Kant/Sade (was Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

>  >>> furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx 12/06/00 09:12PM >>>
> > CB: I think it was use of force and violence externally that made
> > primitive accumulation on a global scale possible. Would have been
> > difficult to accumulate globally by only doing things internal to
> > Europe.
>
> Enclosure + chattel slavery = primitive accumulation = the origin of
> capitalism.  The rise & development of the dominance of instrumental
> reason (the Benthamite part of "Freedom, Equality, Property, &
> Bentham") are an effect, not the cause, of the capitalist ensemble of
> social relations.
>
> (((((((((((
>
> CB: Is instrumental reason what Weber termed "rationality"?

I use it in the same sense as Weber's formal rationality (economic
rationality).

Ricardo writes:

> Every human in
> every culture is rational in this practical sense, and some cultures
> did indeed develop formally rational institutions, as exemplified by
> the Chinese bureaucratic state and its system of examinations. W[eber]
> would insist however that, in the West, formal rationality came to
> penetrate every sphere of live, including the economy as
> symbolized by double-bookkeeping.

If understood as an effect of the development of capitalism, there is
nothing wrong with taking note of the penetration of formal
rationality into "every sphere of life."  However, an effect cannot
be turned into the cause of the birth of capitalism through the
sleight of hand.

Further, since the rise of capitalism, formal rationality has
penetrated _every part of the world_.

And (modern) science belongs to everyone.  Otherwise, why should
Meera Nanda (an Indian woman) defend science from French, American, &
other post-modernists?

Lastly, under capitalism & imperialism, the domination of formal
rationality dialectically tends to transform itself into its
opposite: the Holocaust, MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), etc.

Worse yet, Kant is a dialectical twin of Sade, as Adorno & Horkheimer
suggest in _The Dialectic of Enlightenment_.

Yoshie