Fable of the Bees

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lisa:
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Chris, would you, could you [or somebody else] summarize the Fable of
the Bees for the list?  I've never read it.  Since I'm reading about
the origins of capitalism right now, I'm curious:  what was allegedly
uncanny about it's apparent social cohesion?  Compared to what?
Didn't feudalism have 'social cohesion'?

Chris:
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I don't have this to hand now but I vaguely recall that it may have
been published by Penguin Books in England, just possibly with an
introduction by Joan Robinson??? But I may have got this confused.
Somebody else?

My point about uncanny social cohesion is that hundreds of thousands
of  atomised exchanges produce a pattern, nevetheless, and people have tried
different ways of conceptualising that. Adam Smith's unseen hand (though I
have not been able to check that reference either) seems to me similar.

I think I recall the Fable of the Bees was about 2nd quarter of 18th
Century and may have been more suited to conceptualising a time when
mercantilist ideas still influenced primitive western economic theory,
(storing honey) and there was a lot of what Marx called primitive
accumulation going on.

Does your course touch on these issues?

Of course as some of us have discussed on this list before, nowadays
we might look to the new understandings that non-linear maths and
complex systems may produce surprisingly stable systems although each
individual movement is unpredictable.



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