4 Novembre 2019 - Séminaire du LED - Tiago Mata (UCL) - Radical Expectations, a 1970s program to change economics and America

Date de publication : 9 nov. 2019 23:41:37

Abstract: In the turbulent early years of the 1970s, heteorodoxies, promises of scientific and policy revolutions proliferated in the American economics discipline. Radical political economics was among these dissents and in a couple of years (1969-1972) it gained hundreds of converts and was welcomed by eminent members of the discipline. Radicals organized as a social movement. They wrote pamphlets, staged protests and participated in campaigns. The intellectual conterpart to their militancy within and beyond academia was unsettled. In this talk I examine how the intellectual program of radical political economics came into being. I show that the first to outline a program for radical economics were sympathetic conventional economists, who aspired radicalism to be a rebirth of interwar left economics. A program by radical economists only slowly came into being built upon a set of shared themes and concepts - the urban guetto, stratified labour markets and contractual power. The research priorities of radical economists were answers to a political test, how to identify the agency for social change in America.