One of the most frequently used textbooks in political philosophy these days is by WIll Kymlicka, a professor at Queen's University in Toronto. Photo of Kymlicka here. Here, just for nothing, is its table of contents: 1. Introduction 2. Utilitarianism 3. Liberal Equality 4. Libertarianism 5. Marxism 6. Communitarianism 7. Citizenship Theory 8. Multiculturalism 9. Feminism If you're looking for me to say something profound about that ... I got nothing. But if you've got a kid or grandkid in college going for a political science degree, he or she will probably have either that table of contents or something similar in front of nose.
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As the importance of east Asia (not just China and/or Japan) in the global picture increases, it may behoove is to learn a little something about Pancasila. That is an Indonesian term, derived from Old Javanese words for "five" and "principles." It has become a political philosophy central to discourse in that country. The principles are: Belief in the One and Only God; A just and civilized humanity; The unity of Indonesia; Representational democracy as an expression of collective wisdom, and Social Justice for all Indonesians. Sukarno presented these principles in a speech on June 1, 1945, when the war in Europe was over and the end of the war in Asia, too, was in sight. Sorry to sound neocolonialist and all that, but ... is that list of principles as vacuous as it sounds?
There has been a lot of social media chatter about the sale of seeds in recent days.... https://twitter.com/jamie2181/status/1249516143502450691 As that tweet illustrates, a lot of people believe that either the federal government or a lot of state governments have made the sale of seeds illegal. That is not accurate, though it isn't entirely false. Agriculture is an essential business, and of course farms buy seeds. In a more urban/suburban setting, hardware stores are generally considered essential businesses, and they are allowed to sell seeds too, along with other gardening equipment. And Amazon will mail you seeds if you like. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=seeds+gardening So: what is the controversy? Stand alone greenhouses are NOT considered essential businesses in many states. They have been closed down. If that had been your avenue for buying the seeds for your backyard (or balcony) garden, you may well be ti...
Given Sanders' repeated reference to himself as a "socialist," arguments over the definition of the word have become very vogue. I want to contribute a thought today about a wrong way to proceed. A Facebook friend of mine, who shall go nameless, wrote as follows: "I'd say Stop Signs are socialist. I'd define it very broadly." What he is saying is that any government as the term is usually understood is socialist, because such an institution collects money, at least some of it non-voluntary, and uses at least some of that money for non-controversial purposes such as putting stop signs up in places that help avoid collision and death. There are at least two purposes to which such an argument may be put: If I know that you agree that the word "socialism" names something bad, I may use something like this to push you toward anarchism. On the other hand, If I know that you believe in some sort of government or other, I may use the argument...
Had things worked out a little better for him on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders would be in a position to regret his participation in the last round of Democratic Party rule making. There is a paradoxical tone to the situation that I have not seen anyone in print pick up on yet. So I guess I'll have to do it. Sanders is the most Rawlsian candidate in the race. Yet though the Rawlsian notion of justice works for him, the Rawlsian notion of a social contract that depends on a veil of ignorance works at the expense of a procedural position he has taken. To get this, we have to distinguish those two parts of Rawlsian social theory: the idea of the social contract, with of course traditional Lockean roots but filtered through game theory; and the suggested content of the contract, which the contractors supposedly agree to in the Rawlsian model. [That's a portrait of John Locke you're looking at, BTW. ] As to the contract: Rawls said that justice should be understood as the set...
In the Ian Fleming novel Goldfinger (let's forget about the Hollywood treatment for now), there is a remarkable moment involving M, James Bond's boss. This novel was published, let's remember, in 1959, during the heyday of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary affairs. There were strict rules in the UK, pursuant to the Bretton Woods agreement, about when gold could be taken out of Britain. Saying, "But I own this gold! I should be able to taken it on the cross-channel ferry with me if I want and sell it to the first Frenchman I met on the other side!" was not a defense, it was a confession. The Kingdom had a claim to that gold too, and if you as a subject of Her Majesty owned any gold you owned it, as a private person, only subject to that claim. The passage I want to quote today is in an early expository bit of the novel. Bond and M are both recipients of a lecture from an official of the Bank of England, who explains to them what nasty stuff...
"Suppose some of the people in your neighborhood (there are 364 other adults) have found a public address system and decide to institute a system of public entertainment. They post a list of names, one for each day, yours among them. On his assigned day. . .a person is to run the public address system, play records over it, give news bulletins, tell amusing stories he has heard, and so on. After 138 days on which each person has done his part, your day arrives. Are you obligated to take your turn? You have benefited from it, occasionally opening your window to listen, enjoying some music or chuckling at someone’s funny story. The other people have put themselves out. But must you answer the call when it is your turn to do so? As it stands surely not.” This is important, and a response to the "muh roads" arguments of statists. Yes I benefit from the existence of roads created by government edict. Yes, I plan to continue using the roads while arguing for anarch...
Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the Boston Globe has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homa...
I'd like to present today, without further ado, something David Hume wrote about the Tories and the Whigs of his day. As no party, in the present age can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues. ... The one party [defenders of the absolute and divine right of kings, or Tories], by tracing up government to the DEITY, endeavor to render it so sacred and inviolate that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party [the Whigs, or believers in constitutional monarchy], by founding government altogether on the consent of the PEOPLE suppose that there is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserv...
A new take on Plato's politics, GLAUCON'S FATE, will be available from Paul Dry Books in about a month. A new take on Plato's politics? A novel take on a subject that has been under debate for two and a half millennia? This speaks to a good deal of confidence on the part of the author, Jacob Howland, in the possibility that he really has something new to say. And the newness consists in looking to the frame story. The Republic begins thus (Socrates is speaking): I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the so...
The philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter recently wrote summarily, "Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche." For some of us in the peanut gallery, this raises the question: what the heck is a Straussian? The term arose in political philosophy and was in use back in the early 1970s, around the time Leo Strauss co-edited a textbook on the history of political philosophy with Joseph Cropsey. The term "Straussian" suggests several things. First, it is an approach to the classic texts of political philosophy that presumes that nearly every important philosopher in the canon was hiding something. Thus, texts must be read for their esoteric meaning. Second, related to this, the esoteric meaning was often irreligious. Political philosophy is full of thinkers who are in fact atheists but who have to hide the fact. Third, related to this in turn, Straussians suggest that these thinkers were right to hide the fact. Their own premise is that there is no God,...
In a new book, Yechiel J.M. Leiter offers a "Hebraist" interpretation of the political philosophy of John Locke. This view holds that, despite Locke's nominal affiliation with the Church of England, and thus by inference, with Christianity, the New Testaments play very little role in his thinking. Furthermore (on Leiter's view) classical Greek sources play only a minor role. Leiter says that Locke's views were formed largely from contemplation of the Old Testament. Leiter is not merely a man of ideas but a man of affairs in Israel. He has served as chief of staff to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Locke has always struck me as a schoolhouse pest, given a role as venerated sage in American secondary school education because of his importance to the founding generation, but not especially intriguing in the way that other great Brits, like Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith, often are. But perhaps Leiter's argument can induce me to give Locke another look. Leiter plac...
I have found this line online, attributed to Voltaire. "It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence." Now: Voltaire is one of those figures to whom things (passive voice) get attributed . Or, as I believe Benjamin Franklin wisely put it, "You can't believe all quotations you find on the internet." The inequality/dependence line seems as if it might have been created by someone intent on arguing against the New Deal, or some subsequent welfare-state sort of development, and backdated to Voltaire to give it some Enlightenment cred. Not that that's a bad cause. Regular readers of this blog know my sympathies. But deception mars every cause for which it is employed. [And a reasonable induction is that it is employed for all human causes.] So: I open this to my readers. What are the odds that actually comes from Voltaire? Or from anyone speaking or writing earlier than, say, 1932?
I mentioned Pufendorf here recently, very much in passing. But hey, why not devote a brief post to him? He does tend to get lost in quickie surveys of the Enlightenment figures, although he usually does show up in those lists. Here is a link to a discussion of some of his key views in Stanford's invaluable encyclopedia of philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pufendorf-moral/ Pufendorf's overriding project was to set natural law theory on a firm foundation. His presumption was that theology and exegesis was NOT a firm foundation, but a slippery sand of contending sects and state-sponsored devils quoting scripture for their own purposes. He wanted to start again with moral and political philosophy in much the way that Descartes recently had with metaphysics and epistemology. The equivalent of "I think," then ... in this writing? Consideration of what life would be like in a state of nature. Yes, Pufendorf -- a contemporary of John Locke -- had obvio...
The title of this blog entry, Republic of Equals, is also the title of a new book on political philosophy. The author, Alan Thomas, a philosophy professor at the University of York, and the head of the department there puts forth a theory of justice he calls "predistribution." The underlying idea is that a republic is valuable and sustainable only to the extent that the ownership of property and/or "access to capital," is widespread, that is, to the degree that there are institutional checks in place to prevent a drift toward oligarchy. Further, it is Thomas' contention that this "stable management of capital dispersion ... require[s] relatively extensive involvement by the state." The term "predistribution," which Thomas adopts from other thinkers, is a name for the idea that it is better to keep the horse in the stable than to try to chase down the horse after it has run away. Thomas' notion of justice, derived largely from a c...
Eric Voegelin was a political philosopher of some repute at the time of his death in 1985, but whose repute has fallen somewhat since. If one had to express Voegelin's views in one quick phrase, it would be, "gnosis is bad." Or, not so quickly, "Gnosticism is bad." Gnosticism in the relevant sense is a certainty about one's own rightness, usually coupled with a desire to create a heaven on earth. Bad stuff, that. Here is a great quote from EV: "[T]here has emerged a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning. This is not a matter of resistance to analysis – that existed in antiquity as well. It does not involve those who cling to opinions by reason of tradition or emotion, or those who engage in debate in a naïve confidence in the rightness of their opinions and who take the offensive only when analysis unnerves t...
Insofar as any individual is THE public voice and face of anarcho-capitalism these days, it is not me (alas) but Stefan Molyneux. Be sure to spell his first name properly when looking for information about him. Though there is a well-known Stephen Molyneux, he's different person. At any rate, Stefan's rise to prominence has made me grateful that I am no longer editor of a publication on anarcho-cap and related subjects. Were I still at The Pragmatist, I would be expected to say something about him. And the sort of thing one can say must be either (a) ranks-closed against the mutual statist foe, or (b) shocking/edgy/pointed. My own reaction falls between the two stools. I have had no journalistic responsibilities within the world of libertarian and anarcho-capitalistic theorising since well before 2005, the year Molyneux founded what has been his punditry base ever since, FreeDomain Radio, out of Ontario. I fear that Molyneux, on balance, harmed rather than advanced...
John Rawls saw himself as an heir of Immanuel Kant. I have long had this tidbit of knowledge stuck in the back of my head, a remnant of my law school days when Rawls was a common subject of discussion. But I've never bothered to document it. Recent interests have led me to do so, and among supporting texts I'll offer only three. One comes from the Preface, where he states clearly, that his theory is "highly Kantian in nature. Indeed, I must disclaim any originality for the views I put forward." A little later, in his Chapter One, he invokes Kant to explain the "original position," his reworking of the old idea of the "state of nature." This original position "is not, of course, thought of as a an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice." That phrasing seems to admit that the ...