As Paracelsus said in 1537, “the dose determines the poison.” Nothing is safe at infinite dosage.
The whole point of The General Theory, [[Joan Robinson] believed, was to show that economic production could not be understood as a self-sustaining set of processes independent from social norms and political realities.
Charles Raison, a professor of psychiatry and evolution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, stands at the front of the room wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows—a nod to the stuffy academic halls that he’s used to lecturing in. He’s discussing the relevance of ancient medicinal practices in 21st-century psychiatry. And he starts with a simple supposition: Until the modern world, energy was always at a premium, and humans—not to mention every other living thing on Earth—need energy to survive. The first challenge for any living thing is to find a way to produce, store or share heat.
Whereas in a natural process the past dies in being replaced by the present, in historical processes the past survives in the present. The difference is vital. So to think of human history as, for example, an evolutionary process is to commit a double mistake. First, it confuses human action with natural phenomena, and second, it is blind to the notion of the past living in the present.
N.B. Isn't the whole concept of evolution based on the accumulation change over time? The "past" always delivers the present. And like all human phenomena, it is part "natural phenomenon" and part "human action." In a sense were all ten million (or more!) years old! (Hat tip to William Ophuls for this turn of phrase, who hat-tipped Jung for it.)
Plotinus and Jung agree in declaring for a wholly psychic base to consciousness, a base in the imagination, of what Ficino later was to call fantasy or idolum. By holding to this tenet — the independent power of the imagination –Jung separates his psychology from those of Freud and Adler.
Albert O. Hirschman pointed out in a bravura essay, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society” (1982). If indeed capitalism softened manners and made competition less warlike, was that good or bad? Schumpeter first thought it good, by making nations less eager to fight each other. Later he worried that “softening” both disarmed the bourgeoisie for its historic task of throwing off the “shackles” of the old order and robbed it of the self-denial needed to be effectively capitalistic. Like another observer at mid-century, the liberal Louis Hartz, Schumpeter wondered if a capitalist society given over entirely to the authority of the market would not work better if some of the old shackles providing cultural and moral guidance were somehow retained. As Hirschman suggested, there were part truths in each of those grand claims. They lived on in thinking about the “cultural contradictions” of capitalism, which took wing among German and American neoconservatives in the 1950s and 1960s.
