Michael Hudson — Revolts of the Debtors: From Socrates to Ibn Khaldun

Last week I attended a wonderful conference in the university town of Tübingen, Germany, on “Debt: The First 3500 Years,” to bring ancient historians together to discuss David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

I was enlightened by two papers in particular. Doctoral fellow Moritz Hinsch from Berlin collected what Socrates (470-399 BC) and other Athenians wrote about debt, and the conference’s organizer, Prof. John Weisweiler, presented the new view of late imperial Rome as being still a long way from outright serfdom. The 99 Percent were squeezed, but “the economy” grew – in a way that concentrated growth in the hands of the One Percent. In due course this bred popular resentment that spread in the form of debtor revolts, not only in the Roman Empire but that of Iran as well, leading to religious reforms to limit the charging of interest and self-indulgent greed in general.

I had not been in Tübingen since 1959, and it was my first chance to meet with David Graeber since he moved to England to teach at the London School of Economics after being hounded out of his apartment in New York City in the wake of the police and FBI crackdown against Occupy Wall Street. Our mutual German publisher, Klett-Cotta, sent its senior editor from nearby Stuttgart to discuss their German translation of my Killing the Host, to appear in November, as Der Sektor: Warum die Globale Finanzwirtschaft uns Zerstört.…

Counterpunch
Revolts of the Debtors: From Socrates to Ibn Khaldun
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Eric Schliesser — Plato: incentives matter!

Because the image of philosopher-kings is so durable, it is easy to imagine that Plato's Socrates is naively over-confident about the virtue of experts. But as the quoted passage reveals, he is very explicit that incentives -- material ones and of honor -- matter even to would-be-philosophers and that even the (very rare) best souls can be corrupted.

Digressions&Impressions
Plato: incentives matter!
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Eric Schliesser — On Plato's System of Natural Liberty (and Adam Smith's True Religion)

Weekend reading.

The issue in The Republic is living a good life in a good society.

Digressions&Impressions
On Plato's System of Natural Liberty (and Adam Smith's True Religion)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Nigel Warburton — Talk With Me

...Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):

"The contradictions cover such a range.The talk would talk and go so far aslant.You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

Whenever philosophical education lapses into learning facts about history and texts, regurgitating an instructor’s views, or learning from a textbook, it moves away from its Socratic roots in conversation. Then it becomes so much the worse for philosophy and for the students on the receiving end of what the radical educationalist Paolo Freire referred to pejoratively in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) as the ‘banking’ of knowledge. The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal, though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing how to live.’

Aeon
Talk with me
Nigel Warburton