Politics
Harris was also influential with many students and colleagues, though in a less public way, in work on the amelioration of social and political arrangements. His last book — The Transformation of Capitalist Society — summarizing his findings, was published posthumously. In it he proposes ways to identify and foster the seed-points of a more humane successor to capitalism, which he saw would arise in niche areas in which capitalism cannot function well, much as capitalism arose in the midst of feudalism. Some of his unpublished writings on politics are in a collection at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania.
He was committed all his life to radical transformation of society, but from the ground up rather than by revolution directed from the top down. From his undergraduate days he was active in a student left-Zionist organization called Avukah (Hebrew "Torch"). He resigned as its national President in 1936, the year he obtained the Ph.D., but continued in a leadership advisory role until, like many other student organizations in the war years, it fell apart in 1943. From the early 1940s he and an informal group of fellow scientists in diverse fields collaborated on an extensive project called A Frame of Reference for Social Change. This develops a new vocabulary and concepts on grounds that the existing ones of economics and sociology presuppose and thereby covertly perpetuate capitalist constructs, and that it is necessary to ‘unfool’ oneself before proceeding. This was submitted to Victor Gollancz, a notoriously interventionist editor, who demanded a complete rewrite in more familiar terms. A manuscript among Harris's papers at his death titled Directing social change was brought to publication in 1997 by Seymour Melman, Murray Eden, and Bill Evan. The publisher changed the title to The transformation of capitalist society.
Read more about this topic: Zellig Harris
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“It is not so much that women have a different point of view in politics as that they give a different emphasis. And this is vastly important, for politics is so largely a matter of emphasis.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)