The review in 5500
Times Literary Supplement (14 August 2009) 5 by David Armitage of William Doyle's
Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2009) notes ancien regime beliefs that those of blue blood were biologically different to the common herd, beliefs that meant nobility was as much a physiological (even proto-racial) status rather than a question of class.
Many French nobles, supported by their ideological allies among historians, had long argued that they were literally a race apart from other Frenchmen, decendants of the conquering Franks, not of defeated Gauls. To strip them of fiscal privileges was one thing; to extinguish heredity in the name of equality was, 'in noble eyes ... nothing less than an attempt to change biology'.
A consequence was that some observers recognised three biologically transmissible power relationships: monarchy, aristocracy, monarchy and slavery. Doyle notes that few historians have treated three shades of blood as manifestations of the same thing but the "most thoroughgoing egalitarians of the Age of Revolution", such as Paine, did: "nobles, kings and slaves [were] equal affronts to human dignity because their existence derived from the same irrational exclusionary principle: heredity". Offended aristocrats claimed that they might be deprived of their titles and wealth, and forced to use what the revolutionary legislature characterised as their "real family names" but would die as gentlemen, because gentility was in their blood.
The way we wear our hats
The way we sip our tea
The memory of all that
No, no you can't take that away from me!
The way we hold your wife
The way we dance till three
The way you change my life
No, no you can't take that away from me!
'Towards a Structural Solution to Unemployment' by
Robert Struble Jr in (1993) 28(11)
International Journal of Social Economics 15-25 comments
Chronic unemployment is a flaw in modern capitalism that calls for reform. Unlike expansionary demand‐management programmes, public works will be non‐inflationary if they put back into the economy in government spending no more than the dollar value taken from the economy in taxes. The spending should be labour intensive while all associated taxing should target sectors and products that are capital intensive. This economic approach is not expansionary/ inflationary but structural: the reforms would shift production in a labour‐using as opposed to a labour‐saving direction, so that it would take more hours of work to produce the same GNP. The pool of workers who are under‐employed and unemployed would supply the required extra hours. First, examines the problems associated with fiscal and monetary approaches to unemployment. Then details the proposed reforms, looks at technical aspects, diagrams and macro‐economic implications, and considers the probable effects on the US balance of trade. The final section considers the critics′ view that an automation tax would be a neo‐Luddite attack on technological progress.
