V&R loves Roger Caillois! His work on games adds to the reflections of Huizinga (V&R Chapter 6), which I think analytically potent. Whilst Huizinga dwells on the attributes an activity must have to be a game, Caillois thinks about the classification of games. He identifies four: competition, chance, mimickry, and vertigo. These categories, respectively,…
Over at Law & Liberty, I explore how Smith would morally assess Patagonia’s new moral stance on making fleece vests for banking houses: https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/04/25/fleecing-the-bankers-patagonia-environmentalism/
Discussed at V&R Chapter 3 are the basic principles of Catholic Social Thought (CST), including the moral principle of subsidiarity. Don Quijote is a Japanese retail chain whose business plan is built on each shop having subsidiarity (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-17/the-cult-japanese-retailer-making-billions-breaking-all-the-rules). All hiring and management is local to ensure that the shops act like barometers to tastes…
A recent opinion piece at BoF argues that rapidification is necessary to bridge the gap between sluggish production and intensified consumer expectation: “Speed, tightly and newly coupled with data science, enables opportunity across each tier and partner of the supply chain” (https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/opinion/op-ed-fashion-needs-a-new-business-model-speed-is-the-answer). V&R Chapter 2 discusses Pope Francis’s critique of this ideology of technoscience…
The moral and political character of Smith’s thinking, and thus the meaning of the Scottish Enlightenment, is increasingly contested. My latest at Law & Liberty: Anxious Trade
For those in the Baltimore area, I hope you might join us Monday, April 15th at 6pm in the Auditorium of the Loyola/Notre Dame Library. Dr. Brian Murray of our Writing Department will discuss “Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Catholic?” Film clips are included and his talk is followed by Q&A. The lecture is sponsored…