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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
The Anatomy of Financial Destructiveness Dr. Cay Hehner
Chapter 4: The Future of the West or Are We Condemned To Repeat History?
Abstract: What promises does the 21st century hold for the Western world? Are we heading toward another cycle of instability with dreadful social consequences ultimately leading to the demise of capitalism or are we able to chart a new course to a less tumultuous, more promising future where human needs and planetary limits are reconciled?
Throughout the ages the great philosophers of civilization have contemplated history in order to precipitate the Future. From Giambattista Vico, Georg Friedrich Hegel, and Benedetto Croce, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Henry George, Sri Aurobindo, and Egon Friedell, Robert Musil, via Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Karl Popper to Samuel Huntington, and Francis Fukuyama the future of Western civilization has been painted in hopeful or dire terms. [1] What are our prospects for the 21st century?
Santayana (1906) has admonished us repeatedly that if we are not willing to learn from our history we will be forced to repeat it. This admonition is haunting us today with a twist and a vengeance. The Iron Curtain has fallen in 1989, consequently the former Soviet satellites and Russia have been trying “to learn from their history” and not repeat the mistakes of the command economy conundrums of communism; they all have tried to imitate capitalism as best they could, in fact, there seems to be an unspoken internal jousting match among these post-Soviet satellites to outsmart capitalism on the right; have the peoples of these territories been indoctrinated by the penalty of death to despise and defy the unbridled capitalism of the early 19th century Manchester model, now they are being told that nothing works better economically than just this model! As if there were no tomorrow and as if there had never been a Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and its ensuing Great Depression, and as if there had never been a slew of recessions,
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Great Recessions, downturns, economic busts, financial delusions roughly every 18 to 20 years in the major capitalist economies and consequently the world markets in the last two centuries. [2] Now the capitalist countries on the other hand - since World War II led as usual by the U.S. - have hailed the “death of communism”, only to forget their own history lesson and begin to nationalize and command-economize their (so-called) free- market economies to the leading financial wizards and gurus’ heart’s content.
We have argued in general since the early 1990s, and in particular in 2004, that “capitalism as we know it and have been practicing it” is based on non-sustainable premises and that it consequently is going to have to fall within one generation. If former polit-commissars now doff their red berets and Kalashnikoffs, don pin-striped suits and carry palm pilots and Blackberries instead to continue the game on those unsustainable premises they are now building their financial and economic sandcastles on the quicksand of neoclassical fallacies no less than their Wall Street colleagues, previously. It is as if the respective post-Soviet and post-free-market cultures were struck by reciprocal amnesia regarding the very principles of survival on the planet. Just to recapitulate:
The world population of seven billion inhabitants strong, jointly and separately, needs certain hourly, daily, weekly, monthly quantities of natural resources, i.e. sun light, clean air, clean water, unpoisoned foodstuff, a minimum of shelter and a modicum of clothing to survive. In this individual as well as collective need there is no individual choice involved whatsoever as Hayek, Menger, von Mises, and the other pundits of the Austrian School would have us believe and as our Chicago boys from the monetarist persuasion have been hammering home the same message with maddening insistence and fallaciousness for generations now. No human being “has a free choice” to breathe, to drink, to eat, etc. as the non-choice means certain death.
