This is an exceptionally good series because you bring into focus the shared cha

This is an exceptionally good series because you bring into focus the shared challenge throughout each generation: their ongoing attempt to solve the problem of modernity: morality at our new industrial scale, (just as the great transformation in the 5th century bc was created by the scale of our cities and the markets they created between them.

Most of these men are demonized by one politically evangelical side or the other despite their various attempts to solve the same problem. It’s especially helpful that you touch on the … exaggerated focus of each of these thinkers, as ‘the one way’ to solve the problem. “If we just got everyone to believe this…” is a pretty obvious attempt to replace christianity with a new value system equally homogenous.

What isn’t obvious is that each proposes (like monotheistic religion before them) a MONOPOLY solution to the problem rather than tailoring the social order to the abilities of each class – given that the challenge of modernity is the increasing value provided by our ability to learn, rather than our ability to labor or escape labor.

I think this is the question that we beg but are collectively afraid to answer because it will eliminate the necessary democratic illusion of equality, that replaced the necessary monopoly illusion of monotheism.

The one persona I feel you are missing is perhaps Thorstein Veblen. Your addition of Ruskin’s aesthetics is … delightful – I wouldn’t have thought to add him. You’ve elegantly illustrated that these are all collectively moral men attempting to preserve monotheistic cultural homogeneity in new institutional form.

But now that you illustrated the similarities in ambition, it might be just as informative and helpful to illustrate the dissimilarities advocated by the outliers: Marx/Keynes/Rawls(lower/left classes) on one end, Locke/Smith/Hayek(middle/libertarian class) in the center, and Nietzche/Darwin/Spencer on the other(upper/right classes).

It might be interesting to compare the moral approach you’ve taken, with the three competing class propositions that would illustrate the conflict between classes more clearly.

My position is that we are always just choosing between dysgenic, compromise, and eugenic reproduction. And that the rest of our pontification regardless of position is all justification of those priors.

Anyway. I’m just offering thoughts as a way of appreciating your work.

Thank you.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute