Integral Dynamics: Political Economy, Cultural Dynamics and the Future of the University

Lessem, Ronnie, Schieffer, Alexander, Tong, Junie T. and Rima, Samuel D. (2013) Integral Dynamics: Political Economy, Cultural Dynamics and the Future of the University. Transformation and Innovation Series . Gower Publishing Limited, United Kingdom. ISBN 978-1-4094-5103-7 (hbk); 978-1-4094-5104-4 (ebk - PDF); 978-1-4094-7135-6 (ebk - ePUB)

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Abstract or description

One becomes rich by taking advantage of the many canals that irrigate and diversify knowledge and wisdom, and stimulate mutual discoveries and recognition. People themselves are the main means for making this synergy work : hence the importance of supporting dynamic processes that rehabilitate people in all their dimensions, and that also rehabilitate relationships between themselves and their surroundings.

Emmanuel N’Donne Reinventing the Present : the Chodak in Senegal

1. Introduction : Political Economy, Cultural Dynamics
and the Future of the University

The Nature and Scope of Integral Dynamics

Starting with the Integral in the Foreground and the Dynamic as Background

As we listen to today’s news (December, 2011), hearing that the Fitch Credit rating agency is about to downgrade six European countries, we wonder what on earth the world is coming to? For we have reached a state where the state of the economy, of a particular society, or at least how it is perceived by such “rating agencies”, drives all else : nature, community, culture, spirituality, science, technology. No matter that Greece or Italy, for example, are the respective birthplaces of European civilization, both are now up for sale. The time has now come for us to reinvent ourselves, locally and globally, if the whole world is not to suffer the same fate. For such a process of re-invention, we need both a whole new field of activity, and a new kind of agency, or institution, to promote such.

Our new discipline, and prospective area of practice, Integral Dynamics, is forged out of Political Economy, Business Administration, and, most distinctively, Cultural Dynamics. These are altogether geared toward the identification and development of a particular individual and community, enterprise and society. While such an Integral approach transcends a previously so called “westernized” one, in each individual, enterprise and societal case, the Dynamic orientation serves to recognize and release both individual and also collective genius. Integral Dynamics, a new discipline and a new agency as such, is premised on the belief that the development of individual leaders, or entrepreneurs, without the simultaneous development of particular institutions, and societies, in both theory and practice, is a futile exercise, analogous to fiddling while Rome or Rwanda or Russia burns! Why then more specifically, and for whom is this new academic discipline and institution, on both integral and also dynamic counts, being developed, at this particular time?

We start with our practical intent, and focus on the need that integral dynamics - as opposed to, say, affirmation action (cultural dynamics), economic growth (political economy), leadership or entrepreneurship (business administration) - intends to fulfill. For, as of our writing toward 2012, and in the wake of the endemic financial and economic, social and environmental crises, facing us locally and globally, we seek a specific way forward for each society in turn. For the seriously concerned citizen then, in each, for the government policy maker, for the enlightened practitioner, for the university administrator as well as for the committed student and researcher into economics and enterprise, all of whom may sense that the way forward, into the future, needs to be fundamentally different from - even while drawing upon - the past, our individual and collective focus is on Integral Dynamics.

Most specifically moreover, and in the final analysis, we are establishing a newly integral, and dynamic, academic discipline and institution for these who feel, individually and communally, organizationally and societally, that you have something unique and particular to contribute to the world, and that the world as a whole will benefit, integrally and dynamically from such.

On the one hand, integrally then, it is becoming ever more apparent that business, and indeed economics, cannot be insulated from nature, technology or culture. After all, firstly, energy and the environment are becoming ever more pressing issues today. There is a vast and growing literature on such. Secondly, the interface between business and economics, and science and technology is there for all to see, especially in the case of energy and communications technology. Cultural issues, finally, underlying development in Europe (north and south, east and west), in Africa, in the Arab world, in India or in China, come ever more to the fore. Yet, except for generally superficial analyses, ranging from the German “well oiled machine” to Chinese “guanxi” (as if that is all these two great European and Asian civilizations have to contribute), the interaction between culture, economy and enterprise, especially from a dynamic and developmental perspective, gets short shrift.

At the same time, over the course of the last century, as a result of research in anthropology, archaeology, macro-history, philosophy, and areas studies – Aboriginal, African, Latin American, Egyptian, Arab, Indian, Chinese and Japanese, European and American – and many other diverse cultures have been uncovered, through intense intellectual scholarship and also prolonged physical exploration. Yet such rich diversity has seldom been in evidence either in business administration, in economic analysis, or indeed in the establishment of academia as a whole. The one recent exception, business-wise, was Japan, but now, as its economic miracle has faded, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon academic orientation to economics and enterprise once more rules the roost. It is with all that in mind that we perceive, on the one hand, the need for integral, that is trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary, studies, inclusive of, but extending beyond, economics and enterprise.

Aligned with the Dynamic in the Foreground with Integral as Background

On the other dynamic hand, secondly, in the last 150 years, nearly every natural, if not also social, science, has been transformed from an analytically based approach to the phenomena under investigation to a dynamic one. This occurred in astronomy with Laplace, in physics with Heisenberg, in chemistry with Prigogine, in logic with Hegel, in biology with Darwin, in psychology with Jung, and indeed in economics with Marx. Interestingly enough, such a dynamic approach has by and large not been incorporated into business studies, and as such business or public administration, the very term administration (business or public) being antithetical to such.

Moreover, in economics Marx is the overwhelming exception to the otherwise generally analytical rule. However, much to the world’s cost, as we shall reveal, the dynamic economic baby, Marx’s “dialectical materialism”, and his unique understanding of capital flows, has been thrown out with the allegedly “Marxist” bathwater. In effect his alleged “socialism” has been deemed antithetical, ironically, to the prevailing “capitalist” establishment. The fact that Marx, by the way, brought with him a German historicist and holistic-rational, dynamic impulse, linked to bildung (cultivation), whereas Adam Smith had, comparatively, a more analytical- pragmatic British orientation, linked to efficient markets, seems to have passed conventional wisdom unwittingly by.

