The time gap between the reader and the text seems to be a problem, an obstacle in the way of interpretation. Gadamer (p. 297) rather views it as productive: “Temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing... Read more
Modern hermeneutics highlights hermeneutical circles of various sorts: To understand the part you must understand the whole, but to understand the whole you must understand the parts. To understand the author you must understand his times, but to understand the times you must understand the author. Dizzying. Tight. Enclosed. No, says Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , p. 291): Drawing on Heidegger, he insists that hermeneutics’ circle is centrifugal: “we learn that we must ‘construe’ a sentence before... Read more
In his study of the rise of the spirit of capitalism, translated as The Quintessence Of Capitalism: A Study Of The History And Psychology Of The Modern Business Man . . . , Werner Sombart emphasizes the role of the State in cultivating the capitalist spirit and in supporting capitalist enterprises. He sees, for instance, links between the adventurous spirit of capitalism and the adventurism of early modern states. He also argues that “the modern state” can be viewed as... Read more
In his Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990 – 1992 (Studies in Social Discontinuity) , Charles Tilly tells the story of the modern state as a story of coercion and capital. It is a story of two political forms, state and city. Coercion is gradually monopolized by the state, while the cities were the centers of capital accumulation. There was often tension between the State and the cities, but they also worked out various forms of cooperation and compromise.... Read more
In an earlier post, I quoted Robert Nisbet’s suggestion that the capitalist system was the result of state intervention in and even destruction of earlier economic arrangements. No movement illustrates the point better than the enclosure movement, the subject of JM Neeson’s Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Past and Present Publications) . Neeson concludes that “Parliamentary enclosure marked a turning-point in the social history of many English villages. It struck at the roots of the... Read more
Nisbet ( The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind) ) admits that “no one can seriously question the abstract superiority of a society in which freedom of economic choice exists as compared to a society in which it does not. Moreover, only the willfully blind will fail to mark the danger to economic freedom created by increasing political controls at the present time” (p. 213). Yet, Nisbet... Read more
In his classic The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind) , recently republished by ISI, Robert Nisbet places the rise of capitalism within the history of modern Statism. He notes, “The expansion of the State in European history has been both territorial and functional,” and is most interested in the latter. Over time, the State has gradually absorbed “powers and responsibilities formerly resident in other associations and... Read more
Challenging both the “traditional” social interpretations of English politics in the 17th century (Stone, Hill) and also the Revisionists who dismiss social causes, Robert Brenner ( Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 , p. 650) offers this summary of the shift of politics and society in the transition from feudalism to capitalism: “What the transition from feudalism to capitalism on the land essentially amounted to was the transformation of the dominant class from one... Read more
As Inwood explains, Heidegger doubts that a correspondence theory of truth is coherent. Truth for him is “disclosure” rather than correspondence. Why? If truth is correspondence, then an assertion is true if it corresponds to the facts of the case. Heidegger raises questions about both the assertion and secondly about the fact to which the assertion corresponds. For the correspondence theory to work, we have to establish the independence of the assertion from the facts. If it’s not independent, then... Read more
Michael Inwood’s Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction is superb. It is, as the title indicates, very short. It is, however, thorough; and it is, unlike its subject, completely lucid. Inwood has the English knack of making Heidegger’s most abstruse concepts seem perfectly down-to-earth. Near the beginning of the book, he notes Heidegger’s suspicious about epistemology as the leading concern of modern philosophy. Knowledge, Heidegger observes, involves a relation of knowing between a knower and an object. As Inwood says, Heidegger... Read more
Leithart
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