If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly on the natural inclination every one has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest.#Quoted in Tom Palmer, “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom” (1990)
One lesson of the last several years is that human capital is virtually the only reasonably reliable store of value in periods like the present. Is it just coincidence that active academics (not the emeriti), media commentators and “intellectuals” in general think the rest of society makes too much fuss over inflation as a social problem?#
The growth of a market in children’s life insurance was shaped by changes in the way that children themselves were valued: these began as a means of giving the “sacred” child a proper burial, later becoming a means of investing in their future education. Neither life not children’s insurance was a straightforward case of commodification or an instance of the encroachment of market values into terrain whose moral fabric they immediately destroyed.#
Theories of the physical world are shaped by the social relations within the culture which generates them, and these are used in turn to express in reified format the essence of that culture’s ideal of order.#
In a piece by Prof. Jacobi (about the Irvingites, 1854) I see that the Mormons assume that God is not everywhere present but moves with great speed from one star to another. Splendid! Generally progress means, compared with a more childlike age, that more spiritual conceptions are achieved, as if a more childlike age had fancied that God moves with great speed from one place to another—and now the modern age understands that God is everywhere present. But here the movement is in reverse! It is very characteristic, and presumably I am not wrong in assuming this to be the influence of trains and the invention of the telegraph. In all probability there is in store for theology a completely new development, in which all these modern inventions will be employed to decide the conception of God.#