Review Essay : Only One Quarrel with Kenneth Boulding
| Author | Johan Galtung |
| DOI | 10.1177/002234338702400208 |
| Published date | 01 June 1987 |
| Date | 01 June 1987 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review
Essay
Only
One
Quarrel
with
Kenneth
Boulding*
JOHAN
GALTUNG
Princeton
University
In
1977,
Kenneth
Boulding
had
twelve
quarrels
with
Johan
Galtung.
Ten
years
later,
reviewing
Boulding’s
two
recent
books,
The
World
as
a
Total
System
and
Human
Betterment,
Galtung
has
only
one
quarrel
with
Boulding.
That
quarrel
concerns
the
notion
of
structural
violence.
ISSN
0022-3433
Journal
of
Peace
Research,
vol.
24,
no.
2,
1987
Ten
years
ago
Kenneth
E.
Boulding
(1977)
wrote
a
review
of
my
Essays
in
Peace
Research,
Vols.
I-V,
entitled
’Twelve
Friendly
Quarrels
With
Johan
Galtung’.
Friendly they
were,
quarrels
they
were
to
some
extent,
and
the
question
is
whether
I
should
now
continue
in
the
same
vein,
poss-
ibly
with
twenty-four
or
144
-
depending
on
the
mathematics
-
friendly
quarrels.
Impossible.
There
is
no
way
I
know
in
which
the
figures
twelve
and
two
could
be
com-
bined
so
as
to
give
the
number
of
worries
that
came
to
my
mind
when
reading
these
two
delightful
books.
None
of
them
really
amounts
to
any
quarrel
except
one:
a
fun-
damental
argument
with
Boulding,
and
of
course
it
is
on
the
issue
of
structural
violence.
I
shall
come
back
to
that
later.
Let
me
start
by
saying
something
about
what
the
reader
has
a
right
to
expect
from
these
books.
1.
Boulding’s
Wisdom
They
are
written
by
a
person
whose
intel-
lectual
trajectory
is
literarily
speaking
astro-
nomical.
Boulding
has
read
so
much,
seen
so
much,
thought
so
much,
discussed
so
much,
and
in
addition
to
that
written
so
enormously
much,
that
what
comes
out
cer-
tainly
merits
that
rare
distinction:
wisdom.
These
are
both
flow-of-consciousness
books,
extremely
well
organized
as
one
expects
from
such
an
orderly
mind -
very
embroi-
dered,
and
filled
with
the
eddies
and
water
falls
of
such
an
imaginative,
rich
mind.
I
*
A
review
of
Kenneth
Boulding’s
two
1984
books,
The
World
as a
Total
System
and
Human
Betterment.
See
references
below
for
full
details
on
the
books.
think
the
way
to
read
them
is
to
enjoy
them,
to
listen
to
overtones
and
undertones
and
not
to
take
everything
that
Boulding
has
told
his
dictation
machine
too
seriously
at
the
level
of
the
individual
sentence
or
single
paragraph,
but
very
seriously
indeed
as
a
total
construction.
At
this
point
a
reflection
on
individual
life
cycles
might
be
in
order.
Boulding
is
today
the
distinguished
Professor
Emeritus
of
Economics
at
the
University
of
Colorado.
He
is
no
longer
a
young
man,
he
is
in
the
early
stage
of
retirement.
It
takes
many,
many
years
to
arrive
at
his
level
of
reflection.
His
’career’
in
purely
bourgeois
terms
was
made
decades,
even
one
generation
ago
for
that
matter.
He
could
have
rested
on
his
laurels,
for
instance
after
that
penetrating
book
essentially
placing
economic
theory
in
a
broad
interdisciplinary
context,
The
Image,
a
book
which
as
far
as
I
can
understand
is
in
the
Nobel
Prize
class
of
economics.
But
he
did
not.
With
ferocious
intellectual
appetites,
stimulated
by
his
strong
moral,
sometimes
moralistic
concerns,
he
went
on,
and
on
and
on.
Buddhists
talk
about
eight
levels
of
consciousness,
not
necessarily
obtained
in
one
life
span.
Boulding
must
have
gone
through
several
and
one
day
it
would
be
interesting
to
have
him
reflect
more
on
his
own
intellectual
odyssey.
However,
the
point
I
am
arriving
at
is
simply
this:
the
role
of
perseverance
in
intel-
lectual
pursuits.
There
is
nothing
faintly
com-
parable
to
the
human
brain
as
a
place
for
storing
impressions,
processing
them
and
producing
at
times
fascinating
outputs.
We
are
often
told
that
this
capacity
diminishes
To continue reading
Request your trial