<SNIP>
> Would anyone else here like to see those debates revisited in the light of
> intervening research and theory?
>
> It would be very hard to decide on candidates.  At least at the start, Noam
> would be the best one to make the nominations.
>
> I would offer for consideration people like: Pribram, Gardner, Lefebvre,
> Edelman - recent Peirce studies...
>
> Harvey Wheeler

Harvey,

        First of all, I don't think Chomsky's talks with Piaget were a
"debate"; Chomsky claims that Harvard packaged his conversation with
Piaget as a "debate" to sell copies. It was more like a discussion.
        I'm surprised you mentioned Lefebvre; I've always been intrigued by his
ideas and, yes, I would enjoy hearing much more from him than it seems
one is able to find nowadays. Has anybody else here read anything by
Lefebvre, and can you recommend any English translations of his works? I
have been interested with this ex-leader and theorist of the French
Communist party since I read Greil Marcus's wonderful accounts of his
ideas in the enlightening book _Lipstick_Traces_. Greil Marcus writes:

        "[Lefebvre felt that] Instead of examining institutions and classes,
         structures of economic production and social control, one had to
         think about 'moments' -- moments of love, hate, poetry,
         frustration, action, surrender, delight, humiliation, justice,
         cruelty, resignation, surprise, disgust, resentment, self-loathing,
         pity, fury, peace of mind -- those tiny epiphanies, Lefebvre said,
         in which the absolute possibilities and temporal limits of anyone's
         existence were revealed. The richness or poverty of any social
         formation could be judged only on the terms of these evanescences;
         they passed out of consciousness as if they had never been, but in
         their instants they contained the whole of life.
                                        .   .   .   .   .   .   .
         But if those moments could be given a language, a political
         language, they could form the basis for entirely new demands on
         the social order. What if one said no to boredom, and demanded sur-
         prise, not for a moment, but as a social formation?"
                                        [_Lipstick_Traces_, pgs. 144-145]

This, in my opinion, is where Postmodernism begins to come to play on
sociopolitical revolutionary theory -- and Chomsky has said he does not
think highly of the French Postmodernists (according to Barsky's book),
which I feel is a shame. Is Lefebvre still alive? What is he doing?

                                        --Brian
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--
"If it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of
human nature is the need for creative work or creative inquiry, for free
creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive
institutions, then of course it will follow that a decent society should
maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to
be realized. Now, a federated, decentralized system of free associations
incorporating economic as well as social institutions would be what I
refer to as anarcho-syndicalism. And it seems to me that it is the
appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological
society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the
position of tools, of cogs in a machine. " -- Prof. Noam Chomsky, MIT