[lbo-talk] Philip Mirowski - Social Physicist

[Vincent Clarke]

> I haven't been following this thread closely, but this seems sort of
> bizarre. If x is the relationship, why are you binging in Y at all. It
> seems that you are merely in love with the WORD, "structue." If it is a
> relationship, then you can forget "binary" and "structure" and settle
> down to study social relations ratheer than play semantic games.
>
> Carrol
>
>
One more comment, for fun - and perhaps so someone can learn from it.

Marx does this. He opposes X to Y. The bourgeois to the proletariat.
Coincidence? No! He's operating from Hegelian logic.

Hegelian logic has nothing to do with "material reality". It is a method for
interpreting or discerning material reality (you choose - its arbitrary).
Read Das Kapital - its a reading of history in terms of binary opposites.
This isn't arbitrary - I consider it ingenious - but you could read history
in a million other ways (through famous characters; through population
growth; through intra-sexual struggle; through race-war... you choose).

Personally I consider Marx's the most valid. But its not materialistic - at
least not in the sense that proving that heat cannot transfer from a colder
to a hotter body is.