open and wanton cruelty. Far better to have them absorbed on Wall Street, or in the City of London than in organised crime. ₈₂

It is little wonder, on such evidence, that self disclosed insanity, even psychopathy, within the profession of economics is, if not common place, at least, frequently commented upon.

 

Self-disclosures of madness in economics.

More prosaically and typically, however, the mode of self-disclosed insanity in economics has taken two forms evasions-through-denials, such denials covering a spectrum from the methodological to the quintessentially human, and dementia in the market. The former is well defined by the extension of Hahn’s injunction to avoid the discussion of mathematics in economics to the more encompassing realm of methodology, or philosophy, in economics. It is variously, seen as either a “waste of time,” or contrary to common sense; in either case, methodology is discouraged “explicitly and boldly.” As well, there is a “clear reluctance” on the part of mainstream economic journals to publish articles in the area, and funding agencies to underwrite relevant research. As Lawson writes of the situation in the UK, “the training currently provided and recommended for economics students tends to be more or less devoid of any explicit methodological content.” ₈₃ Given the insubstantial nature of its foundations this might be thought an appropriate response, a method of avoiding an embarrassing acquaintance with doubt, akin to those communities and societies which discouraged their lower echelons from acquiring excessive education for fear that it would encourage challenges to the established order by redistributing knowledge, and hence, power. Indeed, the degree to which mainstream economic analysis excises from its professional deliberations the inescapable context of its being recalls John Ralston Saul’s view that its “greatest desire is to generalise and institutionalise a syndrome resembling Alzheimer’s disease.” ₈₄

The travesty only continues when recourse id has to the expanded critique of Homo Economicus from the standpoint of a feminist understanding of economics. To this end there is a need, in the first instance, to understand it as a male-dominated-discipline, a discipline which faithfully, but mistakenly, extends the masculinised world view which overtook science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surveying the aspirational literature of the time by such luminaries as Henry Oldenburg (an early secretary of the Royal Society) and Francis Bacon, as well as offerings which represent the historical development of economics, and then drawing upon numerous recent analyses employing literary criticism, historical interpretation, and psychoanalysis, Julie Nelson produces abundant proof of both the gendered nature of Cartesian thought and the “identification of science with masculinity, detachment, and domination, and of femininity with nature, subjectivity, and submission...” The critical issue of individual choice illustrates this character admirably: the material world, and the existence of real persons and things within it — such things as childhood, bodily needs, human connectedness, and nature — are displaced in favour of the detached cogito, possessed only by man. ₈₅ Such a theoretical eccentricity then isolates economics from one of the most easily verifiable facts of life, as expressed by Diana Strassmann: “human beings begin (and often end) life in a state of helplessness and unchosen dependency.” ₈₆

Whether as a consequence of this orientation, or other factors, it is nevertheless the case that male domination of economics is also in evidence demographically. At the mundane level of awards it can be gauged by “the extent to which women have been absent from the ranks of prestigious economists who have played a significant part in shaping the discipline” and, more widely, by the under-representation of women among those who receive advanced degrees in economics, or who are appointed to the faculties of colleges and universities, especially to senior positions. ₈₇ Further testimony in support of the general proposition appears to be manifest in a recent claim by a leading philosopher of economics, Donald N. McCloskey:

It is a fact that there is not a single prominent economist who is also an avowed homosexual, although, given the reported percentages of men and women with homosexual experiences, there must be hundreds upon hundreds of gays and lesbians in our field. ₈₈

What McCloskey is raising in this unusual critique, (the moreso because, within it, he announces his intention to become, “under medical supervision,” a woman) is that the discipline to which he has given his professional life is, prima facie, a discipline of oppressive silences. It demands, or easily imparts the requirement, that the subjective “I” exist in straitened conditions if that identity needs to be understood in terms which it has decided are feminine — bodily needs, human connectedness, and nature. As Donald/Deidre contemplates it: “It makes you wonder whether a discipline that ignores love and friendship might be a little nuts.” ₈₉

The gendered nature of economic thought which follows from the gendered nature Cartesian thought provides little support for those who would defend economics against McCloskey’s suggestion. Indeed, one of the most immediate consequences of this genealogy ought to be the replacement of Homo Economicus with Vir Economicus. The explanation here is simple: although the former literally means “economic human,” the gendered nature of economics demands that a more accurate, or more truthful term be used to cover the male-dominated phenomena in question: the suggestion, accordingly, is the latter, where vir is the Latin word for “male adult” or “husband.” ₉₀ Deploying the term Vir Economicus would, therefore, capture the stereotypical male celebrated in market economics: “rule-driven, simplemindedly selfish, uninterested in building relations for their own sake. A cross between Rambo and an investment banker...” ₉₁

Meanwhile, economics continues to make women invisible through an incomplete treatment of the economy in which women as subjects of economic study are absent, through approaches which are blind to the family and household work, two areas in which, traditionally, women, as uncompensated domestic labour, are economic producers, but within a social, rather than an individual framework that requires the particular models in use to exclude them. And this says nothing of the need to not only include women, but to do so in terms of the contexts in which they are most likely to be located — dependence, interdependence, tradition, and power (although these same dimensions could, with advantage, be introduced to mainstream, male-oriented economic analysis). ₉₂ The partiality of the dominant mode of economic representation, therefore, is incomplete, but it is more than that as well: it is preferential and, in the injury it does to women’s labour, vicious. It compounds their degrading within Cartesian science with the arbitrary refusal to hear, see, and speak the obvious role of women in the economy, an inclusion which, as Block argues, radically potentialises economics as an area of social inquiry. ₉₃ Moreover the self-absolving plea that the assumptions of economics are only assumptions, and relatively innocent ones at that, fails, as Diana Strassmann demonstrates, because these same assumptions disguise the value judgments inherent in the decisions, policies, and ultimately, the views of the world and the material conditions, which flow from them. ₉₄ In the denial of this nexus is found another instance of the confusion between the popular addiction to a narrow self-knowledge framed by professional self-consciousness, and a deeper awareness of the self and its relations afforded by an understanding of the origins of historical and social habit — a refusal which, far from being harmless, not only affirms (Lord) Thomas Balogh’s rebuke that “[t]he modern history of economic theory is a tale of the evasions of reality,” ₉₅ but also recalls Jung’s verdict that it “adds stupidity to iniquity.” ₉₆

For a mainstream international relations audience reared to forgive, and even to revere, the intellectual meanderings of Samuel P. Huntington, and thus his lament for the decline of authority, and the public’s willingness to challenge “ the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception,” much of the above might seen as the all-to-be-expected grievances which “ minorities” and “ special interests” articulate within the “ democratic distemper.” ₉₇ In which case it is appropriate to note that one of Huntington’s Harvard colleagues, the renowned economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, has identified madness as a common feature resident in the great speculative episodes of the financial markets over the last three centuries. Not only does he survey the more notorious disasters they have witnessed, he is able to account for the generational recidivism involved only by recourse to such terms as “ recurrent speculative insanity,” “ speculative dementia,” “ mass insanity,” “ mass escape from reality,” “ mania of speculation,” and “ serious commitment to error.” ₉₈ To this end he has also provided a rudimentary typology of the three underlying causes of the condition — euphoria (“ the mass escape from reality”); the extreme brevity of the financial memory; and the specious association of money and intelligence — and the dominant types of dementia operating on each occasion — individual, institutional, collective, and compelled. ₉₉ So profound, and so permanent are these features that prognosis is easily forthcoming: within the bounds of the economic culture in question, it is incurable, for two reasons:

In the first place, many people and institutions have been involved, and whereas it is acceptable to attribute error, gullibility, and excess to a single individual or even to a particular corporation, it is not deemed fitting to attribute them to a whole community, and certainly not to a whole financial community.

