Apart from the advantages accruing from from praying ardently to Marx, a facility for startling and often entertaining play upon words, suitable for a salon, account no doubt for much of Lévi-Strauss’s celebrity although […] equally effective in this respect must be his highly original technique of persuasion (reminiscent of a sorcerer’s spell casing) based on threatening people with mathematics: muttering darkly about algebraic matrices and transformations without revealing their exact nature.
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Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences As Sorcery (Penguin, 1974), p. 85Claude Levi-Strauss
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In randori we learn to employ the principle of maximum efficiency even when we could easily overpower an opponent. Indeed, it is much more impressive to beat an opponent with proper technique than with brute force. This lesson is equally applicable in daily life: the student realized persuasion backed up by sound logic is ultimately more effective than coercion.
Jigoro Kano
Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.
A. J. Muste
Allow me to define more specifically the inherent limitations of our numerical knowledge which are so often overlooked. I want to do this to avoid giving the impression that I generally reject the mathematical method in economics. I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation. We could scarcely have achieved that comprehensive picture of the mutual interdependencies of the different events in a market without this algebraic technique. It has led to the illusion, however, that we can use this technique for the determination and prediction of the numerical values of those magnitudes; and this has led to a vain search for quantitative or numerical constants.
Friedrich Hayek
Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The new art must be based upon science — in particular, upon mathematics, as the most exact, logical, and graphically constructive of the sciences.
Albrecht Durer
Levi-Strauss, Claude
Levi, Eliphas
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