Rhetorical Gestures (was Re: Spivak sez...)

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Thu Oct 14 14:36:52 PDT 1999


On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:


> Except for Locke (1632 - 1704). I mean, you left out
> Johnnie Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) in
> favour of Kant (1724 - 1804) because you hate the English,
> right?

Love the English working-class and hate the sins of English capitalism, I always say. Actually, Locke's stuff is proto-philosophy, i.e. a 17th century empiricism not yet capable of doing more than quizzing itself on the Galilean experimental method. There's no really national juridical content in Locke's work, put another way, though there are flashes of the thing, mostly in the moments of protest against monarchical absolutism (also true of the ideology of mechanism and autocracy in Hobbes, by the way). The thing just couldn't exist until national capitalism coalesced in the Industrial Revolution dating from the 1770s.

-- Dennis



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