>
> Yep, that's the one. Oh, I'll grant that the man was
> no friend of democracy(in his time and place no one
> was). But the policies he implemented were
> instrumental in turning the US (the northeast of it,
> anyway) from a semifuedal agarian state into a modern
> industrial and yes, capitalist, democracy.
>
> Jefferson, for all his florid rhetoric, was
> essentially a reactionary. Hamilton and his
> followers, as distasteful as they seem to us in our
> context, were the real progressives in theirs.
>
> Whatever happened to the strain of leftism that sees
> capitalism as an improvement on what existed before,
> and as a nessessary precursor to socialism?
>
> Jim Baird
===========
Agree with the 1st part of the last paragraph. It's my ambivalence
with regards to the epistemic and ontological issues surrounding
*necessity* that makes the last part of the sentence problematic. It
may be the case that capitalism is no more a precursor to socialism
than theism is a precursor to atheism. It is the contingencies of
collective action and the notorious ability of human beings to
disagree on deep issues of social organization that makes for this
problem, imo.
Ian
"The best way to predict the future is to create it" [Alan Kay]