References

This retrospective essay on left-wing organizing examines how movements can move from exposing oppression toward building effective resistance, with this excerpt arguing that criticism must be accompanied by achievable goals, hopeful visions, and recognition of victories if it is to inspire action rather than cynicism.

Leading leftist activist, speaker, and writer; co-editor of Z Magazine

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I agree with you and I think we have to take some responsibility for it. For 30 years we have done consciousness raising around how bad things are, around the broad systemic causes of the ills that people suffer. But where was the consciousness raising around what we want, about goals, about means of accomplishing change, about our prospects for victory? In the absence of insight into future possibilities, growing awareness of the scale of oppressions and their tenacity breeds cynicism and not resistance. I think that is largely our plight. Of course it doesn’t mean we should stop pointing out the systemic causes of oppression, stop naming the enemy. But it does suggest that we have to give a lot more attention, as well, to vision and strategy, and to creating organizational forms that can protect people against depression and nurture opposition. I remember in the early New Left there was this particular speech that Carl Oglesby gave. In it, he railed at liberals and named imperialism, not just bad policy, as the real culprit in Vietnam. This kind of systemic “revelation” (and others about gender and race and poverty and so on) was very powerful then, because it was so new and eye opening for almost everyone. Now, 30 years later, revelations from the left about how bad the society’s institutions are rarely go beyond what people already take for granted. Our negative critical messages don’t generate anger and action, but only pile up more evidence of the power of the state into the mountain of belief that the enemy is beyond reach that already weighs so heavily on people. What is needed is desire, hope, and vision. But what almost everyone spends their time on is enumerating ills. Why? I honestly don’t know. Why don’t writers and speakers, as just one example, devote themselves more to what we want and how we can get it, rather than always emphasizing what we are against? It causes us to appear negative, rather than inspirational. It doesn’t give orientation and hope. Maybe it’s habit or maybe everyone is emulating a few people who do this very well rather than moving on to other tasks, so there becomes an imbalance. Maybe some people’s perfectly justified worries about sectarianism and authoritarianism have confused them into thinking that one should avoid vision, one should avoid strategy, instead of working to make both into open and public possessions. There is another phenomenon on the left, we might discuss that relates to how we deal with cynicism and how we often seem to feed it rather than reduce it. Tom Hayden—who is far more insightful than his later career leads some folks to believe—likes to say that the left has a penchant for grasping defeat from the jaws of victory (thus turning a cause for celebration and hope into a sign of inevitable decline and loss). I think he had in mind two related things. First, we are often so caught up in analyses of how horrible everything is that we don’t see that there are good things out there too. It is as if to celebrate progress, or to even admit progress, is to somehow negate our critiques. What a debilitating notion. Hayden was also highlighting that when the left wins something, such as an end to a war or affirmative action or higher wages, or whatever else, the gain is, of course, enacted by the powers that be. They sign the bill or end the war or whatever, and then they take credit for it and denigrate the left as having been just an annoying obstacle to reaching these ends. The left often accepts this manipulative spin and views its own success in forcing elites to comply as if it were a crass cooptation. We grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.

This practical organizing manual offers a guide to building grassroots organizations that enable disadvantaged communities to gain political and economic power, and this excerpt belongs to its discussion of means and ends, arguing that organizers should mobilize people's actual motivations rather than demand morally pure reasons for supporting desirable changes.

Community organizer, generally considered the founder of modern social activism

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With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason—this is a fight with a windmill. The organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved, although it may have been achieved for the wrong reason—therefore he should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals.

Hannah Arendt argues that civil disobedience, rooted in America’s associational traditions, deserves legal recognition as organized, public dissent. why the French experience became such an influential model for later revolutions.

Political theorist; Professor, University of Chicago

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“THINGS of this world are in so constant a flux that nothing remains long in the same state.” If this sentence, written by Locke about three hundred years ago, were uttered today, it would sound like the understatement of the century. Still, it may remind us that change is not a modern phenomenon but is inherent in a world inhabited and established by human beings, who come into it, by birth, as strangers and newcomers (υέoτ “the new ones,” as the Greeks used to call the young), and depart from it just when they have acquired the experience and familiarity that may in certain rare cases enable them to be “wise” in the ways of the world. “Wise men” have played various and sometimes significant roles in human affairs, but the point is that they have always been old men, about to disappear from the world. Their wisdom, acquired in the proximity of departure, cannot rule a world exposed to the constant onslaught of the inexperience and “foolishness” of newcomers, and it is likely that without this interrelated condition of natality and mortality, which guarantees change and makes the rule of wisdom impossible, the human race would have become extinct long ago out of unbearable boredom. But if change is constant, the velocity of change is not. It varies greatly from country to country, from century to century. Compared to the coming and going of the generations, the flux of the world’s things occurs so slowly that the world can almost be called stable. Or so it was for thousands of years— including the early centuries of the modern age, when first the notion of change for change’s sake, under the name of progress, made its appearance. Ours is perhaps the first century in which the speed of change in the things of the world has outstripped the change inherent in the human condition. (An alarming symptom of this turnabout is the steadily shrinking span of the generations. From the traditional standard of three or four generations to a century we have now come to a life expectancy per generation of four or five years.) But even under the extraordinary conditions of the twentieth century, which make Marx’s admonition to change the world sound like an exhortation to carry coals to Newcastle, it can hardly be said that man’s appetite for change has cancelled his drive for stability. It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. Obviously, neither man’s capacity for change nor his capacity for preservation is boundless, the former being limited by the extension of the past into the present—no man begins ab ovo—and the latter by the unpredictability of the future. Man’s urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order.

This essay on race and inequality responds to disputes over cultural explanations of racial inequality, arguing that educational expectations, family structures, and other cultural norms deserve attention alongside racism and structural disadvantage, drawing on comparisons among Black Americans and Black immigrant communities to advocate greater emphasis on personal responsibility and opportunities for improvement.

Writer and journalist; contributor, City Journal

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Social Order, Politics and Law Sep 27 2022 / Share The rising tide of political correctness has thwarted honest discussion about the centrality of culture in shaping life outcomes. That cultures vary widely in their prioritization of education, family, and vocation has become an unspeakable proposition on the left.

This essay on collective emotional practice and empowerment work, written about fears surrounding the Y2K computer problem, describes how practices developed in response to nuclear-war anxiety can help people transform despair into shared commitment and action, with this excerpt explaining how acknowledging fear can reconnect participants with their underlying care for life and the future.

Founder, Co-Intelligence Institute

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Apocalyptic Y2K expectations can make us afraid, depressed and numb. Intense emotions like this can wipe us out -- to a point where we can't act effectively. But it turns out there is a gift hidden at the core of these emotions, a gift that gives us power.

But first a bit of history.

During the 1980s some peace activists realized that their fellow citizens were paralyzed by fear and powerlessness in the face of the threat of nuclear war. They observed people lost in denial, trying to go about their lives as if the threat didn't exist. Wanting to learn more abouit this phenomenon, these activists listened carefully to these haunted people -- and searched their own hearts, as well. They discovered that under everyone's denial was a deep caring for their lives, their children's future, and the fate of their world. From that insight, these activists developed a number of emotional and spiritual approaches to help people in groups break through their denial and despair to contact that deep caring. Once they got in touch with their shared feelings and stories and passion for life, such groups often found a new vitality and determination to do something about the problem. Buddhist scholar and systems thinker Joanna Macy, pioneer in this work, called it "despair and empowerment work." A number of people who were involved with that work a decade or more ago, are now evolving new forms which they are applying to threats such as ecological collapse and the socioeconomic collapse that could be triggered by the Y2K computer problem and our dependence on technology. John Steiner of Boulder CO, writes of the method he's working with: "We are finding how important it is to do fear and empowerment workshops re Y2K. A group of us have done several afternoons on all the assaults from nuclear war on down that we are facing and then going deeply into our fears (Y2K) and then coming out the other end with a sense of power and vision."

