Category: Uncategorized
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The Great Paradox of the French Revolution
One of Bastos’s central arguments is that the French Revolution destroyed forms of authority and social organization that had evolved over centuries, replacing them with an abstract, homogeneous, and centralized political model. According to this interpretation, the old provinces, charters, jurisdictions, and local communities were replaced by artificial administrative divisions conceived by the central power…
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El Espejismo de la Atenas Castellana: Por qué Salamanca no fue el “Silicon Valley” del siglo XVI
En su ensayo Salamanca, capital del conocimiento (2024), el filósofo Pedro Insua propone una sugerente y combativa relectura de la historia académica española. Siguiendo la estela del materialismo filosófico de Gustavo Bueno (España frente a Europa, 1999), Insua sostiene que la Universidad de Salamanca tras la Reforma funcionó como una suerte de “Silicon Valley” de…
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Why We Consume More Than We Need: Duesenberry’s Theory of Consumption and Saving
Why do people continue spending even when their income falls? Why do some households feel poor despite earning relatively high salaries? And why does consumption seem to spread through society like a social contagion? These questions were addressed by economist James Duesenberry in his influential 1949 book Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.…
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Beyond Borders: Aristotle, Leonardo and Leibniz as Models of Universal Knowledge
Aristotle represents the first great systematic mind: he tried to organize almost every field of knowledge, from logic and ethics to politics, biology, metaphysics and rhetoric. His importance is not only that he knew many things, but that he created frameworks to connect them. Key books by Aristotle: Leonardo da Vinci represents the fusion of…
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Capitalism as a “Mental Technology”: From Bastos to Hartmut Rosa and the social capital theories
One of the most intensive defenses of capitalism I have recently heard comes from Miguel Anxo Bastos. In several conferences and interviews, he presents capitalism not merely as an economic system, but as a kind of “mental technology”: a way of seeing the world rationally, systematically, and productively. In his account, capitalism emerges from habits…
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Max Weber, Hidden Behind the Clichés
A Spanish-German colloquium on the contemporary relevance of the thinker held in Madrid Reyes Mate4 DEC 1989 – 00:00 CET Share on WhatsAppShare on FacebookShare on TwitterExpand Social NetworksAdd EL PAÍS on Google Max Weber, the most important German thinker at the hinge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeks his place in the history…