Abraham Rotstein, Weekend Notes XII

Weekend Notes (Overview)

Text in English to type

"Freedom and Technology" - General Comments

[2] […] The existential criticism begins with Freud and runs to Sartre and is not a criticism of society at all e.g. Tillich, Nietzsche. Shaw accepted the idea from Nietzsche that we need a superman. […]

[3] […] In dealing with Owen, Shaw and the young Marx does the latter come in at end of social discontent? He didn't join in the social pessimism. P. anticipates that the Russians are turning to the early Marx.

[4] Tillich

P. also read Kierkegaard again an read the story of Abraham and Jacob. […] Descartes and a Latin sentence from Newton to prove [5] these people were not atheists. But in this piece there is no specific interest in Christianity and no belief in Christ but there is a belief in God. On the other hand if it is faith irrespective of Christian tenets, then it is not sure if anything else is meant than the firm conviction of the meaningfulness of existence. The Christian position is based on the fact that Jesus redeemed mankind.

P. started the Old Testament and read a lot. It is a confused story starting off several times from Genesis and especially peculiar with regard to the ancestors of the race. As regards the morality of Jacob it is not known if it is a humoresque or seriously meant e.g. the Esau affair.

[…] It means becoming different people - Shavian people. Shaw said that [6] human society won't go to hell and is not dependent on cheap conventions. We can drop them; what we are adjusting to are not the true necessities. We shouldn't talk with big gestures, with big phrases. That's Shaw.

[…] J.S. Mill, “On Liberty” (1839?)

[…] Luther and Calvin did say …

[7] Cromwell Locke and the Seekers - tolerance.

[8]

[9] [10] [11] [12]

[13] […]

Shaw is usually recorded as a critic of society, but he is not. […]

Goodrich, Chapman Terry Hopkins Rousseau [14] […] Mannheim

[15] […] Mannheim says that the masses play a bigger part in political and economic life …

[16] [17]

[18] […] Michael Polanyi read a paper

[19] Tillich's term 'estrangement' is a Marxist term (cf. article in 'Time').

P. is for "religion" rather than using "Jewish-Christian position." Shaw is for that and so is Owen. […] ↑

Introduction to "Freedom and Technology"

[20] Use the outline submitted to Bledsoe (April 24, 1957) for the introduction.

The preface will contain the economistic fallacy while the introduction will contain the dilemma only. The answer will be in the theoretical development and the practical proposals come at the end.

[21]

[22] […] We have three socialist writers - Owen, Shaw and Marx.

In Halasz' book every chapter started low and worked up to a terrific tension.↑

Robert Owen (2)

[23] P. thinks we should borrow more from The Great Transformation on Robert Owen. Much of it is really needed. The "Discovery of Society” background is relevant and should be brought to life on the Owen chapter and no other. In England this is not accepted (The Great Transformation fell through) but this doesn't hold for America. (They know nothing about anything anyway but the American history of England is a different history from the English. What another country wants to know about a country may be quite different.)

Owen was in a unique position. He was on the same level with sovereigns, the Church, and was even ordering Parliament around. Being Welsh he had an equal social status. (The Tudors were Welsh, had they been English they would never have been sovereigns.) MacDonald, if he had been English would have not have been Prime Minister. England didn't have lower class English Prime Ministers. Wales did not have classes and there is no nobility, so that this was possible for the Welsh. Half of the brigands were called Owen which is a name as Welsh as Morgan.

Owen was a Welshman and had money and could rise to a position of potential influence which twenty-five years later, Cobden and Bright couldn't achieve because they were commoners from Manchester and hadn't gone to Oxford. But Owen needn't go to Oxford. (Write a paragraph on how Owen could rise. This wouldn't occur to G.D.H. Cole but it occurs to K.P.) Cobden and Bright wore black clothes and bowler hats but couldn't get a hearing. They were the leaders of the free trade movement which was victorious in ten years. The English middle class couldn't be the leaders of the middle class and it was [24] not Cobden and Bright but the aristocracy who went liberal. The Tories went Conservative and that is why England imagined the Whigs were Liberals to start with. They were not, and that would be to imagine the court aristocracy of the four Georges was liberal. They were Whigs and came in with the new dynasty.