This philosophical treatise on the good life argues that a good life depends more on meaning, achievement, and engagement with worthwhile pursuits than on maximizing happiness.

Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Fredonia

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A minimally worthwhile life is one worth living […] The bar of a meaningful life is quite low.

This international law article argues that deference to states and traditional self-determination encourages extinction rather than survival, and that educating people about the link between death and geopolitics first requires reducing the perceived threat of nuclear war.

Professor of International Law, Purdue University

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Rather than rescue humankind by freeing individuals from fear of death, this perspective recommends educating people to the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and geopolitics. By surrendering ourselves to States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but premature and predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely understood. There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus of geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations all over the planet turn increasingly to States for security. It is the dreadful ingenuity of States that makes possible death in the billions, but it is in the [*24] expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety. Indeed, as the threat of nuclear annihilation looms even after the Cold War, 71 the citizens of conflicting States reaffirm their segmented loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason that is, after all, the most indelible badge of modern humankind. As a result, increasing human uncertainty brought about by an unprecedented vulnerability to disappearance is likely to undermine rather than support the education required. Curiously, therefore, before we can implement such education, we will need to reduce the perceived threat of nuclear war 72 and enlarge the belief that the short-term goal of nuclear stability is within our grasp.

This international law article argues that fear of death is essential to the survival of states as well as individuals, claiming that Israel's insufficient existential dread leaves it unable to take the steps needed for collective survival.

Professor of International Law, Purdue University

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Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not only for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an incapacity to confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance. So it is today with the State of Israel. Israel suffers acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness and growth. For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether critical benefits of "anxiety."

This popular essay on psychology and critical thinking explores the psychological and social reasons intelligent people cling to flawed ideas and resist changing their minds.

Author and former Microsoft program manager

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be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you’re arguing with aren’t as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren’t as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.

This historical and political commentary traces parallels between left-wing movements and fascism to argue that the contemporary left reproduces authoritarian habits.

Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

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For them it is the whole system that is wrong, the alleged 'systematic racism,' not the real crimes of the lawbreakers. An unqualified attack on 'the system' was a hallmark of the Nazis' rhetoric against the democracy of the Weimar Republic.

This role-playing video game is set in a post-nuclear-war Washington, D.C., in which the player survives a devastated wasteland.

Video game developer, Rockville, Maryland

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War. War never changes.

This essay on social theory argues that society needs a pluralistic, realistic "Neo-Utopianism" that offers clear visions of the future, countering both postmodern relativism and fundamentalist certainty.

Social researcher, Strategic Educational Planning Institute

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Many of us need clear visions of our possible futures in order to live as human beings on this earth. But we need, a new, more practical form of utopianism than what has existed in the past. We need Neo-Utopianism.

A rational social science would offer a coherent vision of the innate possibilities of humans, and this vision must incorporate our social values. Values underlie the pictures or scenarios we create about the future. Indeed, some scenarios are mini-utopias. Futurist methodologies will probably be a basic functional tool by which we might construct a Neo-Utopianism.

Human society cannot conduct itself rationally without a clear idea of where it wants to go. (Clear ideas would be a better term, because Neo-Utopianism should be pluralistic in order to avoid the totalitarian, know-it-all temptation that has doomed utopian experiments in the past.) We must have a vision of the kind of future we want in order to make rational decisions on a daily basis. Having a vision and being a realistic visionary are absolute necessities for functioning as a rational human being.

The primary human survival tool is not instinct but the reasoning mind evaluating the human environment. Those who are better at this usually have more successful lives. Societies and cultures that encourage this kind of thinking are usually much more developed.

The rational Modernists were simplistically optimistic about the perfectibility of a planned human society. The Postmodernist critique identified the simplistic hubris of Modernism and showed how this hubris resulted in catastrophe in ecology, politics, economy, etc. Postmodernism gave us wisdom about the limitations of power. An anonymous hacker shutting down AOL or hacking into a government computer system is an example of a Postmodern assault on Modernist hubris.

But today we have graduated to an even higher wisdom-that criticism of simplistic visions is not enough, that human society absolutely requires visions of where it wants to go, and that without such visions it is impossible to conduct society in a rational way. These visions might be vague, but exist they must if a culture is to be vigorous and healthy.

The question is, on what basis do we make our judgments? If we do not have a clear vision, or if we have several alternative visions, then how do we make rational decisions? If we do not have a future ideal of the kind of life we want, we cannot judge the practicality or the value of judgments we make in our daily lives.

A plurality of visions may be necessary for practical reasons in such a rapidly changing world, and not only to avoid the totalitarian temptation. Neo-Utopianism must reflect the uncertainties of the future, and it must embrace a cosmos that is "progressively evolutionary, infinite in its capacity and comprehensible," as Eric J. Lerner writes in his brilliantly original book The Big Bang Never Happened (Times Books, 1991). UTOPIAN THOUGHT AND FUTURISM There is a socio-psychological price to be paid for the death of utopianism. Observe the number of people in the modern world who seem to float through life rudderless, without a clear view of their own value as human beings. They are so confused about the complexities of modern life that they shut off their cognitive, rational faculties and try to fill the subsequent spiritual vacuum by going shopping, taking drugs, getting involved in cults, getting religiously "saved," getting "into" New Age fads, and so on.

Human beings are the only species that can conceive of the future, the only species truly cognizant of its own mortality. The resulting angst leads us into the future-conceiving business. Religions long had a monopoly on the far future (the end of days, the coming of the Messiah, eternal life, eventual human salvation, life after death, reincarnation, etc.). With the rise of Modernism, science began to replace religion in areas amenable to quantitative measurement. Futurism has attempted to make this process more comprehensive and as rational and as realistic (i.e., connected to reality) as possible.

Utopianism was one of the foundational building blocks for futurism. Now futurism must serve as one of the foundational building blocks of a Neo-Utopianism.

Modern utopianism coincided with the secularizing process of the Renaissance. People were beginning to shed their certainty about the future, such as the guarantee of an afterlife, provided by religion. This uncertainty was reflected in the plays of Shakespeare, the first truly modern writer, who anticipated the angst of modern man. "To be or not to be, that is the question." Utopian speculations, in all likelihood responding to this incipient angst, offered secularized versions of a possible end of days as it pertained to human society on this earth.

One of the positive aims of Postmodernism was to attack human certainty (moral, scientific, or political) as insufferable hubris. While Postmodernism has performed a valuable service in critiquing Modernist ideology, it is essentially nihilistic. It offers no coherent alternative to Modernism. Indeed, Postmodernism would view the very search for coherence as a Modernist pretension.

But if humanity is to survive and have a meaningful existence, then the intellectual project of the twenty-first century must be to move from Postmodernism to Neo-Modernism. We must reinstate the Enlightenment ambition to create a "Science of Man." We must become Neo-Utopians. Neo-Utopian thought can find support in a New Science of Man based upon new developments and insights in the biological and cosmological sciences and from genetic research giving us ever-increasing knowledge about life itself. RECOGNIZING THE THREAT Secular humanism, an outgrowth of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment, has been one of the foundation blocks of Modernist ideology. But its growing spiritual inadequacies, such as its lack of certainty about the future, have led to the radical moral relativism of New Age Postmodernism on the one hand and a return to the bedrock certainties of religious fundamentalism on the other hand.

Both these extremes feed off of one another, and both, together and separately, are very dangerous for the future of human society. Only a Neo-Utopianism can offset this double trend and reinvigorate the secular humanism that is the necessary meta-ideological underpinning of constitutional democracy.

Utopianism meets our fundamental need to improve things, to believe in the improvability of life. Is the United States better off because academic research has "proven" that the "American Dream" was a manipulated myth? Is Israel better off because intellectuals have "proven" that the "Zionist Idea" was flawed at its very inception? Is anyone better off because radical Greens have" demonstrated" that human beings are basically pests infecting Mother Nature?