The second reason that the speculative mood and mania are exempted from blame is theological. In accepted free-enterprise attitudes and doctrine, the market is a neutral and accurate reflection of external influences; it is not supposed to be subject to an inherent and internal dynamic of error. This is the classical faith. ₁₀₀

To summarise, self-disclosure reveals the socially pathetic condition of a community who forgot life’s address. Clinically and more significantly, it records the chronic and general presence of mental illness in neo-liberal economists. Though, occasionally, their belief systems and behaviours are those also found in the syphillitically brain-damaged (in the period of quaternary or neurosyphillis), the absence of both physical evidence — chancres, lesions, and damage to the skin, lymph nodes, mucous membranes, cardiovascular and central nervous systems — and any evidence that it is sexually, or congenitally, transmitted, or even contractible via wounds, requires that this explanation be abandoned. We never the less need to explain what is, beyond all doubt, a dangerously altered state inducing abnormal levels of commitment and claim, the veneration of the market suggesting a possible approach: it is at least mildly and interestingly suggestive of paranoia since, although it does not embody claims of intercourse with God, it clearly embraces claims of constant communication with It. To this task of a more detailed and more nuanced understanding we now turn to the various categories available in psychiatry and psychology.

 

Economics by category of madness: from the general to the specific.

The immediate problem we face in this venture is the richness of the possible categories of mental illness in which we might locate neo-liberal economists. As seen through their denials and evasions, they are clearly delusional in their construction of a reality which is radically incomplete as the basis of an explanatory and predictive science. Moreover, unlike normal beliefs which are modified in the light of experience and information, neo-liberal beliefs are held despite all evidence and arguments brought against them; as well, it is not uncommon for them to constitute a coherent system. Furthermore, they are to be distinguished from simply over-valued ideas and beliefs (which can be found in “normal” scientific communities) by the reaction of their adherents to challenges — whereas the former tends to provoke anger, the latter, indicative of pathology, tends to bland or otherwise inappropriate responses. ₁₀₁

At the same time, the obsession with abstract formal models and mathematics, the compulsion to marketize the world, the phobias concerning non-market alternatives, and the less well-published, but long-established, condition of erectile impotence require neo-liberals to be understood as neurotic . ₁₀₂ As noted earlier, these habits are both maladaptive and distressing, yet, strangely, more or less fixed and resistant to modification, through processes of learning which are available to the community at large. ₁₀₃ Since current investigation of neuroses turns on the study of mental mechanisms, and their origins in past experience and current behaviour, those of economists seem most likely to be the result of disciplinary training undertaken at the university level, reinforced by subsequent professional economic life and its imperatives. Fortunately, however, the full-blown obsessive-compulsive neurosis is relatively rare, being usurped by the simple obsessional personality found most commonly in certain scientists, typesetters, proofreaders, and clerks of an excessively orderly disposition (the anally retentive). But where “normal” daily life is dominated by ruminations about abstract problems and the manipulation of words and numbers, and where the subject is absorbed by his/her delusions, as economists’ lives are, the prognosis is poor: depression frequently accompanies this neurosis, and the best treatment available will only reduce, rather than eliminate the full impact of the patient’s disabilities. ₁₀₄

For a yet more specific classification it is necessary and useful to refer to the range of illnesses and symptoms in which the patient’s basic competence as a person is called into question by her/his misapprehension and misinterpretation of reality — namely, psychosis . The World Health Organization lists eight specific psychoses of which four are, on the basis of current evidence, irrelevant to the generality of neo-liberals: senile, pre-senile, arteriosclerotic, and alcoholic. [The pronounced neo-liberal tendency towards thinking and behaving in manner consistent with Alzheimer’s disease is seriously challenging this view, to the extent that it has encouraged innovative psychiatric and psychological research proposals, but in the context of this paper these need not concern us here]. Conversely, the other four, functional psychoses — schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, involutional melancholia, and paranoia — are already known to be extremely relevant to neo-liberalism even though there is considerable controversy within the psychiatric profession as to whether there are any convincing specifiable physical causes for them. Again, for current purposes, the resolution of this conundrum is not necessary, especially since there are at least two non-medical conceptions of psychosis in circulation, one of which holds that, in principle, they are little different to neuroses, while the other — post-Laingian school — is of the view that psychotics are the victims of the schizophrenogenic power the politics of society and/or the family, as per the formulation proposed by Bateson. ₁₀₅

Refining the offerings further on the basis of neo-liberal economic discourse, schizophrenia and paranoia warrant the closest attention. The former commends itself on the basis that it is a relatively common, evenly distributed, condition, affecting nearly 1 per cent of the world’s population, appreciably more, therefore, than the population of economists. As well, it is the most important single cause of chronic psychiatric disorder, yet the subjective experiences and observable alterations in behaviour which characterise it are very variable. ₁₀₆ Symptomatically, these include a comprehensive range of the required behaviours of the neo-liberal: in the beginning, commanding voices are heard, commenting on, or repeating his/her thoughts (Market outcomes); thought processes develop a vagueness and illogicality (Galbraith’s euphoria); speech becomes almost incomprehensible (the journal Econometrica ₁₀₇ ), and a loss of coordination between different psychic functions, particularly the cognitive (intellectual) and the conative (emotional) aspects of the personality, (the ignorance of love and friendship).

This last-mentioned pathology is complemented, if not confirmed, by evidence that suggest schizophrenics have difficulty processing incoming information, both auditory and visual, and the relevant from the irrelevant. Over a prolonged period, apathy, eccentricity, and isolation result, as almost any of the current critical works on the discipline of economics will attest to: in the mainstream there is neither the willingness to abandon its dishevelled and discredited abstractions, nor recognition of the need to embrace a muti-disciplinarity which could potentially revitalise the study of the pursuit and creation of wealth.

For such a socially damaging disease, it is sad to report that cures are unlikely although various palliative treatments have been attempted with varying success — for example, the drug chlorpromazine, special diets and massive doses of Vitamin B. ₁₀₈ Probably more important, though, have been the increased public tolerance of madness since the late 1950s, and the growing realisation by psychiatrists of the detrimental effects of life in nineteenth-century asylums, which together have resulted in novel attempts to both de-institutionalise, and re-institutionalise, schizophrenics within a liberal treatment regime. ₁₀₉ To advance the former, traditional institutions underwent a transformation from a sombre custodial, to an a seemingly enlightened open-door / community therapy / early discharge, function (while ultimately and legally retaining the sanction of confinement should a relapse occur). ₁₁₀ But in the single institution of the modern university both transformations and all possibilities were open to the neo-liberals who, with tenure, seized power in the name of “The New Dumb.” At one and the same time, they could be schizophrenic, relapsed, incurable, and tolerated. Dr Hunter S. Thompson has written of them:

The standard gets lower every year, but the scum keeps rising... and they have no sense of humour. They are smart, but they have no passion. They are cute, but they have no fun except phone sex and line dancing... They are healthy and clean and cautious and their average life-span is now over 100 years... ₁₁₁

