"Greg Burch" <gregburch@gregburch.net> writes:
> This shouldnn't surprise us at all, given when Bernal was writing. The
> Soviet Union was new, the Bolsheviks were engaging in agressive and effective
> cultural "outreach" to intellectuals in the West and the horrors of Stalin
> lay in the future. One is hard-pressed to find an intellectual in the West
> in the 1920s who wasn't at least willing to give the Soviet Union the benefit
> of the doubt in the 1920s. The idea that the then-recent bloodbath of the
> first World War was the result of "capitalism" was also accepted widely
> among Western intellectuals of those times. The dialectic (irony intended)
> that eventually brought forth the renaissance in thought about liberty and
> economic freedom that produced Hayek also lay in the future at this time.
> It was an age of innocence and naivete.
I guess this is the time to suggest reading Hayek's _The Intellectuals
and Socialism_ to the list. The amazing guy actually invented a bit of
memetics beside his neuroscience and lesser known :-) economics.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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