Re: <nettime> The secret financial market only robots can see

[Keith Hart <johnkeithhart@gmail.com>]

Dave, I am with you and Brian on this one, so I hope this doesn't come
across as merely scholastic. It is not about same vs different, but about
difference-in-sameness or the other way round.

There was a rather sterile episode in economic anthropology along these
lines known as the formalist-substantivist debate. But it's ancestor was
the Methodenstreit (battle over methods) in late the 19th century
German-speaking world. The issue was whether the ancient Greek economy was
the same as or different from contemporary German capitalism (Schmoller in
Berlin vs Menger in Vienna). Max Weber entered the fray saying "We wouldn't
be interested in the Greeks unless they were different and we couldn't
understand them unless they were in some sense the same".

I share your irritation with the same-old people, but we have to place our
times in history and that means dialectic.

Keith

On Saturday, 28 September 2013, David Mandl wrote:

> To restate what Brian wrote, in five times as many words:
>
> I think it's easy (and *usually* reasonable) to say, "This thing that's
> happening now, and the backlash against it, is just like such-and-such a
> thing that happened 100 years ago, and all that fuss turned out to be very
> silly".
>


-- 
Prof. Keith Hart
www.thememorybank.co.uk
135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere
75009 Paris, France
Cell: +33684797365


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