Paranoia, too, is a mode of existence common to a great number of more or less normal people; indeed, its significance extends from this feature. ₁₁₂ And from the fact that, when it is unmistakably present in powerful political elites, it is allowed to reign virtually unchallenged. (To this extent it might be an even greater cause for concern than the schizophrenics since many of them are, by choice, institutionally localised). Some occupations, are however, more fortunate in this regard than others. For an example outside of economics we need turn no further than James Jesus Angleton, former CIA chief of counter-intelligence for over 30 of the more than 40 years he spent in the CIA and its predecessor, the OSS. He has been described, even by a professional admirer, as a man who went “dotty” and “subtly mad.” ₁₁₃ By other accounts, such as that by Tom Mangold, ₁₁₄ he was a chain-smoking insomniac and drunk, a second-rate analyst and a first-rate charlatan, a projector of omniscience and certainty and, over time, a person whose paranoia increased exponentially. ₁₁₅ These traits notwithstanding, he was, in so many ways, unexceptional. As historian of the CIA, John Ranelagh, has noted: “Counterintelligence is a very specialised and sophisticated activity. It has an in-built paranoia which sooner or later overwhelms every counterintelligence officer and Angleton himself was not immune“ (emphasis added). ₁₁₆ Moreover he wasn’t even an economist: at Yale he majored in English, and was greatly taken with formalist literary criticism which he subsequently used as the basis for the development of counter-intelligence methodology and theory. ₁₁₇

In present-day life an almost identical indulgence has been extended to Michel Camdessus, head of the IMF. Despite his organisation’s abysmal double record of failure with Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) over a period of 15 years — they have not only failed to bring prosperity, but also caused their target countries to regress — he now advances the proposition that the time is nigh for the introduction of a “second generation of reforms.” In one of the more outstanding examples of the refusal to learn from experience, let alone be shamed by it, he even admitted to a group of U.S. church leaders that realising the benefits of this new macroeconomic initiative might require the “sacrifice of a generation” ₁₁₈ (emphasis added).

To the fore here are both the traditional, or etymological, and the contemporary clinical, symptoms of paranoia. Nothing need be said of the former other than to note that, given the circumstances surrounding Camdessus’ proposition, and its highly probable consequences, he would appear to be quite literally, “out of his mind.” Turning to the latter, the degree to which this is the case is most troubling. Through the promise of a another phase of SAPs, Camdessus, first, is advancing a coherent, internally consistent, but, as history records, entirely delusional belief in market economics. Second, his proposal at this juncture of economic debilitation in the global South establishes his belief system as a persistent and chronic condition, one that almost certainly indicates a fixation at some infantile stage of development during which the self is its own love object, the period of undergraduate training in economics being the most likely source of this. Third, coming at a time when the IMF is the object of widespread, serious, and justified criticism, Camdessus’ proposal reflects an excessive self-confidence indistinguishable from hubris, a self-worth as a techno-rationalist Elect which the rest of the world refuses to endorse, a disconcerting and embarrassing assertion of the innate superiority of neo-liberalism identical to (as Galbraith confirms) religious messianism, and all are held without him in any way recognising that he is ill. In all, the symptoms in evidence are those of true paranoia, a rare disease, not amenable to any known treatment. ₁₁₉

Complicating matters, however, is the fact that internally consistent delusions of grandeur occur in other psychoses as well, most notably schizophrenia. Furthermore, when found in the presence of other symptoms such as emotional withdrawal and the pattern of arrested intellectual growth, primarily (80 per cent) in males, which define the autistic character of economists, the clinical diagnosis precludes true paranoia, but permits a finding of paranoid schizophrenia , indicating the breadth of mental pathology to be found in economists. ₁₂₀ In an attempt to reveal the inescapably endemic nature of them in economists a coup de grace will be attempted via the history of scientism in economics, (physics as the model / mathematics as the means) which is their vocation.

 

Scientism as defining symptom.

It is almost commonplace to record that “physics envy” seduced political economy away from its roots in society towards the end of the nineteenth century. The success of science, particularly physics as an exemplar of the ability to control conditions and predict outcomes promised, a rational understanding of the economy through the eye of mathematics (with which physics was braided), which, of course, required a reconfiguration of the study in terms of the methods by which it was to be understood. In the prevailing view, mathematics was to give to economics, and thus to economists, the relevance and, therefore, the professional status with government, industry, and community, which had progressively been accorded scientists since the age of Newton. Since, in Modernity, mathematics was the highest distillation of truth — exact, unshakeable, and infallible — all that remained for the transformation to be effected was to establish the necessary axioms, isolate the relevant variables, and apply the appropriate mathematics which would reveal economic truth with a clarity without historical precedent.

This turn to physics was ironic because physics was itself beginning its turn to a world much less congenial to the type of professional, policy-oriented certainty that was economics’ objective. Even more ironic, however, was that the associative jealousy which obsessed economics not only occluded an awareness of the quantum revolution in physics, but also the uncertainties in mathematics, as a multi-discipline itself. It was as though, in the process of becoming something that was, by definition, an ahistorical area of inquiry, economics was excused from seriously investigating the intellectual history of its new habitat for signs of contradiction and decay. Had it done so it is possible that the embrace of mathematics might have been less warm, because, throughout the nineteenth century, a revision of its claims and pretensions, themselves a reflection of its strange evolution since classical times, most notably in the development of “strange geometries” and “strange algebras,” had become imperative. Destroyed in the process was one of mathematics’ principal conceits — that the mathematical laws of science were truths and that mathematical design was inherent in nature. Thus, like Newtonian physics in the face of the quantum revolution, mathematics was suffering a long overdue debility of identity, forced on it by the accumulated contradictions in the behaviour of mathematicians which were no longer tenable. Reflecting on this, the historian of mathematics, Morris Kline, writes:

... mathematics had developed illogically. Its illogical development contained not only false proofs, slips in reasoning, and inadvertent mistakes which with more care could have been avoided. Such blunders there were aplenty. The illogical development also involved inadequate understanding of concepts, a failure to recognise all the principles of logic required, and an inadequate rigour of proof; that is, intuition, physical arguments, and appeal to geometrical diagrams had taken the place of logical arguments (emphasis added). ₁₂₁

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century mathematicians, moreover, were not only aware of this, but published their misgivings. Of ideal concepts such as proof and absolute rigour, Alfred North Whitehead lectured that they had “no natural habitat in the mathematical world.” And throughout the last 200 years, the consensus seems only to have only grown, with a foremost American mathematician, E.H. Moore, concluding in 1903 that mathematics were a function of the historical epoch in which they were constructed, a view essentially shared previously by Hermann Hankel, Richard Dedekind, and Karl Weierstrasss, and subsequently by some of the greatest mathematicians in the last 100 years — Hermann Weyl and, irony of ironies for economics, Nobel prize-winning physicist, Percy W. Bridgman. As well, in the interim, Kurt Godel effected what Kline terms a “debacle,” by demonstrating that, while mathematics consisted of several schools, each in disagreement with the others, none of the logical principles accepted by the several schools could prove the consistency of mathematics. Even worse for the status of mathematics was an emergent character of confusion in which disagreement between the various constructions attended both the question of what might properly be designated as mathematics, and, within the constructions, of what might be the proper superstructure. ₁₂₂

As if these developments were not unsettling enough, research throughout the twentieth century has pointed to a disconcerting (for mathematicians, and, thus, economists) conclusion of Copernican significance: monkeys, though they have no formal language, can do mathematics. Homo sapiens has been displaced from the centre of the sentient universe. The turn-of-the-century possibility that this was true, took the form of a Russian trotting horse, “Hans,” counting answers to arithmetic question by tapping the ground with a hoof; over time, furthermore, suggestions that “Hans” was telepathic were raised and investigated, most notably in the 1911 book, Clever Hans, by O. Pfungst. This served to discredit the claims numeracy and telepathy on the basis, inter alia, of unwitting gestures being made by the questioners, and there matters rested until quite the release of findings from a Columbia University study by Elizabeth Brannon and Herbert Terrace, in the journal Science, in October 1988. ₁₂₃ What this showed was that two rhesus monkeys, with the Shakespearean names of “Rosencrantz” and “Macduff,” had demonstrated a fundamental grasp of numeracy, implying that a competence that was once thought to define the superiority of people over the “lower” animals could now be thought of a skill which reduced people to more adept primates (in general), and equated economists with other species who can grasp simple concepts of counting.

