The Hunt for the Law of Infinite Cornucopia
The obvious guess is that it comes from an obscure article of Kolakowski’s that is not available online. My other guess is that it is lurking somewhere in his multi-volume classic Main Currents of Marxism, of which I have read chunks but do not have copies handy.
Despite the lack of original sourcing of Kolakowki’s Law on the Internet, it appears that the person who originally brought the law to the attention of a wide audience was the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who referenced it in a 1996 article in The New York Review of Books and then again in a book of his. There is no footnote in either text.
This, then, seems to be one of those cases in which an entire superstructure of references is built on a rather flimsy base.
My curiosity growing, I e-mailed Garton Ash today inquiring where Kolakowski first articulated this elusive but profound law of political debate. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the source is obviously available on the Internet and that I missed it. Any Kolakowski scholars in the PJ community? If so, please e-mail me.
I shall report back to you.
Next time try Google Books, and be sure to put the search phrase between quotes.
Kolakowski is quoted on the law of infinite cornucopia on page 4 in the Introduction in Embattled Reason: Essays on Social Knowledge, Volume 2, by Reinhard Bendix. A footnote “4″ is added. The footnote appears on page 5 and says:
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 16.
Ah! Thank you, sir or madam! Google Books has not yet become a part of my search habits so naturally I overlooked it. I knew it would be a simple oversight on my part.
Odd, though, that it’s rarely cited to its original source.
I’m no fan of Google’s politics, but Google Books is one of the best things since sliced bread. They have editions that are centuries old there. Old journals, too. There’s also the Internet Archive at archive.org.
I’m used to using library-sponsored search engines like LexisNexis and other large databases, so I’m only now learning how great some of Google’s resources are.
Formally, this is trivial. There are an infinite number of rules, or laws, or equations, that will result in any finite series.
For example, the series (1,2,3) may be the first members of (1,2,3,4, …) or (1,2,3,5,7,11,13, …) or (1,2,3,3,3,3,3,…), … I guess you can see how that works. Wittgenstein once went on at great length about this, c. 1950.
For that matter, there are an infinite number of stories that begin, “Once upon a time, …”