John Dunn

Metamorphosed return to pre-Renaissance feudalism

Friday, 12 July 2024 at 21:53

Paolo Sarpi

Metamorphosed return to pre-Renaissance feudalism

The outcomes of the so-called Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution were no teleological advance. This was not a shift from feudalism to capitalism. Rather they marked a metamorphosed return to pre-Renaissance feudalism, establishing new ways in which to extract and share the surplus produced by the producer-class, not through serfdom, but rather through the wages system, central banking and taxation. The pre-Renaissance exploiters operated in a monetary economy that existed in parallel to a world ruled over by kings and princes. Following the French revolution, economics as monetary accounting moved to centre-stage. The state and state trappings of kings, princes, presidents and parliaments were co-opted as the guarantors, not of a feudal hierarchy, but of central banking, taxation and debt collection by means of physical force. This was the system first established in Venice, then later in the Netherlands, Britain, France and the USA. This was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ writ large. The pressure to extend this system has resulted in constant geo-political upheaval over the past two and a half centuries.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

True post-feudalism

Wednesday, 10 July 2024 at 20:15

Hegel portrait by Schlesinger 1831

True post-feudalism

The concept of a self-driving materialist teleological progress in history was introduced by Marx, based on Hegel. This was a false interpretation of history, but one which was convenient to the neo-feudalists, or ruling oligarchy. So-called capitalism as a successor to feudalism (as in the Marxian narrative) never happened. The socio-historical and cultural phenomenon known as the Renaissance was the actual successor to feudalism. The Renaissance was the true post-feudalism. The political manifestation of the Renaissance was the Renaissance state, which reached its zenith with the Peace of Westphalia.

© John Dunn.

Bring a moral order into being

Tuesday, 9 July 2024 at 21:01

Spinoza inverted

Bring a moral order into being

With Fichte's inversion of Spinozist philosophy, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Man’s purpose is to act upon the world, change it and perfect it, i.e. change what is into what ought to be. The vocation of man is a moral one, which is to transform nature and bring it into accord with his ideals. The world exists so that man can express those ideals and bring amoral order into being. It follows from this that any distraction from man’s moral vocation is a reversion to Spinozist determinism. After all,with trade there is a preoccupation with profit and ongoing subsistence. The lives of individuals are determined by forces external to themselves, principally the controllers of money supply (a truth later masked by democracy), quite apart from the economic forces, which take on a life of their own. Fichte’s politics were at one with his idealist philosophy. In the context of his philosophy, to embrace trade is to renounce freedom, the Absolute I, God and man’s cosmic role in bringing moral order into the world and beyond. This is what drove Fichte to postulate the closed commercial state, a controlled economic environment that would free individuals to follow their true cosmic vocation.

© John Dunn.

The individual freedom of the Absolute I

Sunday, 7 July 2024 at 16:53

The individual freedom of the Absolute I

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (pictured) presented his ideas in The Closed Commercial State (1800), in which he postulated the withdrawal from foreign trade, the introduction of a national currency, a system of price controls, the balancing of production and consumption, and the regulation of the workforce - as means of securing the industry and the economic independence of all its citizens. His comprehension of the enduring tensions between commercialised society and political freedom was ahead of its time. It was his philosophical idealism, rooted in a reading of Kant, and opposed to Spinozist materialism, that motivated his recommendations, i.e. the desire not simply to subordinate the individual freedom of the Absolute I to the external imperatives and needs of globalised capitalism.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Policed borders

Saturday, 6 July 2024 at 21:11

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Policed borders

Fichte followed the pattern of Renaissance states. His main concern was to establish economic autarky within defined and policed borders, not as a matter of principle in its own right, but as a means of wresting control from a resurgent globalising oligarchy.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Opposing Spinoza's crypto-politics

Friday, 5 July 2024 at 21:55

Spinoza's crypto-philosophy in the service of his crypto-politics

Opposing Spinoza's crypto-politics

It should be no surprise to find that someone as vehemently opposed to Spinoza’s materialist monism as Fichte, should also be opposed equally to Spinoza’s underlying, crypto-political project of providing the philosophy (a counterpart to Sarpi’s politics), that would serve the interests of his exiled community in a new ‘Republick of Merchants’.

© John Dunn.

Magna Carta and feudal privileges

Thursday, 4 July 2024 at 20:25

King John ruled England from 1199 to 1216

Magna Carta and feudal privileges

Magna Carta,that supposed written bastion of individual freedom, epitomised the power of the nobility to maintain its feudal privileges, even in the face of fierce opposition from the king. In response to King John’s brave attempt to assert the authority of the monarch, the feudal barons enforced Magna Carta upon him, which was a charter establishing the rights of the nobility against the efforts of the king to rule a unified nation.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.