Diego Rivera peasants
Scholars are supposed to create revisions of the past through exhaustive archival research. But careerism pushes them to curry favor with patrons and senior professors who will get them jobs and fellowships. In order to get the doctorate and a job in academe they must create a simulacrum of “objectivity.” A faithful rendering of their archival nuggets will label them as “disruptive” forces to be stopped cold in their tracks. “Mining” the sources, letting chips fall where they may, is verboten, even Satanic, in the new dispensation.
Fascists reconfigured class conflict in the mid-1930s. Here is a footnote to my last blog in this index. “See W.P. Witcutt, “The Future of Capitalism: A Note on Werner Sombart,” American Review 5 (Oct. 1935): 531-535. Comparing Hilaire Belloc and Sombart, Witcutt wrote (praising Sombart for his “objectivity”), “By Capitalism Sombart, like Belloc, does not mean the régime of private property, as opposed to Socialism. He does not give any formal definition of Capitalism, but indicates certain constituent elements which may be gathered under the following headings. The Capitalist system consists: (1) of a society stratified into possessors of capital, entrepreneurs, and workers, pure and simple, possessing nothing–proletarians; (2) in the intensive utilization of mineral wealth. “The exploitation of riches beneath the earth’s surface and modern Capitalism are at bottom different aspects (natural and social) of one and the same phenomenon” (531-532). Cf. A.J. Penty, “The Centrality of Money and Machinery,” American Review 6 (Nov. 1935): it is the financiers who first destroyed the stability of peasant life and property. The merchants were the “haves,” the peasants the “have-nots” (2-3).
https://clarespark.com/2010/02/10/a-brooding-meditation-on-intimacy-and-distance/ (especially good on the peasant problem)
https://clarespark.com/2011/12/15/gingrich-and-the-socially-constructed-nation-state/
https://clarespark.com/2013/01/20/an-awesome-inauguration/
https://clarespark.com/2013/06/15/the-politics-of-family-vs-mass-politics-altered/ (On superheroes and Les Misérables)
https://clarespark.com/2013/06/30/the-origins-of-political-correctness-2/
https://clarespark.com/2013/07/04/independence-and-the-marketplace-of-ideas/
https://clarespark.com/2013/07/09/preconditions-for-hard-liberty/
https://clarespark.com/2014/01/08/the-frontiersmansettler-as-all-purpose-scapegoat/ (American Protestants are Puritans and un-Christian according to the moderate men)
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