These conjoint resources needs are the preconditions of life on this planet itself pretty much for all homo sapiens alive (unfortunately not always as “sapient” as one would wish). Not making these life-sustaining resources available to each and every one of us, indeed “the least amongst us” as the most exalted is a failure of humankind as a whole, not of individual nations, ruling classes, or civilizations themselves. [3]
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Throughout recorded history thinkers of all classes, castes, strata and stations of society have turned to the study of the past in order to comprehend and elucidate it in order to intuit, project, plan, and precipitate the Future. In this essay we are going to look at some of the more eminent thinkers and savants who have done so in the West, since the end of the Dark Ages and the Dawn of the renaissance. At the outset of Modernity stands a much misunderstood, enigmatic spiritual and intellectual giant who remained virtually unknown outside the pale of his scholastic compadres, who was discovered for the world a century after his death by the irrationalists Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi and the romantic historiographers Jules Michelet and Benedetto Croce. We are talking about the Neapolitan scholastic and legal philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico. He influenced the enlightenment philosophers Rousseau and Diderot, the poet S. T. Coleridge, the labor- economist Karl Marx, the educator Wilhelm Dilthey, and the existentialists Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Heidegger. In fact, in the 20th century it would be easier and shorter to enumerate those Western social thinkers he did not influence than those he did, meaning virtually every civilization philosopher of moment. In the U.S. for our time he was brought to renewed prominence by the conservative post-Hegelian anti-Gnostics Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss, as well as for the present generation by Mark Lilla. [4]
Vico’s main work Scienza Nuova or The New Science encompasses 1,700-some pages and several volumes, it has been written in an old form of post-Latin Italian, was heavily amended, and entirely rewritten, then republished after the maestro’s death with marginal notes of his more erudite students, in other words the MS. is an absolute, near- undecipherable mess for the general reader an equally near-absolute delight for the ivory tower scholar and specialist!
The New Science contains unquieting and unsavory authoritarian tendencies for our democratic age which we need not heed here, but for our purposes it shall suffice to zero in on what has been most universally acknowledged and acclaimed in Vico, namely the center piece of his philosophy of history. Vico encapsulates the essence of his insights in the aphorism: verum (esse) ipsum factum which is usually and roughly translated as “a given thing is true (if and only to the extent to which and) because it is made”. What follows for Vico is that we can only truly know what we have made ourselves or participated in the creation thereof. It the technical terms of the specialist scholar this is called ‘constructivist epistemology’; for those of us not sufficiently fortunate to have an affluent forebear to grant us permission into the haloed halls of elite education one could
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
say it is a way to gain knowledge only by way of fabricating of creating something, as, i.e., one tends to know one’s own spouse and children better than the spouse and children of one’s neighbors. It is no accident that this sanctification or declaring essential of the creative element in human beings – what later came to be called homo habilis or homo faber – emerged in the wake of the Italian renaissance, which, after all, experienced an explosion of creative, constructive and artistic energy (paradigmatized by Leonardo, Raffael, Michelangelo, Duerer, and Grunewald), all of which was codified by Vico in his New Science.
It is also not difficult to see that such a teaching would appeal to the young Karl Marx as well as to any social or economic thinker like Henry George who starts their productivity and analysis from the labor theory of value. After having established the imperative of creation in the process of gaining knowledge or Greek episteme Giambattista Vico then makes a further useful distinction between science and consciousness. In approximate analogy to the old Scholastic distinction between the realist and the nominalist school he maintains that the objects of (objective) scientific knowledge be universal eternal therefore true, whereas the objects of (subjective) consciousness be particular and individuated, or as expressed in his language vero/scienza or science be concerned with truth in a restatement of the scholastic realist position certo/coscienza or consciousness (conscience) be concerned with empirical certainty retaking the nominalist position. [5]
While Henry George and the classical economists saw economics to be based on natural law, Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce saw natural law in all of History. To summarize this position and with only a modicum of oversimplification it could be said that if Santayana holds that we need to know our history in order not to repeat it, Vico (and Croce in modified form) would hold that in order to know your history you proactively have to “make” it that is participate in it to an important, constructive, and distinguishing extent.
If Vico’s verum ipsum factum or “(the) true is only what is made” reads like a mangled or shallow version of Hegel’s “the real is rational and the rational is real”, in other words if it reads as the apologia and sanctioning of the status quo or the justification of the ‘realities’ created by the powers that be, however bad that may be, be it the war in Iraq, the “Madoffization” of Wall Street, the collapse of the real estate and the credit market,
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
then that may be due again to the fact that many thinkers read Vico backwards through Hegel after having misunderstood Hegel in the first place. [6]
Hegel manifestly did not defend the arch-conservative moribund Prussian State against the powers of revolutionary France embodied in a revolutionary Napoleon when the latter conquered Prussia in the early 19th century, nor did he declare “the end of history” as latter Hegelians like Fukuyama would have us believe, on the contrary he held that the whole process of world history be world court and last judgment perpetually in session which in no way condones tyrants or abets gross social injustice! But we will have occasion to revisit Hegelian concepts and intentions at a later stage.
