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In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation
Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sais-je?' ('What do I know?')
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- Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
- Montaigne's stated goal is to describe man, and especially himself, with utter frankness.
- Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time, reflecting a spirit of scepticism (believing that humans are not able to attain true certainty). The longest of his essays, Apology for Raymond Sebond, contains his famous motto, "What do I know?"
- Much of Blaise Pascal's skepticism in his Pensées was a result of reading Montaigne, whose influence is also seen in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson.^{[citation needed]} Friedrich Nietzsche was moved to judge of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth" from "Schopenhauer as Educator".
- Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
- Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.
- Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them
- Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
- Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."
- No man is a hero to his own valet.

03 Nov 09

Business.view: How to change the system | The Economist

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31 Oct 09

Sophie Calle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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: Marek Edelman | The Economist

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16 Oct 09

Thinkers 50

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08 Oct 09

Adam Greenfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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05 Oct 09

Antonio Gramsci - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion, and in a "crisis of authority" the "masks of consent" slip away, revealing the fist of force.
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- Gramsci gave much thought to the question of the role of intellectuals in society. Famously, he stated that all men are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the social function of intellectuals. He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media.
- Furthermore, he distinguished between a 'traditional' intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks 'organically'. Such 'organic' intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from without the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical of the status quo the already existing intellectual activity of the masses.

27 Sep 09

John Dewey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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24 Sep 09

Montaigne; or, the Skeptic

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said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the
world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea man,
"but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much better than both of you,
all muscles and bones, for ten guineas." Thus the men of the senses revenge
themselves on the professors and repay scorn for scorn.
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the
scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the
middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in
extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not go
beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a
Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to
keep it cool; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in
toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?- You are both in extremes, he says. You that will have all
solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted
and grounded on adamant; and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you are
spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and
capped and wrapped in delusions. Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a
gown. The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are
cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption,-
pallor, squalor, hunger and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they
entertain,- they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, but
destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all
energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.
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- But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in
  extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing
  beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of
  pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power
  of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high, will snap.
  If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are
  conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
  make up his mind, yea or nay,- why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers.
  I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand
  here to try the case. I am here to consider, skopein, to consider how it is. I will try to
  keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off theories of
  society, religion and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way,
  insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of my
  neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so
  simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus*(28)
  is? Why think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or
  two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the
  truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.
- Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which
  any thing more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question,
  when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution
  wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates, to him who
  asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, that "whether he
  should choose one or not, he would repent it." Is not the State a question? All
  society is divided in opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves it; great numbers
  dislike it and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance; and the only defence set up,
  is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the Church?
- Or, to put
  any of the questions which touch mankind nearest,- shall the young man aim at a leading
  part in law, in polities, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in either of
  these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost in his mind.
- In short, since true fortitude of
  understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by what we do not
  know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can command, and not risk them by
  clutching after the airy and unattainable.
- Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix
  in affairs; let us learn and get and have and climb. "Men are a sort of moving
  plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air. If they
  keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what
  we know, for certain; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A world in
  the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with
  skipping ghosts.
- This then is the right ground of the skeptic,- this of consideration, of
  self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor of universal
  doubting,- doubting even that he doubts; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeering
  at all that is stable and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
  philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding
  his means, believing that a man has too many enemies than that he can afford to be his own
  foe; that we cannot give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal conflict, with
  powers so vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this little conceited vulnerable
  popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the other.
- The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes
  are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance,
  seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial.
- The soul of man must be the
  type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is
  built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are golden averages, volitant
  stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea.
- The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain solid and
  intelligible way of living of his own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of
  human life; proof that he has played with skill and success; that he has evinced the
  temper, stoutness and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and
  countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets of life are not shown
  except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or
  pedants, but to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition
  between the extremes, and having, itself, a positive quality; some stark and sufficient
  man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do justice to
  Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities can
  not overawe, but who uses them,- is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.
- It seemed to me as if I had
  myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and
  experience.
- I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs
  of William Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is the only
  book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's library.
- Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretence of any kind. He has been
  in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge
  himself with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gipsies, use
  flash and street ballads; he has stayed in-doors till he is deadly sick; he will to the
  open air, though it rain bullets.
- He took and
  kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and
  wrote Que scais je? under it.
- I will rather mumble
  and prose about what I certainly know,- my house and barns; my father, my wife and my
  tenants; my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what drinks I
  prefer, and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,- than I will write, with a fine
  crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray and
  autumnal myself, and think an undress and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old
  friends who do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and
  pump my brains, the most suitable.
- The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the
  book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.
  Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.
- Montaigne talks with
  shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never
  shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish
  to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and
  solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and
  realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake.
- Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which
  society adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in their tendency and spirit. The
  ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to
  have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom
  at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the
  evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.
- The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with
  the projects that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no
  conservative, he sees the selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions. But
  neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
  wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are those
  of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat,
  "There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred"; whilst he sentences law,
  physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He is a reformer; yet he is no better member of the
  philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the
  pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our life in this world is not
  of quite so easy interpretation as churches and schoolbooks say. He does not wish to take
  ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon every
  doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him. But he says, There are doubts.
- Or shall I state it thus?- The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of
  reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the
  Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub of
  cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;- is then lost for months or years, and
  again found for an interval, to be lost again.
- The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man
  helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize;
  to believe what the years and the centuries say, against the hours; to resist the
  usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one
  thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to
  tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by
  knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every
  political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set
  of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is
  changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies,- yet, general ends are
  somehow answered.
- Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to
  bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence;
  let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss
  open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal
  Cause:-
  
