The concept of “commercial economy” is quite independent of the existence and extent of a “capitalist” economy, that is, economic activity oriented to capitalist calculation. In particular, the normal type of commercial economy involves meeting need through a monetised economy. It would be wrong to assume that the existence of capitalist economic activity developed in step with the increased use of money to meet need, hence, that it entirely followed the course taken in the Occident. Rather, the opposite is the case. The increased extent of a money economy could be accompanied (1) by the increasing mo nopolisation of Chancen of making large profits on the part of a ruler’s household. This occurred in ancient Egypt during the time of Ptolemy, for which domestic account books show that the money economy was very developed, but they also show that this did remain a form of monetary accounting based on the household, and never became capitalist calculation. Or (2) with the rise of a money economy, the farming out of fiscal Chancen could arise, resulting in a traditionalist stabilisation of the economy (as in China, which will be discussed at the appropriate point). Or (3) the capitalistic valorisation of monetary property could be directed towards investments other than those oriented to exchange Chancen in a free goods market, and hence not oriented to acquisitive Chancen represented by the production of goods (which is almost exclusively the case outside the modern occidental economic region).
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Class interests as well as status interests may be represented by parties. In contrast to classes and status groups [however], parties are always purpose-rational associations, since their goal is the acquisition of power in larger associations.#
Classes are part of the economic order, status groups, of the social order; put in another way, classes are rooted in the sphere of production and acquisition, status groups in the realm of consumption.#
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.#
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.#
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.#