Steve Walt opines that “would-be foreign policy wonks” should basically get a classical liberal-arts education, and he uses a traditional justification for this: “In world that is both diverse and changing rapidly, a broad portfolio of knowledge is almost certainly the best preparation for a long career in the field.” I’d amend that somewhat, and say that a broad liberal-arts education — which isn’t about gaining a portfolio of knowledge or skills as much as it is about developing a certain critical intellectual disposition — is almost certainly the best preparation for the rest of your adult life, not just for a career in the IR field however understood. Hyper-specialization at the undergraduate level is something that annoys me to no end, and on that score as on many of the specifics in Walt’s list I find myself in complete agreement.
Two minor quibbles and one more major issue.
Minor quibble #1: I think Walt gets the justification for studying some statistics as an undergraduate student precisely correct: “statistics is part of the language of policy discourse, and if you don’t understand the basics, you won’t be a discerning consumer of quantitative information.” It’s a language, you need to be able to speak it in at least a rudimentary way to make headway in most policy circles, and (it pains me to say) in most IR academic circles too. [Not because statistics is bad, but because I think we can do better as a basic methodological vocabulary than elementary statistics. But that’s another post, or a different book that I already wrote.] But when Walt advises the study of economics, he shifts his epistemic warrant slightly, calling for “basic grasp of the key principles of international trade and finance and some idea how the world economy actually works.” The former justification (statistics is a language) makes no commitment to statistics being a correct or even defensible way to view the world, just as his recommendation to learn a foreign language makes no commitment to a given language being somehow truer. But the latter justification presumes that the language of contemporary economics is some kind of a reliable guide to how things work, a debatable proposition indeed — especially given very good recent work on the performativity of economic language. he should have stuck with “learn some of that language too.”
Minor quibble #2: Walt suggests that “geography matters” so students ought to learn things like the physical characteristics of different regions. But this is a non sequitur, since it is entirely possible for one to maintain that geography matters without becoming a geographical determinist. Studying the physical characteristics of a region and expecting them to give one insight into social and political dynamics is geographical determinism, whether or not one produces a minor caveat by converting those physical characteristics into an independent variable with only a partial or probabilistic impact on outcomes…if physical characteristics explain social forms, then we’re a minor and theoretically inconsequential step away from “geography is destiny” and Halford Mackinder’s world-island and heartland. On which, well, one might read any piece of critical geography/geopolitics written in the past several decades, starting here and here. In fact, works like those two provide a gateway to a more defensible and less reductionist/determinist kind of “geography matters,” in which it’s the discourse of geographic space and not that space “in itself” (whatever the heck that might mean) which has consequences.
And this in turn links to my biggest hesitation about Walt’s list, which is his persistent equivocation between the notion that one should study certain things as an undergraduate in order to grasp the diversity of ways that people make sense of the world, and the notion that one should study certain things as an undergraduate in order to grasp the way that things really are (despite what others might think, because they’re wrong). This is perhaps most apparent in Walt’s first recommendation, which is that one should study history:
Not only does history provide the laboratory in which our basic theories must be tested, it shapes the narratives different peoples tell themselves about how they came to their present circumstances and how they regard their relationship to others. How could one hope to understand the Middle East without knowing about the Ottoman Empire, the impact of colonialism, the role of Islam, the influence of European anti-Semitism and Zionism, or the part played by the Cold War? Similarly, how could one grasp the current complexities in Asia without understanding the prior relations between these nations and the different ways that Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Pashtuns, Hindus, Muslims, and others understand and explain past events?
Walt’s “not only” joins two extremely, even radically, different versions of what it would mean to study history. History as “laboratory” — Walt means historical facts as data for our theories to test themselves against, but this conception also covers historical facts as parts of developmental sequences that play themselves out behind the backs, or otherwise out of the grasp of, actors — suggests that we understand a present situation in world politics better by studying what came before it. History as “the narratives different peoples tell themselves about how they came to their present circumstances” — true, Walt says that those narratives are shaped by history rather than being history itself, but then as the paragraph unfolds he grants the study of historical self-understanding its own autonomous role in grasping “current complexities” — suggests, by contrast, that we understand a present situation in world politics better by seeing what use is made of the past in the present and how that puts horizons on the future. Events with persistent causal power versus the causal power of “eventing,” so to speak.
