Mark,
There are two types of error: telling someone something they know already
and not telling them something they don't know. I would rather commit the
first type of error, but most of the people I know commit the second. So
here goes.
Louis Dumont is best known for his work on India. He
Keith:
Thanks for your thoughtful and generous reply.
My fascination with the Germans is certainly driven in part by my inability
to read the language (plus some potential ancestral linkage) and, alas, my
French isn't proficient enough to read Dumont in the original but I'll
gladly look
Brian:
Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go.
Thanks. Here's some more . . .
The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these
socio-economic transitions.
As you know, the *four* cardinal virtues and, thus, the foundation of
Western culture --
Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go.
What you say about desire largely holds, I don't disagree. But over
that three hundred years since Adam Smith, a major corrective to
the moral theory of desire, which is visible already in Marx and
explicit in Nietzsche, is that the
Greetings
On this question it might be worth it for those interested to take a look at
The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman at Princeton Univ Press.
He illustrates the historical roots of what we can call the 'avaricious' side
of capitalism; an issue that has been debated for
Morlock writes:
There is pretty much a consensus that in the first world only about
10-15% need to work to provide *all* goods and services. Then,
depending on the system, there are 15-20% of the armed guards (police,
military, etc), and the rest are sort of ... redundant. Hence
unemployment and
Mr. Ghost-of-Wells:
As your email address indicates, you are apparently a fan of H.G. Wells.
Of course, the Morlocks and Eloi (plural, one l) are the dramatis
persona in Well's 1895 Time Machine.
By the year 802,701 AD, _humanity_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_race) has evolved
Folks:
In preparation for some work on the impact of digital technology on
political-economy, I have been re-reading Mandeville, Smith, Maltham,
RIccardo
and others (including various commentators like Marx) to try to sort out
what *assumptions* were made about humans in the beginning of
