thoughts in and out of season
Modernity attempts to achieve control through formalization. The great triumphs of modern natural science have come from exact measurement and mathematical modelling. Similarly, modern political and social systems substitute the simple and abstract concept of preference—the tendency of actors to choose some things over other things—for the more complex and subtle concept of the good. … More ...
A friend sent me a copy of a note he had written arguing against the neoconservative claim that the liberalism dominant today in the academy, the Democratic Party, and the New York Times is the illegitimate result of smuggling (bad) Leftism into (good) pre-60s liberalism. My response:
… More ...I agree with your overall argument. The distinction
Here’s a review by Joseph Stromberg of A. J. Conyers’ The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit. The book’s been out for a while now, and I haven’t read it yet but should. It seems to feed into the developing critique of the standard liberal view that the … More ...
The uniform view of the cultural Left—which includes everything that counts as mainstream from the standpoint of our bureaucracies of truth—is that nods by Republican leaders toward traditionalist cultural concerns prove that the GOP has been hijacked by fundamentalist wackos. That’s not rhetoric and spin, things really look to them that way. It’s clear … More ...
One of my main points here at Turnabout has been that if government sells itself as neutral administration and adjudication, then ultimate power belongs to whoever gets to say what knowledge is. Another has been that officially-recognized knowledge today is a matter of “expertise”: the views of self-contained bureaucracies of knowledge arrived at in accordance … More ...
Someone suggested in connection with my dialogue on liberalism, citing Norberto Bobbio, that the summum bonum liberalism proposes is validated by universal consent in the form of international human rights conventions. My response:
… More ...I can’t see international human rights law as a universal consensus on the highest good. The people who determine the policies
Freedom—the liberation of desire from restraint by other people’s understanding of the good—is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over … More ...
Can Christendom be restored?
Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.
The issue then is … More ...
Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy … More ...
Europe refers to a geographical area and a civilization. In the former sense it stretches in the West from Gibraltar to the British Isles, in the East to the Urals, and on the South to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian Sea. In the latter sense it has usually been more restricted. Napoleon said … More ...