History and Moral Philosophy: Some Fairly-Recent Should-Reads
- (i) Free trade, (ii) the industrial research lab, (iii) the gold standard, and (iv) high finance to lobby for peace and channel money to régimes that played by the rules of the game—those were the key stabilizing institutions of Gold Standardism. (i) Labor unions, (ii) Keynesian demand management, (iii) social insurance, and (iv) high-throughput oligopolistic assembly-line manufacturing—those were the key stabilizing institutions of Fordism. So what are the next key stabilizing institutions? There is no guarantee that there will be any. There was, after all, a 33-year gap between the breakdown of Gold Standardism in 1913 and the first clear signs of the successful construction of Fordism in 1946. If we see 2000 as the last gasp of successful Fordism... then we may have a long slog. For who in 1913 would have predicted the future and bet that labor unions, Keynesian demand management, social insurance, and high-throughput oligopolistic assembly-line manufacturing were the key institutions to be building?: Nicolas Colin: Doom, or Europe’s Polanyi Moment?: Polanyi’s... The Great Transformation... is really about the social and economic institutions that are necessary to support the market system and to make economic development more sustainable and inclusive...
The big problem China will face in a decade is this: an aging near-absolute monarch who does not dare dismount is itself a huge source of instability. The problem is worse than the standard historical pattern that imperial succession has never delivered more than five good emperors in a row. The problem is the again of a formerly good emperor. Before modern medicine one could hope that the time of chaos between when the grip on the reins of the old emperor loosened and the grip of the new emperor tightened would be short. But in the age of modern medicine that is certainly not the way to bet. Thus monarchy looks no more attractive than demagoguery today. We can help to build or restore or remember our “republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government“. An autocracy faced with the succession and the dotage problems does not have this option. Once they abandon collective aristocratic leadership in order to manage the succession problem, I see little possibility of a solution. And this brings me to Martin Wolf. China's current trajectory is not designed to generate durable political stability: Martin Wolf: How the west should judge the claimsof a rising China: “Chinese political stability is fragile...
Damn: This is good: Jeffrey A. Sachs: Laicite: "I spent six years in Quebec, a province that has moved in fits and starts toward criminalizing public displays of religiosity...
Holly Brewer: Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery: "I contextualize Locke’s ideas and actions with regard to slavery in the empire...
In this Age of Trump it no longer seems a no-brainer that democratic republics offer the best form of government. But to strengthen your confidence that that is indeed the case, there is no better thing to read: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Federalist Papers
An extremely, extremely dense but classic and well worth considering meditation on the utiity of history and historical knowledge for those who hope to change the world for the better. My notes giving background: Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History. And other commentaries well worth reading:
- Andrew Robinson: Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution–Theses on History
- Stanford Encyclopedia: Walter Benjamin
- Robert Alter: On Walter Benjamin
- Karl Marx: Theses on Feuerbach
#shouldread
#historyandmoralphilosophy
