Heilbroner begins chapter 3 (“The Regime of Capital”) by reiterating the main points from the first two chapters. He describes capitalism as a “stratified society in which the accumulation of wealth fulfills two functions: the realization of prestige . . . and the expression of power.” The accumulation of capital is driven partly because it is the…
Robert L. Heilbroner (1919−2005) was a historian of economic thought and a professor at the New School for Social Research. He wrote about 20 books, one of the most important of which is titled The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (1985). In writing these blog posts, my immediate purpose is to summarize/paraphrase that book, and, in the process, try to…
Johan Galtung has shown that there are several different ways of classifying the phenomenon of violence. Here I will summarize the three main types of violence: (1) personal or direct, (2) structural or indirect, and (3) cultural or symbolic. In his paper “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Galtung made his highly significant — and now widely…