This suggestion complies with the notion that
capitalism was a dynamic, progressive, new development compared with
the previous feudal rigidity. It played it's role, now it is but an
obsticle in the way of the next stage...
Eva
> I am not an expert on the history of Early Modern Europe,
> but one only need read Elizabeth Eisenstein's monumental
> text: _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_ (Cambridge Univ.),
> which she says she wanted to title:
>
> The Master Printer as an Agent of Change
>
> , to understand that something has been lost between
> the true giants of early capitalism: the great master
> printers whose work laid the foundation for the modern
> world, and "the bourgeois".
>
> The former, who devoted their mornings to
> "business" and spent much of the rest of their
> time in study and correspondence with their peers (an
> earlier "Internet" / "Europe Wide Web"...), had no need
> to supplement their motivational horizon with
> "traditional world views", for they were busy
> and transforming the very notion of the past, in
> the production of *uniform printed editions*.
> They *created* the past and "reality" as we know those
> things.
>
> They both employed and read Erasmus.
>
> I would guess Bill Gates and Donald Trump do neither
> (although Bill is busy muddling the equivalent of
> "uniform printed editions" for *our* time: SGML
> and other computer *standards*...).
>
> Tom's diagnosis seems right on target for *our*
> [lumpen-]bourgeoisie, to whom the appellation:
>
> consumers
>
> well applies (as an article in one of
> yesterday's New York papers described a
> Greenwich CT stock broker looking at
> Porsches and wondering whether to buy a
> "mate" for the one he bought in February)!
>
> \brad mccormick
>
> --
> Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
> Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
>
> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
> -------------------------------------------------------
> <![%THINK;[SGML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