P. described the idea of “science” (as doing anything scientifically) in those times as referring not to natural science but to social science. In The Great Transformation there were many pages on Society, which was thought then to be an experimental field. There was only one science at the time - economics. It is the model of science and there was no physics or chemistry of any importance. Even the terrific authority of Newton did not establish a science. Scientific meant methodical, even if empirical was also meant. Society was thought to be the field of inquiry. See the Great Transformation, chapter 10, pages 1119-120. “The decisive contribution of science to engineering…”. (Bentham as a social engineer).

Political economy was the greatest social science ever. The laws of society were the laws of political economy and it was really as revolutionary as the discovery of nuclear energy and fission today. Ricardo wrote in 1811 and this was the sensational thing. And Owen would have known it.

The authority of science came from economics. It was thought of as the laws of society and no one thought of the market as a distinctive institution. It is recognized that it wasn't natural science which created the Industrial Revolution. Science has nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution and not before of the 19th century did science become a source of technical progress. In Owen there is no mention of science. Rationality is education and following one's enlightened self-interest and discipline. Rationality would eliminate crime.

[25] That was the very period that the Conservatives started on low tariffs - Hutchison 1819-21 (?).

The very word society was unknown in the 18th century. The word didn't exist. The would say: commonality or the state. (Look up “society” in the 8 volumes Oxford dictionary - Murray, when the word was first used.)

Owen must have been selling to India etc. and therefore would have got caught up in the Bullion problem. Where is the economist in Owen hidden? Did he think that was Malthus and Ricardo said was irrelevant?

There is an indirect reference to labour difficulties, no fear of high wages and no sympathy with the labour organization. Look up how he stood to Doherty and these people. Where did he take the idea of social legislation? Peel's 1802 Act? Were there people preceeding Gastler and Saddler? From what country did it come?

P. thinks that some workers wanted the Statute of Apprentices of 1563 revised since this would offer some protection. The only place to find all this is in Sidney Webb on the Trade Union and there almost all the evidences was collected.

There wasn't much competition at the time and a manufacturer could sell virtually any amount. They never could produce enough yarn to occupy the weavers.

All the discoveries were spinning inventions except the first and the last. the first was a weaver's shuttle - Kay's flying shuttle. The weavers always needed yarn therefore they produced machines one after the other: the Jenny, the Mule, and Arkwright stole this invention. There was no need for weaving machinery, and the power loom although it was invented was not used.

[26] When it was finally used the weavers starved and wages fell below any living wage. the weavers however, stuck to the weaving trade and starved. This was the only place it happened and their wages fell everywhere else wages were rising. Business was very good and the demand was enormous.

In New Lanark papers he said that unless we do something the machine will destroy us. But there might be a limit e.g. under the Russian system it turned out that at some points they are doing the opposite of what they want to do. the workers today e.g. Hungary say "we want our own trade unions", socialist state or not.

Owen was the main complainer and was the founder of European socialism.

The idea that there is a limit set by the nature of human society is a thought one doesn't meet before him or after him for a long time.

Owen saw these things at the very beginning when it was only possible to see them. Later on they couldn't be seen. It was just like Aristotle who saw things at the beginning (myself: it was Owen's genius to see things before maturity).

The Robert Owen chapter should be a closed chapter in itself.

With Robert Owen we begin the story of the discovery of society.

My question: do we transcend Christianity in the first chapter with Owen?

Owen didn't understand the thing. He had the Christianity of the Welsh churches and miners in mind. P. doesn't really think that Owen went to the roots of the matter but he was right all the way. What Wesleyan Evangelism [27] meant was the disintegration of the individual personality which comes from putting the obvious failures of the social system on the individual. He who was the victim was responsible for it. P. thinks that a suspension of the Christian revelation as a guide to life is basic to P.'s position. He sees the bridge to the Christian heresies of Communism which says that the Christian heritage is unsatisfactory.

