> What explains DP? Unless you can ground the explanation in
> concrete social relations of a particular time and place you
> are merely providing substitutions for the old
> one-size-fits-all explanation of "Providence."
>
> Carrol
Carrol, you seem to belive that people are like tabula rasa and everything that is "in their minds" was shaped by their experience. I do not. I belive in cognitive styles or forms if you will that are apriori to any experience. And I am in good company here, that includes Noam Chomsky (or at least his linguistic ideas).
That is not to say that experience is irrelvant, but it is not the whole story either. A person with a cognitive style that predisposes him or her to authoritarianism may find different ways to manifest those authoritarian tendencies under different social-historical conditions, i.e. become an inquisitor, a secret police agent, an NKVD operative, a gestapo officer, or a menber of a Committee on Un-American Activities. O even a college professor or a military officer. But different people behave differently under the same sets of socio-historical conditions.
As to your comment about absence of pacifism in the middle ages. You missed the part in which I say that it is not the ideological contants that matters here, but role expectations. Pacifism can be defined by ideology (i.e. rejection of collective violence) or by social role (nonconformism or definace of authority) and it is the latter that matters in my explanation. You cannot argue that these roles - nonconformism or definace of authority - were absent from other historical periods.
Wojtek