In his seventieth year, paralleling Ezra Pound’s life work of 117 Cantos, Phil McShane began a long project of writing 117 essays, a new one to be published on the Web on the first day of every month. So far he has kept successfully to this gruelling schedule. He calls these essays ‘Cantowers’, the name involving a multi-levelled pun, partly on the word ‘canto’ itself, but also hinting at the notion that persons ‘can tower’ above the partial and confused perspectives (...) of what McShane would describe as our interim ‘axial’ state, this long dark night in our thinking. (shrink)

This essay endeavours to follow my reading of the argument in Bernard Lonergan’s quite brief discussion of the above topic, to be found in Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 15 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), as §28 (pages 156-162). Apart from minor changes in notation, etc., and some greater detail in the use of mathematical arguments, there is little that is novel in what is offered. It merely reflects what I found helpful, and (...) the augmentations I needed, in my own attempts to grasp Lonergan’s arguments. The essential point made by Lonergan is that the cyclical variations in the ratio under discussion are treated as signals of what is happening in the economy. It is because these in practice are often misinterpreted (primarily because of misleading underlying theory rather than as a result of malevolent greed) that the ongoing ‘pure cycle’ becomes corrupted into the boom and bust of the ‘trade cycle’. (shrink)

The core of the present paper is an attempt to understand what is meant by a brief fragment found within Lonergan’s economic writings. The text of the ‘page’ in question is given on page 216 of For a New Political Economy.