Neither individuals nor societies can function efficiently and flourish in an atmosphere of declining self-esteem. Human beings are not just economic beings or cultural beings or social beings. They are first of all heroic beings, who require a heroic image of their own future in order to stimulate and sustain the energy capable of bringing out the best of their being.

This is the task of Neo-Utopianism; not a blueprint, but a vision of what things could be like and should be like. THE VALUE OF NEO-ROMANTICISM Let us describe the new mood--the yearning for a heroic image of the human future-as Neo-Romanticism. A Neo-Utopianism would want to change the focus of Romanticism. It would want us to be romantic about the future-not about the past.

Romanticism is that literary genre which sees the human being as a heroic creation and deals with human life as it ought to be, in light of heroic human nature, and not as it is. Romanticism contrasts with Naturalism, which views and even celebrates life as it is. Futurism is, in a way, a realistic Romanticism. It does not deal in fantasy or wishful thinking, but in the rational organization of empirical fact in order to assist us in constructing positive alternative visions of our future.

Rather than an idealized nostalgic attachment to the past, let us cultivate a Romantic attachment to the possibilities of the future. We will live in the future and not in the past; therefore, the future is more important than the past, and if we are to love our own lives we must learn to fall in love with the future.

Let me be clear and precise: The call for vague visions and Romantic attachment does not justify mushy and impractical thinking. The challenge must be clearly and precisely formulated and must reflect reality, not wishful thinking. The challenge must be long term, but not so long term as to be inconceivable. Any vision that transcends 100 years in the future is usually in the realm of fantasy and science fiction-interesting, but essentially useless. GETTING THERE FROM HERE I will formulate a possible NeoUtopian challenge as a question, hoping by doing so to avoid the totalitarian tendency of positivist utopianism. The question is: "How can we create, by the year 2100, a planetary human society composed of 12 billion people with an American standard of living with one-tenth the negative environmental impact that present human society has on nature?"

What research and development policies, international trade policies, tax policies, space exploration policies must we pursue in order to achieve such a vision? This is a practical question that will engender numerous alternative possible answers. The debate, therefore, will be utopian, but pluralistic and nontotalitarian.

By clearly defining the challenge, we will have avoided the imprecise, wishful thinking of New Age Postmodernism. A Postmodernist would meet this challenge by calling to lower the world's population from 6 billion to 2 billion within the next century and to "educate" the remaining 2 billion to adopt the way of life of a European village before Charlemagne. This is neither clear nor moral thinking, its immorality being a direct consequence of its lack of clarity. To attain such a goal, we would have to exterminate a few billion people, forcibly sterilize a few billion more, and reeducate the remainder, in the Rousseau/Robespierre tradition of "forcing people to be free"-a chilling oxymoron that began with the guillotine and ended with the gulag.

Most people want a clean environment, not so much because of theories about human-induced global warming, but because of much more banal and selfish reasons. People do not require a grand theory of global warming to be in favor of a clean environment. We favor a clean environment because we do not want to breathe, drink, or eat befouled air, water, or food.

Whether the theory of human-induced global warming is correct or not is beyond the point; any future vision of society that includes a clean environment must argue its case on the basis of the interests of real human beings living real lives in a sophisticated technological society.

Most human beings have no intention of giving up their technological lifestyle, and billions more aspire to a technological lifestyle. Frantic, self-righteous calls by neurotic dropouts to give up soap and hot water and live in teepees are not likely to have wide appeal. NEO-MODERNISM: A BETTER APPROACH A practical utopian ism would not require people to give up modern dentistry in order to save the environment.

Indeed, modern dentistry might be the greatest justification for the inherent human morality of the Industrial Revolution. When you go to a dentist, you are giving sanction to the metallurgical, chemical, electronics, and pharmaceutical industries, as well as to industrial civilization in general, which has provided both the technical means and the surplus wealth to train the dentist.

The Modernists were right: The Industrial Revolution was the greatest event in the history of humanity. In 1750 in France, 70% of children died before the age of 5, the life span was less than 40 years, most people were toothless by their late teens, and only a minority of the population could read and write. How many sane people would want to return to such an era? Yet it is this very gloomy "utopianism" that we are being offered in some anti-modernist quarters.

A practical utopianism would be based upon a Neo-Modernism that accepts the Postmodern critique of the hubris of Modernism but rejects Postmodernism's radical relativism and lack of coherent vision. Embracing science and reason, Neo-Utopianism would have a good chance at being relevant and offering positive direction for human civilization. It would enable us to once again instill human society with purpose, rejuvenating human culture around a coherent, yet pluralistic, framework of ideals and values. This would be utopianism come of age.

This article on postmodern international theory argues that every social order and form of thinking excludes what does not fit its view of the world.

Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland

Every social order, even the ones that are based on the acceptance of difference, excludes what does not fit into their view of the world. Every form of thinking, some international theorists recognize, expresses a will to power, a will that cannot but ‘privilege, oppress.’

This international relations article defends humanist photography of HIV/AIDS in Africa against the claims that it aestheticizes suffering and causes compassion fatigue, arguing that both critiques have been convincingly rebutted.

Roland Bleiker — Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland; Amy Kay — co-author, University of Queensland

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Two main interrelated critiques have been raised against such forms of humanist photography: that it aestheticizes suffering and that it leads to compassion fatigue. We believe that both critiques are not warranted, at least not in an unqualified manner. The former critique is epitomized through a prominent essay by Ingrid Sischy (1991: 92) about Sabastião Salgado’s beautiful and politically engaging photographs. She found them problematic insofar as they “anesthetize” the viewer. “The beautification of tragedy,” she stresses” results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity toward the experiences they reveal.” This passivity, some commentators assert, is reinforced by the very confronting nature of photographs like those by Hooper. Shock can only work for a limited period of time before its mesmerizing capacity looses sway. Even the most horrific image becomes banal when it is repeated ad infintium. It may end up normalizing suffering, and thus rending the viewer numb and indifferent (Sontag, 1977: 19-20; and Dean, 2003: 88). The result, some stress, is what Susan Moeller (1999) termed “compassion fatigue” or, as it might be called in the case of our specific topic, “AIDS fatigue.” Both of these critiques have, we believe, been dismissed convincingly by scholarly literature. David Campbell (2004: 62), for instance, demonstrates that the compassion fatigue position cannot be sustained in an unqualified manner, not least because there is widespread evidence that the public often reacts generously when charity organizations appeal for help (see also Cohen and Seu, 2002: 200).

This essay on debate culture argues that the spread of kritiks and critical theory in high school debate rewards nihilism and teaches students that reform is hopeless.

Former competitive Parliamentary debater (competed from age 12); writer for Slow Boring

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When debaters reject the topic and advocate for these critical theories, they choose not to engage in pragmatic policy discussions. Instead, they condemn American institutions and society as rotten to the core. They conclude that reform is hopeless and the only solution is to burn it all down. Even if they’re not advocating for kritiks, in order to succeed at the national level, debaters have to learn how to respond critical theory arguments without actually disagreeing with their radical principles.

High school debate has become an activity that incentivizes students to advocate for nihilist accelerationism in order to win rounds. It’s the type of logic that leads young people to label both parties as equally bad and to disengage from electoral politics. What most normal people think debate is about — advocating either side of a plausible public-policy topic — is no longer the focus. With kritiks taking a larger share, debate is increasingly societally rejectionist. Too often the activity is no longer a forum for true discussion, but a site of radicalization.

This essay on political theory argues that the retreat from politics into localism and anti-politics leaves global problems unsolved and may let authoritarian elites fill the vacuum.

