I find the whole Niall Ferguson debacle***to be very funny because it demonstrates that the economists are still trying to resolve an issue that scholars of literature have settled decades ago. The biographical approach (meaning, an attempt to analyze an author’s contribution in terms of his or her biography) has long been discarded as useless, unproductive, and amateurish.
The reason why scholars of literature have abandoned the type of criticism where it was acceptable to say things like “Writer X had a miserable relationship with his mother and this colored all of his female characters” is because none of these assertions can be verified. We cannot possibly know anything about another person’s perception of his or her own life. All we can know is how we see that life and what it means to us.
Another problem with the biographical approach is that biographies are just as fictional as any novel. Somebody organized the events of a person’s life into a coherent narrative. In the process, a lot of material was of necessity edited out of the story. How can we know that the events which were not included into the story and that seemed unimportant to the biographer were not of the utmost importance to the person whose life-story is being narrated? If we are talking about an autobiography, how do we know that the author is not presenting us with a set of self-serving and self-aggrandizing lies?
This is why literary critics have long abandoned all attempts to psychoanalyze authors and explain their work in terms of their biographies.
Scholarly disciplines would do well by communicating with each other.
You can observe the intensity of the biographical debate among economists here.
*** “[I]n front of a group of more than 500 investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’s famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I think it is important, for example, to know that Évariste Galois died at the age of twenty, and so had little time to make contributions to mathematics. This explains why his body of work, while profoundly important, is not as extensive as that of many other mathematicians.
Why is it not important to take note of this??
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What you are mentioning is a fact of objective reality that is easily verifiable. There is a huge difference between this and “he was gay which is why he didn’t have children which is why his theory is less future-oriented.” In the latter case, the cause-effect connections are completely arbitrary and subjective.
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Or another example:
A. The poet traveled to New York and wrote a collection of poems based on his experiences in that city. = Easily verifiable. This is just a fact, not an attempt at analysis.
B. The poet traveled a lot because his childhood home environment was unhappy and he never felt truly at home anywhere. = Not verifiable at all.
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I liked your reasoning on this matter very much, Clarissa! I’m so sick and tired of all those know-it-all ”weekend-psychoanalysts”, bred on uncle Freud’s cocaine-driven vivisection of a human soul. A tree born crooked will never grow-up straight.
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I liked your reasoning on this matter very much, Clarissa! I’m so sick and tired of all those interpretations of each man’s act and word as deeply connected with his childhood experieces (especially the traumatic ones), mostly coming from numerous ”weekend psychoanalists” fanatically devoted to uncle Freud’s cocaine-driven pseudo-theories. ”A tree born crooked will never grow-up straight”.
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Anything Writer X has to say should be in the text anyway, otherwise they’d be a lousy writer. What’s the point of getting their personal life involved in their professional work?
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It’s one of the reasons why I don’t like psychoanalysis as an ideology. I say clearly, I don’t like it as an ideology. If there is a non-dogmatic use it can be put to, I don’t mind it, but that makes it hardly an interpretive device. I think some people take a lot of pleasure in making creativity look like sickness, in making it look like something abnormal and therefore wrong. For some reason, one may feel more free applying the dogmas to minorities rather than to that standard fellow, being the white male who supplies us with the model for medical normalcy.
I must say I’ve really hated the way psychoanalysis has been used to analyse Marechera’s life. I’m sure the literary critics who do this are also quite capable of shrugging and saying, “Hey, it’s just my interpretation!” Some interpretations are extreme and racist. For instance, he stuttered because he was a masochist we wanted to be hit by a white, male soldier. Yes, that is a funny joke. Or rather, it’s fairly typical of what often happens in psychoanalytical interpretations of characters deemed unsympathetic: the effect is exchanged for the cause. In reality, it’s much more likely he stuttered from an early age because he *did not wish to be hit*. But it’s funnier to make it into its opposite, to imply that any vulnerability is an invitation to be smashed down again.
And that’s what I don’t like about psychoanalysis. Injuries are an invitation to be smashed down. The “hysteric” is blamed for having caused patriarchy. If she hadn’t caused, it, she would not be hysterical now. The rape victim caused the rape. Dora caused her sexual harassment by desiring sexual intercourse unconsciously.
The world is as it should be, then.
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And I hate cucumbers as an ideology. 🙂 Even the most amazing things in the word can become total crap if used for purposes they were never intended to use. In my culture we call this hunting mosquitoes with a bazooka or driving in nails with a computer. 🙂
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But I have mostly come across it as an ideology, that’s the thing. It’s rare that it is an art, rather than a content that wants to superimpose itself upon a situation, just because practicing an art requires much more skill than imposing an ideology.
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Sorry, I’m in a non-intellectual mood today, so I feel the need to share the following Soviet joke.
Women are buying cucumbers from a street vendor.
“Can I have this long and thin one?” one woman asks.
“And I prefer this short and thick one,” another woman says.
“I’d like that slightly crooked but sturdy one,” the third woman says.
“And I just want to make a salad,” the fourth woman sighs.
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masalada= a woman in Zimbabwe who enjoys eating at salad bars/enjoys the high life. She may well be a form of prostitute in many instances.
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This is fascinating! Love of salads as a sign of decadence and self-indulgence.
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I think that the biographical approach is even worse when applied to economics than when it is applied to literary criticism, since economics makes prescriptive statements. Niall Ferguson’s comments, to me, sounded very much like an attempt to poison the well: “oh, you don’t have listen to Keynes because he was gay.”
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It’s scary that this sort of weird and unhealthy gossip actually passes for scholarship.
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Gossip is not science.
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I just read an article that proclaims triumphantly that Ferguson is wrong because Keynes did have sex with a woman and even enjoyed it! Yay! What a load off everybody’s shoulder is this revelation. (Sarcasm.)
This is what passes for economic science these days: a discussion of ho slept with whom and how often.
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Neither is economics.
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