Suffice it to say here that Hegel held that the historic process was not some mystical derrings-do of some obscure occult higher or lower power, but that with the historic action the protagonists were continually held to account for and be held personally responsible for what they did - quite unlike today’s C.E.O.’s of multi-billion $ corporations who can laugh all the way to the bank with taxpayer bailouts, while having bankrupted certain market segments in particular and the hard-working public in general.
* * * *
If Vico’s monumental New Science is generally considered the birth of modern Western philosophy of civilization and Hegel’s Philosophy of History and his Philosophy of Law are considered early summits of historical philosophy, it is the publication of Charles Darwin Origin of Species in 1859 and Herbert Spencer’s subsequent reinterpretation of it in his Principles of Biology (1864) and Study of Sociology (1873) that took the world by storm in the later part of the 19th century.
It would put the philosophy of civilization on an entirely new footing which would be enhanced by Oswald Spengler’s daring The Decline of the West (1923) half a century later and one could easily argue from a progressive Georgist perspective, in spite of Spencer and Spengler’s intellectual bravado, it positioned the new philosophical discipline on a new and all-time low. If passages of Vico - from our perspective today - read as a brighter Machiavelli and a greater Hobbes, in other words if they read as a definite improvement on Machiavelli, the so-called ‘evil genius’ of the Renaissance and
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Hobbes, the ‘dark angel’ of the age of enlightenment, Spencer’s Social Darwinism and Spengler’s cultural pessimism and apologia of the tyrant certainly read like several steps down from both Machiavelli and Hobbes.
Spencer actually reads like ‘a poor man’s Machiavelli’ and Spengler reads like a bowdlerized version of Hobbes marked-down for those petty-bourgeois spirits from which Hitler would recruit the majority of his goose-stepping henchmen and hatchet men. It was actually Spencer who had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864 in reapplying some of the findings Darwin had made in his examination of the animal kingdom to human society. Social Darwinism in the late Spencer becomes a scientific rationalization for the law of the jungle and it basically reduces mental man capable of civilization and culture for hundred thousand of years - if anthropological data is to be trusted 250,000 to be exact – to the limited confines of primates. In the perennial debate whether man derived from apes one could answer in the negative, qualifying that negative to excepting some low-brow philosophers of the Social Darwinist caliber.
It would break the concentration of our topic on the Future of the West to include a detailed discussion of what salient abuse Karl Marx wrought upon Hegel’s Philosophy of History or shall we say what havoc he tried to wreak upon it. All those who disagreed with St. Karl and St. Friedrich were invited to institutions of “re-education” and many a so-called dissident in the former East Bloc countries would find himself or herself either prescription-drugged to the hilt in a Moscow psychiatric ward or worse in a Siberian gulag basically to dig their own graves, spiritually, intellectually, morally, psychologically, emotionally, and physically. [7]
Spengler’s Decline of the West which for its audacious juxtapositions of historical data and contrasting of contemporary and ancient culture gained a wide followed in the Anglo-Saxon world - Henry Kissinger, Fritz Lang, and Herman Kahn count among his admirers – may also be called with little malice and much straightforward facticity the leisure-class version of Mein Kampf. Overtly offensive racist passages were deleted, constant reference to a barrage of classical writers and historic events spread over several millennia and the entire planet would act as so many smoke screens and mirrors to detract attention from the rather monolithic basic message. If the perpetrators of today’s economic and financial crisis have been called free-market fundamentalists, Spengler may easily be called a fuehrer-fundamentalist.