Professor of Social Sciences, National University, Los Angeles

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The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites an already familiar dynamic in many lesserdeveloped countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75

This international relations article defines security as the absence of threats and argues that emancipation from war, poverty, and oppression, rather than power or order, produces true security.

Professor of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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"Security" means the absence of threats. Emancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security.

This paper presents the simulation argument: at least one of three propositions must be true, one of which is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Philosopher; founding Director, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford

This working paper on the ethics of artificial intelligence analyzes when superintelligence should be developed, weighing the interests of people who are alive today.

Philosopher; founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute (2005–2024)

This environmental history article argues that land managers cannot "do nothing" in dynamic ecosystems and that the basic goal of management should be minimizing the rate of species extinction.

School for Environmental Research, Charles Darwin University

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Land managers can use the enormous complexity of landscape change and the absence of clear goals as an excuse not to act. But this strategy ignores a basic lesson from environmental history that it is impossible to 'do nothing' in dynamic systems. I suggest that the most basic goal of land management should be to minimize the rate of species extinction, particularly in largely intact landscapes and to maintain or restore ecosystem services, such as potable water, in degraded landscapes. In this regard a historical perspective provides an important context to detect marked declines in species populations and ecosystem function.

In this Supreme Court decision, the Court held that the government may punish advocacy of illegal action only when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it.

Supreme Court of the United States

This work of critical political theory argues that critical theory must reconnect with institutions and public political aims, because emancipatory ideas stay abstract and paralyzed without an institutional referent.

Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University

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Critique can no longer afford to turn its back upon the workings of power or the positive values underpinning its emancipatory enterprise. It has become unrealistic for even the most devout adherents of the Frankfurt School to insist on the "great refusal" or the simple "nonidentity" of subject and object. The radicalism of this stance has been squandered: its uncompromising rejection of the "system," with its indeterminate slogan proclaiming that "the whole is false," has already been incorporated into mainstream academia and the culture industry. Employing categories of this sort has turned critical theory into a form of pseudocritique and resulted in dialectical paralysis. Connecting critical theory with a certain set of public aims – highlighting its commitment to liberal ideals of institutional governance, socialist notions of economic justice, and internationalist perspectives for dealing with transnationzl problems – is the only way to reinstate its radical character. Critical theory must recall, in keeping with Hegel, that new ideas of political emancipation will necessarily remain abstract without an institutional referent. In short, once again critical theory must become political: it must project an egalitarian, global order, one that is sensitive to cultural differences but in which a restructuring of economic power complements an ever expanding realm of democratic action. Critical political theory must address the question of practice in new ways. It must still steer between materialism and metaphysics. It can no longer accept the existence of prefabricated revolutionary agents like the proletariat any more than the illusory comforts of an analytic philosophy whose ideas stand outside of history and beyond any concern with action. A critical theory of politics needs to focus upon the transformative moment in which ideas might influence action, the interface between ideas and action: the structures and the constraints, the institutions and the movements, the customs and the norms with which it is possible to inhibit or expand the autonomy of citizens. Indeed, without a willingness to envision ideas in action, political theory loses its ability to fashion meaningful distinctions between institutions or to formulate the complex struggles facing the exploited and disenfranchised.

This philosophy article explains Heidegger's distinction between calculative and contemplative thought, arguing that Heidegger seeks to open space for other forms of thinking without denigrating calculation.

Professor of Philosophy, McGill University

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This "gap" does not mean that calculative thought is somehow "bad," or that contemplative thinking is "better." To judge contemplative thought as superior to calculative thought is to think calculatively, and hence cannot be the task of authentic philosophy. Neither is Heidegger claiming that the nature of modern science as calculative is to be viewed as negative. It is the good "fortune" of science that it cannot "think" in the contemplative, deliberative or recollective sense.7 The problem, it seems, occurs when calculative thought pushes aside other forms of thinking. Heidegger wants to undermine the exclusivity of calculative thinking without denigrating it. He desires to open a space for other forms of thinking.

This communication studies article analyzes citizen discussion groups to show how cynical expressions about government end policy conversations before problems can be solved.

Professor of Communication Studies, University of Kansas

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In discussing Clinton’s use of the “tax scheme” charge, citizens constructed a purely strategic conception of political rhetoric. The Clinton campaign, according to these participants, chose to call Dole’s tax plan a scheme because such rhetoric would resonate with what “we’re already thinking.” In this instance, citizens viewed Clinton’s “tax scheme” argument as purely strategic discourse, and as such they evaluated it on strategic terms. While discussing the strategic merits of such discourse, citizens turned their attention from the substantive merits of certain tax proposals. That is, rather than discuss the actual costs or benefits of Dole’s tax plan, citizens instead focused upon the rhetorical viability of such a plan. Moreover, such strategic discussions could not direct the discourse toward communal interests. Would certain tax policies benefit the nation? This conversation cannot address such questions because strategy is largely irrelevant to such questions. One reason that citizens may view politicians’ rhetoric in purely strategic terms centers on the differences in politicians’ and citizens’ argument frames. Discourse can be conceptualized along an expressive (designed primarily to convey the self) to instrumental (designed to meet some pragmatic persuasive objective) continuum.⁴⁷ The citizen discourse in our discussion groups clearly gravitated towards the more expressive end of this continuum; participants grounded their public policy discussions in terms of self-interest and self-experience, and such discourse failed to demonstrate the type of other-concern incorporated into instrumental messages. In sharp contrast to the discourse in our discussion groups, presidential candidates show an extreme other-focus. They never claim to support a policy because such support helps them in some way; rather, they frame their policy arguments around others—[gap in supplied images] even though citizens view such framing as strategic and self-serving. For example, when Dole advocated his tax proposal during the San Diego debate (this particular debate discussion stimulated the preceding group discussion), he specifically framed his policy arguments around another individual. [continues]Many of the public policy discussions degenerated into cynical [End Page 420] exchanges that steered discussion away from the possibility of solving communal problems. Such problems, the discourse suggested, will not be solved because actors in the political process do not really care about citizens' needs. For instance, one group in San Diego had the following exchange regarding environmental policy: F1: On the other hand, as a contrast, somebody like Al Gore especially, is a total environmentalist. That's why I hope he becomes president next. They are so near-sighted, they don't realize that in 200 or 300 years from now, people won't be able to breathe the air, and they're going to have to eat pills instead of food, because there isn't going to be any land to grow crops on. Everything will be so polluted because of all the pesticides and so forth. Q: I heard something pretty astonishing today, that at the rate we're going, there is going to be a food deficit; we won't be able to feed the population. F1: Well of course. Q: I was kind of stunned with that. Now you go into any supermarket, and it's full of all this stuff that no one needs, and it gets thrown out all the time because it expires. F1: That's another thing. This country is the worst waster of any country I've ever known. The first thing I noticed when I came to this country was how overpackaged everything is. If you go buy a pound of coffee in Ireland, they weighed it out and gave you one bag. Now, it's in one bag, and then it has plastic on the outside. Tea bags have two or three different layers on the inside. I couldn't believe how much waste. I campaigned at the supermarket once for people to use canvas bags instead of plastic or paper. Q: Everybody in Europe shops with their own bag, right? M1: Of course the government isn't going to do anything about that . . . M2: It's a special interest. M1: Right. The paper companies are the ones, plastic companies, aluminum companies, they help the presidents get in; the lobbyists. In this instance, citizens addressed a number of important environmental concerns such as how the nation should grapple with excessive waste. However, this important environmental discussion soon shifted to cynical observations about the government. Participants charged that the "government isn't going to do anything" about environmental waste because such actions would harm special interests such as "paper companies." This argument is once again built upon a warrant grounded in egocentric presumptions. Specifically, the reasoning undergirding this argument suggests that if an affluent special interest is against a certain policy, then the government will reject [End Page 421] that policy. Such reasoning again frames political actions as motivated by self-interest. Presumably, paper companies want to promote waste because waste improves corporate profits, and politicians want to promote waste so that these increased corporate profits will flow into their campaign coffers. Many political scholars who have studied the U.S. electorate have alluded to the electorate's intense cynicism. 52 The DebateWatch participants also revealed such cynicism in their extremely unfavorable assessments of government. One such citizen from California remarked that "the real controlling interest in this country, the big business and money, they have either of these parties [Democrats and Republicans] under control one way or the other." A participant in San Diego stated that there is too much "waste in government" caused by "too many groups and too many interests that are taken into account. Just to be president, you owe favors to every single group out there." An individual in Maryland remarked, "I don't listen to what anybody [any politician] says, I watch what they do. I don't like what any of them do." Such political cynicism is fueled by the very candidates who seek to become a part of the political system. Office seekers from the courthouse to the White House liberally sprinkle their campaign rhetoric with talk of "getting the government off our backs" and of cutting taxes because "citizens know better than government how to spend their hard-earned dollars." In the 1996 debates that acted as a stimulus for our discussion groups, Dole spoke of how the "American people have lost their faith in government" because they see "scandals almost on a daily basis," and Clinton remarked that "one of the things I think that really frustrates people is that so often, political campaigns seem to be more about the politicians that are running than the people." 53 With such rhetoric, politicians further the notion of the individual fighting against an oppressive government rather than a notion of a representative government acting for the collective good. Almost all group participants spoke of "the" government rather than "our" government. The article "the" suggests that government is somehow separate from the collective citizenry. While finding cynicism in the electorate is not new, the group texts provide new insights into how such cynicism affects civic discourse. One such text emerged from a discussion group in Detroit : M1: Because if you're going to hit voters, there is some room for foreign policy, but most people just want to know, "are you going to cut taxes or not? You've been talking about 15%, are you going to do it or not? And what about my kids?" M2: I don't know how he [Dole] expects to cut taxes 15% with the budget and the deficit . . . F1: There is no way. [End Page 422] F2: All politics is local. F3: Cut the riches boodle. M3: You can go back to Eisenhower. Every candidate has said, "If you elect me, I'm going to cut taxes." Then they get into office and go, "I didn't know how massive this problem was. Nobody told me the severity. We can't cut taxes." F1: How can Bill possibly say that. In this particular case, citizens explored the issue of tax cuts. They were cynical about any tax cut plan because they believed that all candidates ultimately raise taxes. As with the previous discussion on the environment, these cynical expressions bring an end to the tax cut conversation because they make the conversation irrelevant. There is no point discussing the issue of tax cuts if tax cuts will never take place. Essentially, when citizens offer cynical statements during public policy discussions, they effectively bring an end to the public policy debate.

This international relations article argues that conventionalism provides an adequate philosophical basis for international relations theory that is relevant to policy.

Professor of International Relations, Colgate University

This essay on the ethics of war argues that counting enemy dead in the Iraq War is an act of responsibility that preserves their humanity and our own.

Professor of Religious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

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What I fear is a world where thousands can be killed and no one is responsible, where deaths are erased from history as soon as they happen. The body count was more than an act of responsibility. It was a permanent record. It made each death a historical fact. You can go back and graph those Vietnam deaths from day to day, month to month, year to year. That turns the victims into nameless, faceless abstractions. But it least it confirms for ever and ever that they lived and died, because someone took the time to kill and count them. In Iraq, it is as if the killing never happened. When a human being's death is erased from history, so is their life. Life and death together vanish without a trace. The body count has one other virtue. It is enemy soldiers, not civilians, who are officially counted. Antiwar activists rightly warn about civilian slaughter and watch the toll rise at . It is easy to forget that the vast majority of Iraqi dead and wounded will be soldiers. Most of them were pressed into service, either by brute force or economic necessity. As the whole world has been telling us for months, there is no good reason for this war, no good reason for those hapless Iraqi foot-soldiers to die.They are victims of brutality -- inflicted by their own government and by ours -- just as much as the civilians. They deserve just as much to be counted. So let us bring back the body count. If we must kill, let us kill as one human being to another, recognizing the full humanity of our victims. Without a body count, our nation becomes more of a robotic killing machine. As we dehumanize Iraqis, we slip even further into our own dehumanization. Let us bring back the body count, if only to recover our own sense of responsibility to the world's people, to history, to our own humanity.

This philosophy of technology article, drawing on Ihde, criticizes Heidegger's nostalgic myth of a harmonious pretechnological past and argues that technology has always been part of the human condition, with gains and losses.

Philosopher and Levinas scholar; Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought

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As Ihde has made us acutely aware, however, Heidegger's dissatisfaction with modern technology stems from his assumption of a decontextualized attitude of nostalgic romanticism (PP 103—I 15) based on the unacknowledged construction of a myth of lost pretechnological ages of harmony. As such, and paradoxically contrary to its own self-interpretation, Heidegger's account remains a willful subjectivist dialectical partner and reflection of the technological age it invents to criticize. In fact, technology has always been part of the human landscape, from chipped stones, from plows and altars, to trains, super-highways, telephones and computer generated virtual realities. Each technology involves gains and losses. To build a temple is to create a quarry or deforest a wood. To gather here is to separate there. The issue in understanding technology is not to deride it as such, which is equivalent to deriding the human condition as such (which is a theological rather than a philosophical position), but to grasp and then evaluate what is peculiar about its contemporary manifestations in our time of modern science.

This political theory article argues from a settler-colonial framework that Palestinian resistance should be understood as a response to ongoing colonial structures.

Professor of Global Studies, St. Lawrence University

This chapter argues that every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical, rejecting Agamben’s claim that biopolitics has simply intensified toward the camp.

Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

Agamben contends that biopolitics has be­come intensified [...] What a joke. Every way of life in­volves the infusion of norms [...] Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical.

This book on democratic theory argues that nuclear weapons draw Nietzsche’s preservation and overcoming closer together, since failing to preserve humanity would end the struggle for the overman.

Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

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The Nietzschean conception of a few who overcome resentment above politics while the rest remain stuck in the muck of resentment in politics is not today viable on its own terms. Today circumstances require that many give the sign of the overman a presence in themselves and in the ethicopolitical orientations they project onto the life of the whole. But this break with the spirit of Nietzsche requires further elucidation. The shift results partly from the late-modern possibility of human self-extinction. In this new world the failure to "preserve man' could also extinguish the human basis for the struggle Nietzsche named "overman." Preservation and overcoming are now drawn closer together, so that each becomes a term in the other: the latter cannot succeed unless it touches the former. But the entanglement of each with the other in sociopolitical relations means, when the logic of this entanglement is worked out, that the "overman" as a type cannot eliminate from its life some of the modalities definitive of the "human." If the overman was ever projected as a distinct type—and this is not certain—it now becomes refigured into a struggle within the self between the inclination to existential resentment and an affirmation of life that rises above this tendency.

This political theory essay considers how the contemporary left might assemble a broad, pluralist coalition for political change.

Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

My conviction is that the materialization of a generous ethos of multidimensional pluralism—an ethos itself drawn from several ethical sources—also sets a key condition of possibility for the reduction of economic inequality.4 And vice versa.5 The potential for synergy on the Left, then, may reside in the production of multiple relays between constituencies who locate their priorities differently, more than in the formation of a single block in which members agree on what priorities all must adopt with respect to both. Indirect evidence for this thesis can be found on right-wing TV talk shows. Every time it appears possible to generalize medical care, increase welfare, or improve urban education, the Right campaigns against these changes by blaming the poor for their condition and by showing how homosexuals, AIDS victims, unwed mothers, drug addicts, or nihilists might benefit from the proposed policies. That strategy of division would not succeed if a generous ethos of pluralism were materialized. So the ethos sets a condition of possibility for a reduction of inequality in income and job security. I have no doubt that many on the democratic Left disagree with my convictions on this score. But it still seems probable that many of us can find specific occasions to band together across these differences.