Owen was selfless with a temperament of a philosopher and one could reconstruct his vision on what he did and said (in modern terms.) His superlative optimism is parti of it. At the same time it was balanced by a realism which surpassed everyone, (e.g. his remark on the “limits”, no one had thought of that).

The church would have said to him that this was human nature. he said no, that it was society and there is the inference that the limitation of society is not that of human nature. The limitation P. has in mind has nothing to do with human nature. The limitation P. has in mind has nothing to do with human nature. It is not the evil in us that creates the power and not the good. It is the nature of power that it is a reference to my own valuations. The more ardently I wish the good the more power there is and that is what the Robespierre found. By society Owen didn't mean common interest but something in the nature of society.

Is there any formulation of the Owen position possible which would be sufficiently interesting to arrest the reader? The opening sentence of chapter 1 might be that Owen saw into the heart of the industrial revolution. We might dramatize the matter for he will now be featured on extremely slim evidence and be credited with tremendous intellectual importance for the century. The great peculiarity in P.'s presentation is that he was unable to prove that Robert Owen ever recognized in its real importance the reality of [28] society, because otherwise the reader expects chapter and verse. The meaning of the reality of society is that there are limiting factors. What he did might indicate that there is no limit - never were so few words made to carry such a large proposition. We are not the first to have an intimation of it.

Why do we believe that Robert Owen was a man of this stature and insight and how do we make out his case at all? We can do that only if we regard his whole activity as one in which immense optimism and fantastic dedication and unparalleled sacrifices had their place. There was a kind of heroic determination in solving the miseries of mankind which he understood. Is there any sign of his having envisaged that may not be possible? he saw only that human society reset the limit - not as it is, but as it would be transformed. The changing heroism would be from his own person to mankind which would have to bear it.

Some like Malthus argued that there was an inevitable fate of vice, misery, etc. Owen said this needn't be so, but if it had to be, mankind would have to bear it.

(P. thinks if I could rise to half the height of this heroic figure I could see the summit).

From a knowledge of the institution and the problems nothing would follow. He was a tragic hero and that is why he went spiritualist. Who could live up to it? Unless we can see something bigger than the usual we won't be realistic. After all, what made the world sit up? Take everything he said à la lettre, he meant it.

Some things he put in an unnecessarily vast way e.g. “the whole history of mankind”. However the essence is clear.

[29] The Malthusian position turned out to be in practical terms, utterly idiotic. Malthus said these things precisely when the world food supply increased fifty fold, with the discovery of America and Australia and the danger was oversupply ruining agriculture in Europe. Owen's answer was that he doesn't accept that unemployment means too many people. Today we would say one hundred times that he is right. The whole of political economy was utterly mistaken. One hundred years later Keynes said that there was something wrong with money. He said that and people thought it was idiotic. P. says this things to give the measure of the man and to give the measure of our thoughts. the point isn't that we think he was so great but he was so important for our argument - who else saw anything? By 1820 there was the first capitalist crisis that we know and 150 years have gone by in regard to these public affairs (others called it the “social question”).

Nobody should argue that we are starting here a literary proof. We have our vision and what else proves it? Nobody else has been found. There was Comte but he drew the Catholic conclusion. There would be a new church and he would be the Pope and would indoctrinate the world with political economy. The highest knowledge was sociology.

Comte had a hierarchy of the disciplines from physics (at the bottom) to sociology (at the top). He invented the word sociology. His work is marvelous but he was all wrong. Few people were as wrong. He was the Pope of a satanic church based on science (sociology was a satanic science). He drew the conclusion that resignation was the only answer.

Both Comte and Owen were alternative to Ricardo and Malthus. Both started from the reality of society. It was amazing how alone Owen was. There was no other person or group to right the wrong.

