What surprises me looking back is how much of what Hedrick Smith pointed out about the Soviet Union (self-serve gas stations, obsessive security, censWhat surprises me looking back is how much of what Hedrick Smith pointed out about the Soviet Union (self-serve gas stations, obsessive security, censorship) applies to the U.S. today. His remark that the Russians were told about our problems (unemployment, inflation, costly education) but not our welfare state solutions (unemployment benefits, COLAs, student loans), in light of 40 years of austerity, is just laughable today. I thought it was a fascinating and well written book at the time, but today it's little more than outdated propaganda. ...more
As the foreword notes, readers should not allow the absurd humor of this screed to mask its serious side, nor should the seriousness mask the humor. NAs the foreword notes, readers should not allow the absurd humor of this screed to mask its serious side, nor should the seriousness mask the humor. Nor should the class angle be ignored, for perceptive readers must ponder why Valerie Solanas has become such an ambivalent figure in modern feminism.
As an aside, I recommend the movie I Shot Andy Warhol for its superb performances and its enlightening representation of the events that brought fame to the author of this manifesto. ...more
William Labov's discussion of changes in American accents ends with a political conclusion, so the politics of language is decisive to this study. A wWilliam Labov's discussion of changes in American accents ends with a political conclusion, so the politics of language is decisive to this study. A word must be said later on this point.
This book's immediate concern is that in two important ways American accents are actually diverging. First is a recent vowel change known as the Northern Cities Shift. The second is the continued isolation of African American Vernacular English, which for its part is undergoing new changes that bring it no closer to standard English. The Southern accent is evaporating, according to Labov, as part of a process of convergence one would expect in a country held together by mass communication. So why the divergence of the other two speech patterns?
In the concluding chapter the author suggests that the shift in the accent of the North -- that is, the Great Lakes region -- is the product of ideology, a commitment to "making the world a better place" that sets this region apart from other parts of the country. After all, he notes, the shift was first seen in the 1960s among liberal, educated, upwardly mobile women in that area. He tells us, "If there is a social motivation to the Northern Cities Shift, it is interesting to think that it might be connected with the better part of our human nature."
An inescapable paradox of left politics in the United States is that its discourse, expounded in the mass media and academic settings, provides so much fuel for far right extremism. What causes those two to function primarily in relation to one another is their common basis in a political system that rejects any broad-based notion of equality: It's said that the Republicans want ten people to own the nation's wealth. The Democrats object that five of those people should be women.
The author does point out that in the ghettos of these same cities blacks do not share either in the accent or the privileged lifestyle it represents. He puts this down to racism. Fine. But if that's so, what makes the ideological commitments of those who speak with the Northern Cities Shift morally superior? One chapter associates the Northern commitment to fairness and equality with the region's solid backing of the Democratic Party. But that doesn't explain anything. The author seems simply to be taking sides in the culture wars between left and right. If Northern whites believe as the author says, and they very well might, then racism cannot be the fundamental reason for the inequality in Northern cities.
The book is good so far as it describes changes in American dialects. But in trying to figure out why, the author makes indefensibly partisan claims. Labov's scholarship is needlessly divisive, so much so that it left me wondering just how solid the research-based conclusions are. It is particularly questionable whether, based on the sample population, the author is justified in claiming that all speakers in the Great Lakes region have now adopted the Northern Cities Shift. ...more
This characterization of our self-presentation as analogous to a theatrical performance has a few interesting points to make, but the examples are datThis characterization of our self-presentation as analogous to a theatrical performance has a few interesting points to make, but the examples are dated and the social situations depicted often no longer occur or take place in a context of refinement not ordinarily encountered.
This exciting title delivers as promised -- it's a documentation of the philosopher Martin Heidegger's lifelong sympathies and connections to the NaziThis exciting title delivers as promised -- it's a documentation of the philosopher Martin Heidegger's lifelong sympathies and connections to the Nazi movement.