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
It makes no matter essentially that Spengler had a fall-out with Hitler in the Thirties and did not consider him worthy to incarnate the Nietzschean Uebermensch and “blond beast” – perhaps he took offense that Hitler was not blond and that he dared not to make him, Spengler, or shall we say, ueber-Spengler in his own mind, Minister of Aryan Culture – what does matter is that Spengler staunchly adhered to the fuehrer principle, in Spengler’s terms called “cesarism”. Spengler continued to tinker with and blend concepts of Nietzsche and Goethe – two thinkers he credits most for having become his mentors. While Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy develops the distinction between Apollinian and Dionysian cultures, Goethe dramatized the dilemma of modern man drawn between rational research and passionate emotions in his Faust, Spengler synthesized or rather synchretized both in making distinctions between Arab and North African civilizations which he labels “Magic” or “Magian”, Mediterranean societies which he calls Apollinian, and Nordic tribes which he calls “Faustian”. The tragedy of Faustian man, according to Spengler, is that he aspires to infinity without ever being able to reach it. Given the severe limitations of Spenglerian theory small wonder that even humbler goals cannot be reached.
Whereas Goethe took the Medieval legend of the gold maker and magic maker Faust and turned it into a parable of modern man signing away his soul to the devil through science and a one-sided rationalism – herein anticipating the fall-out of the Industrial Revolution - Spengler literally signed away his own soul to the devil of a political system that would revel in the adoration of the tyrant and the strongman. Robert Musil (November 6, 1880 – April 15, 1942) wrote an essay reviewing Spengler’s main work in the Twenties entitled Spirit and Experience – For Readers who have Escaped the Decline of the West. Another writer who deals with Spengler brilliantly, a panorama no less impressive about historical contrasts spontaneous parallelisms is Egon Friedell (January 21, 1878 – March 11, 1938). His Cultural History of Modernity (1927) - like Musil’s own The Man without Qualities (1938, 1943) - deal with many of the historical phenomena Spencer, Nietzsche, and Spengler deal with, and with no less erudition, wit, brilliance and without a wholesale sell-out to authoritarian political systems and a base-line of social-Darwinist confinement of thought.
The middle and later 20th century finally brings out four seismic events in civilization theory that bear mentioning. Arnold Toynbee (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975)
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
published a twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations called A Study of History (1934-1961). Toynbee may be called the sane man’s non-Social Darwinist. Against Nietzsche and Spengler Toynbee holds that conflicts throughout history are driven by civilizational contrasts rather than by national-ethnic or religious causes. Toynbee here anticipates Huntington who would polarize that theory dramatically to offset the “West” from “the rest”. Toynbee also holds against Spengler, Hegel, and Vico that the rise and fall of civilizations is non-teleological, non-deterministic. In other words there is an element of choice and free-will included in civilizational development which cannot completely be accounted for and hence anticipated. Civilizational progress is determined not by a rigid “historical law” to which men helplessly fall victim. It is rather a matter of challenge – response. Various civil societies may be challenged from the inside or the outside by events or natural occurrences, and they rise or do not rise to the given challenge accordingly. Decline ensues with a series of inadequate responses; progress follows as long as the continual challenges can be met. [8]
Karl Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994) in his Open Society and its Enemies asked the right and pertinent questions in face of the egregious, all-menacing threat of totalitarianism of the 20th century, even if he, in consequence, has not managed to find satisfactory answers; it was important to formulate the issue fairly and squarely: an adequate and exact description of the problem is the first step towards its answer. Popper’s falsification conundrum may be loosely restated as follows: How can we fight totalitarianism effectively without turning ourselves into thorough totalitarians. In the post-9/11 world this issue has assumed a new depth and poignancy, not with politically driven retrograde ideologies like national socialism, phalangism, or fascism, but with ideologies distorting the basis of religion.
Samuel Huntington (April 18, 1927 – December 24, 2008) with his essay on the Clash of Civilizations (1993) and its subsequent republication as a book (1996) exaggerates Toynbee’s civilization thesis fundamentally to a point-of-no-return. His popularity is due to the coincidence that he published nearly a decade before 9/11 which seems to endow this rationalist philosopher in the positivist vein with preternatural powers of premonition. Powers, coincidentally, that Huntington always denied. Most problematic about him and his theory is that he no less than Spengler gives at heart an intelligent man’s guide to white supremacism. We owe Nibaldo Aguilera a first insight into
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Huntington’s strange civilizational valuation system, but have, meanwhile, been able to confirm it independently. [9]
Last but not least we have to mention Francis Fukuyama (October 27, 1952). Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man, (1992, 1989) although we may disagree strongly with a number of his main premises as well as some of his cardinal conclusions, is a literary and philosophic tour-de-force that can stand honorably and independently next to the best works cited here above. Fukuyama has a more coherent and consummate understanding of Hegel than either Marx or any of the positivist and existentialist schools following. He single-mindedly reads Hegel through Kojeve’s “end-of-history” lens, to a degree that Hegel would object to, but he owns up to that procedure blithely and he manages to give us a coherent picture of the world and a sane outlook into the near intermediate future to a degree few of his spiritual and intellectual forebears would have been capable off.