This article on media literacy education argues that media literacy education should include anticolonial analysis of how media represent Indigenous peoples.

Ashley Cordes (Coquille) — Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon; Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) — Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education, University of Oregon

This article on environmental security argues that framing environmental priorities partly as security concerns helps win public attention and support for international action.

Director, Environmental Change and Security Project, Woodrow Wilson Center

These considerations can greatly enhance the process of formulating effective solutions and winning sustained public attention and support for international environmental action. Policymakers might therefore be best served by framing international environmental priorities in terms of a broad set of interests, including, but not limited to, security concerns. [...] debates concerning environment and security matters will continue to be instructive.

This work of historical sociology examines Foucault's claim that the coexistence of mass slaughter and care for life reveals the historical forms of political rationality, and that modern power presupposes agencies capable of killing whole populations.

Professor of Sociology, Macquarie University

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Consider this striking passage from Foucault's lecture at the University of Vermont in 1982: The co-existence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life is something puzzling and needs some investigation. It is one of the central antimonies of our political reason which I'd like to consider. I don't mean that mass slaughters are the effect, the result, the logical consequence of our rationality, nor do I mean that the state has the obligation of taking care of individuals since it has the right to kill millions of people. Neither do I want to deny that mass slaughters or social care have their economic explanations or their emotional motivations. It is this rationality, and the death and life game which takes place in it, that I'd like to investigate from an historical point of view. (Foucault 1988g: 147-8) This passage is difficult not least for the positions which Foucault elaborates in order to negate. It is a passage finally affirming very little except this: in order to understand political action, from elaborate processes of policy formation and political decision-making to the daily, cynical exercise of power, it is necessary to understand the historically given forms of political rationality. This, however, is a thesis that requires some underlining. For what is clear is that, for Foucault, politics is never, even in the most immediate or brutal action of the exercise of domination and power, without some degree of 'thought'. This is the first part of his thesis on political rationality. The second part is that this 'thought', this political rationality, does not simply arise from the rulers consulting their 'interests', or their capacity for rational choice, but from historically developed and modified forms of rationality. Political rationality, in this sense, is anterior to political action and a condition of it. This thesis does not merely lead to a particular technique of analysis of political rationality. It draws attention to its fragility and dangers, particularly where political rationality is regarded as ahistorical common sense. What the opposition between genocide and what we might call 'geno-weal' suggests is the seriousness with which Foucault had come to regard matters of state, and the ethical grounding of his analysis of political reason. In the above passage, Foucault suggests that the right of mass death does not follow from the power over life. In the earlier discussion of bio-politics he argues: 'if genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population' (Foucault 1979b: 137). It would seem that power may in principle be dispersed in a vast array of micropowers, but its exercise in advanced societies presupposes agencies capable of governing, and slaughtering, whole populations. It is little wonder that Foucault seeks to investigate both our political inventiveness and the nature of our 'limited' form of liberal government from a perspective that he conceded might be understood as ethical, if the latter is regarded as a practice, and ethos as a mode of being (1986f: 376-7).

This article on political theory argues that Nazi genocide arose from linking bio-power with sovereign notions of blood and fatherland, while liberal democracies use market and rights-based limits to check bio-power.

Professor of Sociology, Macquarie University

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In a passage from the latter, Foucault shows that the genocidal character of National Socialism did not simply arise from its extension of bio-power (1979, 149-50). Nazism was concerned with the total administration of the life, of the family, of marriage, procreation, education and with the intensification of disciplinary micro-powers. But it articulated this with another set of features concerned with ‘the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood’, of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race. In other words, if we are to understand how the most dramatic forces of life and death were unleashed in the twentieth century, we have to understand how bio-power was articulated with elements of sovereignty and its symbolics. Pace Bauman, it is not simply the development of instrumental rationality in the form of modern bio-power, or a bureaucratic power applied to life that makes the Holocaust possible. It is the system of linkages, re-codings and re-inscriptions of sovereign notions of fatherland, territory, and blood within the new bio-political discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene that makes the unthinkable thinkable. The fact that all modern states must articulate elements of sovereignty with bio-politics also allows for a virtuous combination. The virtue of liberal and democratic forms of government is that they deploy two instruments to check the unfettered imperatives of bio-power, one drawn from political economy and the other from sovereignty itself (cf. Foucault, 1997a, 73-9). Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to govern too much by pointing to the quasi-natural processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to government. To govern economically means to govern through economic and other social processes external to government and also to govern in an efficient, cost-effective way. Liberalism also invokes the freedom and rights of a new subject - the sovereign individual. By 'governing through freedom' and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal democracies are able to differentiate their bio-politics from that of modern totalitarian states and older police states.

This paper introduces Debate-AI.com, a crowdsourced platform of linked arguments and outlines, and advocates a "Debate Singularity" in which debate infrastructure becomes a public reasoning system for AI governance.

Debate AI Institute - open-source collective consciousness founded by former debaters and AI researchers with over a decade of field expertise

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This paper introduces Debate-AI.com, a platform for crowd-sourced AI-generated outlines of topic arguments to set a critical model for AI governance, which consists of CARDS: Crowdsourced Annotated Research for Debating Solutions, FIAT: Forum for Issue Analysis on Topics, LEARN: Lectures from Educators, Archive of Rounds & Notes, REASON: Research Editor for Annotated Summaries in Outline Notation, and STREAM: Search with Top Result Extraction & Answer Model. This paper advocates for the Debate Singularity, a research agenda in which debate infrastructure becomes a public reasoning system for news analysis, outline generation, and AI-assisted decision-making. Rather than treating articles, cards, and arguments as isolated artifacts, the framework models them as linked components in a shared research tree that supports summarization, verification, simulation, and public interpretation. Existing work on AI debate and argumentative human-AI decision-making suggests that structured contestation can improve the quality, transparency, and revisability of AI-supported reasoning (Bikakis et al., 2023; Xiao & Greer, 2023). A platform centered on crowdsourced evidence, interpretable summaries, and topic-level outline construction can serve both competitive debate and set a model for AI governance via collective consciousness.

This paper examines federalism and politics arguments in policy debate, arguing that decision-makers should limit consideration to intrinsic opportunity-cost tradeoffs.

Debate AI Institute - open-source collective consciousness founded by former debaters and AI researchers with over a decade of field expertise

In this Supreme Court decision, the Court upheld the convictions of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government.

Supreme Court of the United States

In this dialogue, the philosopher argues that responsibility requires deciding case by case whether to oppose or defend the sovereign state, since conditional sovereignty already calls the principle of sovereignty into question.

How do we deal with this? Here we return to the question of heritage with which we began. It is necessary to deconstruct the concept of sovereignty, never to forget its theological filiation and to be ready to call this filiation into question wherever we discern its effects. This supposes an inflexible critique of the logic of the state and of the nation-state. And yet—hence the enormous responsibility of the citizen and of the heir in general, in certain situations—the state, in its actual form, can resist certain forces that I consider the most threatening. What I here call "responsibility" is what dictates the decision to be sometimes for the sovereign state and sometimes against it, for its deconstruction ("theoretical and practical," as one used to say) according to the singularity of the contexts and the stakes. There is no relativism in this, no renunciation of the injunction to "think" and to deconstruct the heritage. This aporia is in truth the very condition of decision and responsibility—if there is any. I am thinking for example of the incoherent but organized coalition of international capitalist forces that, in the name of neoliberalism or the market, are taking hold of the world in conditions such as the "state" form; this is what can still resist the most. For the moment. But it is necessary to reinvent the conditions of resistance. Once again, I would say that according to the situations, I am an antisovereignist or a sovereignist—and I vindicate the right to be antisovereignist at certain times and a sovereignist at others. No one can make me respond to this question as though it were a matter of pressing a button on some old-fashioned machine. There are cases in which I would support a logic of the state, but I ask to examine each situation before making any statement. It is also necessary to recognize that by requiring someone to be not unconditionally sovereignist but rather sovereignist only under certain conditions, one is already calling into question the principle of sovereignty. Deconstruction begins there. It demands a difficult dissociation, almost impossible but indispensable, between unconditionality (justice without power) and sovereignty (right, power, or potency). Deconstruction is on the side of unconditionality, even when it seems impossible, and not sovereignty, even when it seems possible.

