Yes, I do.
>
> How? Since I am only sixty pages into F. Hayek's Individualism and
> Economic Order,
You must have a high tolerance for pain.
Michael Perelman
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Damn! Now I have to go out and buy yet another book. I already racked up fifty buck just today, with Hayek's Challenge. An Intellectual Biography, and the one Dennis Claxton mentioned, Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction, Chritopher Gosden...
I haven't finished Geoff Eley's Reshaping the German Right. Haven't even opened Pleukert's Weimar, and never got very far into Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, not to mention Hegel's Philosophy of History (page 100 and something), or the rest of George Giovanni's Jacobi, Popper's Open Society... the list seems endless.
I did manage to re-read Conrad's Outpost of Civilization last week...
I mean there is a reason the comprehensive book review is a dying art. Shit. With guys like you, who can write more books than I can read, and I read all night, every night, there is no hope...
I've read so much that I can barely form an opinion anymore. As to my pain threshold for Hayek, blame Doug.
Meanwhile Work is stalled out in a morass of medical justification bullshit and the crazy new owner waggles her finger at me as if it is all my fault. Sure, I am doing nothing all day. I only touched a physical object known as a wheelchair twice for a few minutes in eight hours of labor today. How do you think I can post here in the middle of a work day? The rest of the time I was trying to get paper work done to justify doing actual skilled manual labor. The steps between me and my tool box have proliferated into The Trial of Joseph K, Der Process. It's given me great insight into the destruction of empire, the decline of the US economy. It doesn't crash and burn. It dies in paper work, lost in a morass of bullshit to justify itself, when it can not.
We always thought we were the re-incarnation of the British Raj or in darker moments the German Wehrmacht. All crisp and sharp, Johnny on the Spot, eptidome of efficiency and all. Not so. We are the neurotic Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat, the clerk mentality mired in his papers, looking for documentation in the borderlands of the unreal, where the undocumented wait for days just to gain passage into never neverland. Well, and of course never-neverland is not even there anymore. I traverse from grey to grey in days of mid-day fog, wondering in the nothingness... The empire doesn't crash. It just evaporates.
CG