Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

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why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

i'll contribute my best guess about that. I fear that left wing leadership in general believes quite strongly in the essential goodness of human nature. as a result, they consistently direct their narratives and appeals for support to our better side. they experience just enough success with this approach that they persist in it as their habitual mode of operation to a degree that no practical politician ever would.

to be fair, if left wing political leadership were to swing very far or very obviously away from their stated idealism they would risk alienating those who have responded most strongly to their idealistic positions and these are the people to whom they most directly owe their current position and power. this dynamic makes them vulnerable to the attack that they are out of touch with reality, or, if they have moved tentatively toward the center, the attack that they are 'mushy' or 'waffling'.

in practical terms, this has some explanatory power in regard to the successes of single issues in left wing politics. by isolating an issue it becomes easier to dissociate it from left wing politics as a whole, so that the center elements of the center-left coalition that eventually help the issue to succeed do not have to identify with broad left wing aims or tenets, but can address the issue on its individual merits. It is a variation of divide and conquer, dividing the center so that parts of it can be split off to form an ad hoc majority on that one issue.

a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Sunday, 26 June 2016 18:48 (eight years ago) link

but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization.

im not very smart or knowledgeable about this kind of thing, but i think this is a really insightful point. the post-marxist left is more or less founded on post-68 critical theory, but it's that same foundation which makes any actual program or sufficiently large coalition impossible to achieve (cf. deleuze's notion of an authentic leftism being devoid of content). and while im sympathetic to that deleuzian point it's also important to recognize that it is in no way a political point. this is the big failure and misunderstanding of a lot of critical theory on the left imo. there's no real politics in it at all--hence the massive and infuriating hyper-inflation of what counts as "political" thinking in a lot of current theoretical discourse. as a result the left devolves into the endlessly fragmenting forms of identity politics you see going on now and thus an "authentic leftism" becomes a kind of performance of absolute theoretical purity.

ryan, Monday, 27 June 2016 17:37 (eight years ago) link

(i also think there's also more than a touch of gnosticism in a lot of theoretically oriented leftist discourse, hence its essentially a-political slant at times)

ryan, Monday, 27 June 2016 17:39 (eight years ago) link

remember when 'everyone' was suddenly excited about the political potential promised in hardt & negri

last fall i did a 'name the last book you read' exercise and one of my students had read graeber over the summer, was hoping to read piketty, so i think that's indicative of how wide of philosophy the curious-to-be-political reading syllabus is going to be for some time

j., Monday, 27 June 2016 17:46 (eight years ago) link

I have a 15 year old unread copy of Empire on my shelf that testifies to that moment.

coming out of a Schmitt/Koselleck ---> Luhmann school I probably sit uneasily in the Left as currently construed but for myself I'd argue that one of the more important projects for the Left is to achieve an understanding of politics and political action that is more, and not less, specific and limited.

ryan, Monday, 27 June 2016 18:28 (eight years ago) link

recently i feel like the problem is that the left walled itself in -- it put all its eggs into articulating a dramatically different vision of society from capitalism and when the ussr collapsed (and chinese communism was forced to transform) it essentially lost touch with reality. there's never going to be the popular will for the dismantlement of the essential institutions and structures that provide order + stability to people's lives. the best thing the left could do is continue to mitigate the failures of capitalism and slowly guide the project along the historical route to communism, but that kind of incremental action is demeaned as neoliberalism (or "soft" neoliberalism, as i've heard recently, or third-wayism). the main difference obv should be that while neoliberalism uses progressive policy to perpetuate the capitalist system (take care of the people so they don't riot), a leftist incrementalism would see it as a process towards developing a more communist government (tho everyone at this point should be honest that it's always going to look a little hybrid - obv fully state-planned economy does not work). so a difference in goal and motivation, if not really in practice. the good news tho is that if the left embraced this we'd eliminate a lot of the idea that communists cannot work w/ socialists (or liberal democrats or whatever the more moderate left is calling themselves that week) bc they could contextualize these incremental reforms as inherently subversive. you see this psychologically too i think - as things get better the people demand more. even if the capitalist bankers see government jobs, or higher minimum wage, as a way of keeping the proletariat under control, they're making the changes that will fundamentally alter the system.