  "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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23 Sep 09

Masters Of Design 2009 - Fast Company

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21 Sep 09

Intel Fellow - Genevieve Bell

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16 Sep 09

James Scott and Friedrich Hayek

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Heaven knows that I am no Austrian--I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat--but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago.
But on a second level, it is an act of displacement. Friedrich Hayek, after all, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for making many of Scott's key arguments: that the bureaucratic planner with a map does not know best, and can not move humans and their lives around the territory as if on a chessboard to create utopia; that the local, practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot is important; that the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation; that any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space for those on the spot to use their local, practical knowledge (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility). These key arguments are well known: they are the core of the Austrian economists' critique of central planning.
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- Scott draws heavily on the excellent work of Jane Jacobs to criticize this planned, surprise-free, every-apartment-building-looks-the-same high-modernist order of pre-planned Brasilia.
- Jacobs argued that rigid spatial segregation of functions made for visual regularity from the bird's-eye view of the architect but made the city damn hard to live in. By contrast, it is the mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces that makes an urban neighborhood interesting--and livable. And this urban diversity of uses cannot be planned by the high-modernist architect. At best it can be planned for--by the government providing a framework and infrastructure for urban development instead of specifying land use down to the last square centimeter.
- I should note that today almost every single economist--even those who (like me) are profoundly hostile to many of Hayek's arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income are likely to lead to totalitarianism, that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society)--agrees that Hayek and his company (including Scott) hit the particular nail that is Scott's central theme, the critique of high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering, squarely on the head.
  
  Scott's Seeing Like a State's index contains no references to Ludwig von Mises. It does contain six references to Friedrich Hayek:
- The first two references I agree with. Hayek is right in criticizing the inflexibility of the command economy, and Scott is right in arguing that the market economy is not the "natural" form of human social order.
  
  The third, fourth, and fifth references seem to me to miss the point: no one reading Hayek should be surprised that he is skeptical about claims to useful theoretical knowledge, the unanimity between the left and right branches growing out of the anarchist tradition is not "curious" but a result of these two branches' common roots, and the late Foucault (even though correct, and at the time of his death a serious student of liberal political economy) is not the expert of choice on liberal political economy.
- The sixth reference may be the key. Scott cannot cite Edmund Burke in Seeing Like a State--and much of Scott's book consists of praise for the wisdom embodied in community practices in a Burkean vein--except as an "apologist... for... power, privilege, and property." And Scott cannot embrace Friedrich Hayek out of the fear that it will turn his book into a "case for politically-unfettered market coordination." Instead, he believes that his argument is as much a critique of "market-driven standardization" as of "bureaucratic homogeneity."

JOURNEY

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14 Sep 09

Why capitalism fails - The Boston Globe

article on minsky - v clear & easy

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But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he
argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
While most economists spent the 1950s and 1960s toiling over mathematical models, Minsky pursued research on poverty, hardly the hottest subfield of economics. With long, wild, white hair, Minsky was closer to the counterculture than to mainstream economics.
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- In his writings, Minsky looked to his intellectual hero, Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. But where most economists drew a single, simplistic lesson from Keynes - that government could step in and micromanage the economy, smooth out the business cycle, and keep things on an even keel - Minsky had no interest in what he and a handful of other dissident economists came to call “bastard Keynesianism.”
- Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.
- he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.
- Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”
- As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.
- Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.
- Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers’ and companies’ growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.
- A year ago, an influential Financial Times columnist confided to readers that rereading Minsky’s 1986 “masterpiece” - “Stabilizing an Unstable Economy” - “helped clear my mind on this crisis.”
- To prevent the Minsky moment from becoming a national calamity, part of his solution (which was shared with other economists) was to have the Federal Reserve - what he liked to call the “Big Bank” - step into the breach and act as a lender of last resort to firms under siege. By throwing lines of liquidity to foundering firms, the Federal Reserve could break the cycle and stabilize the financial system. It failed to do so during the Great Depression, when it stood by and let a banking crisis spiral out of control. This time, under the leadership of Ben Bernanke - like Minsky, a scholar of the Depression - it took a very different approach, becoming a lender of last resort to everything from hedge funds to investment banks to money market funds.
- Minsky’s other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of “priming the pump” by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor - by building a new high-speed train line, for example.
  Minsky, however, argued for a “bubble-up” approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call “Big Government” - should become the “employer of last resort,” he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage.
- “He saw these ideas as perfectly consistent with capitalism,” says Wray. “They would make capitalism better.”

13 Sep 09

Wall Street Executives After the Financial Crisis - Graphic - NYTimes.com

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11 Sep 09

Hanif Mussa - Blackstone Chambers

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