The German philosophers of the 19th century were remarkable thinkers. Amongst the many concepts they gave the world was something they called zeitgeist, or “the spirit of the times”, which underlies the moral, cultural, and intellectual direction of the age.
The reason I am recalling these two concepts is a lecture I heard in 1970 at the Delhi School of Economics. I don’t remember who the speaker was but I do recall that she was defending the social control of productive assets. The immediate provocation was the nationalisation of banks by Indira Gandhi the previous year.
The burden of the professor’s speech
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