Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics There is often a significant time lag between an idea and its expression. Being aware of that gap maybe necessary for appreciating the original idea for what it is. I am reminded of this in reading Raymond Geuss’ book Philosophy and Real Politics which…
“It is hard to see the citizenry of the United States at present as especially successful in furnishing themselves with good government under their uniquely time-tested and elastic democratic formula,” John Dunn, the English political theorist, observes in his profoundly unsettling book Breaking Democracy’s Spell
Can Democracy Work? is James Miller’s sequel to his book Democracy Is in the Streets of thirty years ago, In the intervening years he seems to have become less certain of the answer to the question whether democracy cam actually be made to work. The earlier book had been a…
“Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking? … We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession. But now we turn to our own country.”
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die
Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis is a tightly argued new book by Ci Jiwei that sets itself the dual task of analyzing China’s democracy deficit while doing so in a genuinely philosophical manner. Such an exercise in a “diagnostic” style of political philosophy is greatly more challenging than the…
Technology has transformed and deformed our long-evolved political order and it is likely to do more of that. A technologically enabled economic and financial system has certainly diminished the regulatory power of the state. Goods, services, and people can now move easily across continents, not always under the control of governments. Pictures, words, ideas, and information are massively channeled within and between political systems, often defying the power of states but also often abetting it. At the same time, the state’s tools of surveillance and repression have become definitely more effective. Its military strength has vastly increased and can be projected over wider distances. We notice, thus, a diminution of state power in some respects, but also an increase in others.
Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Penguin Books 2017, republished with a new preface 2018.
Joshua Green’s book has been somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury but it adds significantly to Wolff’s account and corrects it at some important points. It tells in fascinating detail the story of bad bargain the American people accepted when they elected Trump.
February 11, 2018. After reading Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House it becomes difficult to believe that the Trump presidency will have a happy outcome either for Trump himself or the United States as a whole. If this turns out to be the case, Wolff’s book will surely be read for a long time. Even if it comes otherwise, I hope the book will be remembered for its vivid depiction of a deeply disquieting moment in US history.
Poor Frankfurt School. Turn to the internet these days and you realize that the handful of German professors who go under that name are being held responsible for almost everything bad that has happened to society since … when? !990? 1970? 1945? Or even 1920? All these dates are being tossed around on those feverish websites. Neo-Marxism, cultural Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, sexual excess, postmodernism, political correctness, and all in all the entire “Western decline” are due to their nefarious doings.
David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick. The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Princeton Univerity Press 2020, xiv + 313 pp, $ 27.95. It was the morning of June 22, 1936. Shortly after 9 am Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was on the…
Does philosophy have a future? That is the question Raymond Geuss asks in his 2017 book CHANGING THE SUBJECT. PHILOSOPHY FROM SOCRATES TO ADORNO. And the answer he gives is unsettling. Philosophy, as we have known it, may, in fact, have already come to an end – sometime in the second half of the twentieth century – without any of us realizing this.