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This book on the philosophy of science argues that anything not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable given the right knowledge.

Physicist; Visiting Professor, Centre for Quantum Computation, University of Oxford

everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable.

This article on political theory argues that Nazi biopolitics was driven by a totalitarian political structure rather than by modernity itself, and that scholarship focused on biopolitics' negative potentials has produced a one-sided picture that ignores how democratic biopolitics expanded freedom.

Professor of History, University of Cincinnati

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Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive "iron cage" of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics: the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true. Oddly enough, fundamentally our vision of science and the welfare state sounds rather like liberal and conservative critiques of science and the welfare state any time between the 1880s and the 1950s. Critiques of the iron cage of rationality and of the moral emptiness of instrumental and scientific rationality were commonplaces in the milieu of left-liberal social science, or in the milieu of conservative Christian social teaching, at the very moment when the whole complex of biopolitics was being aggressively constructed. Nor is the idea that Auschwitz was a product of the Enlightenment particularly new. Christian critics warned of the murderous potentials of Darwinist thought for decades before 1933, and by the 1950s Auschwitz could be taken by many critics of modernity as merely a confirmation of an analysis they had long championed— as when, for example, in 1954 Hugo Müller saw in the impersonal rules and procedures of the welfare state a glaring example of a process of dehumanization, depersonalization, and alienation that began with Kant’s commitment to abstract moral imperatives and culminated in a program of mass murder that sacrificed individual persons in the name of the abstraction “humanity.”103 And at root our vision shares something important with that of the conservative Catholic ministerial official Friedrich Rothe, who remarked before the FRG’s Federal Council on Youth Affairs in 1957 that the “dissolution of ethical principles” that underpinned and resulted from the expansion of the welfare state was “unconsciously preparing our delivery into the hands of totalitarian forces.”104 This kind of analysis may or may not be partially correct; but it seems to me that we should take care not to allow our theorization of modernity to be overly influenced by the perspective of the German Bildungsbürgertum, who viewed it with profound and not quite disinterested pessimism. In any case, the focus on the activities and ambitions of the social engineers in the literature on biopolitical modernity has begun to reach the point of diminishing returns. In the current literature, it seems that biopolitics is almost always acting on (or attempting to act on) people; it is almost never something they do. This kind of model is not very realistic. This is not how societies work. The example of the attempt to create a eugenic counseling system in Prussia should be instructive in this respect. Here public health and eugenics experts— technocrats— tried to impart their sense of eugenic crisis and their optimism about the possibility of creating a better “race” to the public; and they successfully mobilized the resources of the state in support of their vision. And yet, what emerged quite quickly from this effort was in fact a system of public contraceptive advice — or family planning. It is not so easy to impose technocratic ambitions on the public, particularly in a democratic state; and “on the ground,” at the level of interactions with actual persons and social groups, public policy often takes on a life of its own, at least partially independent of the fantasies of technocrats. This is of course a point that Foucault makes with particular clarity. The power of discourse is not the power of manipulative elites, which control it and impose it from above. Manipulative elites always face resistance, often effective, resistance. More important, the power of discourse lies precisely in its ability to set the terms for such struggles, to define what they are about, as much as what their outcomes are. As Foucault put it, power— including the power to manage life —“comes from everywhere.”105 Biomedical knowledge was not the property only of technocrats, and it could be used to achieve ends that had little to do with their social-engineering schemes.106 Modern biopolitics is a multifaceted world of discourse and practice elaborated and put into practice at multiple levels throughout modern societies. And of course it is often no less economistic—no less based on calculations of cost and benefit —at the level of the individual or family than it is in the technocrats’ visions of national efficiency. In fact, the literature of the past twenty years has made it abundantly clear that a great deal of “official” biopolitical discourse generated by academics and civil servants was essentially reactive. A vast amount of discussion among eugenics, population policy, and welfare experts focused on the concrete “problem” of the demographic transition of the early twentieth century. It was the use of reproductive knowledge and reproductive technology by millions of Europeans to limit their fertility — the Geburtenrückgang or decline of births, in German parlance — that was the center of concern. While much of the historical literature stresses the role of science in shaping technocratic ambition, of course actually a large proportion of the technocrats’ discourse was concerned with orchestrating a return to more “natural” and less technologically-enabled reproductive patterns. The problem, particularly for the more influential moderate and pronatalist branch of eugenics, was not only how to apply modern science to humanity, but more importantly how to get humanity to stop applying modern science to itself. Atina Grossmann, in her history of the organized mass popular movement for fertility control in Germany in the 1920s, has given us a good example of what this shift in perspective can reveal. Grossmann stresses the technocratic ambition and relatively conservative intent of many medical sex reformers, the power of the “motherhood-eugenics consensus” to shape and limit acceptable definitions of women’s social and sexual roles and aspirations in this period, and the prevalence of the rhetoric of “social health, medicalization, cost effectiveness, and national welfare.” And yet, in the final analysis she describes a powerful reform movement that helped to spread contraceptives and contraceptive knowledge widely among the German population. Popular groups were “increasingly insistent that the working class also had a right to the benefits of scientific progress” (in the form of contraceptive technologies); and while most of the medical establishment opposed the widespread use of contraceptives, the popular movement garnered critical support from radical socialists within the med-ical profession. As Grossmann remarks, “the German case is instructive precisely because it illustrates the fallacies of setting up rigid categories of ‘popular’ and ‘professional.’”107In short: is the microphysics of modern power/knowledge always the microphysics of oppression, exploitation, and manipulation? Are technocratic elites always in charge of the imperatives of discourse — or do discourses have their own logic, which technocrats can define, escape or direct no more (or less) than can anyone else? Discourse may or may not be a locomotive, driving down a pre- determined track and dictating individual decisions and fates by its own internal logic; but even if it is, the technocrats aren’t driving it, and in fact their schemes may get field of state activity was often the product of technocratic “readings” of biopolitical discourse. But it was only one small part of a much broader process by which a large proportion of the German population came to define their needs and aspirations in new ways. We need not exaggerate the degrees of freedom that process generated to be able to appreciate that in some cases, to some extent, and sometimes willy-nilly, discourse and policy were actually a response to that broader process of redefinition — in short, to “demand-side” pressures. Uncoupling “technocracy” from “discourse” is not yet enough, however. We should also be alive to the ways in which new social practices, institutions, and knowledge generated new choices — a limited range of them, constrained by all kinds of discursive and social frameworks, but nonetheless historically new and significant. Modern biopolitics did create, in a real sense, not only new constraints but also new degrees of freedom— new levers that increased people’s power to move their own worlds, to shape their own lives. Our understanding of modern biopolitics will be more realistic and more fruitful if we reconceptualize its development as a complex process in which the implications of those new choices were negotiated out in the social and discursive context. Again, in the early twentieth century many more conservative biopolitical “experts” devoted much of their energy precisely to trying— without any discernable success— to control those new degrees of freedom. For most social liberals and Social Democrats, however, those new choices were a potential source of greater social efficiency and social dynamism. State policy reflected the constant negotiation and tension between these perspectives. Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and technology. It might make sense, too, to reexamine the process of institution-building, the elaboration of the practices and institutions of biopolitics. No doubt the creation of public and private social welfare institutions created instruments for the study, manipulation, or control of individuals and groups. But it also generated opportunities for self-organization and participation by social groups of all kinds. Grossmann’s birth control movement was but one instance of the explosive growth of the universe of associational life in the field of biopolitics, which itself was only one small part of a much broader development: the self-creation of a new, urban industrial social order, the creation of a self-government of society through myriad nongovernmental organizations. In these organizations, citizens were acting to shape their own lives in ways that were often fundamentally important as part of lived experience — of the “life world.” Of course there was nothing inherently democratic about these organizations or their social functions — many were authoritarian in structure, many cultivated a tendentially elitist culture of expertise, and some pursued exclusionary and discriminatory agendas. Nevertheless, they institutionalized pluralism, solicited participation, enforced public debate, and effectively sabotaged simple authoritarian government. Again, National Socialist totalitarianism was in part a response precisely to the failure of political, social, and cultural elites to contain and control this proliferation of voices, interests, and influence groups.108 Private organizations, further, were not the only ones that helped to build habits and structures of participation. The German state deliberately recruited citizens and nongovernmental organizations to help it formulate and implement welfare policy. It had to, for no state could possibly mobilize the resources necessary for such a gigantic task. And of course often the policy initiative came from the other direction — from private organizations engaged in elaborating biopolitical discourses of various kinds, and working to mobilize the authority and resources of the state to achieve the ends they defined for themselves. That was an intended consequence of the creation of a democratic republic. As S.N. Eisenstadt wrote in 2000, an important part of the project of modernity was “a very strong emphasis on the autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution of the social and political order.”109 Again, the massive, stateorchestrated mobilization of the German population in the Nazi period or in the German Democratic Republic (not least in welfare organizations) should remind us that such mobilization is not necessarily democratic in nature; this is a point made amply for the Weimar period too by, for example, Peter Fritzsche.110 But obviously, it could be, and in fact, before 1933 and after 1949 in the Federal Republic of Germany, very often was.