Notwithstanding this relegation, which admittedly took nearly a century to be realised, there was immediate and particular import for economics in the status of two branches of mathematics which, it is widely agreed, have made seminal contributions to the development of the discipline — differential calculus (in relation to the extremal nature of economic theory), and statistics (the manipulations of which are at the heart of macro-economic predictions of probable states of the economy as a result of policy change). Neither, it has to be said, have been treated more kindly than mathematics in general in the search for certainty. Calculus, as the result of its faults, became the focus of “rigorization” in the mid-nineteenth century and after, but the efforts ultimately failed to achieve this end. Even the best efforts by David Hilbert failed to establish its predicate, or first order logic. Of this Kline note that the search for certainty has produced only an “unending” process of undecidable propositions. ₁₂₄

Statistics also underwent a developmental phase in the nineteenth century — from being seen and used in an ancillary role, as servants of argument, to being accorded the dominant role in the search for the laws of nature. Eventually they were thought capable of deciding “whether the universe was a deterministic system of laws, or whether it was the product of the operations of blind chance.” ₁₂₅ The answer, if it qualifies for as such, is that nature is “not at all determined, but rather chaotic.” The best approach to certainty in nature that statistics can provide is by way of predicting a most probable state under specified conditions, but, for all of that, nature remains independent of mathematical laws. ₁₂₆ In any case, statistics do not, in themselves, explain why certain states are more, or less, probable. In the end, as Mary Douglas highlights in Ian Hacking’s work, statistics are historically sensitive; they cannot be divorced from the political culture and the associated style of reasoning in which they are manufactured, the neglect of which caveat he demonstrates with many examples, effectively attributes “autonomy” to statistics and results, inter alia, in the “reckless use of the law of large numbers for finding facts about human behaviour. ₁₂₇

For all of its existence, therefore, mathematical economics has relied on the certainty and scientific status of a discipline whose troubles constitute, according to Kline, “a mockery of the hitherto deep-rooted and widely reputed truth and logical perfection of mathematics.” Neo-classical economics, has, therefore, throughout its lifetime and of its own volition, proceeded into serious error and ridicule since it insists on fate-sharing with a form of science, which we are reminded, is endangered and, because of this, dangerous:

... the lack of a proof of consistency still hangs over the heads of mathematicians like the sword of Damocles. No matter which philosophy of mathematics one adopts, one proceeds at the risk of arriving at a contradiction. ₁₂₈

In this light the criticisms social critics and some critical economists make of economics, to the effect that it privileges the mathematical over the material and the interpretive, are somewhat beside the point because they imply that, in general, the status of science as a producer of knowledge is unassailable, and that, in particular, mathematics is beyond reproach as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge. What eludes them is a prior matter of extraordinary importance, the logical and philosophical exhaustion of science, which Bruce Wilshire outlines in the following terms:

... the term good “talks” to us on the inner level of the self. But it cannot be taken in as a whole by science and defined in the required precise and predictive sense, so it cannot figure in the truths that scientists discover. Science by itself cannot tell us how to educate, not even how to educate as persons those who are to be scientists. In fact, although science is considered the paramount way of knowing, it cannot establish what nearly everyone assumes: that it itself is good. ₁₂₉

Thus the extremely valid charges against economics made by Tony Lawson — that the discipline is guilty of uncritically, and in a widespread manner, appropriating mathematics for systems or conditions for which they are not suited — is a fourth, and only fourth, order criticism, being degraded, if you will, by the need to understand the long-standing and significant critiques which attend, in descending order, science, mathematics in general, and the prevailing, conventional attitude of economists to mathematics. ₁₃₀ Thus, fourth, it is significant because it locates the misappropriation within a third order critique which, in simple terms, is the foregrounding of a disciplinary disposition best described as a form of contemptible anti-intellectualism.

The basis for this claim is that, historically, economics has contrived successfully, and at the highest levels to celebrate itself as an “unworldly,” area of mathematical inquiry at the same time its adherents lower down in the professional hierarchy represent their knowledge as essential to sound government. Nobel prize-winning economist Gerard Debreu, in his 1990 presidential address to the American Economics Association, provides one of the more outstanding contemporary examples of the former, proposing an “acid test’ for articles in economic theory, namely “removing of all their economic interpretations and letting their mathematical infrastructure stand on its own.” ₁₃₁ For others, outsiders, such a criterion is warranted on the basis that, for all of economics’ immersion in virtually every area of state policy, “the theory and its development have been as insulated from empirical influences as geometry ever was before Einstein,” implying thereby that, since it fails by the criteria of policy utility, it might as well be given residence in the neighbourhood it most covets and, accordingly, be regarded as “a branch of mathematics.” ₁₃₂ But contempt is also courted because the abnegation of the world, so dear to Debreu’s “acid test,” has been joined not only with exhortations to use mathematics but, at the same time and in the recommendation of Frank Hahn, to “avoid discussion of ‘mathematics in economics’ like the plague.” Such advice, furthermore, is proffered on the basis of assertion rather than argument, but appears to have succeeded for the most part nonetheless. ₁₃₃

If we examine this development from the perspective of mental illness we find, in the first instance, an atavistic intrusion into the study of the economy by way of a form of uncontrolled excitement, over-activity, and obsessive behaviour — which is to say, a mania — about counting and the symbolic numbers of arithmetic which first appeared around 1200. The principal difference being that, then, it was not considered to be progress. ₁₃₄ Second, we find that, rather than a turn to science, the late nineteenth century imitation in economics, of physics, through mathematics, is merely a cute return to religion: Newton wrote eloquently of how God “was a skilled mathematician and physicist.” ₁₃₅ And while this is not to say that Newtonian physics can only be appreciated and pursued through theism, the lack of certainty in mathematics which economists are silent on, and the worshipful attitude to mathematics throughout history, from the Pythagoreans and the Platonists through to such adepts as Georg Cantor (who framed modern set theory on the claimed basis of a vision vouchsafed to him by God, and ended his days in an asylum for the insane), ₁₃₆ and economists themselves, there is, again, that strong presumption that economists were seeking to evade the terror of modern consciousness through a religious consolation in delusion.

More than this: they constructed what Brian Rotman identifies as “fortress mathematica.” Reviewing separate biographies of the mathematicians Paul Erdos and John Nash, he more generally makes a compelling case for the discipline as the refuge from (in simple and direct terms) the imprecision and impurity of everyday life, for people who believe that “the book of the universe was written (by God) in the language of mathematics.” Failing that, it also suffices, as “a secular divinity, a god of the atheists.” ₁₃₇ And who, or more precisely, what does the fortress protect? Consider Erdos, “number theorist and combinatorialist extraordinary.” On the basis of extensive research he was:

eccentric, socially dysfunctional, obsessive, childishly egocentric, helplessly dependent on fellow number freaks to feed him, transport him, put him up and put up with him.... [yet] monkishly pure...