I expected to read more than the author gives us about the way in which Heidegger adapted his brand of existentialism to support fascist ideology. Farias instead puts heavy emphasis on academia and university politics, which, I suppose, are a necessary part of the story. We get prodigious accounts of such things as which rectors and deans of which universities attended what particular meeting, function, or seminar. It all goes to make the author's point quite convincingly, but much of the detail could have been shunted off to the appendix with no loss of integrity to the book's thesis. ...more
More and more these days the mavens of American opinion have taken pains to frame the Declaration of Independence as either a rhetorical relic or a naMore and more these days the mavens of American opinion have taken pains to frame the Declaration of Independence as either a rhetorical relic or a narrowly directed legal document. Here, author Alexander Tsesis tell us why they do: the assertion that all men are created equal found in the Declaration's preamble. That notion doesn't square with the reality today's political system.
And do the opinion makers mean to change that reality? It doesn't seem likely. Instead, they reason from it that the DOI must not have had much actual significance in American law and culture in the first place, or so the current trend in academics and the media goes. And that frames inequality as an insoluble problem. This book means to counteract that perception.
Tsesis dispels the notion that the Declaration of Independence is a meaningless document and further argues that quite the opposite is the case. He does it by showing how the preamble to the Declaration factored into debates over every legal and social turn in American history in which the idea of equality has a bearing.
By taking that approach the author's thesis becomes a little repetitive; at each point in the nation's history he demonstrates anew how the Declaration's preamble plays a key role in building the notion of equality into both law and popular culture.
I like the book. Although I've been generally aware of the importance of the preamble, I'm surprised at how effectively the book drives home the point. As an example, the author shows how the first blow against "aristocracy" in the United States came immediately in the wake of independence with manhood emancipation. This struggle to extend voting rights to men generally, not just those who owned significant property, was carried out in good part by veterans of the Revolution who had understood themselves to be fighting for the idea of equality designated in the preamble and held that as the explicit sine qua non of joining the new federation.
From then on, more intriguing instances of what was first thought of as a battle against "aristocracies" draw attention to the enduring efficacy of the preamble of the Declaration. Readers even encounter the argument negatively, for Tsesis points out how so many countries emulating the United States excluded any reference to equality in their own founding documents; he leaves it to us to consider the legal and social systems that resulted.
I recommend this book. It has greatly helped ground my understanding of the unprecedented power of this unique document....more
You won’t stick your hand down your bathing suit ever again after reading this. Bataille will see to that. And yet this author's misgivings about the You won’t stick your hand down your bathing suit ever again after reading this. Bataille will see to that. And yet this author's misgivings about the erotic seem somehow misplaced. They serve as springboards to jump off on tangents. Our writer throws in a bunch of psychoanalysis, too, but only insofar as it gets us to the religious take on man’s psychic esoterica.
But first let’s look at what Bataille gets right.
He starts with "continuity," an aspiration that for humans is the essence of being. It's what we discontinuous beings want from sex, but our primordial emergence from animal to human marks the change from nature to culture. Taboos meant to deny our animal side quarantine both sex and death so that we can get work done. Death, and then sex, become a kind of psychic violence: Either involves a transgression of taboos; either violates the status quo of culture.
This transgression generates eroticism. Religion for its part transforms transgression into sin. Thus, the Catholic Church becomes the most able defender of our humanity, preserving eroticism by upholding taboos.
At the same time, our need to work turns people into objects for other people, and only our animal nature can stop that. Sexuality, then, is “the greatest barrier to the reduction of a man to the level of a thing.” The erotic returns to humans their subjective dignity.
So the body becomes poetic and pure, and its erotic defilement is brought on by the sanctioned sin of marriage. Thus, the Church safeguards our dignity through its prohibitions.
Got that? Good. I'll buy it. But now Bataille starts to go off track.
Eroticism for him applies only to straight, married, pious males. He neither mentions nor acknowledges female sexuality, nor anything outside lawful relations. He wavers as to whether even this constricted eroticism is disgusting or not, but reaches no final verdict. This same waffling permeates most of his conclusions.
With sex equal to death, “man must die to live“ he keeps telling us. He bases this on the enormous expenditure of energy the sex act requires, energy denied to work. Bataille makes death look good and sex bad -- he might as well be talking about salmon and spiders.