Mordy, Monday, 27 June 2016 18:35 (eight years ago) link

idk if anyone here missed it (i linked to it from the stalin thread) but ppl might find this thread worth checking out - mostly quotes i thought were interesting from some reading i did over the weekend re the left + the weimer republic: social fascism

Mordy, Monday, 27 June 2016 18:36 (eight years ago) link

not an expert by any means here, but i feel like a lot of the problem between socialism and capitalism is that for a socialist, the greatest imperative is to ascertain what the right thing to do is, and do it, whereas for a capitalist the question is what action will yield the best results. that's not to say that capitalists don't have values and socialists are never pragmatic, just the the two groups have different ethical hierarchies. for a capitalist, compromise necessarily implies compromising some of one's principles, which they are willing to do, but they will expect that anyone they compromise with do the same.

beyond that, perhaps compromise, as a relational mode, is so strongly identified with capitalism that expressing a willingness to compromise makes you look like a capitalist.

hypnic jerk (rushomancy), Monday, 27 June 2016 19:23 (eight years ago) link

i'm not sure i agree. you can have dogmatic capitalists and pragmatic socialists. for me it's the difference between economic liberalism / free market / adam smith and state-planned economy / regulated market.

Mordy, Monday, 27 June 2016 19:29 (eight years ago) link

hmmm. maybe it's that capitalists have the opportunity to put their ideas into practice on a much wider scale than socialists do. i mean, i guess you have that basic income experiment going on in oakland, but compare that to the much greater extent of micro-lending (the failure of which didn't become apparent until it was deployed on a wide scale) and you have a lot of socialists talking theory and a lot of capitalists talking about their experiences.

hypnic jerk (rushomancy), Monday, 27 June 2016 19:55 (eight years ago) link

partially though isn't that because communism has generally been a failure - in the USSR, in China, most recently in Venezeula. obv lenin would say that this also has to do w/ the inextricable link between capitalism and imperialism/colonialism (about which there's maybe room for skepticism but still it would explain why capitalism has been so persistent at getting their ideas out there). certainly while communism was a going concern tho it was being exported diligently. and also, tho this is obv an area ripe for discussion, ideologies associated with successful states are going to be more attractive. now the question is whether capitalist west was successful bc of historical contingency (aka for arbitrary non-ideological related reasons) and you can imagine a counterfactual where the eastern bloc is more powerful and so communism is v attractive, or whether capitalism was successful bc it's actually a better economic theory for developing nations / keeping stability. my reading of the literature suggests the latter to me - and even marx had his infatuations with the productivity of capitalism.

Mordy, Monday, 27 June 2016 20:03 (eight years ago) link

Socialism can try to be a theory of everything, the Right is much more comfortable with odd or contradictory alliances.

inside, skeletons are always inside, that's obvious. (dowd), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:08 (eight years ago) link

On the Question of Free Trade: Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition pamphlet

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created -- for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount; the industrial monopoly of England on the market of the world seemed more firmly established that ever; new iron works, new textile factories arose by wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on ever side. There was, indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was overcome, and the onward movement in trade and manufactures soon was in full swing again, until in 1866 a fresh panic occurred, a panic, this time, which seems to mark a new departure in the economic history of the world.

curious about the translation of the colloquial "anyhow," but anyhow, the attraction of free trade - in spite of the 'inevitable' crises it produces - is obv. 'productive forces expanding to such a degree,' that they rebel but if you can mitigate the rebellion and keep the system running you get all the production and limited downside. and maybe it's worth asking whether he was right anyway that they contain their own undermining - i mean in 2008 i looked at the world and felt like holy shit this is obvious what he was talking about, but otoh life is full of crises (which was what i was asking when i bumped the thread above) so to attribute a collapse to capitalism /inherently/ is not so certain and certainly when compared w/ equally (or more) unstable systems where you don't even get the production but you still get the crisis.

Mordy, Monday, 27 June 2016 20:09 (eight years ago) link

personally, i'm no more interested in lenin's excuses for the failure of soviet communism than i am in churchill's self-justifications on the topic of gallipoli. i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

hypnic jerk (rushomancy), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:20 (eight years ago) link

the far left is dead, everyone still claiming commie status is just fronting IMO

de l'asshole (flopson), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:42 (eight years ago) link

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

― flopson, Monday, March 14, 2016 4:54 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

de l'asshole (flopson), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:47 (eight years ago) link

i actually know ONE real honest-to-god communist. he reads Andrew Kliman and political papers, and he's part of a group that goes to industrial towns and give out pamphlets about the revolution to factory workers

de l'asshole (flopson), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:48 (eight years ago) link

Marxism is parlour games for members of a small, and unimportant cabal and attempts to use Marx as a tool for creating revolution is doomed to failure because literally everything he expected to happen to precipitate world revolution hasn't occurred, class as he understood it no longer exists, and his writing is almost completely non-programmatic.