That having been said, without some recognition of the particularities of kultur, to use the German speaking word, and the bildung (culture building) dynamic that goes with it, there is no transformative substance – our cultural dynamics as we shall see - with which to work. We are left with nothing other than the will of the individual entrepreneur, with all its positive and negative attributes, to provide such. Integral Dynamics, thereby, sets out with the intention of recognizing and releasing individual, organizational and societal substance, in a specific local context – naturally, culturally, technologically and economically - in close association with global others (in all of the above), over an extended period of time. Moreover, and in extending the notion of e-ducere, drawing out, from the individual to the organization and society, such dynamic development is enriched and extended, particularly to the extent that a new kind of institution can be co-evolves to establish such.

Indeed, and to put all this into current perspective, as a close colleague and graduate of one of our transformation programs, Karen Michael, who is a social worker, financial services coordinator, and now union activist in the UK, mentioned in an e-mail communication to us, after a recent visit to Italy, toward the end of 2011 :

I was just in Italy: it was gorgeous as ever, and showed a rather lovely pattern of economic activity in the "real" sense. Of course as the benighted "austerity" cuts begin, this will all change, and they will start spiraling into the maelstrom of demand failure and destruction of living standards.

In other words, as the markets and the politicians hover over Italy, this “country” today means in essence “its economy”. As such, the particular natural and cultural heritage of this glorious birthplace of the European Renaissance, not to mention that of its ancient neighbor, today’s modern Greece, are both considered today like bonded slaves to the market. Economic and financial analysis, yes that matters a lot in Euroland, but dynamic culture, or nature, or even science, that’s another matter. And indeed thee is no particular agency, or set of agencies, that can serve to release a society’s; genius, not to mention an individual’s or organization’s.

In response, integrally to begin with, we extend economics and enterprise to include, within and alongside it, underlying nature and community, science and technology, culture and spirituality. To that extent, Integral Dynamics aligns itself more closely with the Swedish interpretation of “business”, as naringslav, meaning the nourishment of life, than with the English meaning of “busy-ness”! Subsequently, dynamically, as per the African term ntu, meaning “vital force”, it seeks to recognize and release the vitality of each particular entity with which it is vitally concerned. To that extent, overall moreover, we draw on the German concept of bildung - education, development, cultivation - both individually and collectively. Ultimately, and institutionally moreover, we extend the French post-modern philosopher, Foucault’s notion of genealogy, to reflect a new kind of integral dynamic institution, as well as and alternative approach to history and philosophy.

At the same time, as per Italy or Greece, the new discipline and activity, field and prospective agency, fully takes account of the fact that each culture, like each discipline, or indeed each person, is incomplete in itself, and therefore is in need, continually and reciprocally, of the other, if it is to develop and evolve, dynamically (transformatively) and integrally (analytically). That is where we are focused.

Political Economy, Integral Dynamics and the Future of the University

Ironically, as we shall soon see, the grounds for a more integral approach to enterprise and economics, encompassing many disciplines if not also, implicitly at least, diverse cultures, was laid out by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two and a half centuries ago, but, alas, that trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural impulse has been largely missed. In fact taking culture seriously, altogether, has been all too often hoist by the “essentialist” petard, especially in the wake of racism if not also fascism, and the horrendous negative stereotyping that has gone with both.

While Adam Smith, as we shall discover, allegedly had the moral sentiment to reach out integrally and inclusively to the other, alongside his desire to advance the wealth of nations, the other formidable co-founder, so to speak, of political economy, Karl Marx, had an innate feel for the dynamic flow of capital. In fact the integral-dynamic complementarity between the two of them, not to mention their respectively Protestant/Western European, and Jewish/Eastern European heritages, has since been torn asunder, over two centuries, by mutually destructive ideological divides. Moreover, the fact that Marx established what we might call a social laboratory, apart from any particular university, is seldom acknowledged.

Before we pursue the argument further, underlying the specific nature and scope of our proposed new academic discipline and institutional activity, that is Integral Dynamics as a composite discipline and “genealogical” – see the culminating chapter for a detailed exposition on such - institution, let us say something about, firstly, how and why a new discipline, generally, is born? As such, and as we will now see, we build, successively on the trans-formational and the trans-personal, the trans-cultural and the trans-disciplinary, altogether set within, not a pre-modern, modern or post-modern, but what has been called our trans-modern age, and indeed a trans-modern alternative to the modern university, which encompasses them all. The integral dynamic institution, as we shall see, will be a composite of community (Grounding), sanctuary (Emerging), university (Navigating) and laboratory (Effecting), with a view to thereby releasing GENE-ius. .

Transformational to Transpersonal

Why and how is a new discipline born : for example, chemistry out of alchemy, political economy out of moral philosophy, or indeed biotechnology out of biology and mechanical engineering? Generally speaking, there are four reasons. First because the world is forever changing and (wo)mankind has a need to understand what is going on around them, something new (for example chemistry) is invariably, especially when there is a deep spirit of curiosity, being trans-formatively created out of the old (in this case alchemy). Secondly, there are always new problems to be solved, which require freshly developed kinds of thinking as the world grows ever more complex. In the twentieth century, specifically for instance, the evolution of “general systems theory” marked out a newly trans-disciplinary territory, to deal with such. Indeed Political-Economy was an example of this, two centuries prior in the eighteenth century, as it emerged out of, as we shall see later, and duly extended and enriched, prior Moral-Philosophy.

Thirdly and ever more as (wo)mankind’s thinking evolves, the “inner world” of subjectivity, the psyche and the spirit, combines transpersonally with the “outer world” of objectivity, of matter and energy, and vice versa. This is where and how, for example, the Swiss psycho-analyst C.G. Jung and the Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli came to realize in the mid twentieth century that they were kindred spirits, who could mutually benefit one another. Finally, new trans-disciplinary as well as now trans-cultural potential is opened up as diverse disciplines (for example bio-technology or social psychology) and now also diverse cultures (for instance Europe and the Arab world in the early Renaissance) come together.

Interestingly enough, the same kind of overall logic applies to the establishment of a new institution, for example when the research university emerged, initially in Germany, out of the old universtas, that is community of scholars oriented toward disseminating and sharing knowledge, rather than generating new knowledge. So where does our so called Integral Dynamics compositely fit in?