He hammers away at the energy wasted by sex, forgetting that intercourse takes just a few minutes, whereas humans usually work all day long. I can’t tell what’s more in play here, the Church or the vogue of psychoanalysis, but similar flights of fancy come up later in The Denial of Death, a dreadful ripoff of the same theme.
Bataille’s discursive style gives his thinking a profound Hegelian veneer hinting of intellectual alacrity. But he seems to think Hegel grants us license to say just anything. His concept of eroticism is a floating abstraction backed up by hearsay upon hearsay, evidence like, “There is no reason to believe their [mystics’] experience is not genuine, according to people who know such practitioners.”
As the book goes on a frank disgust for the erotic emerges. The author uses the better part of one page to denounce obscenity, which he finds to be the creation of a “repugnant” class of people “vomited forth” by society. This bourgeois writer slams the lower classes for letting whores take over the streets, accusing them of intending to destroy society, refusing to work and using the “advantages of insubordination” to slake their lust. Erotic thoughts disturb him. He draws on his Church for support, but I doubt Catholic theology espouses the level of revulsion over eroticism that his writing achieves.
Beyond the diatribes the writing is clunky, repetitive, indifferent and archaic (“venereal orgasms“). The psychoanalysis and anthropology are outdated, and the Catholic references are suspect. The truth is, this book has no bearing on anything today. It’s hard to believe the author of Blue of Noon also wrote this flapdoodle, but I believe that's why I thought I'd like it.
Bataille is good at literature; he’s bad at social commentary. I advise readers to skip this one....more
What does “private property” mean, and who has a right to it? Jeremy Waldron takes up these two neglected areas of politics and philosophy. In doing sWhat does “private property” mean, and who has a right to it? Jeremy Waldron takes up these two neglected areas of politics and philosophy. In doing so he crosses territory already marked out by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, which means the discussion will build on those two authors. But he also takes up the argument for private property laid out during that same era by Robert Nozick. Waldron casts a wide net in order to look at the concept of private property from every angle. This wide scope is one of the strengths of his book.
Like so many political thinkers, Waldron takes us often to that famous “state of nature” that factors into so much of the the moral justification of politics. The author takes up John Locke’s conception of a state of nature, among others, in order to pinpoint our problem: How did something already out there in the natural world come to belong to certain people? Seeing how this question has been answered in the past sheds light on our present conceptions of private property. Waldron argues that the appearance of government ends the state of nature and abolishes original concepts of property, such as first occupancy, replacing them with newer conceptions.
The idea of a “right” to something comes under scrutiny, with Waldron noting that negative rights are in fact duties imposed on others. From this concept the author brings us to two implicit conceptions of “rights”: Special Rights and General Rights. Which is a the better conception, a right that guarantees the private property of certain people or one that guarantees the private property of all? In the background lie two famous conceptions of private property, that of Locke, who argues for private property as a special right of those acquire it, and Hegel, whose writings imply a general right to private property for all persons.
Waldron so far seems to be veering to the left, but he’s not ready to go Marxist on us. After all, he’s talking about our rights, not some utilitarian calculus or an argument for collective property, both of which he dismisses. As to Nozick, Waldron points out that his argument for private property in Anarchy, State, and Utopia depend upon a theory of distributive justice, much as socialist policies do. He faults Nozick for an absence of grounding principles in his book which forces libertarian and anarcho-libertarian conceptions of private property back onto Locke.
After many interesting chapters and unique arguments, Waldron comes to his point: What conception of private property could defeat a Marxist pessimism about private property and Marx's conception of public property as a means of avoiding injustice? Again he turns to Hegel, and here he looks to the very definition of private property to suggest an intriguing answer.
This book gives us a thorough, strongly argued case for Waldron’s conception of private property. I recommend it to every political reader for its penetrating reach. For even if Fukuyama’s “end of history” has put collective property out of reach as a concept to be opposed to private property, the kind of private property that could best serve this new world order is relevant, but unexplored, factor for the success of that order. ...more
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