Over the years, I have read a few of Cassirer's books. One notices immediately that his theory of the symbol allows him to study the humanities and the natural sciences together, so he effectively dissolves the two cultures. This is attractive, and gives his throught the breadth someone as erudite Justin doubtless appreciates. His criticisms of vitalism and historical pessissism in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences are powerful, an important intellectual monument of the resistance of the liberal individual to the barbarism of his times; his critique is grounded in the (kantian) possibilities of human autonomy and reason as enabled by the futurity implicit in the symbol.
I am tempted to study how he made sense of the revolutions in thought effected by personalities (and for Cassirer the focus is on personalities) such as Galileo, Descartes, Luther, the important figures of the Italian Renaissance to see if light could be thrown by his methods on Marx. Yet socio economic determinants or causes hardly ever appear in Cassirer's explanation of the transformations in thought. I have been meaning to make a study of Cassirer on myth (arising out of my interest in racial mythology) for some time, but have just not got to it. The work of anthropologists such as Leach, Levi Strauss, Das and others has seemed (and has been) more promising, though Cassirer's idea of the importance of the productive imagination, the novelistic elements in any otherwise scientific recreation of meanings in historical or foreign societies reads to me as quite similar to how Leach understood the work of social anthropology.
RB