Interrogations for Equality Seminar Session 2. Racial Inequality

Reading "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology," I found the distinction Mills makes between ideal-asidealized-model and ideal-as-descriptive-model to be very close to the distinction often found in Marxist political economy and philosophy between mental generalizations/idealizations and real abstractions, respectively--though this is a debate I've always had difficulty with. So, as I understand it, if both neoclassical economics and Marxian political economy are in the business of building general theories to discover the structures beneath the mess of concrete reality, they are said to have different relationships to the concrete. Neoclassical economics is then accused of creating sets of ideal laws that operate when many concrete factors are assumed not to exist. By contrast, the search for real abstractions in the Marxian tradition, like the ideal-as-descriptivemodel, is a search for those essential features of actually existing concrete factors (so to understand the general laws which regulate the capitalist system). I think this is what Marx is talking about in the methodological discussion in the Grundrisse, which implores social scientists/philosophers to move from the concrete to the abstract so to better understand the concrete (which then in the context of broader abstractions appears to be less chaotic).