Skip to main content

Home/ Politically Minded/ Group items tagged collision

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
thinkahol *

The Tea Party Is Challenging the G.O.P. - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-party-is-challenging-the-gop

Tea Party sThe Is Challenging the G.O.P. - Room for Debate NYTimes.comeems to be on a collision course with three key Republican factions conflicts which could fracture and even cripple that party.

shared by thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11
     
    The Tea Party seems to be on a collision course with three key Republican factions, conflicts which could fracture and even cripple that party.
thinkahol *

Is This the Way the World Ends? | Truthout - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...1307908449

Is This the Way World Ends? | Truthout

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Jun 11
     
    The world is not, however, out of the woods if you read Peter Nolan's superb book, "Crossroads: The End of Wild Capitalism and the Future of Humanity." Nolan's thesis is that unrestrained capitalism, its extremes and its contradictions, have put China, the United States and the world of Islam on a collision course that gives the world "the choice of no choice." Either these three models of culture and capitalism will find constructive engagement, or the world as we know it is in extreme peril - either from economic instability and social reaction, military conflict, or environmental destruction, or all of the above.
Arabica Robusta

West 86th - The Administration of Things: A Genealogy - 0 views

www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/...-administration-of-things.html

political theory

shared by Arabica Robusta on 03 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • “If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility
  • The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”
  • Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • All history, Comte argued, is a history of class struggle. Not the struggle between master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian—that was still a couple decades away—but the struggle between two classes of phenomena: “critical” phenomena that contributed to moral and political decay and “organic” phenomena that promoted individual and social regeneration.
  • The objective was to protect against arbitrariness in all of its manifestation. Earlier political thinkers had tended to associate arbitrariness mainly with absolutist governments, but for Comte any form of government was susceptible so long as it rested on “metaphysical” rather than “positive” principles.
  • Engels believed that the obsession with detail that had characterized utopian socialism—its compulsion to work out every last aspect of future social organization—is precisely what made it so utopian.
  • When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary.
  • “I think it was Trotsky who used a very plain but very telling metaphor,” the historian Isaac Deutscher told graduate students in a seminar on bureaucracy at the London School of Economics in 1960. “The policeman can use his baton either for regulating traffic or for dispersing a demonstration of strikers or unemployed. In this one sentence is summed up the classical distinction between administration of things and administration of men.”
  • Our hasty genealogy of the “administration of things” must conclude with its latest, and quite possibly last, iteration: Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” or Dingpolitik. Initially proposed in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991), then extended in a massive exhibition and accompanying catalog, Making Things Public (2005), Latour’s program has attracted a growing number of partisans in the world of political theory
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page