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Re: Bell and the PMC
Rafael Candido Alvarado (rca2t@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU)
Mon, 13 Dec 1993 16:48:48 -0500
> For those of you who are interested, see Pocock's `The Mobility of
>Property and the Rise of 18th-Century Sociology' in Anthony Parel and Thomas
>Flanagan, _Theories of Property_. Equally, see Peter DeBolla's _Discourse of
>the Sublime_, which has a nice, if long, chapter on the increasingly
>insubstantial nature of debt. Of course, Jean-Christophe Agnew's _World
>Apart_ deals at length with growing public concern (in the 17th C?) that
>people were not what they seemed, but mere appearance, in English commerce.
> Alvarado's note also reminded me that Americans and Britons, more than
>many continental Europeans, see institutions like the state as intrusions on
>their liberties, rather than devices by which that liberty is constituted.
>
> Yours,
>
> James G. Carrier
Thanks for the reference to Pocock, whose work I have read and admired.
As for the anti-continental slant to my views, your perception is
correct. But it should be added that the contrary to the continental
view is not libertarianism. It is rather that there are better
institutions than large secular bureacracies for "constituting" liberty.
When we find these institutions among non-Western societies we tend to
praise them, but from our own we seek escape.
--
R.C. Alvarado rca2t@Virginia.EDU
Department of Anthropology rca2t@Virginia.BITNET
University of Virginia uunet!virginia!rca2t
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