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I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmodernist, a woman. I'm not ashamed of these changes of mind. As Keynes replied to the complaint that he had changed his mind on free trade, "When I get new information I change my mind. What do you do?"
My main point here is that it's possible to be postmodernist and procapitalist and feminist all at once. Of course I think it's not merely "possible": I think it's desirable and natural. The three hang together, I claim. Together they do good work in the world. Gayatri and I agree on the postmodernist and feminist bits. It's the middle bit, the economics and the economic history, on which we disagree. She says that Marxism is the way forward. I say that market capitalism fits postmodernism and feminism better than Marxism does.
My postmodernism is that of a former modernist. It comes out of an unease I began to feel around 1975 with modern economic method, modern architecture, modern painting, modem academic music, modern social engineering, modern jazz. Postmodernism, after all, is about how we know. It says simply that we do not know in the modernist way, which was a simpleton's version of Science applied to a dogmatist's version of Reality, the Method my former colleagues in Economics at the University of Chicago 1968-80 used to say they believed. George Stigler was an especially simple and dogmatic exemplar. I think if George had been sweeter I would have been slower to see how wrong was his view of science. As it was, he made it easy.
My particular form of postmodernism is the oldest, as all humanists know: the "rhetorical." It dates from 467 B.C., when the new (nonslave, nonpoor, male) democracy of Syracuse needed a disciplined theory of how we persuade. It is very similar to deconstruction: in fact the masters of deconstruction such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida were rhetoricians first, if only from their lycee Greek. I combine rhetoric with the American pragmatism of James, Dewey, and latterly Rorty. The pragmatism gives me a philosophical grounding to do rhetoric in somewhat the same way that Hegel gives...