[lbo-talk] Essential Reading - Hah!

[Carrol Cox]

I have no objection to the turn this thread has taken -- it's produced some
interesting stuff. But my initial point concerned not "good books" or
"important books or, for that matter, books at all. (Shag's remarks on
Hirsch are relevant here.) It concerned a _historical change_, the
_disappearance_ from the 18th-c on, of a cultural/political assumption. I
would speculate, without insisting too much on it, that this change was an
aspect of the change from social relations grounded in "place" (estates,
castes, statuses, etc) to a class society. (I'm assuming that the _only_
class society in history is capitalism). The disappearance of a 'visible'
social structure and the emergence of 
_internally_ generated (rather than the _external_ relations of (e.g.
feudalism or the ancient Palace Economies) dissolved the material grounds
for assuming a core of necessary human knowledge. Pope still (somewhat
desperately) clung (at least 'consciusly') to the older hierarchical
(_visibly_ and _formally_ hierarchical) face of social relations. (Cf. Swift
& the Battle of the Books.) The Dunciad 'celebrates' the death of that world
(and of the rhetoric going back to Rome that placed _oral_ persuasion among
within a privileged status or estate at the heart of public life).

(The so-called "information overload" is one aspect of this change. Public
life is no longer controlled by "Genetlemen" who can address each other as
equals. That shift, Pope (contra Milton) apparently saw as Chaos is come
again. If you want to you can equate that chaos with the anarchy of
capitalist production brought abut by competition. 

Repeat -- a speculation.

Any comment.

Carrol

P.S. The thread metamorphosed into one assuming unrelated individuals
attempting to establish relations where none existed before. We 'know' each
other, but each thread establishes a new set of principles, hence at least
potentially dissolving all established relations and requiring that new
relations be established _as though_ from the beginning among windowless
monads. Note in this connection that Adam & Eve continually 'remarry' as
though for the first time, previous events having 'dissolved' the prior
marriage, leaving them as abstract, isolated individuals (Marx) having only
as a _moral_ imperative to establish anew the relations that make us human.