Re: [A-List] substance and rationality

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

Robert,

The Sanders material posted was from "The Illiquid Economy"
conference.  The "War as an Organizing Principle" conference
has yet to occur; it is scheduled for this coming November.  And,
yes, war as an organizing principle is not a new idea -- but that
doesn't mean it isn't worth a look in its contemporary manifestations.

Anne

----- Original Message -----
From: ewc <ewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 7:46 AM
Subject: [A-List] substance and rationality


> Thanks to Sabri, James and Louis for comment.
>
> My worries about this group - and in general with the ideas of people
> heavily into economics, are to do with
>
> A) being brow beaten by an unnecessary layers of abstraction,
>
> and to do with
>
> B) the widespread ignorance of historical facts (which I do believe
> tracks back to deliberate policies of dumbing down, applied to higher
> education back in the 1950's and 60's)
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> To Sabri:  (thanks for being friendly!) - but really, using
> 'rationality' in a technical sense, derived from the maths of games
> theory, without telling us, is not that helpful.......
>
> To James: (Glad at least that we 'speak the same language' ) - my
> understanding of Plato's essences is that only very clever (and almost
> always very rich) people like Plato himself could perceive these
> essences at all.  I cannot perceive them.  Maybe this is because I am
> not very clever (or very rich).  But actually I think Plato is just
> bullying me with complicated epistemological obscurities.  (My
> detailed position is largely derived from Popper's - 'Open society...'
> vol I;   'Plato')
>
> To Louis.  Glad we agree about Wallerstein.  But I think his whole
> 'world-system theory' is a waste of space too.  In my opinion does not
> tell us anything we do not know already -  its just a way of hiding
> truth behind a layer of unnecessary pseudo-profound rhetoric.  Where
> we would probably disagree on is Marxism (?) - I will illustrate how
> below - with a bit on 'war and debt', since it is topical at present
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> The Saunders stuff just posted on war and debt reminds me just how
> badly the state education system serves us these days.  I do not claim
> to know much - but surely the idea that war is the central organising
> principle of the state is as old as history.  In China, the book of
> Lord Shang (prob c. 350 BC) is all about exactly that.  In Greece, in
> the organisation of Sparta, so loved by Plato, was just the same.  The
> specific idea that war was deliberately fomented as a pretext for
> bankers to raise war loans and thereby get their hands on the tax take
> is found in Machiavelli.  Probably Tom Paine got it from there (Maybe
> via Voltaire - have not read enough of V).  Certainly William Cobbett
> got it from Tom Paine.  The Paine and Cobbetts line is that British
> war with France was fomented in order to justify the British national
> debt.  For me the real enlightenment (in the English language) was
> Paine and Cobbett.  Their works were read by tens of thousands of
> people in the 18th/19th century - mostly working class people - far
> far more than ever willingly read Adam Smith or Marx.  My fear is
> that, in a complicated way, people like Riccardo "invented" Marxism.
> They did it because of the very real problems the no-nonsense guys
> like Paine and Cobbett were causing.  Marxism grew with mass higher
> education as a route to  import a whole raft of obscure rhetoric into
> the debate, along with a load of what seem to me to be quasi religious
> solutions to very real problems.
>
> Lord Shang's dictum was:  "If the people are clever, the state will be
> stupid.  Make the people stupid, and the state will be clever".
>
> Best Wishes to all
>
> Robert
>
> PPS  Am astonished Saunders does not mention the links between the
> British national debt and the war with France.   But perhaps we should
> recall that the growth of the national debt twin tracked in England
> with the abandonment of a silver standard for a gold standard, the
> disappearance of small change, and the exploitative trucking of the
> labour force, ('crucified on a cross of gold' - not for the first
> time, or the last).  So maybe Saunders has his reasons?.
>
>
>
>