More is More

[jody boy]

 Definitely agree with this take.

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 5:48 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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).
>
> 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
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l