Nash, on the other hand, as befits a person with a “vast distorted universe whispering in his head,” which included alien beings, messages from extraterrestrials who were trying to recruit him to save the world:

thought himself to be the emperor of Antarctica as well as the left foot of God, and was possessed by paranoid formulas and fearful ravings about punishment, humiliation and triumph.

Furthermore, and of paramount importance for current purposes, was the lucid and prescient answer he gave to a colleague, the Harvard mathematician, George Mackey, about how he could believe such things: they “came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” ₁₃₈ Thus, in their detachments and withdrawals from the world, strategies of precedent already well framed by Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy, they were, in a manner of speaking, unremarkable in their common illness. Their contemporary, Kurt Godel, claimed to have extrasensory perception of mathematical entities, but starved himself under the paranoid delusion that people were putting poison into his food; and their successor is probably to be found in the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, in whom the intellectual certainty of mathematics is transposed into a system of unchallengable moral truth arraigned against technology. ₁₃₉

Identity rather than difference which, therefore, defines economists and mathematicians; in the pursuit of an unachievable certainty under the unforgiving regime of modern consciousness they both withdraw to a place where the world is so arranged that they do not have to experience its flux and complexity. Ironically, for Kaczynski at least, technology can achieve this end passably well (as Max Frisch warned us), but the conviction that a pure, frugal, and formal language and logic exists, which transcends legitimate uncertainty, ambiguity and disagreement, and which will yet capture the intrinsic order in all things, universally, holds the greatest guarantee. The Unabomber, after all, killed less people in all of the attacks from his own mental and physical wilderness than an average IMF economist in charge of a SAP from behind the barriers of neo-liberal theory.

 

 

Conclusion

The implicit question that recurs throughout this survey is one which, regrettably, cannot be answered definitively — namely, whether economics is a site of mental illness, or whether, as seems to be the case in so many if its manifestations, it is a mental illness in its own right. Further research will also be needed to establish whether, for example, people become economists because they are mentally ill, or become mentally ill once they have accepted neo-liberalism as an authentic response to everyday life. Similarly, on the basis of the scientific literature, there is no reliable way of determining why, and how, the various forms of mental are distributed among economists of almost identical training and background. About all that might authoritatively be deduced is that economists enjoy a catholic affinity with most of the categories of insanity: they are generally psychotic, and, within this description, are more likely than not are best located within the sub-categories describing a paranoid condition. Thus, of the proposition that economics, economists, neo-liberalism, and mental illness are positively correlated there is no escape; indeed, one either evades or vacates the first two constituents of the constellation, or is wilfully complicit in the intellectually degenerative conditions which inevitably follow.

Economists, we should understand, are peculiarly modern, being afflicted with that contradictory state of mind which admits sin and continues to commit it, refuses contrition, yet maintains hope, has contempt for the richness of the world yet wants to prescribe for it, and all in the face of the most destructive consequences imaginable to others. Globally their theories and practices are the habits of premeditated serial killing. By any normal calculation, two equally definitive consequences should have been observed: their discipline should have collapsed under the weight of its accumulated insanity, criminality and stupidity, as, or before, they abandoned it. That neither occurred returns us, initially, to the understanding of insanity prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century, namely that the strategic role was played by the will. Then later, Cowles Pritchard made a contribution in favour of the emotions by introducing the claim that an “apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties” could be influenced by “morbid perversions of the feelings, affections, [and] habits” resulting in what he called “moral insanity.” Though still subsequent work, in particular that provoked by Henry Maudsley and continued to the present, contrarily posited a “tyranny of organisation” — a genetic determinism — rather than the will, as being responsible for insanity, all bodies of thought help us to an interim understanding of economists within insanity. ₁₄₀

The role of the will, in the case of economists, is not in doubt; their various acts of voluntary anti-intellectualism are numerous and irrefutable. The unrepentant attitude to the global destruction caused by neo-liberalism would lead us to the same conclusion in respect of Pritchard’s indicators. And while the question of whether these are genetically determined must remain open in the context of research which emphasises the importance of environmental, as much as hereditary, factors, as causes of felony, it is significant that a consensus exists, albeit divided at the level of causality, and thus, responsibility: such categories of people and patterns of thought as they describe, and within all of which are found economists and economic thinking, respectively, are, to the extent permitted by the sciences of the mind, clinically insane across a wide spectrum of the conditions referred to under this rubric, and dangerous, no matter the historical or contemporary approach favoured to account for the condition.

 

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Endnotes

*: For presentation Wednesday, 17 February 1999, to the panel: From Empire to Enigma: Re-Assessing the Foundations of the British Dominions in the Ashes of the Twentieth Century 40th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, U.S.A. 16-20 February 1999  Back.

Note 1: So named after the Greek physician who elaborated the system of the four temperaments (choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine) which is still used in various forms in the contemporary period.  Back.

Note 2: In the advancement of this argument heavy reliance will be placed upon Richard L. Gregory, with O. L. Zangwill, The Oxford Companion To The Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), hereafter cited as Gregory, The Mind.
NOTE: Care should be exercised in referring to footnotes which appear in passages describing a symptom of mental illness and the corresponding condition in economists: where possible I have attempted to keep such matters separate, but, for the sake of readability and effect, there many passages where this has not been possible. Accordingly, I would advise that no where in Gregory’s The Mind are there any references to economics or economists: the connections between his descriptions of mental illness and the location of economists within them is my construct alone.  Back.

Note 3: As with several points made in this paper, this observation owes much to a valued contribution to the understanding of the modes and rituals of academia in the form of a novel by John Kenneth Galbraith — ATenured Professor: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 49 Hereafter cited as Galbraith, A Tenured Professor).  Back.

Note 4: Gary Mongiovi, “Whose Economy Is It?” [a review of Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London: Verso, 1997)[, The Nation, 8-15 September 1997, p. 29.  Back.

Note 5: Karin Bishop, “Star Search,” The Sydney Morning Herald, Employment section, 5 December 1998, p. 1.  Back.

Note 6: Lewis Lapham, “Painted Fire,” in Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 125-131.  Back.

Note 7: Jacques Le Goff, Your Money Or Your Life; Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone, 1990), pp. 13-14.  Back.

Note 8: Edward E. Leamer, “Specification Searches: Ad hoc Inferences with Non-experimental Data” (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), p. vi, as cited in Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 6-7, (hereafter cited as Leamer, “Specification Searches: Ad hoc Inferences with Non-experimental Data”).  Back.

Note 9: See Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine, 1991), p. 420 (hereafter cited as Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind).  Back.

Note 10: For an historical account of APEC’s development in the above terms through to 1996 see Walden Bello and Jenina Joy Chavez-Malaluan (eds.), APEC: Four Adjectives in Search of a Noun (Manila People’s Forum on APEC / Focus on the Global South / Institute for Popular Democracy, 1996).  Back.

Note 11: E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman, “Perceptual Processing,” Handbook of Perceptions 9 (New York and London, 1978).  Back.

Note 12: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 416.  Back.

Note 13: ibid.  Back.

Note 14: ibid, pp. 417-419.  Back.

Note 15: Gregory, The Mind, p. 657-658. See, inter alia, also Gregory Bateson, “Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: 1956).  Back.

Note 16: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 419-420.  Back.

Note 17: ibid, p. 420.  Back.

Note 18: ibid, pp. 420-421.  Back.

Note 19: ibid, pp. 421-422.  Back.

