|
John Dunn
|
John Dunn home page
|
Spinozism as Marxism
The core principle of Renaissance humanism was man as the ‘living image of God’ (imago viva Dei), with the capacity to be a ‘human god’ and a ‘second creator’ (capax Dei). This was best expressed in a founding text of the Renaissance, Dante’s Divine Comedy.
On the way to Paradise, Dante’s pilgrim symbolically assumed both crown and mitre, the power over things temporal and spiritual.1
Rather than a passive acceptance of the existing order as inevitable, Dante’s work heralded a revolutionary new-found belief in man’s ability to shape the world for the betterment of mankind.
These were the revolutionary ideas that inspired Nicholas of Cusa, Gemistos Plethon, Erasmus and Thomas More, amongst many others, providing the intellectual groundwork for the flowering of art, culture, philosophy and political ideas that had the potential to lift mankind out of bestiality and into a deified realm. They shared a worldview that reached its apogee with More’s Utopia.
 Spinoza/Marx
If the core principle of the Renaissance was the unique ability of man to effect change upon the world, then its polar opposite was the determinist philosophy of Spinoza, the Karl Marx of his time. With such a philosophy, Spinoza led what is popularly known as the Enlightenment revolution, but which was, in reality, as I have described elsewhere, the Counter-Renaissance.
1 Purgatorio Canto XXVII
© John Dunn.
|
|
|
Community of oligarchs
The crucial feature of the Anglo-Dutch liberal model was the independence from national government, elected or otherwise, enjoyed by a privately controlled central banking system. In effect, that central bank became the agent of the landholding, financier-oligarchic class.
John Dunn
|
|
Quote every hour:
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding. Ezra Pound
|
|
‘Liberty’ deceitfully
Nominally ‘free’ trade enjoyed the protection of the state. Not just any enthusiastic would-be entrepreneur could engage in the tea and opium trade, usury, slave trading and the founding of the Bank of England.
John Dunn
|
|
|
|
Click here for BOOK SALES
|
|
You are visitor number 920740
|
|
|
|