The Radical Political Economics of Douglas F. Dowd
Author(s)
Keaney, Michael
Abstract
Of course, Dowd has been informed by the uniquely American experience, and he has, in turn, attempted to use that experience to contribute to the broadening and deepening of democracy in the United States. His political economic philosophy belongs to an indigenous tradition of constructive, radical dissent within American thought, whose main wellspring is the significant corpus bequeathed by Thorstein Veblen. Thus, one might consider Dowd to be continuing Veblen’s radical institutionalist critique in parallel with other important contemporaries including Mills, Paul M. Sweezy, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Dowd’s work may be classified primarily as economic history. Yet such categorization does little justice to the breadth of his interests, which are typical of American institutionalists generally. It would subvert a key claim of critical American social thought, including Dowd’s, which has been that conventional disciplinary boundaries are inherently artificial and more often than not act to impede the development of relevant scholarship that can, among other important goals, engage an audience wider than that of the typical peer-reviewed journal.