The Nickelbackean Ethics (jim in glasgow), Monday, 27 June 2016 20:49 (eight years ago) link

i thought this piece by Mike Konczal was interesting in terms of figuring out what the whole 'democratic socialist' thing is all about

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders

but it's an extremely booj socialism (if it can even be called that) he describes. more along what we now see as yuppie craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality kinda stuff and 'you can't turn me into a commodity, maan' individualism than blood-thirsty class conflict and false consciousness. focus on tensions between the market and democracy, it's closer to what someone like Dani Rodrik or 'Political Economy of Institutions'-development people preach than raw-dog decommodification of the material economy.

de l'asshole (flopson), Monday, 27 June 2016 21:00 (eight years ago) link

topic for discussion: does bernie sanders understand how capitalism works? does he need to?

hypnic jerk (rushomancy), Monday, 27 June 2016 21:07 (eight years ago) link

wow this thread sucks

R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:01 (eight years ago) link

make it better

a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:03 (eight years ago) link

tbf he did post a link to a vice article about a year ago so what more do u want

Mordy, Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:06 (eight years ago) link

i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

^^^this

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:11 (eight years ago) link

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

also this

there is no capitalism or socialism, there are only degrees of mediation between the state and capital

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:12 (eight years ago) link

there is no capitalism or socialism, there are only degrees of mediation between the state and capital

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 2:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't political philosophy. this is a wet raspberry.

R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:17 (eight years ago) link

what day to day experience tho? who knows how to judge this shit objectively - it's not like their homes are being bombed out, or they're starving bc food hasn't been sent to the city in weeks, or they've run out of toilet paper. their serotonin levels more-or-less self-correct and like i said from a historically (or global) perspective they're all doing pretty okay. it's not like if they were doing 10% better they'd necessary feel differently. this kind of thing i don't think actually arises from a real phenomenology. and even if it did, it's not like it's particularly rational to cut off your nose to spite yr ugly face.

― Mordy, Friday, June 24, 2016 12:48 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ and this right up there with some rector shit (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mitt-romney-welfare-obama-robert-rector)

R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:20 (eight years ago) link

yeah i don't think the two are related - mostly bc rector is using a maybe similar argument to push for welfare cuts, whereas i was asking whether economic depravity is a compelling argument for why ppl vote for right-wing outcomes - aka the exact opposite of how he's using the argument. like maybe getting into the weeds of actual quality of life is a bad diversion but if the answer to "why are you voting against your economic interests" is "because my economic interests are not being represented" you're def dealing w/ some kind of paradox.

Mordy, Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:26 (eight years ago) link

and left-wing apologists like jill stein who want to claim that these reactionary political responses are really about economic alienation don't have a clear answer for why the most deprived voters are not voting for these outcomes. it's just a very shallow interpretation of a political phenomenon that suggests that they only see the world on a very determinist economic axis and don't really understand other elements to politics like tribalism, fascism/authoritarianism, nationalism/nativism, etc.

Mordy, Tuesday, 28 June 2016 18:28 (eight years ago) link

yeah, this thread sucks

R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), Wednesday, 29 June 2016 01:33 (eight years ago) link

god u suck what a fucking whiner

Mordy, Wednesday, 29 June 2016 01:34 (eight years ago) link

in my experience a lot of the movers and shakers at the concrete end of political activism, from migrant solidarity to housing campaigns to antiracist movements, are still the kind of ppl who'll read marx and other historical materialist stuff and to a certain extent 'theory' (tho not poor ol' hardt & negri any more) and in some way model their political practices on that background

my experience POSSIBLY a little skewed

god u suck what a fucking whiner

― Mordy, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at least i don't hate poor people

R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), Wednesday, 29 June 2016 13:58 (eight years ago) link

Who knows what you do besides shitpost

Mordy, Wednesday, 29 June 2016 14:01 (eight years ago) link

at least i don't hate poor people

― R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover)

is ok, they're not real poor people, they're KULAKS

hypnic jerk (rushomancy), Wednesday, 29 June 2016 15:52 (eight years ago) link

amazing propaganda posters here:
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/07/01/anti-bolshevik-propaganda-posters-metal-as-fvkk/

Mordy, Friday, 1 July 2016 16:15 (eight years ago) link

oh wau

Οὖτις, Friday, 1 July 2016 16:23 (eight years ago) link

one of my favorite blogs

Mordy, Friday, 1 July 2016 16:26 (eight years ago) link

two months pass...

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/teaching-trump-to-college-students/498158/

Trump’s effect on writing a syllabus has been to make this political controversy even more poignant. This is because for the last 50 years, most political-science professors have relied on what has become a standard framework. It comes from Louis Hartz, a Harvard professor, whose famous thesis states that both the left and the right in the United States are dominated by what he dubbed the “liberal tradition” (“liberal” in the older sense of the word and not as the opposite of “conservative”). The liberal tradition is an ideology that affirms individual rights, due process of law, and a separation of powers in government. Hartz believed this tradition was so ingrained in American culture that there had never really been a need for a distinct liberal party or movement but simply what he called “the American Way of Life.” On this view, ideological conflict in the United States has primarily been an intramural quarrel among conservative liberals, centrist liberals, and liberal liberals.

