More is More

[Mark Kohut]

"agrees with those scholars who have pinpointed a qualitative and
quantitative change"....

In his book *Science of Logic*, Georg Friedrich Hegel remarked: “It is said
that there are no sudden changes in nature, and the common view has it that
when we speak of a growth or a destruction, we always imagine a gradual
growth or disappearance. Yet we have seen cases in which the alteration of
existence involves not only a transition from one proportion to another,
but also a transition, by a sudden leap, into a … qualitatively different
thing; an interruption of a gradual process, differing qualitatively from
the preceding, the former state” (1
<http://www.pnas.org/content/97/23/12926.full#ref-1>).

The significance of this transition from quantity to quality, which Hegel
was perhaps the first to point out, was one of several ways of explaining
change that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels borrowed from Hegel in their
search for the mechanisms of social transformation. It was not, however,
part of Hegel's famous “dialectic,” with its mantra of “thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis,” and its “the negation of the negation,” which Marx and
Engels also borrowed from him.

Perhap's Pynchon's "History is a step function" is a non-marxist way of
suggesting something like the same? If a step every once in a while is
qualitatively a new platform.



On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:20 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-15/visualizing-wealth-
> nations-over-2000-years
>
> On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:04 AM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Deborah Cohen on Frank Trentmann's" :
>>
>> "Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the
>> Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First:"
>>
>> In the NY Review:
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/25/consumer-society-more-is-more/
>>
>>
>> "Just where and when the impetus toward material acquisition
>> originated, though, has been a matter of debate...
>>
>> What, then, about the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth-century
>> Golden Age, when even the maid had paintings in her room? Although
>> Trentmann criticizes the energy that’s been devoted to proving the
>> origin of consumerism, he nonetheless agrees with those scholars who
>> have pinpointed a qualitative and quantitative change in consumption
>> in northwestern Europe, particularly the Netherlands and England, in
>> the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries..."
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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