[30] Technology revealed its essentials to him. This was the first time the thing was seen and in the extremeness of his ultimate conclusion, the reality of society was implicit. The meaning of his determination was in the acceptance of the reality of society. This shows the unity of the whole mentality. This is partly given by his sixteen years of lonely experimenting. Also one shouldn't forget the religious background. The Wesleyan movement from Wales was one of the most intense England had seen. There were night meetings by torch light, fanatical preaching which was meant to induce complete self-effacement and sacrifices of life by the poor. He hadn't invented the tones of Messianism.

Owen was the first to notice the machine and had a vantage point of tremendous direct power. From the first, his position was an ultimate one. He wouldn't accept defeat and this explains how the man became a spiritualist. There is nothing he didn't do - he wrote the tings, sacrificed his fortune, his family, went to another continent, tried to stir the whole mankind. But it was moving in an opposite direction and at the end there was neither the political nor other means to use the machine through the commonality.

Owen was the first to see the thing. And that is where the clarity comes from. He wouldn't accept defeat and with him there was only one reason for failure - that there s an intrinsic factor which could be overcome. This is implicit in his attitude and his sympathy with mankind was infinite. His sincere suffering was the heart of the matter - that is the man he was.

Owen had a peculiar belief in rationality - that was the great faith the the age: science. His determination was fired by faith in reason and his knowledge about society. He has a paragraph on replacing the plow by the spade.

[31] He is quite correct for those times, for the spade cut deep and the plow didn't although the modern plow does. {handwritten text to decipher}

Owen like Shaw was dictatorial - he didn't believe in the people and altogether he was a Fabian. (P. doesn't like that, he isn't a Fabian at all).

Begin chapter 1 on Owen with an anti-climax (the introduction has taken the reader to a high point). Say that the machine, so to speak, speaked in (on tip toe: myself) and the first man who really noticed it was Robert Owen and he got such a shock he almost went out of his mind. It is we who call it the reality of society and he was in a unique position and had an utterly fantastic determination.

The machine was everything for Owen: manufactures had been all wool and then it changed to cotton. Owen said that this was a hundred fold increase of productivity. He said that if they increase markets, a glut will disappear. The great thing about him was that he would not turn against the machine and said the machine cannot be stopped or abolished. his concern for society centered around the degenerate, thievish, criminals and prostitutes - people struggling with vice and illness. There were poor house children and he stopped having poor house children in his factory. Dale, the Elder, had done wonderful work in regards to the poor house children.

Look up the machines that were used in New Lanark. There was a phase when factories were called mills. This refers to water power. It was the pre-urbanized factory. All the mills had a mill wheel run by water power. Include a picture of New Lanark including how big it was.

(Find the passage on the labour market and check whether this was pre-Ricardo). {handwritten text to decipher}

[32] Owen was an obsessed person. He was obsessed by the evil character of a profit-ridden machine. He thought the capitalist was just as evil as the worker, that he was a miser and a heartless egotist. The workers consisted of thieves and prostitutes etc.

When did Owen first come across the mill? What machines were in use at the time? Was the market unlimited at the time so everybody made money?

There was a steam-powered weaving machine which Compton invented in 1780 but it wasn't put into use before 1820. These were all spinning machines driven by water power. Spinning mills were very common at the time of Owen.

Owen thought that the machine must be mastered or it will destroy mankind. Should we have these machines? Yes, but they cannot be left unchecked. That is the crucial point. This is where he differs from Tolstoy. In Owen's time the Luddites were the great figures. Today, the view of the Luddites is that they were right, and the thing to do was to slow down the process of change. Meredith says that they smashed the frames and increased the risks. The English working-class movement was formed out of the idea that the Luddites were wrong, that you can't stop progress. this is a typical idea that society consists of an atomistic flood and which you can't stop.

Just imagine a person forseeing what the machine would do. Owen knew the Welsh and Scottish village which consisted of a rabble of drunkards and prostitutes. he had a sociological angle.

His moral sense was the dominant thing. He had been educated by his environment. He must have heard the Wesleyan sermons at the pithead when he was preaching submission to the miners, that they should go into the pit and [33] perish, and that would do their souls a lot of goods. {handwritten text to decipher}

Owen saw that if the machine remains unchecked great evils will follow.

