FPR readers will be interested in both (1) K.R. Bolton’s traditionalist Conservative critique of Marx and Ideological-Capitalism and (2) Lee Trepanier’s examination of the use of history in Hawthorne. Both essays can be found in ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ Bolton’s critique demonstrates the radically anti-traditionalist motives and aims of Marx, including the many ways he admires how Capitalism destroys tradition and the organic elements of society. Trepanier’s analysis considers how Hawthorne’s development of the allegorical romance genre was a successful attempt to consider timeless “fundamental questions of human nature.” Both essays are well crafted and insightful, and I invite curious readers to enjoy them.
The Bolton piece on Marx was quite enjoyable. For a parallel anthropological perspective, David Graeber makes a similar critique of Marx in “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery.” He argues that, like the capitalism of his day, Marx treats material production as an abstraction of value unconnected to the production of flourishing persons. This abstraction is a modern conceit that the ancients (and non-Western peoples) would consider the subordination of moral and human ends to instrumentality–an arrangement that he rejects, siding with the ancients over the moderns.
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