ABSTRACT
Reasonable people try to adapt their ideas so as to make them conform with their world; to ‘fit in’. The unreasonable struggle to change their world in accordance to their ideas. This is how George Bernard Shaw (the acerbic Irish socialist, intellectual, playwright, pamphleteer, etc.) used irony in order to give ‘reasonableness’ a bad name. Indeed it takes big ideas (or megalomania) to want to change the world. Perhaps Shaw is right: to think such ideas one must be unreasonable. But can people’s ideas really change the world? John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the greatest twentieth-century economist, thought so (see next box). Others (like the revolutionary Friedrich Engels) put their hopes for a better world in the lap of history and its capacity for changing technological opportunities, social structure and, finally, men’s and women’s ideas about their world. Yet in the end, it matters little whether history is shaped by ideas or ideas by history. As the French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84) pointed out, even if ideas do not change the world, the fact that we have them thwarts ‘madmen in authority’ and hinders them from getting away with murder. Ideas are a crucial ingredient of what we call society (regardless of whether they are an input into or an output of the historical process). If economics courses and textbooks matter they do so because they wilfully toy with our ideas about the world we live in.
