philosophy.com'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marxthe demise of liberal illusions- June 30, 2008 In the 1920s Carl Schmitt provided a clear account of political theology, an approach to politics that very few modernists understood and systematically confused with theology as such. Schmitt's theory of political theology simply claimed that all political concepts are secularized versions of theological concepts, and, consequently, to attempt to vindicate their universality and uniqueness would have been an unwarranted recycling of theology. This is why Schmitt always emphasized the...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/the-demise-of-l.html Charles Taylor: expressivism- June 27, 2008 Charles Taylor has argued that an explanatory key to contemporary life is expresssivism: Expressive individuation, he writes in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. So much that we barely notice it. As Victoria Fareld observes in Charles Taylors Identity Holism: Romantic Expressivism as Epigenetic Self-Realization in Telos (Winter 2007) 'expressivism for Taylor refers to the most crucial interpretative tool in Taylors...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/charles-taylor.html Schmitt on the parliamentary liberal state- June 24, 2008 Schmitts political and legal thought has returned to the forefront of current debates within political theory. The interest in Schmitt's understanding of the political has been triggered by a growing skepticism with regard to liberal political thought, such as John Rawlss theory of justice and Kantian models of communicative action and discourse ethics, which both Jrgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck have sought to establish as models for a deliberative democracy with cosmopolitan reach. This...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/schmitts-politi.html liberalism's incoherence- June 22, 2008 A fundamental defect of liberalism is that it is founded on a contradiction. Liberalism purports to be a rationally transparent, culturally and religiously neutral account of objective reality, accessible to all human beings in terms of their shared universal reason. However, in truth, liberalism is merely one particular, debatable account among others, stemming from a particular debatable tradition of rationality. Highlighting liberalism as a tradition diffuses its primary rhetorical strategy..http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/liberalisms-inc.html a different world now- June 21, 2008 In theory, the liberal democratic state operated under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions. It is It has been obvious for some time that these...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/having-a-rest.html Old actions, new clothes- June 18, 2008 It is interesting to look back on the writings about the significance of 911 written in 2001 about the significance of those events. Thus Paul Piccone in So, This is the Brave New World in Telos says that since the US sees itself engaged in a war, it has: a right and a duty to mobilize; but since the enemy is only a criminal enterprise rooted nowhere in particular, but operating anywhere, the US need not bother, at least in the short run, with whatever happens to pass as international law...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/old-actions-new.html modernity's monsters- June 11, 2008 Russell Berman in the Introduction" to Telos Winter 2006 says: The promises of modernity have always been problematic. The aspiration to draw a neat line between a rosy present and a benighted past, the paradigmatic modern historiography, never adequately gauged the force of tradition. The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into the up-to-date illusions of reason. What modern thought derides as...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/modernitys-mons.html managerial liberal state- June 10, 2008 Paul Gottfield describes the managerial liberal state of today thus: What seems most significant about the alliance of mass democracy and the managerial state is that it leads to a radical and irreversible break from bourgeois society and its conservative liberal ideas. The new orders appeal to democracy is an attempt to justify a managerial revolution in which popular rule is reduced to plebiscitary procedures and democratic socialization by the state. The older constitutional liberalism is...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/managerial-libe.html neo-liberalism- June 8, 2008 Pierre Bourdieu in his Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1989), describes neo-liberaism thus A new kind of conservative revolution which appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) to justify the restoration and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market. It reifies and...http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2008/06/new-post-70.html |