Re: Capitalism’s secret love affair with bureaucracy - FT.com

[ish mailian]

I like freewheeling erudition, and I don't mind a bit of hyperbole. It's
his style and it works for him.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> (Continuing my foray into last year's posts....)
>
> I gather that David Graeber has some fans on the P-list, so let me ask
> this ("this" in the sense of, the question that comes after the following
> paragraph).  I think he picks interesting and important things to write
> about, and I am directionally sympathetic with what he has to say.
> However, I get the sense that he plays fast and loose with historical
> facts, reinventing them to serve his own purposes.  For example, in this FT
> excerpt from his book, he says: "The only real way to rid oneself of an
> established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as
> Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome...."  A few minutes of quick research
> suggests that not only did Alaric not kill all the Roman bureaucrats when
> he sacked Rome, in fact the sack was mild by the standards of the day and
> there were no mass killings.  This could be wrong, or perhaps Graeber is
> just relaying something that Weber said (but did he? and if so, why not
> correct it?).  But it seems to fit a pattern with Graeber. To take perhaps
> the most notorious example, in Debt he wrote: "Apple Computers ... was
> founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in
> Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to
> forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages."  As the kids say,
> WTF?  From time to time, Brad DeLong has taken a hard look at Debt and
> close scrutiny of Graeber's history is not kind to it and him.  Moreover,
> my recollection is that when the folks at Crooked Timber did a symposium on
> Debt and asked some tough questions about its claims, he reacted quite
> poorly.  (Recollection somewhat confirmed by a quick search yielding this:
> http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/04/because-imperialism/).  All of this
> leads me to suspect that his books cannot be trusted.
>
> So fans of Graeber, or anyone else, tell me why this is wrong. Why is his
> work worth engaging?
>
> On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Weber, postal service, and the Soviet Union make an appearance by the
>> terrif David Graeber.
>>
>>
>> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/73212b74-c1ba-11e4-8b74-00144feab7de.html#slide0
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad-
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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