To round up our remarks on the history and future of humankind we have to conclude with George and his ground-breaking recognition of sane natural-resources management as the only and at this point possibly desperate way out of our present social, economic, and ecological trilemma. In the later part of his magnum opus: Progress and Poverty (1879) George leave the discussion of classical economic theory aside and gives his vision of the civilizational evolution of man:
“The incentives to progress are the desires inherent in human nature – the desire to gratify the wants of the animal nature, the wants of the intellectual nature, and the wants of the sympathetic nature; the desire to be, to know, and to do – desires that short of infinity can never be satisfied, as they grow by what they feed on … Mental power is … the motor of progress, and men tend to advance in proportion to the mental power expended in progression – the mental power which is devoted to the extension of knowledge, the improvement of methods, and the betterment of social conditions … nonprogressive purposes in which mental power is consumed may be classified as maintenance and conflict. By maintenance I mean, not only the support of existence, but the keeping up of the social condition and the holding of advances already gained. By conflict I mean not merely warfare and preparation for warfare, but all expenditure of
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
mental power in seeking the gratification of desire at eh expense of others, and in resistance to such aggression. … Improvement becomes possible as men come together in peaceful association, and the wider and closer the association, the greater the possibilities of improvement. And as the wasteful expenditure of mental power in conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which accords to each an equality of rights is ignored or is recognized, equality (or justice) is the second essential of progress. Thus association in equality is the law of progress. Association frees mental power for expenditure in improvement, and equality, or justice, or freedom – for the terms here signify the same thing, the recognition of the moral law – prevents the dissipation of this power in fruitless struggle.” [10]
Henry George then concentrates the summa of his findings regarding the development of a just society in the following words:
“Nevertheless … the truth to which we were led in the politico-economic branch of our inquiry is as clearly apparent in the rise and fall of nations and the growth and decay of civilizations, and that it accords with those deep-seated recognitions of relation and sequence that we denominate moral perceptions. Thus have been given to our conclusions the greatest certitude and highest sanction. This truth involves both a menace and a promise. It shows that the evils arising from the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth, which are becoming more and more apparent as modern civilization goes on, are not incidents of progress, but tendencies which must bring progress to a halt; that they will not cure themselves, but, on the contrary must, unless their cause is removed, grow greater and greater, until they sweep us back into barbarism by the road every previous civilization has trod. But it also shows that these evils are not imposed by natural laws; that they spring solely from social maladjustments which ignore natural laws, and that removing their cause we shall be giving an enormous impetus to progress. The poverty which in the midst of abundance pinches and embrutes men, and all the manifold evils which flow from it, spring from a denial of justice. In permitting the monopolization of the opportunities which nature freely offers to all, we
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
have ignored the fundamental law of justice – for, so far as we can see, when we vie things upon a large scale, justice seems to be the supreme law of the universe. But by sweeping away this injustice and asserting the rights of all men to natural opportunities, we shall conform ourselves to the law …” [11]
In the following passage George proposes what amounts to an amendment to the Declaration of Independence:
“The reform I have proposed accords with all that is politically, socially, or morally desirable. It has the qualities of a true reform, for it will make all other reforms easier. What is it but the carrying out in the letter and spirit of the truth enunciated in the Declaration of Independence – the ‘self-evident’ truth that is the heart and soul of the Declaration – ‘That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!’ These rights are denied when the equal right to land – on which and by which men alone can live – is denied. Equality of political right to the bounty of nature. Political liberty, when the equal right to land [and resources] is denied, becomes, as population increases and invention goes on, merely the liberty to compete for employment at starvation wages. This is the truth that we have ignored.” [12]
