debunking Sapir Whorf

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Dec 5 14:22:19 PST 2000


kelley wrote:


>
> no, i'm talking about Weber's study of the rise of capitalism. the
> conditions were, largely, there for the chinese to have been the place
> where a proto-capitalist economic organization took off, not all the
> conditions, but many. nonetheless, various places in the west took off and
> were more successful and this was about the development of accounting
> techniques, in part, that aided people in conceptualizing symbolically
> rational planning of projections based on past, present, future.

Kelley, you are way out on a limb. Have you any idea what storms have raged around this on the pen-l and marxism lists?

The story about double-entry accounting belongs as much to urban legend as does the 400 names for snow. "Take-Off" is a very loaded term. And Weber held to an absolutely indefensible "stagist" and linear view of history. I won't go beyond that. My Netscape folders on "Eurocentrism" and related topics total over 900 posts -- and that doesn't include the first round or two on the topic. Some of those posts are over 30k in length and a large number of them are between 10 and 30k. Just the bibliography from them makes up a longer reading list than any Ph.D. candidate has ever had to go through for her comps.

Carrol



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