2. Integral Dynamics and Trans-Modernity

Trans-formational : Transformation of Local Identity into Global Integrity

The “old” world on which Integral Dynamics firstly draws, naturally and culturally, technologically and economically, is in fact the oldest one, that of “indigenous” peoples around the globe, and their “ever present origins”. In fact, while they are increasingly coming to the fore, this is not yet in a way in which something indigenously-exogenously “new” is being created out of the indigenously “old”. So now we have locally “indigenous knowledge systems” to be set against globally “exogenous” ones, but seldom the twain do meet, either thematically or institutionally. As such, and in the latter respect, communities, whereby it takes a village to educate a child, as the African saying goes, remains disconnected from formal schooling or university. Whereas in the arts, whether in fine art or architecture, dance or in music, tradition (community oriented) and modernity (university based) are continually being juxtaposed together, anew, this is seldom the case in either the natural or social sciences. However, when alchemy becomes chemistry, such a transformation indeed takes place. How does this arise?

In our particular, dynamic case, such a transformation is instigated, in fact, when out of prior, original grounds, a fusion takes place, thereafter (see for example Sekem, in Egypt, chapter 19), between the local and the global, rather than, as is more conventionally so, as in our final Zimbabwean case (chapter 20), the one (global) dominating, or indeed colonizing the other (local). Subsequent to such, should further transformation ensue, a newly global idea, or institution, arises, out of what has emerged before, which is then, ultimately, globally-locally applied. A good example of all of such, in the business world, is the practice of Kaizen, born out of large-scale Japanese manufacturing industry, which we align, as we shall see, with GENE-ius . Grounded in “Zen” Buddhism, locally unique to Japan, Kai-Zen linked locally-globally together “Zen” perfectionism with “Kai” continuous improvement, Emerging through a meeting between “Japanese Spirit and Western Technique” (1).

And that was not the end of the story. Because kaizen, writ large as per what we term Navigation, became conceptualized, and indeed institutionalized, through Lean Thinking (2), a freshly created mode of production, institutionally involving a newly integrated value chain, from supplier to distributor, serving to avoid waste (muda in Japanese) in production along the way. As such a now newly conceived global production process was applied, conceptually and institutionally, in America and Europe, in Brazil and South Africa, where global-local adaptations were Effected. While then, in the specific case of Japanese large-scale manufacturing, this case is well known, it has not been turned into a generalized principle of transformation, in academic theory or institutional practice. Why is this?

Prevailing approaches to dynamics, and to transformation, generally draw upon two approaches, which are both prolific but also mutually exclusive. The first “outer directed” one is derived from Complexity Theory associated with academe, usually drawn from the natural sciences, the most oft quoted source being that of the Belgian-Russian Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine (3). In his Order out of Chaos, he talks of “dissipative structures” in dynamic, natural systems, characterized by “bifurcations” where new order may, or may not, emerge out of old chaos. Marx’s analysis of capitalist dynamics, as we shall see later (chapter 17) is in line with such. Another such leading authority is Sally Goerner (4), in the U.S, who has written along these transformative lines in her Emerging Culture and Science of the Integral Society. Goerner has been inspired, in turn, by the Austrian polymath, Rudolf Steiner, of whom we shall hear much more later. Such an ensuing transformation is necessarily “bottom-up’, and renders life-like phenomena inherently uncertain. We align such, as do many others, with the phenomenon of Emergence.

The second prevailing approach, which is more “inner directed” is characterized by a raising of consciousness, spiritually and psychologically, from lower to higher levels of consciousness, generally associated with “eastern” esoteric philosophy and practical spirituality. The best known “north-western” philosophical authorities on such are two : the Austrian anthropologist Jean Gebser (5), and his Ever Present Origins already mentioned is one; the even better known, natural as well as social scientist and Eastern Philosopher, Ken Wilber (6), with his Integral Spirituality, is the second. Whereas for Gebser, “ever present” archaic origins continually crop us as civilizations mutate through “magical” and “mythical”, “mental” and ultimately integral levels, for Wilber consciousness evolves, progressively, if transformation is to ensue, from “ego-centric” and “ethnocentric” to ultimately “world-centric”.

While Wilber then, adopts a universally linear mode of progression-transformation, as most “eastern” models of consciousness raising do, Gebser mixes such with “ever-present origins”. However, none of the leading thinkers, including innumerable Indian “gurus” on the subject, deal with the dynamics of particular societies. Rather they are, overall, universalists, on the one hand, and almost all deal with consciousness raising of and for individuals, on the other. A such, the outer directed orientation of a Prigogine or a Goerner, societally speaking, is all too seldom linked with Ken Wilber’s inner directed one, individually speaking.

An exception to this rule is Don Beck (7), again in the U.S., co-founder of the National Values Center in Denton, Texas, who has developed his approach to what he now terms Spiral Dynamics Integral, recently in association with Ken Wilber. In fact they have used the term, together “Integral Spiral Dynamics”. Beck also has a “levels of consciousness” model, or “cultural memes”, as he sometimes calls them, which evolve from “beige” (survivalist, instinctive) to “turquoise” (integrative, holistic”), with six colors/memes in between, on an overall path of again linear evolution. Beck then aligns particular cultures, or sub-cultures, with one or the other “level of development”.

Although Beck, and his psychologist predecessor Clare Graves, in America, have developed a richly complex, illuminating approach to the dynamics of transformation, it is again, like Wilber’s, a linear model, albeit portrayed as a spiral. Our integral dynamic approach, to the “release of genius”, as we shall see, is both linear and non-linear at one and the same time. On the one hand it draws upon a particular individual, organization and society, independently and interdependently, altogether, and, on the other hand, it draws upon community, sanctuary. University and laboratory in the same, interdependent and iterative guise. Moreover, institutionally, Beck’s National Values Centre in Denton, Texas, is neither a business, an NGO nor a consultancy, and certainly not a university or even a laboratory, but something idiosyncratic, on its own. And there, as we shall institutionally see, lies a rub.

Trans-personal : Individual, Communal, Organizational, Societal
Individuation and Renewal

Our integral dynamic approach then to both the psychological individuation and also social renewal of self, organization and society, is unusual, and thereby somewhat unique to our prospective new discipline and institution. For example, while Wilber is focused primarily, and developmentally, on the individual, spiritually and psychologically, Goerner, Gebser and Beck tend to focus on society at large. Of course Prigogine, and others like him, Austro-American physicist Fritjof Capra (8) being the most notable, focus on living, natural and ecological more than social and psychological, systems. None of the above then, as we do, focus on individual and collective individuation simultaneously, nor do they operate outside of a conventional university if not also laboratory format.

