<HTML><HTML>In a message dated 5/8/05 6:48:05 PM Eastern Daylight Time, lbo-talk-request@lbo-talk.org writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">The ways in which we know society affect society. There's no substantive evidence that people in KM's time thought of themselves as isolated monads, chances are the vast majority of them still thought of themselves as sons and daughters of god. See Castoriadis contra Engels as well as Arthur Ripstein's work for the skinny on agency, unintended consequences and narratives of description/self-description as I'm too lazy/chilling to scan in the relevant bits on a Sunday. </BLOCKQUOTE> The ways in which we know society affect society. There's no substantive evidence that people in KM's time thought of themselves as isolated monads, chances are the vast majority of them still thought of themselves as sons and daughters of god. See Castoriadis contra Engels as well as Arthur Ripstein's work for the skinny on agency, unintended consequences and narratives of description/self-description as I'm too lazy/chilling to scan in the relevant bits on a Sunday.                                                          Autoplectic                                         ****************** Have you ever heard of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer? They all based themselves upon a philosophy of social atomism, according to which individuals in society are principally isolated calculators of self-interest, attempting to maximize material gain. This kind of thinking may not have been universal in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was a social philosophy distinctive of the rising bourgeoisie, especially of the Anglo-Saxon variety, and was deeply ingrained in what had become "common-sense" notions about society. It still is. Does the phrase, "ownership society" ring any bells? </HTML>