Owen never listens to anyone, yet he was of perfect equanimity and great serenity and charm. Owen was a socialist but he didn't build on the working class. We can draw a character picture of Owen. He had a peculiar relationship to his wife. Once he didn't see her for a stretch of nine years. In 1833 there was the Trades Union. This was a union of trade and various craftsman's guilds and artisans. The trade union is different from the trades union. Previously Owen was in America.

He had made a statement to the Archbishop of Canterbury that Christianity would have to go.

Capitalist were required to carry the risk. This existed particularly for raw materials. There were no markets in which to purchase raw materials and in which to get labour, freight, and insurance for freight. This might cause an interruption of production. As soon as the markets became general, the risks became smaller and that's why public opinion became so favourable to markets. Being able to sell and buy anything, anywhere, at any terms became a religion.

My question: Can we say that it was impossible for the State to share the risk-bearing at the time?

In England the functions of the State were at a minimum. The King was very poor. In France the King was very rich and had factories for luxury goods (Gobelin), but in England there was mass consumption almost at once. Where would they get the money in England? It was tax money.

[34] In Russia the Serfs were working in manufactories and the lat time this had happened was in Egypt under the Pharaohs. The next time was the State atelier of Louis Blanc in 1848.

Risk-bearing by the State… […]

As soon as the plant appears there were entrepreneurs who borrowed money - they defaulted (?) … […]

Owen saw the whole question of the machine on his own and was terrifically gripped and he went out on a lonely exploit. he was fascinated bu the horror of all this. At the beginning of the story, there is here a person to whom there is nothing comparable in the whole industrial history. The next comparable one is Henry Ford with the assembly line and paternalistic principles. No one was comparable to Owen in English industrial history. There were other large manufacturers.

These Utopians were giants and {aach} was regarded as being crazy. The great characteristic of Owen is that he was a Ford Carnegie and Nobel all rolled into one but with enormous intelligence, and productivity. He had an (immense) amount of money, stature, and was all powerful. He had an approach to the possibility of the limitations of human society. He was unlike any person of the time and could talk with the Prime Minister, the Church and the whole European continent. Here a man made his appearance who could tackle [35] society. He even invited American Senators to visit.

A picture of the man, using his writings and the authentic parts of his biography could give a picture of the inner horizons of this man, faced with such novelties as this machine which destroyed morality.

He said only one thing about the workers, that they all united against the employer.

“Undershaft” is Owen all over.

All those items on religion indicate that Owen was for religion and against Christianity. He was horrified at the sectarianism.

Owen was a Welshman. If he was English all those things in his life could never have happened. When he entered the english scene he was a phenomenon. He was a man of parts. He had an exceptional and privileged position not only as a thinker. Where did he acquire his education? His writing is to the point. He doesn't have long sentences with nothing in them.

One must go into Bell and Lancaster. England has no public education system until 1870. Public education came in the wake of the sectarianism. The idea was that the poor should teach the poor. In order to do that they reduced education to repetition of formulae.

The factory system was still in the making and these were the early factories.

One might take Owen's personality as given by his career and his outlook as given by the position he took.

In the Great Transformation it is inexplicable how Owen hit on a [36] limit - this was the era of the Luddites which attempted to destroy the machine. There was an overwhelming need for some kind of domestication of the new “mob” - the population of thee new mills. They were uprooted and Owen facd the problem of how to produce a new population. Even Adam Smith faced the problem of the Scottish worker - the Cotter. If he was turned into part of the factory population he would become a savage.

Owen was peculiar insofar as he didn't forsee that high wages would change the position entirely when they came. His economics was Malthusian. Therefore he was utterly convinced that the wage limit was survival. Any other idea was absurd except that wages were given by the subsistence level. Both Ricardo and Malthus advised that the working classes should raise their subsistence level.

