Monday, 23 November 2009

Year One - HCJ Zeitgeist

At about two minutes to nine on the Today programme this morning there was a discussion about Adam Smith and how the application of his ideas to the economy caused all sorts of problems (claims Will Hutton, ex editor of The Observer. Listen to it again on the BBC Radio 4 play again facility - today prog between 8.50 and 9.00. I have now posted my (very extensive) Adam Smith notes to the HCJ 1 page. I have also posted some notes about Hobbes, the Union of England and Scotland and the rise of the nation state. We don't have a specific lecture and seminar on this topic; but it comes in as an important theme in Rousseau and in Adam Smith; so I put some thoughts in to that - partly summarising the Von Mises radical free market view that the nation state is a fleeting (and basically catastrophic) phase in the development of human society; and that the sooner we arrive at Adam Smith's notion of a world-wide market ('globalised') for all goods, services and labour the better. We will next look at 19th century romantic nationalism (eg Hegel and then Social Darwinism and scientific racialism) as we continue our quick fire, journalistic, headlines-only trip through what we are still pleased to call Western Civilization.

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