My hesitation is two-fold. First, Walt, like many IR scholars, doesn’t seem to be aware of the tension between these two points of view, so he (like others) can pass pretty seamlessly from “here’s how different actors construe the situation” to “here’s how it is.” But there is radical tension, perhaps to the point of incommensurability, between those approaches to history. Because Walt glosses over that tension, I hesitate. But I also hesitate because I suspect that in the end Walt is really siding with the first approach rather than the second, and is hence unable to reflexively grasp the extent to which his own account of “how it is” is itself a perspectival construal rather than a way of dispelling inaccurate perspectives. The point of a liberal-arts education, as far as I am concerned, is to kick the apparent supports out from under each and every supposed “view from nowhere” by showing how they emerge from particular combinations of commitments and stances, and this in turn propels the liberally-educated person into a better grasp of the contingency of things — which in turn allows creative action that shapes a plausible future. It is precisely not about mastering a multifaceted-but-ultimately-homogenous narrative of The Way That The World Is so that one can use that as a basis for Sound Policy Recommendations.
Developing a respect for ambiguity and contingency is not the same thing as eliminating ambiguity and contingency through a more intricate totalizing account, even if that totalizing account is couched in terms of “a broad portfolio of knowledge” for a “world that is both diverse and changing rapidly.” The former embraces genuine uncertainty in the Knightian sense; the latter reduces it to just plain old “risk.” And I would say that the latter is precisely not what a liberal-arts education is all about — it’s a technocratic device for imagining oneself into a far less ambiguous world. But a liberal-arts education equips one to live in that world instead of perpetually trying to engineer it away. Walt’s last recommendation involves confronting ethical questions and conundrums, which I certainly agree is something that one ought to do as an undergraduate student…but not to find a superior foundation as much as to start recognizing the limits of such foundations, the Weberian “uncomfortable facts” that each and every principled position has to confront. Remember that it was Plato who thought that one could craft new, superior foundations; Socrates just asked questions that confounded his interlocutors and forced them to question their assumptions. The liberal-arts educator ought to think Socrates rather than Plato, and the undergraduate student — especially, perhaps, the undergraduate student interested in world politics broadly understood — ought to be a lot more concerned with the diversity of ways of worlding than with looking for the One True (Account Of The) World.
“Walt suggests that “geography matters” so students ought to learn things like the physical characteristics of different regions. But this is a non sequitur, since it is entirely possible for one to maintain that geography matters without becoming a geographical determinist. Studying the physical characteristics of a region and expecting them to give one insight into social and political dynamics is geographical determinism…”
I’m sorry but this ‘non sequitur’ allegation is itself a non sequitur! ‘Physical geography matters’ is not determinism; ‘physical geography determines’ is determinism. And I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that if we allow mountains, rivers and so on into our analyses that we’re a hop and a skip away from Mackinder. What about, for instance, Jared Diamond? Is he beyond the pale? I know that he has a tendency to reify things like ‘national culture’ and for that I would criticise him but in general he does an excellent job of drawing sociality and materiality together in such a fashion that neither determines the other. Braudel too.
This either/or logic is the fundamental weakness of social constructivism: that either we bracket out materiality (in this case physical geography) completely or else we’ll inevitably end up saying that mountains, rivers and disease mechanically determine the various trajectories of humanity. It just doesn’t follow. More seriously, it limits the potential of constructivism with respect to critique, interpretation and explanation. It’s old fashioned dualism dressed up in fashionable new jargon.
Down with this sort of thing!
Other than that, however, I agree with you. Walt all too easily, and perhaps even subconsciously, suggests that some epistemic practices have access to reality while others simply stitch together different aptitudes and interpretations. This is the very worst of advice.
In this century the sociology of knowledge has to be a core part of any decent liberal arts education (or, frankly, any decent education). Without it there can be no reflexivity or self-awareness with respect to everything else that one is learning. Without that students are likely to take the geology, biology and, worst of all, the economics of the matter to be the ‘really real’ behind all the interpretations.
But, that said, it’d help if social constructivism didn’t so wilfully cut reality straight down the middle and pretend that most of the constitutive elements of our worldly existence should be ignored, lest they ‘determine’ us.
Allowing a little non-social influence on social relations is like being a little bit pregnant, because strictly speaking, these are both firm dichotomies rather than categories that can be somehow combined. If social action has parametric non-social limits that can be definitively grasped, then social action isn’t constitutive and creative except within a sphere that something else grants to it. Which is why a little bit of “physical features of a region matter on their own, autonomously” is, conceptually speaking, physical determinism.
