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You should check out the Frankfurt school if you haven’t, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et al. They were fierce critics of the very sort of reductive and restri
by voidhorse 8y ago
You should check out the Frankfurt school if you haven’t, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et al.
They were fierce critics of the very sort of reductive and restrictive societal tendencies you’re arguing against here. Positivism is indeed poisonous, a beneficial poison in some ways, but poison nonetheless. Unfortunately, while some things have improved, a lot of the problems such thinkers diagnosed and fought against in the 40s-60s have gotten more severe—the technical edifice determines the lives of the human beings more than ever, and the possibility of alternatives that would increase freedom and not reduce human experience to subtle manipulation and organization by algorithmic and prescribed modes of behavior seems more and more distant.
- ex3xu 8y agoThanks, I appreciate the recommendation.
- cutler 8y agoWhen I studied economics in the 1980s here in the UK I was dismayed to discover how much positivism implicitly dominated the economics curriculum. At A-level it was even more blatant with Lipsey's "Positive Economics" serving as a textbook for the whole course. Only the study of sociology enabled me to put this perspective in perspective. Lipsey's work presented the theories of supply and demand and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" as some kind of law of nature, the kind of gold sought by Comte and Durkheim. It was only the study of Marx's dialectical materialism which really opened my eyes about how positivism as taught in the economics curriculum was used to justify the capitalist system.