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December 20, 2009

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My sister blog, News from the Zona, just won third place in the 3 Quarks Political Blog contest. All my heteronyms are happy.

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Fair, Forum, Market

I have been thinking about Turgot’s entry on the Foire in the Encyclopedie ever since I read Rosanvallon’s analysis of it in his book on the idea of the market, The Capitalist Utopia.

The Turgot text is treated under the heading of the new geography envisioned by the classic economists – a geography defined by prices. This geography does not lend itself to a map listing nation states – with their different colors – but rather to a map of interconnected hubs, which Adam Smith called the ‘extension of the market.”

Rosanvallon locates this historic moment otherwise than, say, Harold Innis, who was similarly fascinated by the penetration of the price system.

“With the great discoveries, the occidental world is exteriorized. The establishment of colonies was one of the principle forms taken by this exteriorization. In the 18th century, liberalism was translated principally, in contrast, by a sort of return to the interior. Stewart is the economist who best understood how to philosophically …

Fake news in 1800 - or how to do history

There’s a good rule that goes: by indirection find direction out. Or, translated from the Shakespearese into nice wooden ideology critique terms: since present injustices rest on past ones, one of the ways to delegitimate the former (otherwise known as “waking up”) is to go after the latter with a blowtorch. That’s a rule of thumb, natch. It can allow the scholarly type to disappear into the tunnels of history-mongering and never emerge again, blowtorch in hand. Rectifying the past is a painstaking business, and liable to blowback. When you find what you want to find, often you have to ask: is this a poisoned gift? But vanity more often whispers: hey, hypothesis and proof, don’t have nothing whatever to do with the unconscious libido.
So far, I am not describing Abbé Gregoire; I’m merely farting around with ideal types. However, there was, in Gregoire’s capacious C.V., room for activist scholarship – especially when he was on the outs. As he was in 1800.
Before 1800, he’d been one of …

Hitler - a screen memory from America

As is well known, the Hitler comparison is a standard trope among the Internet commentariat. The standard rhetorical reply is to evoke the Godwin’s law, which says that once the Hitler comparison is reached, all further argument is reduced to absurdity or repetition. Godwin’s law may be right as far as the measurement of information is concerned. However, there is more to say about the insistent use of Hitler, at least from the semi-Freudian/Marxy p.o.v. Freud introduced the useful concept of the “screen memory” quite early in his career, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss. In an essay in his “Small Writings” about a childhood memory in Goethe’s autobiography, written in the midst of the horrors of World War I, 1917, he condenses the notion down to its essence:
“Obviously, the important value of such childhood memories is only rarely evident. Mostly they seem indifferent, even nugatory, and it seems incomprehensible that it is just these memories that succeeded in defying our a…

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