IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/spmain/hal-03945951.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Newspeak and Economic Theory: 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)

Abstract

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

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Paul Fitoussi, 2022. "Newspeak and Economic Theory: How We Are Being Talked To," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03945951, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-03945951
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03945951
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    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:spmain:hal-03945951. 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: Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics (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.