I betcha we wouldn't have any economic problems if we had just listened to Whitehead. Damn! What fools we were!
--- On Tue, 11/18/08, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Hegel's point, however, was that modern conditions
> differ from those in the more or less distant past in ways
> that make them more or less essentially different. Past
> conditions, therefore, have fewer lessons to teach the more
> distant they are.
>
> "Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be
> emphatically commended to the teaching which experience
> offers in history. But what experience and history teach is
> this – that peoples and governments never have learned
> anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from
> it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances,
> exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic,
> that its conduct must be regulated by considerations
> connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure
> of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is
> useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The
> pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and
> freedom of the Present. Looked at in this light, nothing
> can be shallower than the oft-repeated appeal to Greek and
> Roman examples during the French Revolution. Nothing is
> more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of
> our times."
> <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history2.htm>
>
> Marx and Keynes's versions of political economy
> appropriate the social ontological idea this claim embodies,
> the idea that social relations are "internal
> relations". The idea has, however, almost completely
> disappeared from contemporary economics, including from
> Marxist and Keynesian economics.
>
> Ted
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