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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5599611" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK. And apologies for overreacting, then (and thanks also for the civil reply - also not always a threat on these forums).I don't think I have a lot of info to dump - I'm not a historian, and the social/political character of modernity is something I'm in the process of trying to turn into my area of expertise (coming off a base of mainstream analytic political philosophy and constittuional theory).But I'll try and say a bit more about this bit:So like I said upthread, I come at world history/social theory from a more-or-less Weberian perspective. Central to this is the notion of rationalisation, or - as Marshall Hodgson calls it - technicalisation.So when I said "orientation", and you then said "depend", I suggested that the sort of orientation I have in mind is more than dependence. It's about the way that the ecomic activity is structured and embedded into broader social life. So what I see as characterising modern third world economies, which is different from the past even though there was widespread and economically significant trade in the past, is that the economic component of life is being restructured in various ways which exemplify technicalisation (ie the subordination of all other priorities to productive efficiency) - so land becomes registered and commercialised and old forms of tenure get broken down; peasants become wage labourers; local food or water markets get created where they didn't previously exist, or if they did exist they become stripped of whatever customary normative constraints might have operated to govern them; joint stock companies (corporations) become the predominant economic actors, and being artificial persons and therefore very obviously not participants in any other sort of normative system, a whole range of traditional understandings about the purpose of and limits upon how production will be undertaken are stripped away. (A good discussion, in my view, of the significance to modernity of the role of corporations, and other devices also whereby the law constitutes fairly narrow role moralities at the expense of more traditional normative systems, is Scott Veitch's Law and Irresponsibility. Also, this is not just a third world thing - it's just that the process under discussion is mostly already over in Europe and North America. For a good discussion by a leading English social historian of how these processes unfolded in Britain, see E P Thompson's Whigs and Hunters.)This is also what I meant upthread when I talked about a more-or-less liberal global economy. It's not just about being able to buy cheap and sell high. It's about the absence of constraints, other than those that inhere in the technical pursuit of the productive enterprise, on the activities of producing, buying and selling. (Weber describes this as the eclipsing of value rationality by instrumental/formal rationality.)One thing that's interesting about this Weberian line of critique is that it resonates with elements of both conservative and socialist (including but not limited to at least elements of Marx's) critiques of modernity: both conservatives (I'm thinking Burke, Carlyle, Coleridge, Arnold, Ruskin, etc) and socialists (the young Marx, Morris, etc) lament the destructive effect that the liberal economy has on "real social relations". In Weberian terms, I would characterise this as the substitution of technical for value rationality. The significance of liberalism here is that it is the liberal conception of individual freedom which creates the moral justification for stripping away pre-modern social institutions that limit free human action (of which customary land tenures, which often constrain commercial dealings with land, would be one fairly typical example).Naturally enough I have my own political views about some of these things, although the board rules preclude me from expressing them! But what I think I can say without violating the rules is that the Weberian analysis differs from both the conservatives and the socialists in being perhaps more hard-headed and less romantic - but therefore also tends to have a somewhat pessimistic streak. In practical political/policy terms it also has implications for what one might call the liberal optimism of human rights advocates, because the same social processes that give discourse about universal human rights and freedoms traction in any particular polity or community are also likely to undermine the social institutions in that policy that provide a break on the sorts of excesses that anti-globalisation advocates complain of. (I'm currently co-supervising a doctoral candidate who is dealing with exactly this issue in relation to South Pacific political and legal structures.)Just to conclude - I don't see the above as an argument that I expect to persuade you (or anyone else). It's an attempt at a fairly broad brush interpretation of a general pattern of social and historical transformation. Different people find different interpretations compelling for different reasons. What makes the Weberian interpretation compelling for me is its "fit" with otherwise very puzzling (to me, at least) features of domestic legal practice, international and especially human rights law and practice, and its capacity to fill significant gaps in mainstream analytic political philosophy.Depending on one's interests (including political interests) other constraints on an interpretation might seem more salient, and the Weberian interpretation therefore unappealing. There are further things I can say to try to motivate my viewpoint - like talking about some of those puzzling features of legal practice, or some of those political philosophical gaps - but that's getting even close to violating board rules!</blockquote>

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