I thoroughly enjoy John Ralston Saul -- he popped up on HN a while back[1]. A Canadian philospher with a GSOH - what's not to love? From his Doubter's Compani

I thoroughly enjoy John Ralston Saul -- he popped up on HN a while back[1]. A Canadian philospher with a GSOH - what's not to love? From his Doubter's Companion (highly recommended) - an occasionally acerbic description of many things - comes this definitive entry under Chicago / Harvard School of Economics: > A great centre of contemporary SCHOLASTICISM. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages. > Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. They also share a tactical genius for exporting their conceptual definitions to less important centres around the world. The result is a pleasing symphony of international echoes imitating their calculations and cadences and so confirming their correctness, even when their policies bring economic disaster. The percussion section of Chicago’s orchestra is the Nobel committee for economics. Each golden medal is like another congratulatory parchment presented at the end of an elaborate theological debate. > But what of content? There isn’t much. What of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? These minor Thomists preach little more than inevitability and so counsel passivity. > What they call libertarian economics is a remarkable revenge of the scholastics on the men of the Enlightenment, who had theoretically destroyed them. Peel away the tangle of intellectual leaves from the Chicago School and what remains is a great clockmaker god who has set the world ticking. But the conclusion of the Enlightenment was that god’s indifference left humans free to organize the world as they wished. Chicago has so deformed this idea as to invert it. The great clock has been turned into an absolute, all-encompassing system. Better than an ideology, the world is its own absolute economic truth. We must remain passive before its majesty. > This is a denial of Western experience. It is nonsense which simply comforts the power slipping increasingly into the corporatist structures. > Strategic thinking can save a great deal of time wasted over tactics. A large number of America’s economic problems, and those of the West, could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics. > This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching their essentially anti-social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139144