In an earlier post, I quoted Robert Nisbet’s suggestion that the capitalist system was the result of state intervention in and even destruction of earlier economic arrangements. No movement illustrates the point better than the enclosure movement, the subject of JM Neeson’s Commoners: . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind) , recently republished by ISI, Robert Nisbet places the rise of capitalism within the history of modern Statism. He notes, “The expansion of the State in . . . . Continue Reading »
Challenging both the “traditional” social interpretations of English politics in the 17th century (Stone, Hill) and also the Revisionists who dismiss social causes, Robert Brenner ( Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic study of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Stories of Faith & Fame) , p. 418 , W. H. C. Frend concludes that “The ultimate legacy of the persecutions was the lasting division of Christendom into its eastern and western parts.” In the east, a “more . . . . Continue Reading »
As Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 150) explains, Dilthey like every other theorist of historical hermeneutics is haunted by the Hegelian ghost he tries to escape. For Dilthey, the problem is to prove the coherence and unity of history. He points to . . . . Continue Reading »
Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 144) neatly summarizes the dilemma of anti-Hegelian historicism, influenced as it was by the hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher and later Dilthey. Here’s the problem: Historicism rejects the Hegelian notion . . . . Continue Reading »
As Young notes ( In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 2001) , p. 12), the early Christians had their own way of taking over the Roman entertainment industry: Martyrs “invaded those spectacles and turned them . . . . Continue Reading »
Why did governments demand taxes and why did people pay? This makes sense if we think that markets pre-existed or if we think they come into being spontaneously. But David Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years ) doesn’t think that they do. Why would kings take control of mines, extract silver . . . . Continue Reading »
Graeber ( Debt: The First 5,000 Years , p. 9) offers this extreme example of the tyrannical use of debt: A French anthropologist in the eastern Himalayas in the 1970s discovered that a cast known as “vanquished ones” was in a state of “permanent debt dependency. Landless and . . . . Continue Reading »
In a lively meditation on money based on Daniel Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years , John Medaille challenges the standard account of the rise of money. Rather that moving from barter to money to credit, Medaille suggests that the historical evidence suggests the opposite is the case. . . . . Continue Reading »
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