#robert heilbroner

[loneberry]

Why does Marx begin Das Kapital with the commodity? Why not the business firm, the marketplace, or the system as a whole?

—Robert L. Heilbroner

[geopolicraticus]

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Robert Heilbronner on Human Agency in Social History

Sunday 24 March 2024 is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Robert L. Heilbronner (24 March 1919 – 04 January 2005), who was born in New York City on this date in 1919.

Heilbronner’s best known book is his history of economic thought The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953). In addition to his books on economics, Heilbroner also wrote a couple of books that take an historical view of the future, The Future as History (1959) and Visions of the Future (1995). Heilbronner’s conception of social history is, in a sense, Arendt’s mass man seen through a more optimistic lens, with the possibility of human agency shaping the future.

Quora:             https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:      http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Podcast:           https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/Robert-Heilbronner-on-Human-Agency-in-Social-History-e2hhcbg

Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/robert-heilbroner-on-human-agency

[frankensteinsfreakydeakymonster]

I’m taking an environmental philosophy and ethics class right now and I think it is so funny (awful) that boomers essentially argued that they don’t care about us or any other future generation and they should be allowed to use as much resources as they want even to the extent that they speed up the imminent doom of humanity. Boomers hated their children before they were even born.

[lean444]

“A man who thinks that economics is only a matter for professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the barricades.”

— Robert Heilbroner

[ethtropy]

Follow-Up Post – According to Robert Heilbroner #TechnologicalDeterminism is a problem of a certain #Historic epoch when the forces of technical change have been unleashed, but the agencies of #Control or guidance of #Technology are still rudimentary. It remains to be seen if this will be the case with #Surveillance #Capitalism. http://ow.ly/6pt450xnDXn

[crapfutures]

A Crap Futures Manifesto

Challenge #1: reverse this statement

‘We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture, people must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.’

Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers, 1927

Challenge #2: reclaim the means - stop obsessing with the ends

‘Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.’

John Carroll

Challenge #3: (as things become increasingly automated) facilitate action not apathy

‘[W]hen it becomes automatic (on the other hand) its function is fulfilled, certainly, but it is also hermetically sealed. Automatism amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere spectator.’

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

Challenge #4: bring an end to this vacuous celebrity designer BS

‘My juicer is not meant to squeeze lemons; it is meant to start conversations.’

Philippe Starck

Challenge #5: interrupt legacy thinking and product lineages

‘All inventions and innovations, by definition, represent 
an advance in the art beyond existing base lines. Yet, most advances, particularly in retrospect, appear essentially incremental, evolutionary. If nature makes no sudden leaps, neither it would appear does technology.’

Robert Heilbroner

Challenge #6: rather than feed the illusion of invincibility, work from the reality of uncertainty and transience

‘Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.’

J.G. Ballard, The Miracles of Life

Challenge #7: set aside the easier work of critique and take up the more difficult challenge of proposing viable alternatives

‘It is true that I can better tell you what we don't do than what we do do.’

William Morris, News from Nowhere

Challenge #8: ask yourself (before putting things in the world): am I qualified to play God?

‘It’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.’

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Challenge #9: design ecologically

‘One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it ... all things are one thing and one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.’

John Steinbeck, The Sea of Cortez

Challenge #10: adopt a khadi mentality

‘True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery.’

Pyotr Kropotkin

Challenge #11: be patient for the quiet days

‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’

Arundhati Roy

Challenge #12: start building the future you want, with or without technology

‘People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.’

Ray Bradbury, Beyond 1984: The People Machines

[sublimequotesilove]

The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.

Robert Heilbroner.

[archaeolady-blog]

Paradoxically, perhaps, the richer the nation, the more apparent is this inability of its average inhabitant to survive unaided and alone.

Robert Heilbroner