The Times Were A’Changin’… to Fit Profit Margins and Gauge Moral Worth

written June 11, 2009   “Time discipline,” as discussed by E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” addresses the shift of concepts brought about from early industrialization, from “task orientation” and “general irregularity” possible in an agrarian-yeoman society to a structured, “time-oriented” labor construct. Further, time discipline was the tool of an often overly…

Carl Schorske and Creating a Future Without a Past

written July 28, 2009   Carl Schorske cites Karl Marx in his study of Vienna: “when men are about to make revolution, they fortify themselves in the past.”1 Yet what if no past is available? The dream of rational liberalism, birthed in Austria following the 1848 revolution, could not be sustained in the cultural sphere…

Weaving the Threads of a Frayed People: Historically Confronting Isolation as Political Product and Cultural Force of Societal Paradigm Shifts

  The early Cold War era presented Carl Schorske with a calamity.  In his view, history had become bereft of a connection with the past, wherein modernity had come to supersede the lessons of the past in importance, “not out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but in independence of the past.”[1]  The…