| This dissertation examines, extends, and elaborates Adolph Lowe's Political Economics, with a special emphasis on his Instrumental Analysis as an alternative methodology for economic theory and public policy. The Introduction contextualizes Lowe's work by offering an overview of his primary influences, thereby addressing the issue of how Lowe came to ask the questions he did. In Chapter II, Lowe's critique of economic laws is examined in light of related work in interpretive social science, as well as more recent postmodern developments. This work is presented as a highly original and greatly underexamined critique of traditional economic theory and the key to Lowe's development of an alternative, "interpretive-structural" approach to economics. Chapter III draws on the work of Peirce, Polya, and Michael Polanyi to offer a new interpretation of Instrumentalism as, among other things, a policy discovery procedure. It is argued that such an interpretation reopens issues related to debates concerning economic planning, and a number of criticisms of instrumentalism are discussed. Chapter IV discusses the relationship between Instrumentalism and Lowe's Structural Analysis, using examples from Lowe's work to demonstrate the usefulness of heuristic devices for gaining insights into structural and technological relations in industrial systems. Chapter V examines the fruitfulness of Lowe's approach for environmental policy, while also arguing that adequate accounting of environmental factors invites a reconsideration of the emphasis of much of Lowe's earlier work on structural analysis. The final chapter concerns the political philosophical aspects of Lowe's analysis of the relation of freedom and order. It begins by examining Lowe's work on the socialization function of education in democratic societies. Insights from the work of Peirce, Vygotsky, and C. Wright Mills are drawn on to defend Lowe's conception of freedom as spontaneous conformity. |