Needless to say the giant in the field, when it comes to such individuation, and psycho-dynamic processes related to such, on whom Integral Dynamics prolifically draws, is the Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung (9). Moreover the American developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson (10) who followed in Jung’s footsteps, in The Seasons of Man’s Life, articulated even more clearly how such a process of individuation takes place, over the course of a lifecycle, with alternate dynamics of structure building and structure changing. Finally, the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (11), in his work on The Human Cycle, has come up with an alternative approach, as we shall see in chapter 10, from symbolic to conventional, onto the individual and ultimately the subjective. Aurobindo was also instrumental in establishing Auroville, based on his spiritual philosophy in India (http://www.auroville.org), which is indeed some kind of prototype of a community/sanctuary/university/laboratory, although the university element is the weakest link.

In most cases, though, the focus of such individuation is on the dynamics of the individual’s personal development. There is all too little work, as such, on authentic organizational development, or individuation, the late Dutch psychiatrist and management consultant Bernard Lievegoed (12), another follower of Rudolf Steiner, being an exception to this rule in his Developing Organization. So, as we can see, the “trans-personal” development, or individuation, of self, organization and society, altogether, indeed applied, independently and also interdependently, to a particular individual and/or collective context, is virtually non-existent, outside of our initial attempt to incorporate such in our new discipline.

Finally, in turning from a conceptual structure for transpersonal development to an institutional agency, for such, which will be explicitly dealt with in the final part of this book, we will be talking of the evolution from university to what we term “genealogy”, as a composite of community, sanctuary, university and laboratory, in each case set within a particular context. Such an evolution we have noted, implicitly, in practice, but as yet no explicit theory has emerged to accommodate such.

We now turn from the transformational and transpersonal dynamic to our trans-disciplinary, and most distinctively trans-cultural, orientation to the integral.

Trans-disciplinary : Natural, Cultural, Scientific, Enterprise
Learning and Innovation

Relatively more commonplace, in integral, and dynamic terms, is a trans-disciplinary orientation to inner directed learning and development, and outer directed research and innovation, as the second of our keynotes. Giants in the field, like Steiner, Jung, Gebser, and Wilber, invariably cross disciplines, within and between the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. In fact Wilber (13) has developed his now famous trans-disciplinary “integral” typology – the four quadrants - incorporating :

• Subjective/individual : the “I” quadrant : Intentional : Psychological
• Subjective/collective : the “We” quadrant : Communal : Cultural
• Objective/individual : the “It” quadrant : Behavioral : Economic
• Objective/Collective : the “Its” quadrant : Systemic : Socio/technical
•
As we shall see, there is a rough correspondence between Wilber’s typology and the integral – “four world” – approach adopted here (see chapter 1) : in our terms, eastern “I”, southern “we”, western “it” and northern “its”.

However, the major force behind such trans-disciplinarity, preceding both Wilber and ourselves, has been General Systems Theory. The founding father of such was the Austrian biologist Von Bertallanfy (14), based in Europe and America, in the second half of the last century, The best known contemporary advocate of such a systemic, integral approach, is the Hungarian ex concert pianist and systems philosopher, Ervin Lazlo (15). Laszlo – unlike his Austrian predecessor – bridges the material and the spiritual worlds, as well as the natural and social sciences, in the most prolific way. Moreover, in a management and organizational context, Peter Senge (16) has systemically taken, in his Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, as we shall see in chapter 17, where they have left off.

In that respect, and in relation to the interdisciplinary, integral approach we have adopted, there is nothing we have come up with that is entirely new, except for one fundamental contribution : that is what we term our trans-cultural, cultural dynamic as opposed to cross-cultural, orientation to the integral dynamic whole.

Trans-cultural : Acculturation within/across Africa, Asia, Europe, Americas

The ultimately most distinguishing feature then, of the fledgling discipline of Integral Dynamics, together with its underlying value base, or axiology, is the conviction that each culture and society has something unique to contribute to the world, even more so when it cross-fertilizes with other ones. In that intra-cultural, and inter-cultural respect, both within a thereby stratified culture (intra) and between or across cultures (inter), we refer specifically to acculuration. Interestingly enough, though not surprising, based on our own knowledge and experience, thinkers who seem to have contributed most to that potential notion, conceptually though not also institutionally, are Africans, or indeed African Americans. Before we come to them, though, let us review the related, conventional wisdom on cross-cultural management, which is conventionally – we would argue wrongly – also aligned with “cultural dynamics”.

For the doyens of such, Hollander Gerde Hofstede’s (17) through his Cultures and Organizations on the one hand, and his compatriot Fons Trompenaars (18) and Englishman Charles Hampden Turner, through their Building Cross-Cultural Competence, on the other, the focus is on analysis (particularly Hofstede), and on surface attitudes and behaviors. There is little attempt to deal with art and religion, philosophy and spirituality, in particular cultures. Their behaviorally oriented work, admirable and well researched as it is, is very much for practicing managers, and is neither specifically developmental nor transformative in overall orientation. As such there is little attempt to uncover what a particular culture or society might contribute to the world, individually, substantively in association with others, and how it might thereby enhance such a contribution, naturally and culturally, technologically and economically. That said, Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden Turner are to be applauded for at least opening up the cross-cultural field in an economic/enterprise context. Integral Dynamics then takes on from where they leave off.

In fact Ronnie Lessem has sought for example, as an Afro-European, to uncover what each part of his “southern-northern” heritage has to bring to his integral whole, not to mention Ronnie’s “eastern” Jewish heritage, and his “western” American education. Of course, as an African , at least in part, especially in the field of economics and enterprise, this has been a very difficult task, because of the absolute predominance of “north-western”, primarily Anglo-Saxon, thinking, in such. This applies not only to scientific disciplines, both natural and social, but also to the institutionalization of such, within university and laboratory, if not also consultancy, as distinct form community and sanctuary.
Nevertheless, it is African philosophers such as the Francophone/Senegalese poet-statesman Leopold Senghor (19), through his concept of Negritude, and the Kenyan-American historian and philosopher, Ali Mazrui (20), in his work on Africa’s Triple Heritage, who have drawn his attention to the power and potential of cultural synthesis in nation, and world building. Note that, invariably, people who engage in such trans-cultural thinking are hybrids in themselves.

