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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5597780" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm always happy to join someone in being anti-Jared Diamond.On the Marx point, though, I think there's a bit more going on than you seem to be allowing for. For example, Marx clearly does think that choices affect outcomes. But he also thinks that choices result from (what we might call) socialisation. Thus he can try and maintain his historical determinism (and hence the importance to the overall theory of the claim that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class).Political activity, then will not only "ease the birthpangs of history" but - perhaps as an aspect of that - help overcome ideology and develop the proletariat as a class for itself.So I don't see Marx as internally incoherent, so much as incredibly optimistic in believing that any situation of social crisis holds within itself its own resolution, which resolution will come to be directly as a consequence of the crisis reaching its crescendo. (And in this reading of Marx I'm heavily influenced by Cohen's critique in If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?)To draw this back to the original topic, it can be interesting to ask "what explanation, if any, can be given for the fact that actor X at historically significant time T has a preference for A over B, and is able to effectively choose in favour of A?" So, for example, when you say ---- the question can be asked "why did it make sense? to whom? and why did that person have the power/capacity to realise his/her preference over the preferences of others? or, if there were no competing preferences, why not?"Of course, there are a lot of interesting ways of tackling those questions other than via a theory of ideology. And in a fantasy world even more answers become possible, like the influence of divination magic, or the gods, on individual preferences and beliefs.What struck me in this is your easy movement between "government", "sovereign" and "lord".In at least some published setting material for fantasy RPGs, it is that easy terminological equivalence that can sometimes cause a sense of anachronism. (And knowing nothing of your campaign world other than your two posts about it in this thread, I'm not passing judgement on it. It's just you use of words that struck me.)It's a while since I studied Roman Law, but as I recall it, well into the principate if not the dominate the imperial administration was still regarded as forming part of the personal household of the emperor, rather than a civil service in the modern sense. And going beyond that single example, Weber puts forward as one characteristic of modernity that offices and their property and functions become divorced from the personality and personal claims and interests of the office holder.There's also a respectable view in the history of ideas that holds that the idea of the state, in the modern sense of an abstract and impersonal system of offices and entitlements to which allegiance is owed, emerges only in the 17th century in the work of Hobbes. (Which is not to say that the political structures to which Hobbes gave a label weren't already emerging. But whereas labelling the natural world at least arguably leaves the objects of the labelling unchanged, this is often not so for the human world.)This is part of what I had in mind when I suggested, in my earlier post upthread, that a quick-and-dirty way to get a feudal rather than modern feel is to make personal and parochical everything that in the modern world we regard as impersonal and abstract - local courts, tax collectors as private actors rather than public officials, "patriotic" duties owed to families, guilds, individual lords, etc, rather than to the nation or the community in the abstract.There's no doubt that this is somewhat crude and simplistic, but I think it is the easiest way to convey a sense of a feudal world in a fantasy RPG.</blockquote>

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