Destroy And Liberate Av Oliver Feltham

In David Hume''s science of human nature each and every self is located by passions that bind it to groups, repel it from other groups, and rank it on a hierarchy: we call this discovery a ''topology of passions''. These ranked selves and groups provide the matter of what he called ''government'', a neutral model of political action designed to avoid the malady of faction and catapult Scotland out of feudalism into a glorious future as a commercial society. Government is to be assisted in this project by the new discipline of political economy, a discipline blind beyond its measures of privileged variables - the volume of trade, interest rates, wage levels. It is such measures that will justify the destruction of any obstacle to the commercial passions. To govern - a new kind of action for a new epoch - is to destroy and liberate. But ever since Hume governments have fallen apart because they fail to take into account the complexity of their societies as topologies of passions. It is t