Note 20: Bill Pearson, “Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and its Implications for the Artist,” in Bill Pearson, Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Auckland: Heinemann, 1974), p. 28 (hereafter cited as Pearson, “Fretful Sleepers”).
NOTE: Though the original publication date of this essay was over 46 years ago (in Landfall, September 1952), and much has changed, in some cases radically, in New Zealand and Australia in the intervening period, I have found this account to be inspirational in understanding ways of thinking and acting in both countries, even though, to labour the obvious, Pearson was concerned at the time only to address New Zealand. I will, therefore cite this source if I consider that, on the basis of similar conditions, his insights apply to Australia as well as New Zealand. To me, on the basis of many years of experience, teaching, and reflection, some identities are that strong. Notwithstanding this conviction, my repeated recourse to “Fretful Sleepers” is made in the knowledge that it could provoke the charge of appropriation; on the other hand, Oliver MacDonagh’s eloquent pleading of a similar case remains with me: “There are times, there are conditions in which one’s [academic] calling is subordinate.”  Back.

Note 21: ibid, pp. 1-32.  Back.

Note 22: John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 (London:Unwin Hyman, 1989); see also Linda Colley, “Strong Government,” a review of this and two related texts, London Review of Books, 7 December 1989, p.8 (hereafter cited as Colley, “Strong Government”).  Back.

Note 23: Colley, “Strong Goverment”.  Back.

Note 24: Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1860-1980 (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1982), p. 176.  Back.

Note 25: W. David McIntyre, “The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances,” Landfall, No. 84 (December 1967), p. 329-330 (hereafter cited as McIntyre, “The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances”).  Back.

Note 26: From “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Life and Contacts).”  Back.

Note 27: From “The Man and his Echo.”  Back.

Note 28: As cited in T. B. Millar, Australia in Peace and War, second edition (Sydney: Australian National University Press / Maxwell Macmillan, 1991), p. 28 (hereafter cited as Millar, Australia in Peace and War). The poet in question, a corporal, was killed at Gallipoli shortly after he wrote the above.  Back.

Note 29: As cited in McIntyre, “The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances,” pp. 331-332.  Back.

Note 30: David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1988), esp. p. 351.  Back.

Note 31: ibid.  Back.

Note 32: James Rusbridger and Eric Nave, Betrayal at Pearl harbour: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into WWII (New York: Summit, 1991), pp. 99-106 (hereafter cited as Rusbridger and Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbour).  Back.

Note 33: For Menzies, see Australia in Peace and War, pp. 140-141; for Holland and Connolly see McIntyre, “The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances,” pp. 332-333.  Back.

Note 34: Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam — The Story of America’s Rise to Power (New York: Random House, 1989), hereafter cited as Perret, A Country Made by War.  Back.

Note 35: Small and Singer, Resort to Arms, pp. 167 and 176.  Back.

Note 36: Daniel S. Geller, “Power System Membership and Patterns of War,” International Political Science Review 9 (1988): 372-3.  Back.

Note 37: Terry Burstall, Vietnam: The Australian Dilemma (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. 8; and Peter Edwards with Gregory Pemberton, Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948-1965 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1992), pp. 332-375.  Back.

Note 38: McIntyre, “The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances,” p. 342.  Back.

Note 39: Pearson, “Fretful Sleepers,” p. 27.  Back.

Note 40: Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1989), p. 143.  Back.

Note 41: Michael C. Pugh, The ANZUS Crisis, Nuclear Visiting, and Deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 2, 134-135, & 140.  Back.

Note 42: Peter Pierce, “Exploding the Myths of War,” a review of Robin Gerster, Big Noting (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), The Age, 9 April 1988.  Back.

Note 43: Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, and Tomorrow (New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 82 (hereafter cited as Heilbroner, Visions of the Future).  Back.

Note 44: In the contemporary global political economy literature numerous terms are deployed to describe neo-classical economic theory-as-practice on a global scale. Thus (to name a few) “neoliberalism,” “economic rationalism,” “free market liberalism,” “free trade,” and “transnational liberalism” all appear, depending on the proclivities of the author. The resulting confusion can be reduced, however, by understanding that, with due allowance being made for different emphases and stylistic preferences, the phenomenon which they describe is, essentially, the same — namely, to paraphrase Robert Cox, the legitimation of capitalism’s “instinct .. to free itself from any form of state or interstate control or intervention [by way of] deregulation, privatization, and the dismantling of state protection for the vulnerable elements of society” (Robert W. Cox, “The Crisis in World Order and the Challenge to International Organization” ( Cooperation and Conflict 29(2): 105), hereafter cited as Cox, “The Crisis in World Order.”  Back.

Note 45: ibid, 103-105.  Back.

Note 46: ibid.  Back.

Note 47: Ricardo Trumper and Lynne Phillips, “Cholera in the Time of Neoliberalism: The Case of Chile and Equador,” Alternatives 20 (1995): 167.  Back.

Note 48: Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State Changes its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 21 (hereafter cited as Pusey, Economic Rationalism).  Back.

Note 49: ibid, p. 22.  Back.

Note 50: An incomplete schedule of conclusions gathered from, inter alia, Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Frederic F. Clairmont, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag (Mapusa, Goa: The Other India Press / Third World Network, 1996); Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Good Society: The Human Agenda (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), The Culture of Contentment (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), A History of Economics: The Past as the Present (London: Penguin, 1989); Robert Heilbroner, Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1992); Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992); Robert Kuttner, “The Limits of Markets,” The American Prospect (March-April 1997); Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997); Gerald P. O’Driscoll and Mario J. Rizzo, The Economics of Time and Ignorance (London: Routledge, 1996); Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, (London: Faber and Faber, 1994); Deborah A. Redman, Economics and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); ); Alexander Rosenberg, Economics — Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); Dorothy Ross, “An Historian’s View of American Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29(April 1993), “Modernist Social Science in the Land of the New/Old,” Ch. 7 in Dorothy Ross (ed.), Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Ringwood, VIctoria: Penguin, 1997).  Back.

Note 51: Figures cited by Davison Budhoo, “IMF/World Bank Wreak Havoc on Third World,” (hereafter cited as Budhoo, IMF/World Bank) in Kevin Danaher (ed.), 50 Years Is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Boston: South End, 1994), p. 22 (hereafter cited as Danaher (ed.), 50 Years Is Enough).  Back.

Note 52: Brecher and Costello, Global Pillage, p. 29.  Back.

Note 53: Barnet, “Stateless Corporations: Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, 19 December 1994, p. 754.  Back.

Note 54: Patrick Markee, “Debt Heads,” a review of Catherine Caufield, Masters of Illusion: The World Bankand the Poverty of Nations (New York: Holt, 1997), The Nation, 17 March 1997, p. 38-39 (hereafter cited as Markee, “Debt Heads”).  Back.

Note 55: ibid, p. 39.  Back.

Note 56: ibid.  Back.

Note 57: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 37, (hereafter cited as Human Development Report 1996), in conjunction with Eve-Anne Prentice, “Richest 358 people ‘own as much as half of the world,’” The Times, 16 July 1996, and “United Nations: Rich Richer, Poor Poorer,” Reuters, 16 July 2:13 AM EDT 1996.  Back.

Note 58: Brecher and Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction From the Bottom Up, (Boston: South End, 1994), p. 60 (hereafter cited as Brecher and Costello, Global Village).  Back.

Note 59: Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 11-13 (hereafter cited as Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth).  Back.

