Guénon grounds social change in metaphysical first principles, not economics alone

Evidence

Yet Guénon shrewdly ties the concept of change in “social institutions”—by which he means all institutions that pertain to society, whether legal, economic, or strictly social—to first-order principles, making the metaphysical stand in dialogue with the mundane, temporal, and worldly. … The inability of Westerners to see the unity of the world as a moral order (bringing us back to the Distinction as being a condition of felicity) and hence seeing Eastern civilizations as fixed and rigid are the source of a “very real opposition … between the East and the West, at least as things are at present.” This “divergence is one sided,” it “being like that of a branch which grows away from the trunk,” a divergence that made “Western civilization” go “astray” from the rest of the world, but not without devastating consequences. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 310

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Distinction concept as a ‘condition of felicity’ — echoes earlier chapters in this same book and the broader thesis that Western modernity severed ethics from worldly affairs. — connects to: Plato’s Republic is best read as a theory of social change — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 29