That said, realize that I am not making fundamental ontological claims here, but analytical ones. Obviously people need to eat, so the food supply is important. Duh. At issue is how one conceptualizes “the food supply” or the mountains/rivers/diseases you invoke. I do not think that it makes sense to simultaneously say that intrinsic characteristics of food/rivers/mountains/diseases cause social outcomes, and that the discourses (and I shouldn’t have to say “discourse isn’t talk, but a system of practical meaning-making activity,” but I am saying it anyway just in case) disclosing these things as meaningful objects cause social outcomes. Theoretically speaking, it’s one or the other, not both — and if it’s both, then it’s usually the former.
Jared Diamond is a determinist hack, and I’d rate his popular work only slightly above that of Tom Friedman because Diamond uses better historical sources. William McNeill said everything Diamond has said about diseases and environments, but decades earlier and more deftly.
Braudel, that’s a different kettle of fish altogether, because of the way that all of the Annales School scholars systematically treat the social as intimately interwoven with the material (like the good sophisticated Marxists that they ultimately are, and like Diamond is not). No determinism here because there’s no material/social duality; there’s one thing, not two. The same is true if one starts on the other side of the theoretical ledger, with the cultural — no duality, so no determinism (things have to be separate for one to determine the other). One misreads both the Annales position and the discourse-theoretical position if one regards either as determinist; instead, they are both positions that embrace contingency, focus on how factors and mechanisms are configured, and worry about process rather than worrying about identifying “fundamental”/”parametric” limits. So — semantic punchline — they’re both equally “constructivist” in the famous Ian Hacking sense of “X did not have to be the way it is; X is not given in the nature of things; X is not inevitable.” They just differ on how they cash out that fundamental insight.
Curious though PTJ, if you think Latour and his relational actor-network theory offers us a way out of such dichotomies or conundrums? As in the dichotomy between the “ideational” and the “material?” I read him as offering an alternative conception of the “social,” which ontologically it could be fleshed out, but epistemologically speaking? I’m not quite sure…
Or to put it another way, I read him as attempting to map out configurations of transactions and relations between social sites, the latter which could be physical objects, persons, etc., hence problematizing the “social”/”non-social” dichotomy. On the other hand, if we did take into account the analyticist methodology you’ve outlined elsewhere, physical objects would still be interpreted of course for the sake of theoretical accounts, so in a sense, perhaps, the “social” is either A) still taking precedence here, or B) as Latour puts it, we’re forced to rethink what “the social” entails. It’s admittedly been a while, so feel free to correct me if I’m off the mark…
I read Latour much the way that you read him here. I think he’s basically a relational discourse theorist who is reacting against the “ideational” misreading of Foucault, so he and his disciples say “material” a lot when they mean discursive in the correct, narrow, Foucault-Laclau-Mouffe-Pickering-and-I-would-also-say-Wittgenstenian-sense of systems of meaning-making practices. The word “material” is a red herring in all-too-many of these discussions.
Funny you should mention Latour, @Nawal!
For Latour there are no such things as ‘social relations’ in an abstract sense. There are no ‘social relations’ as such, only mediators, which are things. When Latour talks about ‘the social’ he is talking about a particular ‘mode of existence’ or mode of connection particular to sociality. In other words, sociality is a particular WAY of connecting things; it is not a separate sphere or realm apart from things. It’s not composed from a different kind of ‘stuff’ to other kinds of things. He isn’t ‘problematising the dichotomy’ — he’s outright denying it.
Consequently, for him, sociality isn’t limited to words, meanings, texts, etc. — anything that performs a social connection is social. While I’m fully aware that “discourse isn’t talk, but a system of practical meaning-making activity” — i.e. it isn’t ‘ideal’ — that isn’t the problem. Some discourse theorists are of course willing to embrace the concept of materiality insofar as texts are material, as are human bodies and regimes of discipline and so on. But these caveats are generally pretty half-hearted and fail to go anywhere near far enough. In fact they’re just margin-notes to a whole mindset that is wrong.
Latour’s definitely not a discourse theorist in any way, shape or form. He certainly owes dues to Foucault, while semiotics is his main ‘toolkit’ but that’s as far as it goes. This becomes perfectly clear in any of his actual actor-network analyses. For example: In his photo essay ‘Paris: Invisible City’ (available on his website) he goes around Paris looking at all the institutions that hold the city together as a city. The city qua city — that is, as a social entity. He looks at, for instance, how the clocks keep time.
