Misc. new year but old style Pynchon-related stuff

[Mark Kohut]

from elsewhere. 
Been reading Consciousness & Society: The Reorientation of European
Social Thought 1890-1930 by one H. Stuart Hughes, orig 1958, revised
editions into the 60s (after 1st Vintage paperback in 1961. This may be
because, as I learned from the aforementioned Patterns of Anarchy, "intellectual
historian H. Stuart Hughes ran for the Senate in 1962 under the Peace Party." 

Hughes writes of German historians, Meineke and Troeltsch [theologian-historian]
and other, lesser ones wrestling with the "Truth" of History while all thinking is moving
toward relativism...Hegel's Spirit [Truth] down the centuries or Not......anyway, Hughes
brings up the argument ---best articulated by Thomas Mann, he sez---of a belief in a 
deeper, purer Germany, beyond the facts of Germanic (or World) History even---ala akin 
to that notion expressed in AtD, we remember.

Also, I learn that Meineke and Troeltsch in Berlin in 1914 used to take long discussion 
walks with Walter Rathenau.....

Emile Durkheim, who gave social thought the Sacred vs. Profane distinction in "The Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life" was subtle about the religous life, sez Hughes, but for the non-religious
[what might be called "the inanimate" in this context], Durkheim overused the unsubtle word 
"thing', sez Hughes. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120102/5206286e/attachment.html>