IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-03812818.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The New Speak and Economic Theory or How We Are Being Talked To

Author

Listed:
  • Jean-Paul Fitoussi

    (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, LUISS - Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli [Roma])

Abstract

This article seeks to show how the impoverishment of language has changed the course of the evolution of economic theory, much as in 1984 the Newspeak changed the order of things and the course of the political regime. At the origin of such an evolution was the stratagem to act as if neoclassical theory was subsequent to Keynesian theory. The inversion of the time arrow had far reaching consequences on the development of economics. In great part the development of a science depends of the scholars who practice it and of its teaching to the new researchers who will further develop it. Both depend on the history of thought. The consequences on economic policies have been major, especially in Europe. By cancelling most of the Keynesian concepts from the Newspeak dictionary, the relative weights of the market and the state were changed, which could only lead to a preference for liberal, market- oriented, policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Paul Fitoussi, 2022. "The New Speak and Economic Theory or How We Are Being Talked To," Working Papers hal-03812818, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03812818
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03812818
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03812818/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03812818. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.