Note 60: Walden Bello, “Global Economic Counterrevolution: How Northern Economic Warfare Devastates the South” (hereafter cited as Bello, “Global Economic Counterrevolution”) in Danaher (ed.), 50 Years Is Enough, p. 18.  Back.

Note 61: ibid, in conjunction with Walden Bello, with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (London: Pluto/Food First/ Transnational Institute, 1994), pp. 52-53 (hereafter cited as Bello, et. al., Dark Victory); and Human Development Report 1996, p. 17.  Back.

Note 62: As cited in Bello, et. al., Dark Victory, p. 51; and Human Development Report 1996, p. 19, Budhoo, IMF/World Bank) pp. 21-22.  Back.

Note 63: The Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, January 1988), hereafter cited as Discriminate Deterrence).  Back.

Note 64: Paul Kennedy, “Not So Grand Strategy,” a review of Discriminate Deterrence (above), The New York Review of Books, 12 May 1988, p. 5.  Back.

Note 65: Discriminate Deterrence, pp. 13-15.  Back.

Note 66: ibid, pp. 15-16.  Back.

Note 67: Jacques Attali, Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991), as cited inBello, “Global Economic Counterrevolution,” in Danaher (ed.), 50 Years Is Enough, p. 114 and 19.  Back.

Note 68: ibid, p. 14.  Back.

Note 69: As might be expected there is an extraordinary number and range of explanations for the “Asian Crisis;” from those that I am aware of I have selected a small number of accessible, authoritative, and persuasive sources for the purposes of substantiating the claims above, as follows: Walden Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle,” The Nation, 12/19 January 1998, pp. 16-21, “East Asia: On the Brink of Depression,” Pacifica Review (10): 95-109, and “Asian Financial Crisis: The Movie,” Focus on Trade # 31 ( http://www.focusweb.org); Philippe F. Delhaise, Asia in Crisis: The Implosion of the Banking and Finance Systems (Singapore: John Wiley, 1998), Robert Garran, Tigers Tamed: The End of the Asian Miracle (Sydney; Allen and Unwin, 1998), Leo Gough, Asia Meltdown: The End of the Miracle (Oxford: Capstone, 1998), and Chalmers Johnson, “Cold War Economics Melt Asia,” The Nation, 23 February 1998, pp. 16-19.  Back.

Note 70: Richard J. Barnet, “Stateless Corporations: Lords of the Global Economy,” The Nation, 19 December 1994, “The End of Jobs,” Harper’s Magazine, pp. 48-49; Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon Schuster, 1994); Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, America Unequal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Robert H. Frank, “Talent and the Winner-Take-All Society,” The American Prospect, (Spring, 1994); James K. Galbraith, Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (New York: Free Press, 1998); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992); “Harpers Index,” in Harpers, February 1995, pp. 9 and 76; Howie Hawkins, “Activism” column, Z Magazine, February 1995; Will Hutton, The State We’re In, new & rev. ed. (London: Vintage, 1996); Edward S. Herman, “Immiserating Growth in the First World,” Z Magazine, January 1995; David R. Howell, “The Skills Myth,” The American Prospect 18 (Summer 1994); Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and its Survival (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996); John McDermott, “And the Poor Get Poorer,” The Nation, 14 November 1994; Walter Russell Mead, “Bushism, Found: A second-term agenda hidden in trade agreements,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1992; Lawrence M. Mead, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America (New York: BasicBooks, 1992); James Medoff and Andrew Harless, The Indebted Society: Anatomy of an Ongoing Disaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996); Lawrence Mishel and John Schmitt (eds.), Beware the U.S. Model: Jobs and Wages in a Deregulated Economy (Washington, D.C.: Economic policy Institute, 1995); New York Times, as cited in Z Magazine 8 (February 1995), cover page; Eve-Anne Prentice, “Richest 358 people ‘own as much as half of the world,’” The Times, 16 July 1996; Wallace C. Peterson, Silent Depression: The Fate of the American Dream (New York: Norton, 1994); Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the reagan Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1990); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995); Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: BasicBooks, 1992), The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Holly Sklar, Chaos or Community: Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics (Boston: South End, 1995); John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy, The Forgotten Americans (New York: Norton, 1992); Lester C. Thurow, “Companies Merge; Families Break Up,” New York Times, 3 September 1995; Joni Seager (ed.), The State of the Earth: An Atlas of Environmental Concern (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Lori Wallach, “Hidden Dangers of GATT and NAFTA,” in Ralph Nader, William Greider, Margaret Atwood, et. al., The Case Against Free Trade: GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power (San Francisco: Earth Island, 1993); United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT), An Urbanizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements, 1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Richard G. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality (London; Routledge, 1996); and Edward O. Wilson, “Death Wish,” Good Weekend, (of The Weekend Australian), 12 February 1994, p. 16.  Back.

Note 71: Gregory and Hunter (see note below), p. 4.  Back.

Note 72: As cited in Wiseman, (see following reference), p. 68. Material for the remainder of the three paragraphs on Australia was drawn from: Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, The Global Economy in Australia: Global Integration and National Economic Policy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999); Robert H. Fagan and Michael Webber, Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ross Gittins, “737,000 jobless — and Peter needs a new speechwriter,” Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1998; Robin Gollan, The Myth of the Level Playing Field (Sydney: Catalyst, 1993); R. G. Gregory and B. Hunter, “The Macro Economy and the Growth of Ghettos and Urban Poverty in Australia: The National Press Club Telecom Address,” Discussion Paper No. 325 [Canberra: Centre for Economic Policy research, The Australian National University, April 1995]; Donald Horne (ed.), The Trouble With Economic Rationalism (Newham, Vic.: Scribe, 1992); Philip Lewis, et. al., Issues, Indicators and Ideas: A Guide to the Australian Economy (Melbourne; Addison Wesley Longman, 1998); John Quiggin, Great Expectations: Microeconomic Reform in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Stewart Rees and Gordon Rodley (eds.), The Human Costs of Managerialism: Advocating the Recovery of Humanity (Sydney: Pluto, 1995); Stuart Rees, Gordon Rodley, and Frank Stilwell (eds.), Beyond the Market: Alternatives to Economic Rationalism (Sydney: Pluto, 1993); Peter Smark, “Jobs for the young? How outdated can you get?” Sydney Morning Herald, 7June 1997; Jenny Stewart, The Lie of the Level of the Level Playing Field; Industry Policy and Australia’s Future (Melbourne: Text, 1994); Frank Stilwell, Economic Inequality: Who Gets What in Australia (Sydney; Pluto, 1993); John Wiseman, Global nation: Australia and the Politics of Globalisation (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Transcript of Questions and Answers Following the Prime Minister’s Address to the Australia Summit, Melbourne Convention Centre, 16 June 1998 [http://www.pm.gov.au/media/pressrel/qandA1608.htm].  Back.

Note 73: As cited in Marcia Russell, Revolution; New Zealand from Fortress to Free Market (Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett, 1996). See also: Tim Hazeldine, Taking New Zealand Seriously: The Economics of Decency (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1998); Jane Kelsey, Economic Fundamentalism: The New Zealand Experiment — A World Model for Structural Adjustment (London; Pluto, 1995); National Health Committee (A Report from the National Advisory Committee on Health and Disability), The Social, Cultural and Economic Determinants of Health in New Zealand: Action to Improve Health (Wellington: National Advisory Committee on Health and Disability, 1998); and Nripesh Podder and Srikanta Chatterjee, “Sharing the National Cake in Post Reform New Zealand: Income Inequality Trends in Terms of Income Sources,” paper presented to Annual Conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists, Government Buildings, Wellington, 2-4 September 1998.  Back.

