Verbiage

We'll see if this can work as a scratchpad for verbiage I encounter that has nowhere else to go.

"the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all" (Scott 1998, 31).

"the Enlightenment fostered a strong aesthetic that looked with enthusiasm on straight lines and visible order" (Scott 1998, 55).

We always need to "reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation" (Scott 1998, 77).

“Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope” (Arendt 1985 [1951], 446).

"The belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time" (Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" [1943], quoted in Scott 1985, 241).

The Fetish for Variation

Political science, and maybe all causal science, is better with variance than with invariance, with change than with constancy.

I didn't know where else to put this, so here it is.

Nietsche: "what we are used to is most difficult ... to see" (quoted in Zerubaviel 2018, 8). So this is like a drunk under the lamppost issue.

Let this serve as a scratchpad for this theme.