(under construction…)

This blog is dedicated to the publication of meaningful texts (articles, tracts, pamphlets and book chapters) of public domain primary sources related to the idea of Society and societies, mostly within what we shall loosely call the “Western tradition”.

Those curious to understand how, within that tradition, various people understood at various times and in various places the questions which have been expressed as “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” those who are not frightened of being challenged in a simplistic vision of the past that is monolithic, linear and the expression of either an ineluctable progress or a necessary decadence, will find some things of interest to them here.

But probably not everything. Because the intent is to attempt to give back their voices to all the tendencies that flourished simultaneously, sequentially and geographically within the wide and blurry scope described above.

Therefore, there will be something for all types of taste, from the delicate to the rough and tumble, for the person whose only qualification is the right to vote, to the academic who is willing to find inspiration outside of the usual references.

The only qualification necessary for the reader is to be just like me, with no authority except than the ability to read, and the willingness to exercise that part of our critical faculties that makes judgment about what is true, and leave aside, if only temporarily, what is good and beautiful.

The history of ideas becomes very limited if it is restricted to the works of the “great men”, and among these to those who wrote sublime and beautiful things that entertain us, even more than they elevate us. If you want to know what kind of things people actually thought, instead of the exceptions, it is better to focus on the norm: what were the second and third rate thinking and teaching? What were the manuals and the text-books teaching? As for moral judgments it has been explained many times that it is not only meaningless but detrimental to our understanding to use our own criteria to attribute guilt onto some people in the past: it deters us from investigating what was the actual state of the circumstances at one time, the differences with the state of the circumstances before and after, so that we can try to identify multiple causes and effects.

We are not looking for laws with a simple causality which allows us to identify the perpetrators, pass moral judgment on them, and blame them for all the ills in our own time (well, we are not…). Nor are we looking for universal laws, which would explain, if we were the all knowing demon of Laplace, the inexorable necessity of the evolution from one state to the other.

We see instead transformations, i.e. the changes of one form (shape, state) to the other; we instead find some families of patterns, with a multiplicity of actions/reactions, where the smallest causality is subject to some extent to the free arbiter of individuals and the smallest difference in the initial conditions may alter the resulting state. We therefore have little hope to find either laws or even rules of thumb (except of the crudest type) for these, because in each individual free arbiter is the one simple break in the chain of causality. By it, we are not just simple cogs in the machinery of the Universe; by it we are truly created in the image of God.

However the question is far less complex, when we look past the causality of events, and look instead at those who pretend to become the engines or motives of change: those who express their opinions in public in order to shape the opinions of the public. Those, then and now, who want to shape and move public opinion, are often engaged in strategies to diminish our free arbiter, –the greatest obstacle to the fulfillment of their intentions in a democracy–, and to identify these strategies is both simpler and easier than t

The only criteria to include something here is therefore not if it is good or beautiful, but if somebody, sometime, somewhere, wrote it and if it was subsequently published, perhaps in other circumstances and by somebody else. It may be that it was published under false pretenses, that it was falsely attributed to somebody else than the actual author, by this very author, that what is written is completely false, but nonetheless, it will be true that somebody wrote it, and somebody published it, at a time and place, which may not be those that are claimed.

But if we have credible indications of when and where this text was published, we know as a historical truth, that in such circumstances, somebody found an interest in sharing with others this information in order, in the literal sense, to attempt to give shape to knowledge and influence what they think, and eventually how they choose to act.