For the renowned African-American philosopher, W.E.B Du Bois (21), moreover, at the turn of the last century, for whom race and ethnicity, in a positive sense, was the keynote of the age, and for the originator of Afrocentricity, Molefi Asante (22), such Afro-centeredness could be generalized, and applied to the discovery of the essence of each and every group of people. What, however, even these geniuses have failed to address is how, through combining the trans-cultural with the trans-formational, aligned with a trans-disciplinary and trans-personal orientation, we may be enabled to recognize and release the genius of each and every society, albeit necessarily in association with the other.

This then is the task we have set ourselves, through Integral (trans/cultural and trans/disciplinary) Dynamics (trans/formational and trans/personal), as illustrated in Figure 1 below. Altogether then, Integral Dynamics starts out, structurally and dynamically, with Individuation and Acculturation, through the Moral Core(s) of an individual and community, organization and society, and then purports to release their genius, spanning nature and culture, science and enterprise in the process, spanning Africa and Asia, Europe and the Americas as it goes. Agentially, the institutionalization of such, as we shall see in the final part, is potentially through a genealogical combination of community, sanctuary, university and laboratory.

FIGURE 1 INTEGRAL DYNAMICS

Now we turn from form, that is how a new discipline such as Integral Dynamics, and an agency for its actualization, are born, to the opening substance of such. The leading cast of characters, our complementary role models historically then, are Adam Smith and Karl Marx, both as Europeans (respectively north-western and north-eastern), together with their “shadow-lands”, that is the places – the rest of the world - they did not, intellectually, emotionally or physically, visit. So, if you like, Integral Dynamics builds on their formidable presence and on what they left spectacularly absent! We start with Scotland’s Adam Smith.

3. How does Integral Dynamics build on Political Economy?

Adam Smith and Integral Dynamics : Revisiting the Scottish Enlightenment

The precocious Adam Smith, who was to become a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, matriculated, as his Scottish biographer, philosopher and historian Nicholas Phillipson has described (23), from school in 1737, at the tender age of 14, a child prodigy. He then spent the next nine years at university, in Glasgow from 1737 to 1746, and thereafter at Balliol College, Oxford. At the time, in fact, Glasgow had become one of the most sophisticated of the Protestant universities of Northern Europe, while Oxford, early on in the eighteenth century, was notorious for being an intellectually stagnant, High Church and High Tory institution. In contrast Glasgow University was part and parcel of the contemporary Scottish Enlightenment, which, at least in European terms, was inherently trans-cultural, with England (south-western) and Scotland (north-western), France (northern-southern) and Germany (north-eastern), all playing their significant part in a progressively more enlightened, and indeed integral, European whole, albeit bereft of the rest of the world.

Indeed the fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa, Asia and America was ensuing at the same time is symptomatic of the limits of such “enlightened” European exclusiveness. Such “non-European” terrain is what Integral Dynamics considers to be the shadow-lands of the Enlightenment, psychologically and spiritually, which duly inhibited the integral as well as dynamic nature and scope of such, naturally and culturally, scientifically and economically.

That said, Francis Hutcheson’s appointment – Hutcheson was one of Adam Smith’s two key mentors, the other being philosopher David Hume - to the chair of Moral Philosophy in 1729, at Glasgow university, was the most important moment in shaping its new academic culture. His was the voice of a new sort of academic philosophy, tolerant in its attitude to religion, consensually minded in its views about the relationship between Church and civil society, radical in his politics. His lectures on politics emphasized the importance of civil and religious liberty to the happiness of mankind (largely European-kind), and set out to awaken and shape his pupils’ love of public spirit. Moreover, and as such, Hutcheson was inherently trans-disciplinary in his overall approach. Before his appointment to the Moral Philosophy chair, his reputation had rested on his insights into the principles of human nature, the nature of virtue and the meaning of sociability.

For Smith’s friend and colleague, the great Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, moreover, in his Treatise on Human Nature (24), what passes as “knowledge” has its roots in the passions, in the imagination, and in the use of intellectual powers we acquire through habit, custom, education and the experience of common life. As we shall later see, underlying our integral dynamics, is a “grounding” in passion, the “emergence” of the imagination, altogether prior to the exercise of the intellect, that is what we term “navigation”. Hume, for us then, had an inherently transformational dynamic approach to, notably, individual human nature.

Overall moreover, in Adam Smith’s birthplace, in Edinburgh, if not also in Glasgow professors and students had begun to see themselves as part of a wider social, political and cultural world and were even beginning to think of this environment as one which encouraged useful learning, both individually and as an overall community. To that extent there was real evidence of trans-personal learning, and as such, communal knowledge creation, going on, albeit that, over two hundred years ago it was implicit rather than explicit, with no institutionalized sanctuary or laboratory to support the community and university. We now turn to Marx.

Karl Marx : Renewing Historical Dialectics in the light of Integral Dynamics

For perhaps the greatest contemporary interpreter of Marx, English born American anthropologist and geographer, David Harvey (25), in his Companion to Marx’s Capital, new knowledge arises out of taking radically different conceptual blocs, rubbing them together and making revolutionary fire. In this seminal work on Capital (26), for us as for Harvey, Marx then brings together divergent, trans-disciplinary as well as trans-cultural (ancient Greece, modern Britain, France and Germany) albeit again in a purely European context, intellectual traditions, to create a completely new and revolutionary framework for knowledge. The trans-disciplinary conceptual frameworks – historical, philosophical, political and economic - that converge are these :

• first, classical political economy (17th to mid 19th century) is mainly British
• a second conceptual building block is philosophical reflection and inquiry, which Marx originated via the Greeks, especially Aristotle
• the third tradition he draws upon is Germanic philosophy, most particularly the dialectical philosophy of Hegel
• the fourth tradition to which Marx appeals is utopian socialism, primarily French, although it was an Englishman, Thomas More, who is generally credited with originating the modern utopian socialist tradition, followed by Scotsman Robert Owen in the eighteenth century.

FIGURE P2 REVISITING AND RENEWING SMITH AND MARX
CO-EVOLVING CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM

Marx felt, then, that he had to re-create and reconfigure what social science, and research methodology, is all about. His new scientific method was predicated, for Harvey, on the interrogation of the primarily British tradition of classical political economy, but also using the tools of the mainly German tradition of critical philosophy, all applied to illuminate the mainly French utopian impulse to resolve what is communism, set against an ancient Greek philosophical backdrop.