Robert Owen could be pictured:

1. From his exceptional position and
2. what “scientific” meant.

Rationalism was linked with the social sciences not the natural sciences. Owen was a rationalist through and through.

For the Owen chapter we are in the fortunate position of just showing his genius and mentality but P. thinks that where his life comes in it should be enormously dramatized. He was ridden by a demon but the one which rode him rode us for 150 years. The thought that there could be a limit could only occur to a giant determined not to be stopped by anything. God's creation was at fault not he. Owen was reinforced by the new science of society (Malthus and Ricardo). These were unbreakable laws. he was anti-Ricardo and thought it was a tragedy [37] to introduce gold. Currency reform was the most urgent need and was stifling business through lack of money on which production had to depend. He wanted to abolish the labour market and have standard wages so that they wouldn't change with supply. {handwritten text to decipher}

In the Great Transformation you get in Speenhamland high corn prices and public works everywhere to buy the corn. It was King's rule that corn prices should always be steeper (graded prices). In the writing one should aim at bringing out those effects - what this Owen was. The way to write about these people is the way Edmond Wilson writes. Such a chapter should be between fifteen and twenty pages. ↑

Institutional Analysis

[38] Harry Pearson has a theory that one can't explain accumulation without prestige phenomena. Veblen had … […]

Harry Pearson … […]

P. thinks … […]

Classical and neo-classical economics starts either from (1) exchange or (3) allocation of scarce means, … […]

[39] he hasn't got the equivalence he works it off. Thus there is no loan, no default and no slaves.

P. thought that institutional analysis was a competing … […] Equivalences, operational devices, and debt bondage don't seem to have a connection from the catallactic point of view. It is a different money which has an operational side which doesn't relate it to value … […]

P. understands more clearly the difference between our approach and that of the others for price-making markets. […]

The American institutionalists have no idea of this.

The best example … […] This has the effect of the [40] middleman paying 64,00 for 100,000 bu the poor man on the market … […]

As for the economy it consists of two elements: … […]

P.'s new book on the continuation of Trade and Market will take the same line.[…]

Harry Pearson in his surplus paper said toward the end how prestige might lead to accumulation.

[41] Institutional analysis comes from an interest in institutions and this is a subject matter change. It is difficult to distinguish it from an operational device. You can use the latter for accountancy and interchange. Therefore it is difficult to distinguish operational devices and institutions. ↑

The Economizing Process

Marginal utility

[42] [43] ↑

Book on Money

[44] Work is proceeding towards a book on money and P. started to map out such a book. This would be a completely different approach from anything ever tried. It would drop the market and exchange side (allocation) but would include the origins of market institutions. P. would use his money paper as an introduction and keep to money uses but not have it systematic. E.g. the role of equivalencies and operational devices in the development of money institutions. He would as Ostwald to do money from this aspect, where sale - purchase isn't practiced, only the auction. (this has the feel of a war.) […]

The Phrygians and the Phoenicians displayed their goods in the argos (auctions).

The impersonal character of transactions is not limited to the market - the auction is just as impersonal if not more so.

The stock exchange is functionnally … […]

Now it turns out that important deals and objects were sold privately and argos … […] The [45] latter are markets because supply and demand crowds are present. There may be transitional things such as controlled prices. (Rostovtzeff says all prices are controlled).

Harry Pearson and Arensberg are agreed to make money the main subject and we have enormous money material which has not been used.

My question: are ration coupons money?

P: … […] ↑

K.P. on Writing

[46] Sartre says a writer can have two motives: he can express his individuality and he can express his solidarity with everyone. Sartre is for the latter and the content and clarity comes from a kind of humility.

P. thinks is true. It was one of P.'s sources of never becoming a writer. For the greatest part of his life he wrote with definite intent of …

[…] Rousseau

↑

The Canadian Elections

[47] [48] ↑

Greece, Rome and the Economy

[49] Plato's views on the economy were those of an aristocrat. But we can't say this of Aristotle who took up the question of the economy. Plato reflects Socrates who has put to death after the Peloponnesian War. Socrates was regarded as responsible for the defeat of the democracy.