Tracing that network one can go from the watch on one’s wrist to the radio towers that transmit pulses to update devices wirelessly to broadcasting stations, to the statute books and standards documents that prescribe the specific definitions of time to the laboratories where standards are produced, criticised, tested, reproduced and so on. But if you keep pulling at the threads you can go even further. Those laboratories don’t just work on texts and traces; they also tie themselves into the persistent, unfailing pulses of decaying radioactive isotopes and the perfectly consistent throbbing of distant, dying stars. These are the objects whose own time-keeping is used to set the whole network in lockstep.
These technical, legal, scientific and political institutions tie the city of Paris together by keeping it in time with itself. And at what point is this network ‘social’ in the narrow sense? The stars, atoms, papers, fibre-optic cables and so on are not part of the network ‘in a manner of speaking,’ nor are they only enrolled insofar as they are meaningful. They simply are part of the network, just as all the meaningful human agents are. The network isn’t reducible to atoms and stars but nor does it make the least bit of sense without them.
Latour doesn’t ask ‘how is meaning made?’ he asks ‘how do things hold together?’ — and cities are held together, in some small part, with stars and atoms — so long as the requisite networking institutions exist, that is.
Stars and atoms aren’t the ‘really real’ behind the veil of subjective impression and they don’t determine anything. The fear of material determinism is frankly silly if you look at how much hard work goes into making the whole network hold together. Stars and atoms don’t easily lend themselves to humans’ peculiar ends. They have to be enrolled, enlisted and maintained. Far from determining the whole getup on their own they are utterly indifferent towards us. They have to be MADE to determine the time on our wrists and on our walls.
And yet, despite all of that, actor-network theory can easily be read as constructivism. It steadfastly refuses, for instance, the notion of an absolute, objective Time sitting behind all our subjective perversions of it. The stars and atoms do not pulse and decay in Real Time, ‘out there,’ as it really is. The aforementioned network does not produce a subjective approximation of an objective absolute. Time is the product of a specific network and, consequently, there are as many times as there are networks producing it. But none of that constructivism draws a line between the atoms and the texts, the things and their meaning. On the contrary, if there were such a line the whole network would collapse; the network exists precisely because the lines of the network look like this: —— (connected) and not like this: —-|—- (disconnected). Putting in place an arbitrary line between sociality and materiality (thereby constituting the fantasy that such things exist, severally) prevents us from understanding these hybrid networks because the networks themselves do not operate on the basis of such distinctions. This is why ANT adopts the ethnomethodological principle to let actors themselves define their own meta-languages, rather than imposing an analytical master-language from the outside.
And this is why our dualist SOPs (whether they’re ontological or just analytical, it makes no difference), in my opinion, are no longer helpful. They are the problem, not the solution.
So, @PTJ, basically I don’t accept that we should have hard and fast divisions between the ontologies of our daily lives — in which we know that the world is full of things that have all kinds of effects on us — and the ontologies of our analyses — where only the ‘meaning’ of things is relevant. It’s not because ignoring materiality locks us into ‘subjectivism’ or because looking at things rather than people makes us all hard-nosed and serious — these criticisms are bogus and based on their own dualisms. It’s because arbitrary, pre-judged distinctions between what matters and what doesn’t make it impossible for us to understand hybrid networks that, themselves, only work because they do not make such distinctions.
If we live in an ontologically hybrid world we need modes of analysis suited to that world. Social constructivism or discourse analysis in the vein of Foucault, Laclau, Wittgenstein, etc. are well suited to particular areas of our world but they miss out entirely on vast swathes of it because of their blinkered and entirely unnecessary dualist predispositions (again, whether it’s ontological or analytical dualism, it makes no difference). Social constructivism should be valued for what it does well but no number of successes should paper over where it goes awry — and where it goes off the rails is in the face of hybrid networks, which are everywhere.
What we have here is a failure to communicate ;-) which is because your reading of Latour — which I generally agree with — links his scientific ontology of the social to a dualist/representational philosophical ontology that I think is neither what Latour is up to nor self-evidently what we social scientists/analysts ought to be engaged in. “If we live in an ontologically hybrid world we need modes of analysis
suited to that world. Social constructivism or discourse analysis in
the vein of Foucault, Laclau, Wittgenstein, etc. are well suited to
particular areas of our world but they miss out entirely on vast swathes
of it because of their blinkered and entirely unnecessary dualist
predispositions…” I would disagree pretty fundamentally here, because like most philosophical mind-body dualists you’re trying to “put ontology first” and make categorical claims about how we should study the world based on the character of the world — a gesture that just side-steps the basic conundrum of how we might get to that character of the world without the conceptual equipment that you are suggesting follows from that character…leaving us with a profession of faith in the character of the world (in this case, that it is made up of “hybrid networks”). Instead of this, why not spend time demonstrating how regarding the world as made up of “hybrid networks” allows us to explain it better? Once one does that — once one shifts one’s philosophical ontology from dualism to monism, come to the dark side, we have cookies — a lot of the supposed “controversy” dries up and withers away.