Marx’s overall methodology, dynamically as such, derives from dialectics what had not previously been applied to economics. While in fact his dialectical ideas derive from Hegel, his “dialectical method” is opposite to his fellow German philosopher, in that it is materially and socially, as opposed to, primarily, ideationally, based. Like Hegel, though, dialectics is to be used to enable us to understand and represent processes of motion, change and transformation. Marx does not, as such, simply talk about labour. He talks, unlike his counterpart Adam Smith, about the labour process. Capital, at the same time, is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. Capitalism is nothing if not on the move. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity.

Finally, from a trans-personal perspective, for Marx and Engels (27), in their Communist Manifesto, the return of Man to his human, that is social existence, would mean that man’s need or enjoyment would lose its “egoistical nature”, that nature would lose its “mere utility” and that the present sheer estrangement of all physical and mental senses, in the sense of having, would give way to the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities. History was the process of the humanization of nature through “conscious life activity”. It was in “creating a world of objects by his practical activity, “by his work upon organic nature”, that man proved himself a “conscious species being”. The infinite could be derived from the finite in the form of historical transformation from In that sense Marx, with Engels, was actively engaged throughout much of his life attempting to promote social transformation, rather than merely writing about it.

It must be apparent, by now, that there is so much more to Marx, and indeed to Smith, than has met the conventional eye, and that, interdependently between them, in principle if not in practice, they established an Integral Dynamic conceptual platform, albeit an exclusively Eurocentric one, for us to build upon. Both were inherently trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary, and, especially in Marx’s case, trans-personal and trans-formational in orientation. Their Achilles heel, in both instances was their Eurocentricism, so that their trans-cultural orientation was limited to the integral European constituencies of such. Indeed, in his latter years, Marx became ever more conscious of this limitation and took a specific interest in indigenous peoples, including those in Russia.

Nevertheless, the fact that, firstly, business and economics has never stood integrally on their complementary shoulders, and secondly, that their integral and dynamic reach is exclusively European, has massively inhibited integral-dynamic progress on economy and enterprise. Indeed the so called “welfare state”, or “mixed economy”, while blending the economic with the social totally by-passes the dynamic elements that Marx introduced. Moreover, the alternating dynamic between Capitalism and Socialism, has served to impoverish, rather than enrich, our post-colonial world. Even the so called mix of capitalism and communism in China today is deceptive, in that “state control” per se is more symptomatic of Chinese nationalism, if not also authoritarianism, than dynamic Marxism. We now return, in some more considered detail, to Adam Smith.

Evolution of Moral Philosophy into Political Economy : An Integral Perspective

Adam Smith : Natural Theology to Commercial Expediency

In 1759, Adam Smith was fully installed as Professor of Moral Philosophy, at the University of Glasgow, and his lectures in such were described by a student at the time, as follows :

The first part contained Natural Theology; in which he considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded. The second comprehended Ethics consisting chiefly of the doctrines which he afterwards published in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the third part, he treated at much more length that branch of morality that relates to Justice, and correspondingly to Law and Government. Finally, he turned to Commercial Expediency, calculated to increase the riches, power and prosperity of the state. In this context he considered the political institutions related to commerce, finance, ecclesiastical establishments an the military. Much of the latter would subsequently be incorporated into The Wealth of Nations.

We now organize Adam Smith’s political economy in terms of what we shall articulate as our dynamic mode of acculturation, focused on our intra-cultural trajectory, or topography (see chapter 7), starting from roots or core.

The Roots : Natural Theology to Moral Core

As economics, in fact, over the course of the eighteen and nineteenth, and most particularly the twentieth, centuries, parted company from political economy, in favor of classical, and subsequently neo-classical, economics, in isolation, so the former integral, and indeed dynamic, connection was lost. Natural theology, historically then, in Adam Smith’s time, connected nature and religion, if not also art, to matters economic, in the same sense as our “moral core”, in integral dynamic terms, does today. The big difference between now and then, though, is that now such a core, for our new integral dynamic discipline, applies to differentiated cultures and societies in the south (Africa and aboriginal Australasia) and east (Asia) as well as the north (Europe) and west (Americas).

In other words, rather than hiding slavery and colonialism behind the Eurocentric cupboard, as was the case in the time of the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, we are seeking to enable, in theory if not yet in practice, all cultures to individuate, so to speak, and thereby come out of the shadows. We are of course helped, in this process, by the fact that, as Ken Wilber has pointed out (see chapter 12), all of the world’s cultures, at least in terms of their underlying arts, natures and religions, have now been explicitly uncovered, through exploration and scholarship, in a way that never existed in Adam Smith’s time.

The Mainstem : Ethical Doctrine to Philosophical Bedrock

For Smith, as we have seen, natural theology, our core, had to be aligned with an ethical doctrine, our bedrock, that he ultimately articulated as his theory of moral sentiments. To that extent, the simplistic interpretation of his “free market” philosophy, through a “propensity to truck, barter and trade”, in Adam Smith’s words, is a gross oversimplification of his overall moral philosophy (roots and mainstem), and political economy (branches and fruits). That having been said, Adam Smith was wedded to a particular, Christian humanist ethic, of his time.

As a result, there was no recognition of the richly diverse ethics, or philosophies, of different cultures and societies, whether African, Arabic, Asian, or indigenous American. Today, by virtue of a proliferation of African or Aboriginal, Arabic or Islamic, Chinese or Japanese, Latin American or native America, studies, at universities, we have access to such richly varied philosophies and epistemologies. The trouble is, of course, is that such variegated cultures and natures, have not by and large been linked, explicitly, to either science and technology or economics and enterprise, except in the “north-western” case, which is of course, with a view to promoting such integral linkages, intra-culturally and inter-culturally, where Integral Dynamics, encompassing nature and culture, science and enterprise, comes in.

Branches : Law and Government to Institutional Subsoil

Ironically, when we see today the extent to which law and government, and indeed justice, is being subordinated to the power of the markets, we need to be reminded of the fact that the founding father of modern economics, Adam Smith, was strongly rooted in the “political” – justice, law and government – alongside the economic. Religiously inspired morality and ethical philosophy for him, our core and bedrock respectively, underpinned law and government (our institutional subsoil). To that extent there was a dynamic interconnection between these, rather than the one, as today – the economy, the markets – in most cases dominating the other.