The dominance of the Hartzian paradigm is evident in the way the top textbooks in American politics (used to teach literally thousands of undergraduates every year) uniformly omit any extended analysis of fascism, communism, or any other non-liberal ideology. This omission was certainly standard practice among political scientists who taught introduction to American politics courses at Berkeley. What it allowed professors to do was paint the full ideological spectrum in the U.S. using the same brush. Everyone in America was more or less on the same side. No harsh lines needed to be drawn. Of course, whether intended or not, this assumption implied a kind of liberal triumphalism. Other ideologies could be ignored because all American roads led to one final destination—liberalism.

j., Thursday, 1 September 2016 04:03 (seven years ago) link

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-lion-in-winter/

 Memories of these times give the impression of a brilliant professor who possessed a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor. During a lecture in the university’s largest auditorium, a student interrupted to ask if Habermas “could express himself a little less complicatedly, for it was so difficult to understand him. One half of the audience applauded. He promised to do his best in order to be intelligible, Habermas replied, whereupon the other half of the audience started booing. To those who were now booing, Habermas continued, he could promise that his good intentions were bound to fail.”

j., Wednesday, 14 September 2016 15:25 (seven years ago) link

two months pass...

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter47.html

But after this doctrine, that the Church now militant is the kingdom of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament, was received in the world, the ambition and canvassing for the offices that belong thereunto, and especially for that great office of being Christ's lieutenant, and the pomp of them that obtained therein the principal public charges, became by degrees so evident that they lost the inward reverence due to the pastoral function: insomuch as the wisest men of them that had any power in the civil state needed nothing but the authority of their princes to deny them any further obedience. For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

The language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

The fairies in what nation soever they converse have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.

The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms, have the power to make those towns, cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.

The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.

In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism; nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return; or rather, an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state. And this is all I had a design to say, concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS. Which, when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.

awesome

j., Friday, 25 November 2016 01:50 (seven years ago) link

he rly liked that kingdom of fairies thing! i'm a big fan of this graf from several chapters earlier

As there have been doctors, that hold there be three souls in a man; so there be also that think there may be more souls (that is, more sovereigns) than one, in a Commonwealth; and set up a supremacy against the sovereignty; canons against laws; and a ghostly authority against the civil; working on men's minds, with words and distinctions, that of themselves signify nothing, but betray (by their obscurity) that there walketh (as some think invisibly) another kingdom, as it were a kingdom of fairies, in the dark.

difficult listening hour, Friday, 25 November 2016 06:21 (seven years ago) link

strange echo at the beginning there of an unborn freud

difficult listening hour, Friday, 25 November 2016 06:28 (seven years ago) link

Was wondering if he had read Kirk's "The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies", but I think they missed each other,chronologically.

Eallach mhór an duine leisg (dowd), Friday, 25 November 2016 10:17 (seven years ago) link

one month passes...

sheldon wolin on hobbes:

The state of nature symbolized not only an extreme disorder in human relations, causing men to consent to the creation of an irresistible power; it was also a condition distraught by an anarchy of meanings. In nature each man could freely use his reason to seek his own ends: each was the final judge of what constituted rationality. The problem posed involved more than the moral issues arising from man's vanity or his desire for pre-eminence. It was a genuinely philosophical one involving the status of knowledge....

[Man] alone of all the animals possessed speech and was capable of science, yet he alone could turn speech into deception, ideas into sedition, learning into mystification.... These ironical overtones rule out interpreting the state of nature as belonging to the remote past... Instead, it represented an imaginative reconstruction of a recurrent human possibility ... built on the causes and consequences of political breakdown. Its meaning remained eternally contemporary and urgent....

In this sense, the concept did not belong solely to the past or even to the present. Its status was that of an ever-present possibility inherent in any organized political society, a ubiquitous threat which, like some macabre companion, accompanied society in every stage of its journey. It was present each night, as men sealed themselves in their homes and succeeded only in locking in fear.... The content of the state of nature could be filled in by consulting "the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to generate into, in a civil war."

difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 11 January 2017 20:25 (seven years ago) link

what do people really mean when they say 'i'm wary of rights talk'?

j., Thursday, 12 January 2017 03:51 (seven years ago) link

xp the first book of leviathan, with the epistemological stuff in it, is pretty amazing

j., Thursday, 12 January 2017 03:53 (seven years ago) link


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