>>10798Not that anon, and I’ve got no first hand experience in graduate economics courses, but I’ve always seen the heterodox economics post-graduate people suggest nobody reads the old stuff. They treat it like a hard science, so they just read distillations and latest textbooks. “Economics” is a body of facts for them, so it doesn’t really matter the origin of the facts.
But as far as reading bourgeois economics I’d say just read the primary sources and some modern critical works. That is for the intellectual history. If you want you could read some shitty textbook for undergrads, just to see what/how they teach people, but that stuff is very dull. It just presents this accumulated tradition as so many facts and definitions. That stuff is designed for training more than anything, at least theoretically. It’s more like indoctrination, but the way textbooks are framed is often like an uncritical manual for the tools of a trade. Read the primary sources and you’ll see the original theorists explaining themselves, why they think producing knowledge in this way is useful, which gives you more opportunity to think critically about it. But even then there is a wider context which can seem opaque that required you to be interdisciplinary about it, you have to read history and even the biographies of some of these people to get why they might have believed the things they believed etc.