“Life, liberty, and property” was the phrase as coined by Locke. That term property very distinctly addressed and called up the right to “landed property”, something inconvenient and awkward in the ‘old world’ as they had generations ago run out of land. So as a legal caveat ‘property’ and all the more so ‘landed property’ was transmuted into the less contentious and more generally appealing ‘pursuit of happiness’. However, George rightly stresses the fact that these rights become meaningless unless their concomitant ‘land’, the term of the classical economists for all natural resources, is also confirmed, guaranteed and safeguarded. Without access to natural resources the very maintenance and continuation of life is imperiled, without access to natural resources the granting of all and any other rights becomes a sham. And as George continues:
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
“We honor Liberty in name and in form. We set up her statues and sound her praises. But we have not fully trusted her. And with our growth so grow her demands. She will have no half service! Liberty! It is a word to conjure with, not to vex the ear in empty boastings. For Liberty means Justice, and Justice is the natural law – the law of health and symmetry and strength, of fraternity and co-operation.” [13]
To come back to the outset of our analysis as to the viability and potential future of the West, against Huntington who gleefully celebrates that nothing will have a future but, on a dead certainty, one does not quite know whence it derives, and equally against Spengler who held that the West was equally dead certain to decline and who celebrated that doom, [14] it may be conducive to bring in another eminent philosopher and historian of civilizations:
“Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. … Recently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-[WW I] Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism, but the home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a first psychological theory of history was conceived and
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presented by an original intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classified and organized phenomena much more successfully than it explained them. Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth while following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience. The theorist, [Karl] Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilization is bound to proceed.” [15]
The philosopher cited, Sri Aurobindo, goes on to develop a theory and panoramic vista of the development of civilizations that is both analogous to Friedell and Toynbee as it surpasses both to an extent. Basing himself on work done by Mazzini on the concept of the self-determination of nations and in parts corroborating conclusions of Henry George, Sri Aurobindo predicts the “end of the Curve of Reason” and the dawning of a suprarational age. The remainder of the 21st century will show whether humanity, indeed, as a whole will fall back into a infrarational cycle of barbarism or whether it will be able to break through onto another shore and, after all, precipitate the future into the present.
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Bibliography: Philip J. Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate, London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2008 Benedetto Croce, What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy, Rome, 1907, translation, London: Macmillan, 1915 -, History as the Story of Liberty, New York: W.W. Norton, 1941 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, 1871 -, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London, 1859 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Univ. of Cal. Press, 1998 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duehring, London, 1878 Egon Friedell, Cultural History of Modernity, three volumes, Vienna, 1932, New York, 1948 Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz, Monetary History of the United States 1867 – 1960, Princeton Univ. Press, 1963 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press 1992 Henry George, “The Law of Human Progress”, in: Progress & Poverty, New York: Appleton & Co., 1880, R. Schalkenbach, 1987, p. 475 – 555 -, The Land Question – Property in Land – The Condition of Labor, New York, 1891, R. Schalkenbach, 1982 -, A Perplexed Philosopher – A Searching Commentary on Herbert Spencer’s Various Writings, New York: Webster & Co., 1892, R. Schalkenbach, 1988 J. W. v. Goethe, Faust, Berlin, 1808 - 1832, translation, London, 1960 -, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Berlin, 1796 -‘ Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Berlin, 1821 Friedrich v. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge, 1944 G. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Berlin, 1835, London,1837 -, The Philosophy of Law, Berlin, 1821, Chicago, 1952 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, London, 1651 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 1944/1955 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, in: Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 -, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996 Homer Hoyd, 100 Years of Chicago Real Estate, New York, 1936 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York, 1987 A. Kojeve, Introduction to Hegel, Paris, 1947 S. Kondratiev, The Business Cycle, Moscow, 1925 Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Antimodern, Harvard Univ. Press, 1994 Joseph Mazzini, A Memoir with two Essays: Thoughts on Democracy and the Duties of Man, ed. by P. A. Taylor, London, 1875 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, translated and introduced by Sheila Benhabib, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, 1932 V. Maslow, The Pyramid of Need, New York, 1994 Ludwig v. Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Yale Univ. Press, 1949 Robert Musil, “Spirit and Experience – For Readers who have Escaped Spengler’s Decline of the West”, in: Musil, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism, Berlin, 1886, translation, London, 1951 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, two volumes, London, 1945 George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress, New York: Scribner, 1906/1951 5 West 19th Street 2C, New York, NY 10011 Tel:(212) 889-8020 Fax: (212)-367-0940 e-mail: [email protected] www.henrygeorgeschool.org
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, London, 1851 -, Principles of Biology, , London, 1864 -, The Study of Sociology, , London, 1873 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, two volumes, Berlin 1922, Oxford Univ. Press, 1991 Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Pondicherry, 1918/1999 Arnold Toynbee, The Study of History, two volumes [abridgement of the twelve volume edition by D. C. Somervell] Oxford Univ. Press, 1955 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, Rome, 1744, Translation T.G. Bergin Cornell Univ. Press, 1948
Notes [1]. See bibliography [2]. Of the economic and financial analysts who are strong on periodicity, re especially P. Anderson (2008), Homer Hoyt (1938) and Kondratiev (1925) [3]. There are works of several psychologists and anthropologists who have done groundbreaking work on this subject, re esp. Maslow (1994) and J. Diamond (1998) [4]. We owe Mark Lilla the reference and first deeper access to a philosopher at the outset of Modernity, who can simply not be underestimated. Although we greatly appreciate his “breaking the ground” and cherish a number of inspiring discussions, we are not sure whether Lilla would appreciate in which direction we are taking Vico’s perspective [5]. Cf. the excellent reworking of this issue along more modern lines by R.W. Emerson in his Essay series, in the chapter bearing the title “Nominalist and Realist” [6]. One tends to wonder whether professional translators had sufficient mastery of either language to translate The Phenomenology of the Spirit as The Phenomenology of Mind, and the Outlines of the Philosophy of Law as Philosophy of Right; why not – while we are at translating what’s not there into what shouldn’t be – say The Endocrinology of Mind, and Sketch of a Theory of Wrong? In other words, and definitely leaving all irony and facetiousness aside, stay away from translations with titles given as the second option if at all possible. If a materialist epistemology and a behaviorist psychology could not follow simple concepts of progressive Law and progressive spirituality that does not need to mean that seminal works of philosophy of the classic age need to be read ad infinitum in such a reductionist fashion. [7]. It was Solshenyzhin with his Archipelago Gulag and Cancer Ward who first drew attention in the West to such inquisitorial mechanisms and procedures. [8]. Toynbee himself condensed his own monumental history of civilizations in the maxim “the virtues of adversity” adapting Shakespeare’s provocative dictum “sweet are the uses of adversity …” to fit the results of his empirical research; overreactions to the historical pressure, challenge, or ‘adversity’ may lead to aborted civilizations just as the failure to meet the challenge adequately would result in the same. [9]. N. Aguilera twice gave presentations on Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations at the Henry George School, New York, once, October 8, 2004, and then the following winter term, February 11, 2005. Both times Aguilera argued that Huntington’s contention is wrong that “bad culture” is what keeps the formerly called “third world” countries poor, but on the contrary the former holds that bad international laws and trade agreements keep those countries in subjection and dependence. Aguilera took Huntington to task especially harsh for the latter’s apparent omission to accord an independent culture and civilization to Latin America. Both Toynbee, writing a half century earlier, and Friedell, writing three generations before
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Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York
Huntington, give a more balanced, less biased, and level-headed account of the civilizational history of the world than Spengler or Huntington. [10]. H. George, (1879), op. cit., p. 506 ff. [11]. H. George, (1879), op. cit., p. 544-545 [12]. H. George, op. cit., p. 545 [13]. H. George, op. cit., p. 546 [14]. “Optimism is for sissies”, he was held to have said in an apocryphal citation that, nevertheless, does justice to his Wagnerian ‘twilight of the gods’ doomsday-frame of mind, which makes it at least psychologically probable. [15]. Sri Aurobindo (1918/1999), p. 5 - 6
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