Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity. Here, as elsewhere, things are what you make of them. — Clifford Gertz

The increasingly transparent weaknesses and contradictions in the capitalist system may eventually convince even some of its more uncritical supporters that an alternative needs to be found. But the conviction that there is and can be no alternative is very deeply rooted, especialyl in Western culture. That conviction is supported not only by the more blatant expressions of capitalist ideology but also by some of our most cherished and unques­tioned beliefs about history – not just the history of capitalism but history in general. –Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism , 2002, p. 2