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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Periodization and historiography: The United States considered as a developing country
- II Studying American political development in the Progressive Era, 1890S–1916
- III Dollar Diplomacy according to Dollar Diplomats: American development and world development
- IV Woodrow Wilson and the developmental imperatives of modern U.S. liberalism
- V Some political and cultural consequences of the disaccumulation of capital: Origins of postindustrial development in the 1920s
- VI Disaffected with development: Henry Adams and the 1960s “New Left”
- VII The corporate reconstruction of American capitalism: A note on the capitalism–socialism mix in U.S. and world development
- Index
V - Some political and cultural consequences of the disaccumulation of capital: Origins of postindustrial development in the 1920s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Periodization and historiography: The United States considered as a developing country
- II Studying American political development in the Progressive Era, 1890S–1916
- III Dollar Diplomacy according to Dollar Diplomats: American development and world development
- IV Woodrow Wilson and the developmental imperatives of modern U.S. liberalism
- V Some political and cultural consequences of the disaccumulation of capital: Origins of postindustrial development in the 1920s
- VI Disaffected with development: Henry Adams and the 1960s “New Left”
- VII The corporate reconstruction of American capitalism: A note on the capitalism–socialism mix in U.S. and world development
- Index
Summary
Historical consciousness: The archetypal and the social
For the most part, modern U.S. intellectuals, and particularly those of us who most claim to be critically conscious, to be rigorously and steadily engaged in developing our understanding, are devoid of a serious conception of human destiny. To put it more precisely, we are devoid of a conception of a nature peculiar to humanity as an historical self-producing species. With respect to the possibility of our living – that is, behaving and acting as well as thinking – in accordance with our ostensible principles, ideals, and hopes, this quality is our chief characteristic. It is, indeed, the quality that chiefly characterizes our mode of feeling and thought about the world, our mode of acting in our day-to-day public lives.
Several different abstract definitions of humanity have been in the recent past, and some still are, current among U.S. intellectuals and in the public discourse, definitions associated with such terms as Industrial Man, Postindustrial Man, Political Man, Psychological Man, Religious Man, Secular Man, Linear Man, Media Man, Technical Man, Global- Village Man, One-Dimensional Man. All these modestly state the denial or nonconceptualization of a human-rooted destiny as a dimension of historical reality. The denial of or aversion to a concept of human destiny in terms of a historical human nature, is the way modern U.S. intellectuals acknowledge the renunciation of history as the study of a necessary process of human development, as a science of laws of social development, our inability or unwillingness to conceptualize history as such a science of laws and act upon that conceptualization.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The United States as a Developing CountryStudies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s, pp. 143 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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