> And "internal relations" ? Like Ollman or no ?
Ollman captures some of what's involved. He has an appendix on Whitehead. The best exponent is Whitehead himself, as in the passages I've previously quoted e.g. the passage giving his definition of a "society," the passage on "law as immanent," etc. A short summary of all these ontological ideas - "internal relations," "self-determination" and "final causation" - is available in the two chapters (VII and VIII) in Modes of Thought I mentioned earlier.
Adventures of Ideas provides an account of historical development based, as I suggested, on essentially the same ontological ideas as the accounts found in Hegel and Marx. Whitehead had indirect access to Hegel's ideas via English Idealism, specifically via Bradley, McTaggert and Lord Haldane. In the preface to Process and Reality, having acknowledged the influence of Bradley on the cosmology elaborated there, he describes the cosmology as "a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute idealism onto a realistic basis." (Process and Reality, Corrected Ed. edited by Donald Sherburne and, yes, David Ray Griffin, p. xiii). This includes an appropriation of relativity and quantum theory (see also chaps. VII and VIII of Science and the Modern World).
I don't think he read any Marx, but his comment about "the economic interpretation of history" is very insightful. It perceives the ontological underpinnings of the interpretation. Most readers of Marx, including many Marxists, don't perceive these e.g. don't perceive that for Marx "forces of production" are the objectification of mind and, as objectified, part of production processes characterized ontologically as activities of "poesis" and "praxis" within internal relations i.e as "objective conditions" that "are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew." They tend to interpret Marx's "materialism" as "a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites".
> "According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the
> juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting
> labour) and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive
> powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and
> knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief
> form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the
> accumulation - which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents
> it - of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated
> activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated
> and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.
>
> "... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one." "Capital
> and a labouring population are precisely synonymous" ([Hodgskin,
> Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.
>
> "These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:
>
> "... The real wealth ... is man" (Della Moneta, Parte Moderna, t.
> III, p. 229).
>
> "The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here
> as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed
> anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the
> crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in
> the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only
> the difference between man and animal disappears but even the
> difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And
> then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois
> political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a
> crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of
> coarse appetites." pp. 266-7 Theories of Surplus Value Part III
Whitehead's criticism of the conventional "materialism" underpinning Darwinism is found in The Function of Reason.
Ted