Note 74: James C. Thomson, “How Could Vietnam happen?: An Autopsy,” in Douglas M. Fox (ed.), The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy Making: A Reader (Pacific Palisades, Goodyear, 1971), pp. 299-309.  Back.

Note 75: ibid, pp. 299-301.  Back.

Note 76: ibid, pp. 303-307.  Back.

Note 77: ibid, pp. 307-309.  Back.

Note 78: Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (London: C.A. Watts, 1962), as cited in Preston, “Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement,” p. 65.  Back.

Note 79: Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 106-118.  Back.

Note 80: Dorothy Ross, “An Historian’s View Of American Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29(April 1993): p. 107 (hereafter cited as Ross, “An Historian’s View”).  Back.

Note 81: Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), p. 50.  Back.

Note 82: Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics, (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 7.  Back.

Note 83: Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 12 (hereafter cited as Lawson, Economics and Reality); see also pp. 10-13.  Back.

Note 84: John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Ringwood, VIctoria: Penguin, 1997), pp. 4-5 (hereafter cited as Saul, Unconscious Civilization).  Back.

Note 85: Julie A. Nelson, “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning?: Gender and the Definition of Economics” (hereafter cited as Nelson, “Gender and the Definition of Economics”), in Ferber and Nelson, Beyond Economic Man, pp. 24-26.  Back.

Note 86: Diana Strassmann, “Not a Free Market: The Rhetoric of Disciplinary Authority in Economics,” (hereafter cited as Strassmann, “Not a Free Market”), in Ferber and Nelson, Beyond Economic Man, p. 63.  Back.

Note 87: Marianne A. Ferber and Julie Nelson, “Introduction: The Social Construction of Economics and the Social Construction of Gender” (hereafter cited as Ferber and Nelson, “Introduction”) in Ferber and Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man, pp. 2-4.  Back.

Note 88: Donald N. McCloskey, “Some News That At Least Will Not Bore You,” Eastern Economic Journal (Fall 1995), reprinted in Lingua Franca (May-June 1996), and reprinted again in Harper’s Magazine (July 1996), pp. 21 and 24-25.  Back.

Note 89: ibid.  Back.

Note 90: Donald N. McCloskey, “Some Consequences of a Conjective Economics,” in Ferber and Nelson, Beyond Economic Man, p. 79.  Back.

Note 91: ibid.  Back.

Note 92: Ferber and Nelson, “Introduction” in Ferber and Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man, pp. 4-6.  Back.

Note 93: Helen E. Longino, “Economics for Whom?” in Ferber and Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man, pp. 166-167; and Block, Postindustrial Possibilities, p. 30.  Back.

Note 94: Strassmann, “Not a Free Market,” in Ferber and Nelson, Beyond Economic Man, pp. 55-56.  Back.

Note 95: Thomas Balogh, The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 32, as cited in Galbraith, History, p. 189.  Back.

Note 96: See Saul, Unconscious Civilization, pp. 51-52.  Back.

Note 97: For a brief account of the views expressed Huntington’s works to the late 1980s, see John Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire (Boston: South End, 1989), pp. 71-76.  Back.

Note 98: John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1993), hereafter cited as Galbraith, Financial Euphoria.  Back.

Note 99: ibid, pp. 12-13; and Galbraith, The Tenured Professor, p. 68.  Back.

Note 100: ibid, p. 23.  Back.

Note 101: Gregory, The Mind, p. 184.  Back.

Note 102: The recent widespread availability of Viagra has both served to reduce the anxiety associated with neo-liberalism, and to make possible a less intrusive, survey-based, research project which could be carried out, in its initial stages, by the relevant GP.  Back.

Note 103: Gregory, The Mind, pp. 549-550.  Back.

Note 104: ibid, pp. 568-569.  Back.

Note 105: ibid, pp. 657-658.  Back.

Note 106: ibid, pp. 697-698.  Back.

Note 107: Paul Ormerod reports what he terms a “perhaps apocryphal” story from Romania under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu: the authorities banned all imported economic journals from the West on ideological grounds, with the exception of Econometrica on the grounds that it was so abstruse as to be of no conceivable relevance to anything (Ormerod, The Death of Economics, p. 43).  Back.

Note 108: ibid, p. 698.  Back.

Note 109: ibid, pp. 654 and 699.  Back.

Note 110: ibid.  Back.

Note 111: Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie — Trapped Like a Rat in Mr Bill’s Neighborhood (Doubleday: Sydney, 1995), p. 126.  Back.

Note 112: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 4.  Back.

Note 113: Thomas Powers, “The Truth About the CIA,” The New York Review, 13 May 1993. pp.52-53.  Back.

Note 114: Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior:-James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).  Back.

Note 115: William H. Epstein, “Counter-Intelligence: Cold-War Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” English Literary History 57 (Spring 1990); pp. 84-85 (hereafter cited as Epstein, “Counter Intelligence”).  Back.

Note 116: John Ranelagh, CIA: A History (London: BBC Books, 1992), p. 134.  Back.

Note 117: Epstein, “Counter Intelligence,” p. 84.  Back.

Note 118: Soren Ambrose, “IMF Bailouts: Familiar, Failed Medicine for Asian ‘Tigers,’” Corporate Watch web site: http://www.igc.org/trac/corner/worldnews/other/other83.html  Back.

Note 119: Gregory, The Mind, pp. 576-577.  Back.

Note 120: ibid, pp. 63-64, and 576.  Back.

Note 121: Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 4-5, and 313 (hereafter cited as Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty).  Back.

Note 122: ibid, pp. 5-6; and 307-27.  Back.

Note 123: Rick Weiss, “Scientists say yes, we have sum bananas,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 1988 (ex The Washington Post / The Guardian); and John von Radowitz, “Mathematics mere monkey business, say scientists,” The Canberra Times, 24 October 1998.  Back.

Note 124: Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 310.  Back.

Note 125: Mary Douglas, “Faith, Hope and Probability” a review of Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), London Review of Books, 23 May 1991, p. 6 (hereafter cited as Douglas, “Faith, Hope and Probability”).  Back.

Note 126: Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 348.  Back.

Note 127: Douglas, “Faith, Hope and Probability,”. 6.  Back.

Note 128: Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 310.  Back.

Note 129: Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (Albany, NY: State university of New York Press, 1990), p. xviii.  Back.

Note 130: Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), p. xiii (hereafter cited as Lawson, Economics and Reality).  Back.

Note 131: Gerard Debreu, “The Mathematicization of Economic Theory,” American Economic Review 81:1-7, as cited in Julie A. Nelson, “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning?: Gender and the Definition of Economics,” (hereafter cited as Nelson, “Gender in the Definition of Economics”), in Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 26 (hereafter cited as Ferber and Nelson (eds.), Beyond Economic Man).  Back.

Note 132: Alexander Rosenberg, Economics — Mathematical politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 247 (hereafter cited as Rosenberg, Economics).  Back.

Note 133: ibid, p. 12-13.  Back.

Note 134: Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, pp. 68-69.  Back.

Note 135: Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture, (London: penguin, 1990), p. 298.  Back.

Note 136: Jim Holt, “The Monster and other mathematical beasts,” Lingua Franca, November 1977, pp. 76-77.  Back.

Note 137: Brian Rotman, “Fortress Mathematica,” London Review of Books, 17 September 1998, pp. 25-26.  Back.

Note 138: ibid, p. 25.  Back.

Note 139: ibid, p. 26.  Back.

Note 140: Gregory, The Mind, pp. 373.  Back.