Thirty years ago, if one were to speak about the “treatment of information, “ the best one could expect would be politely smiling indifference. It goes without saying that this expression, until recently meaningless, refers to the information of machines.

As for human information, it also arouses some interest, but for a very different end. Whereas machines are questioned as though they were oracles, in the majority of cases men are given information so as to be subjected to other men, either directly, or thanks to a kind of neutralization.

The status of the blacksmith in tribal societies poses one of the most puzzling problems of anthropology. By a strange paradox, this noted craftsman, whose bold and meritorious services are indispensable to his community, has been relegated to a position outside the pale of society, almost as an “untouchable.” Regarded as the possessor of great magical powers, held at the same time in veneration and contempt, entrusted with duties unrelated to his craft or to his inferior social status, that make of him performer of circumcision rites, healer, exorcist, peace-maker, arbiter, counsellor, or head of a cult, his figure in what may be called the “blacksmith complex,” presents a mass of contradictions. These contradictions are to be met with wherever, as in the case of barbarian societies and archaic civilisations, iron ore is smelted and iron is worked, even though it is in black Africa that the enigmatic character of the blacksmith is most clearly delineated.

Universal analogy as a principle which underlies a variety of intellectual sciences in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has been a topic for students of this period for a long time and in a variety of ways. The doctrine of correspondences, the levels of allegory, the art of memory, Neo-Platonism, the metaphysical conceit, the political theology of king and state, alchemy, astrology, and hermeticism all, in one way or another, reveal the endemic characteristics of asserting and explaining a symbolic and harmonious relationship which prevails among many things. The consequences of this phenomenon seem to be limitless, both for the culture in question and for those who choose to give some account of it.

One of the more interesting theoretical problems is why history is being constantly re-written. After all it is a notorious fact that everything of historical consequence is not only variously viewed by those living at the time, depending on their social background, convictions, etc., but is also subject to different constructions in different ages. This applies to the vision and interpretation of events and people alike; and especially of great people.

Socialism was born in the West in the 19th century, be it the Utopian visions of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier, or the system, at once theoretical and militant, founded by Marx and Engels. It was the heir not only of the philosophers and economists of the modern age, Diderot, Hegel and Ricardo, but also of a more ancient egalitarian and Utopian tradition, which constitutes its “prehistory” and its “proto-history”: social movements such as the Bohemian Taborites, the Münster anabaptists or the English diggers; and similarly the Utopian outlooks like those of Thomas Moore or Campanella or, still more ancient, Plato himself.

Violence pervades the mainstreams of human culture; indeed one could try to write the whole history of mankind as a history of violence. Traditional political histories, chronicles thick with wars, civil wars, conquests, struggles for nation and empire, seizures of state power, assassinations, insurrections, only begin to tell the story. Consider, for example: The plunder of India, the enslavement and exportation of Africans, the extortion of monopolies in the world's minerals, the exploitation and degradation of starving populations menaced by police and armies—all perfectly legal by the Thrasymachean laws of Europe and America—translates itself (congeals) finally into wealth, which bargains against poverty from positions of financial and technological power; which proclaims then a morality of peace, proposes to wipe the moral slate clean, but wishes to perpetuate a balance of power progressively more unfavorable to the powerless; and which is prepared for new violence (executes new violence) in order to preserve its disproportionate wealth, its privileged status, its authority. Now we have before us fuller principles for writing the history of mankind as the history of violence; for none of this is new under the sun, and a similar pattern has been repeated, former victims of colonialism not excepted, in the internal history of nation after nation.