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| 2020 publication |
That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.
Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein, of our sense experiences. There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them.
The European visitor simply cannot perceive political realities in the United States, because they are so well hidden by the surface of a society in which publicity and public relations multiply all social factors, as a mirror multiplies light, so that the glaring façade appears to be the overwhelming reality. He cannot imagine that Mr. Jones, who in social matters is obviously the world’s greatest conformist and hardly ever speaks about politics, is nevertheless in political matters a most independent creature with a deep feeling of responsibility as a citizen. It is inconceivable to this visitor that a very complicated system of social interrelationships—determined by even more and more heterogeneous groups than one could find in a class system—can underlie the surface composed of all the worst cultural elements of a mass society.
N.B. This was written in the period immediately after the end of World War II; to wit, before 1954.
“The characteristic of totalitarianism is not only to absorb man within the group, but also to surrender him to becoming.” Against this seeming reality of the general and universal, the particular reality of the individual person appears, indeed, as a quantité négligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since it is organized as a movement, is the universal itself.