Vlastos agrees on the Aristotle text but otherwise has a Marxist interpreatation. Aristotle died in 322 B.C.

Plato lived to age 90 insinuating himself everywhere by being a great poet. Plato was the student of Socrates. These three lives span the whole of classical Greece. Aristophanes wrote against and made fun of Socrates - “these Freudian corrupters of the youth”, and was probably responsible for his death.

The work with Ostwald brings in the auction as the main form of sale. […]

[50] ↑

Jewish Survival

[51] Jewry survived because the tribal institutions were artificially introduced at the time of Nehemiah in order to have background for reciprocity institutions. These couldn't have been introduced unless there were tribal or clan institutions to support them. Ezra and Nehemiah list all the clans in the Old Testament in 445 B.C. When this part of Jewry returned they were artificially organized in tribes. This made it possible to say that now they should have mutual help and the principle of no gain. That couldn't have been done unless there was a clan organization and in principle this never ceased to work. These remained established in customs, and the principles of mutual help and non-gain survived but this couldn't have been done without family organization. Jewry continued to practice among itself a consistent non-gain organization throughout the ages and when the clan was disorganized the community organized itself on a reciprocative basis. There were no transactions among members of the community.

This discovery is due to K.P.'s method. Reciprocity can not be practised unless we have an institutional basis. It can only be practised if the individual in one group has a correspondent in another group.

The Mishnah is absolutely conclusive and the extent to which the Mishnah excludes gainful transactions is fantastic. P. thinks that this kept the Jews an utterly non-commercial community through millenia. This forced them for a living on the Gentiles (my question, P. agrees). The community was sharply closed. ↑

Notes

Marx (2)

[52] ↑

Edmund Wilson

[53] ↑

Sartre

[54] ↑

Shaw (2)

Bernard Shaw's complaint is that the bourgeois world is an adjustement to a non-existent world of conventions and phobias which were an evasion of the reality of society. What we suggest is the actual reality of society not the delusionary one.

Shaw was a poet, artist and a successful playwright and had an utterly basic philosophical approach. He could use the circus technique and since people didn't accept the reality of society he could have ropes and holes and people would fall through them and stumble.He brings man's body, soul and spirit on the same level. Otherwise's it's in bad taste to play with man's salvation and cut his whiskers with a scissor. E.g. the doctor and the young girl in “You Never Can Tell”. The idea of the practical joke is a Shavian idea - man stumbling down the stairs in his career. Pygmalion is Greek myth. Ths sculptor forms a girl and brings her to life.

P. read Candida. The most amazing thing is the last page of Major Barbara. Also read “Arms and the Man”, “Man of Destiny”. It is quick reading and the shorter one take only one and a quarter hours. P. also read “The Joan” introduction which is nots so relevant. ↑

Dery

[55] ↑

Montague Norman

Henry Clay wrote a book on Montague Norman and Lionel Robbins reviews it. ↑

The Poor Law

P. upholds the thesis that the Poor Law was the matrix of English economic history. […] ↑

Christianity and the Social Revolution (2)

[56] This is a book with brilliant contributions and nothing came of it. Needham, Borkenau, MacMurray, Noel (who was not very good) made on the whole a series of brilliant contributions but they were lost and nothing came of it. The were also Raven's Lewis', and P.'s wasn't bad but nobody ever mentioned it. It wasn't correctly edited and not rightly done. It was edited ultimately by a Unitarian Marxist, John Lewis, and he ruined the book. He later became editor of the Left Book Club and the number of their publications went into the hundreds. It was one of the biggest things in England of the 1930's. ↑

The Great Transformation (3)

↑

Trade and Market in the Early Empires (3)

P. thinks …

[57]

P. was greatly cheered by the fact that Joan Robinson who dipped about in the book recognized the meaning and importance of it completely. […] ↑

China

↑

France

In France literature is being carried on on an unprecedented level of responsibility and political morality.

Text Informations

Date: June 22, 1957
KPA: 45/08