"'...the psychology of Freud and his successors...gave the first real notion of human semantics.'" (p. 188)
The successors must include Jung? There is the reference to semantics again. But "human semantics"? General semantics is clearly relevant and different from linguistic semantics.
"'Comparative historians like Spengler, Pareto, and Toynbee realized that history did not merely happen but had some kind of pattern.'" (ibid.)
James Blish's Okies future history is Spenglerian.
Poul Anderson's Technic Future History is Hordian.
Isaac Asimov's Robots and Foundation future history is Gibbonian.
Not much is known about Hord.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You wrote: "Not much is known about Hord." Too true! I've tried more than once to find out more about John Hord and his works. But, except for a few articles and citations by other writers, I could not. In fact, I learned more about Hord's analysis of history from Poul Anderson's article for the BULLETIN OF THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA (and A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS) than from academic sources.
You already know how I found Hord's analysis on how civilizations rise and fall disturbingly accurate. Far more so than the speculations of Spengler, Toynbee, Gibbons, or Marx. Only Eric Voegelin, in works such as ISRAEL AND REVELATION, is in my opinion comparable to Hord.
Sean
Sean:
Where does Hord differ from Toynbee?
I've read quite a bit of Toynbee but the only thing by Hord I've read is something recommended on this blog or the comments. "Creatures of the Long Night"
Jim,
Hord differs in analysing detailed stages of social decline.
Paul.
Kaor, Jim!
See what Paul said. Plus, to be more concrete, Hord dates a similar period of decline in the US from the XVII Amendment to the US Constitution.
Ad astra! Sean
Now that I have looked up that Amendment, I see it is just before the major European states severely damaged themselves in WWI, thus leaving the US if not the most powerful, then one of the most powerful nations in the world. Somewhat like Rome after the Punic Wars.
Would any perceived 'decline' be due to the problems of being a pre-eminent power, rather than any effects of the amendment?
Kaor, Jim!
No, the problem Hord (and Anderson) had with Amendment XVII was that it turned US Senators from, in effect, ambassadors to DC from the states to being more like House Representatives. The Amendment made the US less of a decentralized federation and helped to concentrate more and more power in the Federal gov't. With all the bad things that brings: incompetence, corruption, ideological fanaticism, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
When the leaders of the British North America colonies were discussing unifying into a nation that became called Canada, a rather violent dispute was happening to their south. Many of them saw excessive decentralization as a contributing factor to that conflict. So while the US constitution specified certain activities as federal responsibilities & by default everything else was the responsibility of state governments, the Canadian constitution specified certain activities as provincial responsibilities & left everything else as a federal responsibility by default.
OTOH individual provinces being a larger fraction of Canada than individual states are of the US tended to result in provincial governments often being more important, though this oscillated over time.
I don't see any reason to think Canada got things worse than the US.
Personally I rather lean toward putting responsibility to the more local governmental level if there is no obvious reason to prefer putting it in the larger government. It is easier to vote with your feet by moving to the next county than the next country.
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