Recently I have touched the never very pleasant task of reviewing evidence in the course of Sociology of Consumption that I am giving. And among the various things that caught my attention is one that has a relationship with my favorite subject -history.
One of the questions of this test had to do with that could characterize particularly and differentially, if anything can characterize (*), to the modern society of consumption. And many reported a difference in terms of credits: in the current society the credit is available to the poor and not just the rich.
And then one remembers that slavery for debt is known in many societies, and that they weren’t the rich those who fell into slavery because of them. In many societies, the most common method by which the farmers lose their lands is due to the credit. And to use an example of my historical favorite: One of the first things that became a new king, the mesopotamian to ingratiate himself with his people was, of course, declare null and void the debts. That was to establish justice. And of course, the debts in question were common throughout the society. The peasants, as always, have lived on the edge of subsistence.
Well it could defend against that type of debt is different, and that might sound reasonable. But that historically, the credit was available only for the upper classes sounds strange, to say the least.
In any case, this kind of things don’t affect the notes. One can not assume that sociologists, alleged students of the societies, have a lot of knowledge of history, which is nothing more than the examination of other societies.
(*) Nobody thought, of course, that in one of those nothing characterizes the contemporary society of consumption. Or to put it another way, that nothing characterized structurally, and the differences are in the way ‘more and more’ of this. And so even though Stalin knew that the quantity has a quality of its own, the case is definitely apparently the only dogma that all sociologists share is that modern societies are indeed qualitatively different to all the rest.