Nature, Technology and Society is a book that promises much. Purporting to be a study of the cultural roots of todays global environmental crisis, it consists of three parts. The first deals with the history of ideas on nature and technology, beginning with Mesopotamian civilization and ending with the conservation movement in the United States […]
Tag Archives | Science and Society
Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate
In the Fall 1993 issue of Science & Society the editors observed that Murray Smith’s articles on the falling rate of profit, which formed the opening contribution to that issue, constituted an important new study that “should be compared with the work of [Thomas] Weisskopf, [Edward] Wolff and [Fred] Moseley’- all of whom have carried […]
Radical Ecology
“Radical Ecology,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 120-23. (Review of Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology.) Carolyn Merchant is known principally as the author of two landmark studies in Ecological History and the Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (1989). In […]
Crises Lasting for Decades
Sometimes a theoretical debate will degenerate into a tower of babel because the participants, without being aware of the fact, are answering not the same question but different questions. It is therefor essential to be clear about what is being asked. In the case of my essay in The Imperiled Economy (Foster, 1987), which Hower […]
Sources of Instability in the U.S. Political Economy and Empire
“Sources of Instability in the U.S. Political Economy and Empire,” [PDF] Science & Society, vol. XLIX, no. 2 (Summer 1985), pp. 167-193. In Discussing the sources of instability in the U.S. social order, it is useful to focus successively on the economic, political-cultural and imperial aspects of the problem, corresponding to the three levels of economy, […]
Marxian Economics and the State
How can we account for the somewhat paradoxical fact that certain socialist models of the capitalist economy are often thought to be prone to political degeneration? In essence, there are four divisions among Marxist on the subject of crisis: (1) the falling rate of profit school, (2) disproportionality theory, (3) underconsumptionism, and (4) profit squeeze […]
