Lawrence Dennis states:
"The trouble with most of our social thinking is that, being done in terms of eighteenth century rationalism, it takes dynamism for granted and assumes that the chief social problems are those of knowing what you want and how to get it. The chief social problem is that of generating and unifying the social will that creates activity, change and what we have been wont to call progress."Tyler Cowen asks:
That is from his 1940 book The Dynamics of War and Revolution, p.53. It’s an ever so slightly fascistic version of a common critique of neoclassical economics. Is it entirely wrong?See my comment there.
Marginal Revolution
2 comments:
Strikes me that we're unsure of the philosophical basis of anything.
Whether that's because there is a mush of philosophies, or just because the network is so intermeshed people are being exposed to different structures all the time.
There's clearly some philosophical underpinning to the 'Holy Power of Taxation' idea that the left seems to be enamoured with. Personally I'm not sure giving taxation religious overtones is a smart move.
Strikes me that we're unsure of the philosophical basis of anything.
"Philosophy" is a broad term. It literally means "love of wisdom" and in ancient times was equated with a way of life whose goal is to gain wisdom or "enlightenment." Now it broadly means critical thinking based on reasoning and experience. Where reasoning and experience can produce knowledge in terms of a formal model with an established logical that also has an empirical warrant it becomes science (*scientia* means "knowledge" in Latin, from *scire*, "to know").
What remains as yet generally agreed upon based on confluence of logical pedigree and empirical warrant is now known as "philosophy," in the sense of speculative philosophy. From the skeptical POV this sort of inquiry is relative and the proper stance toward it is agnostic.
However, philosophy also means ideology colloquially. Individuals and groups are differentiated by their ideologies, which include a set of beliefs, not always consistent, that serves as a framework for thinking and behaving.
Hegel observed that these ideologies as "ideas" contend with each other on the field of history for dominance as the field on which ideas are tested. This takes place through the individuals (great men) and groups (religions, cultures, etc.) constituted by individuals affiliating with groups with shared frameworks. The dominant ideology of a historical era is the Zeitgeist, or "spirit of the time" as a mindset.
The world is in the grip of neoliberalism as the current Zeitgeist, but it is being hotly contested on the field of history now. The wave may be cresting, or not. It's difficult to tell before the fact. Philosophy of history is about interpreting the past and the future resembles the past only in outline. It's probably safe to conclude that this dialect of contending ideas will continue indefinitely but how it will work out in any case is impossible to know from the past owing to humanity being a complex adaptive system characterized by emergence.
So it is understandable for oppositions to work within the Zeitgeist to get traction while undermining it. One wave can morph into another smoothly without conflict. Ideally, political change should be as smooth as possible through compromise. Or waves can conflict directly to determine dominance, as happens in wars. Contemporary politics is a sort of war of ideas and ideologies.
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