Monday, December 22, 2014

Atomism, Association, Dissociation, Capitalism

According to Atomism, Atoms are immediately given, with respect to which relations between them are products of extrinsic association.  Thus, in Social Atomism, e. g. Smith's model, the members of a society precede, and are independent of, modes of association, such as contracts, and his Invisible Hand.  Now, the primary vulnerability of Atomism is that its presumed immediate givens are, in fact, the products of prior processes of disassociation, e. g. in Atomistic Empiricism, the datum 'red' and the datum 'circle', are abstracted from a red circle encountered in the original experiential flux.  Accordingly, likewise, Smith's Capitalistic social model, including its laws and its psychological presuppositions, is the product of dissociation.  Hence, as descriptive, it falsely represents human relations, and, as prescriptive or normative, its standards are not only groundlessly arbitrary, but are significantly low, e. g. idle shopping qualifies in it as 'rational' behavior.

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