ABSTRACT
Typical vehicles for economies of control of the Enlightenment type include the regulatory state, the administrative state, bureaucratized services and benefits, the legal-rational business firm, and the public-sector ‘organization’. The conflict of economic paradigms boils down to the clash of Renaissance or Axial economic models with Romantic or Enlightenment models. The tension between the political economies of the terra firma and those whose spatial orientation is pelagic and hydrographic is rarely a simple either/or. Nominally, one America is ‘conservative’, the other ‘liberal’. In spite of the reputation and reality of the directing hand of the development-state, non-dualism resonates through Maritime East Asia. The existence of economic cycles is one of the several non-tragic ways that prosperous societies have of resolving the tense interaction of antipodal forces and values. What the cyclical view of things assumes is that economies move not in one direction but in two directions simultaneously. They move up and down at the same time.
