Furthermore, anybody who knows anything knows at this point that LaRouche is not, and never was, a “right-winger”—that he is the most outspoken opponent of the neo-Cons and their fascist agenda.

When “anybody who knows anything knows at this point” that LaRouche started developing friendly connections with Birchers, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis in the mid-1970s and spent most of the 1980s telling anyone who would listen that he was Ronald Reagan’s extra-special buddy.

But you can rip off the credit cards of people buying copies of your pamphlets calling for AIDS patients to be put in camps—and shake down little old senile Republican ladies for their retirement funds in order to help Lyn defeat Communism—for only so long before the chumps grab their pitchforks.

So now he is the last representative of the FDR tradition.

He remains in struggle with the evildoers from Atlantis, of course, so it’s not like he’s being inconsistent or anything.

used to give my family great amusement,

LaRouche seems to have some similarities to Alfred Lawson (“When I look into the vastness of space and see the marvelous workings of its contents… I sometimes think I was born ten or twenty thousand years ahead of time.”) who is a “star” of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. LaRouche is more academically “sophisticated” (Lawson’s Physics was called “Zig, Zag and Swirl”), prolific, and “successful”, but otherwise they seem to have a lot in common. (Lawson had an economic theory known as Direct Credits for Everybody.)

My personal favorite Lawson quote:

Civilized Libraries contain thousands of books that speak nothing but lies. They are labeled fiction. There are thousands of other books that average seventy-five per cent lies, that are labeled history.

i stand gladly corrected.

World history boils down to a war between the anti-technology agrarian oligarchs (reductionist followers of Aristotle, every one) and the city-building forces of scientific progress (who are Platonists).

The whole thing started in either Atlantis or Mesopotamia, or maybe both. I can’t read my notes on that part.

The attempt to use an element of the Biosphere, foodstuffs, for abiotic power, would not be that far distant in annals of either science or morality, from raising and eating one’s children as a practical matter of producing food.

Along the way meeting the “satanic” Paolo Sarpi and his evil henchman Galileo:

The virtually criminal thing which Clausius, Grassmann, Kelvin, et al., did to the work of Sadi Carnot, was to take an expression of the quality of the human mind, the effect of the practice of the discovery of universal physical principles of the same quality as Kepler’s discovery of universal gravitation, and to treat the effects of such principles in the way in which the satanic Sarpi’s lackey Galileo had attempted sodomic rape on the body of Kepler’s discoveries of the Creator’s universal physical principle.[emphasis added]

“As a review-essay, it is sober and judicious, yet suffused with a certain tone of puzzlement, as if Bronfenbrenner had to stop every so often to scratch his head.”

Bronfenbrenner’s essay is, quite simply, a joke from beginning to end. The Journal of Political Economy does not often publish long review essays even about books its editors would consider important, but it often does (or at any rate did then) publish something funny or of quaint historical interest – usually much shorter than this one – as an end-piece. The JPE is, in addition to being one of the leading economics journals in the world, the house organ of the Chicago school of economics. In the early 1970s, Marxian economics was taken seriously by small but significant minorities in many leading American economics departments – but not, ever, in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. Bronfenbrenner notes LaRouche’s dismissal of several leading contemporary Marxian economists, but it is not such serious contenders Bronfenbrenner has come to discuss: it is LaRouche, a clown, for the entertainment of the Chicago faithful. The nature of his audience is clear when Bronfenbrenner finds that he must drop his light tone to do serious business in one footnote, because LaRouche has actually landed a blow on hometown favorite Milton Friedman’s simplistic view of deregulated markets; the professor parries with Friedman and Schwartz’s rather more sophisticated Monetary History of the United States – a cheap move, for reasons that Paul Krugman spelled out well in his obituary of Friedman in the New York Review.

One footnote, however, does not a review make. That may leave the number of serious independent assessments of LaRouche’s theories at exactly zero, which would be evidence either of a previously unfathomed lower bound for standards in the diverse community of academic editors and referees (barring that one mercifully unnamed commissioning editor from DC Heath), or a supremely powerful conspiracy, I’m not sure which.

And I agree on not having them join in common causes. I cannot recall which presidential election it was, but I distinctly recall one where the Democrats actually had to spend time repudiating various positions of LaRouche’s.