A Horn-eye View of History

Abstract

This paper investigates how David M. Potter’s (1954) abundance hypothesis, which sees the American national character as having been powerfully shaped by “economic abundance,” can be updated and extended to other settings. It updates Potter’s work by connection with current research in brain science, suggests various reasons why his work has not received more attention, and proposes “economic scarcity” and a “victimhood hypothesis” as an explanation of late 19th-century imperial Japan’s expansion into Ainu lands and Korea. Connections are identified with brain science, the psychoanalytic theory of Karen Horney, and “history from within.”