However, once again, Smith was alluding to law and government in the “western” world, broadly speaking. To that extent, he was seemingly oblivious to the colonization, and indeed the proliferating slave trade, that was going on at the time, of course totally bereft of the “justice” to which he referred. Needless to say historical and anthropological studies of the “law and government” of tribes and nations outside of “European civilization” were few and far between in that early modern era. Today, moreover, whereas our knowledge of such has increased massively, there is still a profound disconnect, between core or root (images), bedrock or mainstem (ideologies), and, specifically, subsoil or branch institutional frameworks, in this case of law and government. Again this is where a newly integral and dynamic discipline is required, and will thereby unfold in this text.

Fruits : Commercial Expediency to Topsoil Inclinations

The ultimate fruits of moral philosophy, of an enlightened world in “civilized” European guise, for Smith, and of the underlying moral core of each and every society, in our new discipline, is commercial expediency for him, economics and enterprise for us. Such commercial “expediency” is calculated to increase the riches, power and prosperity of the state. In this context Adam Smith considered the political institutions related to commerce, finance, and indeed the military, what today we would term the military-industrial complex. Most importantly, though, such an economy built on prior law, justice and government, prior ethics and natural theology, or morality. What a long way we have come today, form this state of political economy, to a time where, as we have said, the “wrecking-ball” of expediency, as it were, rules the political and economic roost.

In Integral Dynamics, finally then, there are three major new elements, when we compare and contrast this new discipline with Smith’s political economy. Firstly, we draw, integrally, on cultures and societies from the four corners of the globe, naturally and communally (his natural theology), culturally and spiritually (his ethics), social science and technology-wise (his justice, law and government), and economics and enterprise (his commercial expediency). Secondly, and dynamically, the ultimate effect, of economics and enterprise, as distinct from commercial expediency, is now differentiated, between macro (societal) and micro (enterprise), given that the whole new field of management, or business administration, over the course of the last century, has come of age. Thirdly, we apply our thinking to the development of the very agency – community, sanctuary, university and laboratory as we shall see – that serves integrally and dynamically evolve the particular society in question.

Now we turn from Smith to Marx. Whereas Marx recognized Smith as a veritable bedfellows, drawing his seminal “labor theory of value” from Adam Smith, the world at large has fought a prolonged “cold war” over so called “capitalism” and “communism”, even though Smith never saw himself as a capitalist and Marx rejected a crude version of communism as totally out of hand. Indeed, as the world watches the North Korean succession from Kim Jong-il dictatorial rule, in December, 2011, the very idea that his was a “communist” country would lead Marx to turn in his grave.
What then was Marx’s point of focus, other than the commonplace interpretations of “state control”, nationalization of private assets and the need for the “workers of the world to unite”, and to thereby throw off their chains?

Evolution of Moral Philosophy into Political Economy : A Dynamic Perspective

The study of our relationship to nature, for Marx – in inter/disciplinary guise (historical, philosophical, sociological, political, economic) from the outset - as articulated by Harvey, cannot go very far without examining the nature of social relations, our production systems, mental conceptions of the world, and the technologies deployed and how social life is conducted. All of these elements constitute a totality, and we have to understand how the mutual interactions between them work. In fact these can be portrayed in a way that reminds us of our own integral – at least in the trans/disciplinary sense - dynamic, as we shall see later, reflected in the recognition and release of GENE-ius, as indicated in Figure 2 below. For example, for Marx, if you are building an enterprise, or indeed economy, you would want to know what :

• kinds of technologies are going to be embodied;
• is the relationship to nature;
• kinds of social relations are envisaged;
• systems of production and reproduction going to be incorporated;
• kind of daily life is envisaged;
• mental conceptions are going to be involved?

Marx considers each to be a “moment” in the process of human evolution. We can study this evolution from the perspective of one of the moments or examine interactions between them, such as transformations in technologies and organisational forms bearing upon nature and society. Indeed we have also applied such, more or less, to the dynamics of an integral dynamic university, so to speak, itself. This way of thinking permeates Marx’s Capital.

FIGURE 2 MARX’S DIALECTICS AND THE INTEGRAL DYNAMIC GENE

The six elements cited above, for Harvey then, constitute distinctive moments in the overall process of human evolution understood as a totality. This belies the common interpretation of Marx as an ultra determinist, championing the singular cause of labour. No one moment, in fact, prevails over the others, even as there exists within each moment the possibility for autonomous development (nature independently mutates and evolves, as do ideas, social relations and so on). All these elements co-evolve and are subject to perpetual renewal and transformation as dynamic moments within the totality. It is like an ecological totality. We now want to draw the relevant threads of Smith and Marx together, focusing on their respective, and indeed complementary, though incomplete, contribution toward Integral-Dynamics.

Integral : Moral Sentiments and the Relations of Production

Adam Smith : The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith’s (28) Theory of Moral Sentiments was, for Nicholas Phillipson, an extraordinary attempt to develop a coherent and plausible account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life. Indeed, the notion that human beings communicate much of what they mean through sympathy as well as language, not solely through, and out of, self interest, was deeply embedded in the polite conversational culture of the Anglo-Saxon and French enlightenments. His great achievement, therefore, was to turn it into the governing principle of a theory of sociability on which a general theory of commerce could be based. For Smith then :

By the imagination we place ourselves in the other person’s situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all his torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, even feel something which, through weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike him.

To that extent, Smith paved the way for the Integral nature and scope of our new discipline, through reaching out to “the other”, albeit that, admittedly probably unknowingly, he fell short by restricting his cultural horizons to a Eurocentric “Scottish” Enlightenment. So when the British, not to mention the French, colonists entered Africa, “placing themselves in the other person’s situation”, naturally and culturally, was far removed from their empathetic consciousness. So though the nineteenth century African explorer David Livingstone hailed from Scotland, for example, he did little to follow his countryman’s philosophy, at least as far as his ability and willingness to empathize with indigenous African religion. As for John Cecil Rhodes, admittedly English rather than Scot, he was even further removed from any such moral sentiment.

However, overall, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, offered a powerful conjecture about the nature of the “civilizing” process. Human beings engaged in the business of ordinary life set out to satisfy their moral needs, which makes it possible for them to aspire to a life of virtue. Indeed he laid a foundation, albeit a flawed one, for us to integrally follow. What then about Marx?