I’ll say again: no discourse analyst who actually has read Foucault can consistently claim that discourse is somehow opposed to practice or “the material.” The scientific-ontological duality you keep bringing up is a misreading of the social constructivist and discourse-theoretical claim, because it persistently misunderstands such explanations as ideational determinism. Which they are not. I am not putting a line between sociality and materiality, and you are not doing so in your Latour-inspired account of the social world. You are doing so only in the straw man you persistently attack ;-) Let it go, no one is actually arguing that here, and let’s get down to business: whether Latour is better or worse than, say, Bourdieu or Foucault or Luhmann (or, what the heck, Gramsci or Braudel) as a way of making sense of the social world. In that vein, for my money what Latour is doing is relational discourse analysis, with a considerably broader sense of the extent of the relevant networks of discursive practice than most Foucauldians have and perhaps than Foucault himself had. Latour’s networks make meaning possible, so we can sensibly refer to cities and the time and the results of an experiment; in that sense they’re meaning-making practices just like Foucault’s epistemic grammars are. So I personally don’t see the fundamental difference.
I appreciate that our opinions are maybe not as different as I have suggested (oh, academic-types and their nitpicking!) but riddle me this: if discourse analysts by and large do nor operate on the basis of a ‘bifurcation of nature,’ as Whitehead put it, then why are the non-human things upon which ANT analyses focus almost completely absent from DA texts?
Let’s back up: the ANT concept of ‘actant’ comes from semiotics (mostly from Propp and Greimas) where it can refer to any character or thing within a narrative that does something — it can refer to mountains and unicorns, equally, if either of those things does something in the course of the narrative. (This is where the ‘principle of symmetry’ between human and non-human things in ANT comes from.)
Looking at an ANT analyses in these terms the actants in these texts are many and varied: Latour’s aforementioned ‘Paris: Invisible City’ invokes bollards, security cameras and atoms as well as people, texts and so on. If you look at any given discourse analysis text in the same way you will find a far less heterogeneous assemblage of actants: you’ll have signifiers, meanings, subjects, texts — at a push you might have human bodies and printing presses and so on, but rarely (I don’t think that Foucault is especially representative of this creed, as it happens).
DA texts just don’t draw on the same range of resources as ANT ones do. Doesn’t this suggest some more profound philosophical differences beyond simply substituting ‘discourse’ for ‘network’?
To take another example, in his book on Pasteur, Latour describes an event that Pasteur hosted at Pouilly-le-fort in 1881. What Pasteur did was stage essentially an act of scientific theater. He gathered together scientists, journalists, politicians and others and made a grand wager: He took two groups of sheep and infected them with anthrax. One group were inoculated with his vaccine, others were not. The inoculated group would survive, Pasteur claimed, and the rest would be dead in a few days. If he was right he would have proved his theory of microbial infection (or at least he would have submitted an extremely convincing proof of it to all in attendance and, consequently, also to their colleagues, readers, constituents, etc.).
Latour considers the whole event as theater, quite literally. He shows how it was carefully stage managed down to the last detail in terms of how the farm-cum-lab was set up, how the guests were treated, how the vaccines were administered and so on. But, and this is the point, who (or what) is the star that comes onto the stage at the end — the fat lady, if you will –, at the triumphant moment? It is the microbes themselves. They enter the fray as fully fledged actors when they kill the unvaccinated sheep and spare the vaccinated ones. Not the microbes as they are represented — not microbes as linguistic terms or microbes reduced to their meaning (and he is very careful to make this point). Sure, the whole socio-linguistic apparatus was necessary to make their appearance thinkable but it is still the things themselves that enter into the performance, as actors or actants.
Could or would a discourse analyst ever write such a thing? Could a non-human actant ever occupy such a role in a DA text? Would a discourse analyst ever even be interested in such an event?
