Plus Ca Change. . .

A quote from the book Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution.

By Kirkpatrick Sale | 
 

"Imagine what happens to a culture when it actually develops the means to transcend limits, making it possible and therefore right to destroy custom and community, to create new rules of employment and obligation, to magnify production and consumption, to impose new means and ways of work, and to control or ignore the central forces of nature. It would no doubt exist for quite a long time, powerful and expansionary and prideful, before it had to face up to the truths that it was founded upon an illusion and that there are real limits in an ordered world, social and economic as well as natural, that ought not be trangressed, limits more important than their conquest."

-- Kirkpatrick Sale, in Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Addison-Wesley, 1995), referring to England of 1811

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