The basic question that the 'new science' raises for our balance sheet is the issue of what scientific questions have not been asked for 500 years, which scientific risks have not been pursued. It raises the question of who has decided what scientific risks were worth taking, and what have been the consequences in terms of the power structures of the world.

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.

A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.

Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?