EconoSpeak

In previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that "critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant." In the latter post, I stuck to source that Guelzo cited in his published writings. There is much speculation that Guelzo's Kant to critical race theory...

[embedded content]The grinning mug on the right of the YouTube Fox News screen above is Allen C. Guelzo, a historian of the Civil War and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo is also a purveyor of a bizarre theory that Immanuel Kant was the progenitor of critical theory, critical race theory, Marxism, Jim Crow, and "every dictatorship in between":But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in America, and I think that's really because critical race...

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. -- VoltaireKeisha Russell is a propagandist for the "First Liberty Institute" who they grace with the title of "counsel." It looks from her resume that the counsel she provides consists of appearing on right-wing cable news and doing speaking engagements. Her bio at First Liberty doesn't mention any litigation experience and emphasizes her "commentary."Today Russell appeared before the Senate confirmation...

 An unfortunate reason the current war in Ukraine might go on longer than it should (with the should here being that it should never have happened in the first place, and the sooner it stops the better, with the onus here clearly on V.V. Putin to stop it as he started it without any justification), is that wartime leaders get a puff in their popularity at least for awhile and are let off the hook on domestic problems.  From the outside it may look that V.V. Putin is indeed in trouble with...

I reread the first 50-pages of One-Dimensional Man and the 9-page introduction with Rosenberg's critique of Mills, Packard, Riesman, Spectorsky and Whyte in mind. That is a fair sample given that Marcuse repeats his basic thesis ad nauseum in various "negative" formulations. Rosenberg's essay almost qualifies as a critique of Marcuse's book even though it wasn't to be published for another five years. The essay was also published as "America's Post-Radical Critics," a less inscrutable title...

In 1959, Harold Rosenberg wrote the essay "The Orgamerican Phantasy," published in The Tradition of the New. Rosenberg's essay criticized the "post-radical" self-absorption of several of the same authors -- William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard -- that Herbert Marcuse would subsequently praise in the Introduction to One-Dimensional Man for the "vital importance" of their work. In Vance Packard and American Social Criticism, Daniel Horowitz discussed Rosenberg's attack on...

 The stock of Thomas Robert Malthus rises and falls with the real price of food. He was not the inventor of his theory of population, a point that Karl Marx threw at him among other criticisms, with such people as James Anderson and Benjamin Franklin preceding him with pretty much the entiretly of his theory. But his timing was much better, publishing the flawed first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, a year coming at the end of a decade of rising food prices...

 "Rhetoric" in quotes because it may not be just that.  I have not been posting much, partly because had a wedding for daughter, Sasha, last weekend, but also because I am seriously demoralized by the current situation, and every time I think I have something intelligent to say about the economics of it, that seems to keep changing, although I shall soon.Anyway, I have to get off my chest what I have heard from my wife, Marina, coming out of Russian language sources, not reported in English...

Georg Simmel called it "a faint sense of tension and vague longing" connected with the modern preponderance of means over ends. What Simmel calls estrangement  [We] feel as if the whole meaning of our existence were so remote that we are unable to locate it and are constantly in danger of moving away from rather than closer to it. Furthermore, it is as if the meaning of life clearly confronted us, as if we would be able to grasp it were it not for the fact that we lack some modest amount of...

In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, "Obsolescence of Socialism," Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had "repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on the labor time and the quantity of labor expended in the productive process than on the power of the instruments set in motion during the labor...