🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug11.155741.16959@sei.cmu.edu> firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes:
>In article <1992Aug11.143846.24840@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>
>>     This certainly was not dogmatic.  It was simply the recognition
>>     that the 'great currents' idea seems to be held in common by
>>     both Marx and the previous poster.  I believe that the 'great
>>     currents' idea has pretty much fallen by the wayside in 
>>     Economics (though there are always holdouts).
>
>The idea is a lot older than Marx, of course.  Its modern economist
>exponent is Kondratieff, whose exposition was considered sufficiently
>unmarxist to earn him a long paid vacation in Siberia.

     The 'great current' of authoritarian dictatorship often ran
     stronger than the 'great current' of ideology.

>One dividing line that splits the "great currents" people into two
>camps is the issue whether the currents are linear or cyclic.  Marx
>and the Victorians believed in linear, irreversible progress, as do
>modern liberals.  The other camp, from Giambattista Vico through to
>Spengler, believe in cycles - for each flow, there is an ebb.
>
>Kondratieff thought that the motive force for each cycle ("long wave"
>in his terms) was the application of new discoveries to human
>society; in other words, technology - which perhaps links this
>thread to the discussion on sci.physics of big science and its
>spin-offs.

     True enough.  However, I still am very skeptical of 'great currents'
     linking science and society, other than in the most obvious
     manner (say, the fact that a scientist might not have enough
     food might affect his work, and, say, the development of something
     like the theory behind semiconductors might affect society).

                               dale bass
-- 
C. R. Bass                                           crb7q@virginia.edu
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia                            (804) 924-7926