• A. Churches, censors, law courts, schools, the media [institutions variously responsible for I. above]
• 1. Religious officials [IE=religious organizations & officers| EG =Pope, Patriarch, Rabbi, Mosque, Temple, Monastery, Shaman]
• 2. Censorship
• 3. Judges
• 4. Schools, universities, academies
• 5. Publishers, Journalists, broadcast networks, "public intellectuals", the media (including "entertainment")
• B. The state (central, sovereign authority)
• 1. Embassies and military
• 2. Domestic law enforcement (police)
• 3. Legislation
• 4. Budget income (EG= Plunder, tribute, tithes, taxes, state enterprises and properties) [cf. IV below]
• 5. Budget expenditure (EG=Procurement (esp. military procurement), welfare
• C. Other economic institutions  [CF=IV.B below]
• 1. finance, treasuries, banks
• 2. businesses, corporations

• A. Tight social hierarchies = social estates with strict distinctions, e.g., aristocrats & commoners
• B. Looser but very real social classes = the rich, the poor, bourgeoisie and proletariat
• C. Labor (bound labor, servile labor, wage labor, etc.)
• D. Indigenous peoples and ethnic "minorities"
• E. Women; gender issues
• F. Families (extended and nuclear)
• G. "Civil society" [ID] (e.g., "public", leisure, sports)

• A. Agriculture (villages, farms, "feudalism", latifundia estates, corporate farming)
• B. Industrialization (mercantilism, laissez-faire, trans-national corporatism, managerialism) [CF=II.B.4.e above]
• C. Markets, trade

• A. Rural periphery and urban metropolis
• A. Material culture
• B. The "ecosystem" (i.e., the physical and biological environment)

THE HISTORICAL TAXONOMY CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS A SCHEMATIC "POLITICAL ECONOMY"

• Here at point "V", vertical points "I". through  "IV" flatten out. In this way, point "V." can be thought of as a lateral platform or a geo-physical plain (GEOGRAPHY)
• All events embraced within points "I" through "IV" take place on the lateral platform "V. Geography"
• Particularly it is here in the realm of "V. Geography" that the diplomatic/military activities of centralized governments (II.B above) concentrate, EG= frontier and imperialist expansion
• Points "IV. Economy" and "V. Geography" can also be thought to bend around to touch mentalities at the top of the list. As Economy digs into the material culture of daily life and adjusts to its environment, it attaches itself to the upper reaches of the TAXONOMY, to ways of seeing the world. Daily behavior, customary "going about" links intimately with the fluid and complex dynamics of human consciousness in folk behavior, customs, culture, ritual, and beliefs, but also in doctrines and ideologies
• Taken together, sections "II. III and IV" describe the way peoples organize themselves or are organized by others or by circumstances to manage (1) production, (2) distribution and (3) consumption of the things they need and value
• The whole TAXONOMY, points "I" through "V", could be called the economy if we seek to understand the concept not simply as income and expenditure data describing production and distrubution of things of value (as in micro-economics) or stock-market averages (as in financial profit centered concepts) but as functioning people in relationship to actual conceptual, institutional, social, economic and physical environments
• We might need to return to the original written effort to explain "economy", Hesiod's Works and Days [ID], in order to restore a fuller sense of the term
• Considered together,
the following were the subject matter in that grand 18th- and 19th-century tradition called "political-economy"
• world views,
• institutions,
• society,
• economy and
• environment
• [LOOP on "Political-economy"]
• Political-economy seeks to understand how civilizations function, in the largest possible frame of critical or analytical understanding

THE HISTORICAL TAXONOMY IS A MOBILE, EVEN KALEIDOSCOPIC, BEAST

This suggestive organizational TAXONOMY is dynamic with respect to the interior relationships up and down the deceptively stiff-looking outline. The taxonomic categories are themselves fluid and intertwined with one another. Remember these cautionary and suggestive words about "taxonomies".

For example, sometimes it appears that everyday life decides the way people think, while at others it appears that the way people think determines their daily life. Arguments about crime and poverty, for example, often hang on this point. Criminality and poverty are thought by some to be created by circumstances of everyday life. Others think criminality and poverty are created by character traits of the criminals and the poor themselves, and therefore everyday life circumstances of criminals or dangerous classes of people follow from the way they think or are the result of character traits.

Historians might often consider each possibility, and they also like to ask if these situations are the same for all people, up and down the social hierarchy, or in many different places over the globe, or in all periods of historical time.

Of course, there is change over historical time. Chronology works as if our seemingly stable TAXONOMY rolled constantly to the right. Nothing is fixed, up and down the four sections or from geographic place to place, and now we are reminded of the horizontal movement of the whole loose structure over time.

Furthermore, we notice in the record of historical experience that various sections and subsections of the taxonomy above seem to roll forward in time at widely different and irregular speeds. Some aspects of human experience seem to change quickly, then not at all, then very slowly, while others seem never to change. We sometimes detect "retrograde motion". Clothing styles, technology, etc., seem very fluid, while certain basic values seem stable. Is there really a significant history of "murder"? of the emotion "love"? Yet the changing and the apparently changeless dimensions of historical experience are all intertwined. And the whole package is unquestionably rolling forward in time. Such is the four dimensional kaleidoscope of history.

But what sets this squirming kaleidoscope in motion? LOOP back to webpage "Interests"



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