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> At the end, the author gets slightly political Lol, that's the whole point of the piece! The whole rest of it is just a set dressing to sell you on his polit
by earthboundkid 3y ago
> At the end, the author gets slightly political
Lol, that's the whole point of the piece! The whole rest of it is just a set dressing to sell you on his political theory. It's political from beginning to end, but you just don't know where he's going with it for most of the piece.
- jhbadger 3y agoNo, it really isn't, any more than Darwin's Origin of Species is primarily about the evolution of humanity (Darwin later wrote an entire book on that later). It's just that most non-biologists don't care that much about the parts where Darwin or Haldane were talking about animals and their evolution or optimal size and just fixate on the parts dealing with humanity.
- earthboundkid 3y agoSo your supposition is that he was just writing a normal paper about biology for the general public and then he just sort of accidentally added an aside about politics at the end that reframes the whole piece and is extremely relevant to the controversy about democracy vs. dictatorship in the 1920s? No. It's a single extended essay that advances the thesis that human social structures should "be the right size." His other work work is the equivalent of Origin of Species for him, but this is one very short essay with a coherent thesis.