Karl Marx : Social Justice and the Biblical Heritage

Whereas Adam Smith’s heritage was Protestant Scottish, Marx’s was German Jewish. It has in fact been argued rather persuasively, by the European social philosopher Ernst Bloch, cited by South African theologian and economist Klaus Nürnberger in his book Beyond Marx and the Market (29), that Marx (Marx’s parents were originally Jewish before they converted to Christianity), with his passion for social justice and his determination to reconstruct society, represented a secular development of the biblical heritage. He thereby could be regarded as the legitimate heir of the biblical faith. Marx, as we know though (“religion is the opium of the masses”, as he famously said) was overtly ambivalent over his religious heritage.

More precisely though, for Bloch, Marx’s communism was a secular version of the apocalyptic messianism found in late Judaism and early Christianity. This is from where its compulsive fervor is derived. Indeed, every genuine Marxist, Bloch says, is also a missionary. Judeo-Christianity, in principle (all too often ignored in reality), and Marxism then, do both share an uncompromising commitment to social justice, with priority being accorded, for each, to the poor and to the oppressed, at the expense of the rich and the powerful. The Marxist ‘avant-garde’, for Bloch moreover, is a parallel to the biblical ‘suffering servant’, as well as the utopian ‘classless society’, the ‘historical dialectic’ being aligned with God’s ‘providence in history’. This is something that Soviet-style communism ultimately completely missed.

What is integral, then, for Marx - unlike for Smith whose concern was to reach out, individually, personally and interpersonally through moral sentiment, to the other - is to heal social divides, to overcome class divisions, to ultimately reach for the utopian, stateless society. This was to be achieved, in his case, via social, political and economic struggle for social and economic justice, rather than personalized moral sentiment. We now turn from the integral to the dynamic.

Dynamics : The Wealth of Nations and the Contradictions of Capital

Adam Smith : Labor Theory of Value - Advancing the Wealth of Nations

When it comes to economic dynamics, there is not doubt that, of the two, Smith and Marx, the latter was more adept, though both had their transformative orientations. Smith’s (30) Wealth of Nations, for Phillipson, the Scottish moral philosopher’s greatest and most enduring monument to the Scottish Enlightenment, contains a theory of human behavior seen through the lens of Scottish politeness, about agents who are deeply committed to the improvement of the mind, manners and property, and are able to believe in following what seems to be their path of nature in a way that will serve the public good. Smith’s two great mentors, Hutcheson and Hume, in fact, had shown Smith how to develop an account of the progress of civilization which paid as much attention to the material, moral and intellectual progress of humanity as to the lamentable story of the follies of many of the European rulers.

Smith’s contribution to the enterprise had arisen from an absorbing interest in the exchange and circulation of goods, services and sentiments, and in the creation of those cultures on which the survival of human society and the progress of civilization depends. Smith was interested, moreover, in the way in which these economic resources could circulate through the different sectors, in a relatively free market. Labor as such, for him, lodged in an egalitarian society like the one he saw in North America at the time (of course he was oblivious to the lot of the American Indian) was the source of dynamism, within an emerging US style economy, aligned with “the progress of civilization”. Taking on from where Adam Smith has left off, additionally, Integral Dynamics then seeks to release the genius of civilization-s other than merely Enlightened Scotland’s, with an emphasis on the plural, each with their own source of “genius”, which also transcends mere labor. In fact, additionally drawing form Hume, as Smith supposedly did too, we incorporate passion and imagination as well as intellect and enterprise in our dynamic re-interpretation of “labor theory”. Where then does Marx come in?

Karl Marx : The Contradictions of Capitalism and Dialectical Dynamics

The capital-relation, for Marx as interpreted by Harvey, arises out of an economic soil that is the product of a long process of development, such that the productivity of labour is a gift not merely of nature, for Marx, but of history embracing thousands of years. This historic emphasis on “a long process of development, embracing thousands of years” can be contrasted with Smith’s more analytical orientation towards “the labour theory of value”.

The worker himself, for Marx as such, constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, and that objective wealth becomes an alien power that now dominates the worker. The worker produces the instrument of his own domination. This is the paradoxical theme that reverberates throughout Capital, constituting the “contradictions of capitalism”. For Marx then, as per Harvey :

The capitalist ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle .. It compels the capitalist to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.

Capitalism for Marx then, may be monstrous, but, significantly, it is not a rigid monster. Oppositional “Marxist” movements ignore its capacity for adaptation, flexibility and fluidity at their peril. Capital is not a thing, but a process. It is continually in motion, dynamically in flow. Indeed, had the powers that be, post 2008, had a better understanding, as per Marx, of economic dynamics, and capital flow, they may well have done a better job of dealing with the world economic crisis. However, they would have needed to have been open to the antithesis of our prevailing capitalist thesis, of the wisdom of “the markets”, not in the singular terms of the “power of the state”, bit in the multifaceted terms illustrated in the Figure above, with a view to thereafter seeking after w new synthesis.

4. Conclusion

Revisiting Integral Dynamics/Renewing Political Economy

Practice Falls behind Theory

As we watch in despair, in the autumn of 2011, democracy, a mainstem of its European “civilization”, falls at least somewhat by the wayside, as one economic technocrat replaces another, in Greece and in Italy. As the distressed populace is left to protest in the wings, we ask ourselves, why has all this come to pass? Why have matters economic, as Adam Smith’s “economic expediency”, come to triumph over all else : moral and ethical, law, government and justice, ethics and theology, in his terms? Why have the contradictions of capital, to which Marx continually alluded, not been virtually dissolved, if not quite resolved? And where have been the universities in all of this?
If we look at what is happening in the world today, political and economically as a whole, it would not be difficult to find people talking of the break-down of society, of undue corruption amongst government officials, of lack of growth and productivity, of economic and social injustice, or of an absence of ethics and morals. These are all notions with which Adam Smith, two hundred and fifty years, ago, would have been very familiar. Further to such, in the practical world of the “man and woman in the street”, speculation and avarice, rampant bond markets and wayward institutions, New York’s Wall Street and the City of London, are seen to be winning over concerned citizens, over-stretched taxpayers, diligent Main Street and honest-to-goodness manufacturing, while our politicians struggle to mediate.

Overall then, while we might lament the fact that wayward, dynamic forces are riding economically rampant, overa

Item Type:	Book / Proceeding
Faculty:	Previous Faculty of Business, Education and Law > Business
Depositing User:	TONG Junie TONG-CLARK
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2013 17:06
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2023 13:38
Related URLs:	http://gowerpublishing.wordpress.com/201...
URI:	https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/id/eprint/941

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