Of course this is an impossible argument in the abstract — there is no such thing as ‘Discourse Analysis’ only discourse analyses. If we include, for instance, ‘Discipline and Punish’ within the corpus of ‘discourse analysis’ (and I’m not totally on board with that) then perhaps we can say that some DA texts do allow for non-human actants to enter the narrative on an equal basis with signifiers and so on. But even then such instances are extremely rare.
Which brings me back to my previous claim: DA texts are extremely actantially homogeneous compared to ANT texts. Why is this so if DA does not, by and large, bifurcate nature and bracket off a sociolinguistic realm from everything else? I believe that it does, although I appreciate that my own ‘theater of proof’ may be less than convincing and is somewhat under-evidenced.
p.s. I wasn’t trying to be unduly polemical in previous comments — although sometimes that mode of discourse can be fun ;)
This discussion now bears little resemblance to the original post but hopefully it has been interesting to someone, somewhere!
Related to the OP, I’ve just started reading Robert Kaplan’s article ‘Revenge of Geography’ and I can see that geographical determinism of the most blunt and ignorant sort is very much alive and kicking. This is food for critique, yet I do think that ANT and the like stand a better chance of taking apart this sort of paleo-materialist block-headedness than social constructivism as it has been traditionally practiced — and for the reasons I’ve mentioned above.
This really needs a LIKE!
Some very important insights here (everyone should go out and read Lewis and Wigen right now!), and I greatly enjoyed your arguments for a liberal arts education and the dangers of viewing history as fact, but I have to at least partially disagree with you on Braudel.
The Mediterranean certainly doesn’t reach the same level of deterministic hackery as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I wouldn’t even put it at the same level of as Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (which is pretty much a better-put version of Diamond’s argument). But reading Braudel’s work, and especially The Mediterranean, it seems hard to argue that there is *no* part of his analysis that relies on determinism. Contingency is an important element in parts of his narrative, but at other times it is completely left out of the analysis – in favor of longue durée explanations that rely on ecological determinism.
Now this isn’t to say that determinism is a necessary or inherent part of the Annales approach, if we can indeed talk about the school as a distinct and coherent approach, but I would argue that it is present in both editions of The Mediterranean. Braudel’s narratively refined but analytically problematic insistence on dividing the story into three distinct parts is probably one cause of this, leading his historical analysis to be quite self-contradictory at times, when viewed as a coherent whole.
Fair enough. I tend to think more of Braudel’s other work, especially Civilization and Capitalism, and minimize The Mediterranean in my remembrance.
Ah, I see, that makes a lot of sense! In History, the discipline that is, The Mediterranean is emphasized over Braudel’s other work to such a degree that I have now read it in three different seminars, while I’ve had to read Civilization and Capitalism on my own.
Ya, good plan. I agree. Don’t learn geography, IR-wannabes! While you’re at it, don’t learn languages and culture. You wouldn’t want to be thought a cultural determinist. And drop economics and statistics: you’ll be branded a positivist. In fact, best not to learn things that other people, knowing that you’ve learned them, might use to brand you! It’s good, I like having less competition in the job market!
Does one respond to a troll who obviously didn’t read the damn post in the first place, or ignore him? I am unsure.
Ignore.
I think I agree that learning geography proves insufficient to enter or know about unfamiliar worldings or social structures, but knowing something of geographies beyond the ones that one inhabits seems like an important first step to understanding the sociality of physical space. The academic discipline of geography has put a lot of time into understanding social processes related to physical land scape or processes that inhabit the landscape itself (in that sense, I am not sure that geographers would agree with either construction of the term from your or Walt). In understanding those processes, it might seem useful to know something about place, but simply knowing about place is not sufficient to understanding other worlding.
Secondly, learning economics may have a different purpose that’s more akin to language than you like to admit. Having particular language competences — that goes beyond simply the Searle’s Chinese translation room — allows us to enter and interact in different communities. Being able to speak languages gives us access to particular societal institutions. Languages, in this sense, can be access points for societal resources. The ability to understand economics (the terminology, the disciplinary debates, the methodologies) allows one to engage particular elite communities that structure or control policy, social practices, and discourses. If there’s a civic component to a liberal arts education, there’s a moral civil obligation to understand economics. The point is not just to decipher the field, but to actively engage the field in a meaningful recursive way that might engage in intersubjective understandings, role taking, and the betterment of the whole. The entry point — the basis for the common life world — is the economic competence. Who knew Walt was such a Critical Theorist? (A bad joke and over-reading of Walt’s ideas).