Professor of History, University of Cincinnati

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This edited volume on violence and political theory argues that affirming life requires active resistance to despotism rather than passivity or quietism.

Professors of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University

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White’s reading of Nietzsche cannot, as he readily acknowledges, exclude the possibility that someone like a Hitler or a Charles Manson will find their own lives beautiful and seek to live and affirm them in ways that we (or at least many of us) will find utterly repugnant. But the relationship of historical figures like those to their own lives differs from how we have to relate to them, for it does not follow from the above acknowledgement that we are obliged to permit those we consider to be heinous to act in evil ways. As White argues: If, through the lenses of life, I see my life as mine to dance, then I might well resist those who want to force me to take only the steps they prescribe. I might also choose to resist the one who wants to force others to take only the steps he prescribes, whether those steps involve the obeying of his laws or the satisfying of his desires That resistance is a choice, and not an obligation, will prove for some the unsatisfactory nature of a perspective like this. After all, they will argue, evil is evil, and our resistance cannot depend upon the luxury of opting in or out of opposition as we desire. Were life so simple, and evil always so easily and unproblematically identifiable, the unambiguous nature of such declarations would be welcome. But when ‘we’ (individuals and states) have opposed some of the murderous despots through the application of lofty principles, while turning a blind eye to or encouraging others, it is un-becoming (neither helpful nor honest) to demand morally absolute prescriptions from others as the price of their participation in the debate about how ‘we’ can and should act. Resistance, however, is a choice. There is no passivity or quietism entailed in this affirmation. We can act. We do act. All the time. Even, and perhaps particularly, when asserting the stance which Stephen White ultimately finds unsatisfactory because it does not meet his requirement of what it means to act, politically; to act with regard to what, in Simon Critchley’s chapter, is signified as la politique. Moreover, in Alan White’s reading, Nietzsche clearly indicates that for life to be affirmed resistance to despotism is vital. Besides, does a dancer need to be told by someone off the floor that their act is being interfered with?

This law review article argues that censoring hate speech drives hatred underground, undermines free speech principles, and removes a venting outlet that can diffuse social stress.

Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law

Further, censoring hate speech does not solve the problem of hate, but simply drives it underground, where it can seethe with great anger. There is great danger that repressed speech will emerge from its shadows to wreak havoc on society. "Fear breeds repression ... repression breeds hate ... hate menaces stable government ... ." 191 People are more likely to blow up a building, or worse, when they feel aggrieved and silenced. Second, it is always risky to exclude completely any idea from free discussion. Absent demonstration of clear, concrete harm posed by the speech - the methodology of the First Amendment - "there may be no [principled] basis on which to distinguish [undesired] speech from protected [*998] speech." 192 The architecture of the First Amendment - spheres of differently ordered categories of protected speech where the highest valued speech is zealously protected through application of a searching judicial test of strict scrutiny - might thereby be undermined, perhaps causing a meltdown of the carefully constructed set of principles that comprise the modern First Amendment. For if hate speech can be banished because of its unpleasantness, what is there to stop the banishing of other speech simply based upon its provocation or vileness? What of offensive speech, defamation or, even, in terms of banality, commercial speech? In place of our system of free expression we might be left with a regime based simply upon majoritarian preference: speech ordered by its popularity, not by the merit of its communicative value. We might thus inherit a free speech based on democracy, alongside its counterpart in the First Amendment, free exercise of religion. 193 Third, censoring hate speech undercuts the individualist and collective autonomy values that support free speech itself, both as a constitutive element of human personality and as a means to democratic self-government. 194 Autonomy has facilitated the development of our system of freedom of expression and will sustain it in the future. It is important for individual and social freedom that we maintain free speech, at least, as the one protected haven in society where a person can be free. 195 Thus, even if there is little merit to hate speech as a form of expression, it should be protected on account of the process of free speech itself - placing control over expression in the hands of the people. 196 Fourth, "it is constructive for individuals to vent their messages of [hate]." Allowing all people to speak their minds implicates the core autonomy value at the root of free speech described above. 197 Participation in the process of free speech renders that person a stakeholder in the free speech project, adding further support for the enterprise of free speech. [*999] Further, venting hate can be cathartic, diffusing social stress, and perhaps averting greater catastrophes.

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This debate answer file compiles arguments and evidence for responding to kritiks in competitive debate.

Rich Edwards — Professor of Communication and debate coach, Baylor University; edited by Ryan Galloway — Director of Debate, Samford University

In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucault’s ideas have “fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its ‘microphysics.’”48 The “broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus” on “technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science” was the focus of his interest.49 But the “power-producing effects in Foucault’s ‘microphysical’ sense” (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of “an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice” ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the volklsch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s — indeed, individual states in the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism — mass sterilization, mass “eugenic” abortion and murder of the “defective.” Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies. <Continues p 24-5…> Like Fritzsche's essay, Eley's accurately reflected the tone of most of those it introduced. In the body of the volume, Elizabeth Domansky, for example, pointed out that biopolitics "did not 'automatically' or 'naturally' lead to the rise of National soctausrn," but rather "provided ... the political Right in Weimar with the opportunity to capitalize on a discursive strategy that could successfully compete with liberal and socialist strategles."63 This Is correct; but the language of biopolitics was demonstrably one on which liberals, socialists, and advocates of a democratic welfare state could also capitalize. 'and did. Or again, Jean Quataert remarked-quite rightly, I believe - that "the most progressive achievements of the Weimar welfare state were completely embedded" in biopolitical discourse. She also commented that Nazi policy was "continuous with what passed as the ruling knowledge of the time" and was a product of "an extreme form of technocratic reason" and "early twentieth-century modernity's dark side." The implication seems to be that "progressive" welfare policy was fundamentally "dark"; but it seems more accurate to conclude that biopolitics had a variety of potentials. 54 Again, the point here is not that any of the interpretations offered in these pieces are wrong; instead, it is that we are, collectively, so focused on unmasking the negative potentials and realities of modernity that we have constructed a true, but very one-sided picture. <Continues p 35-8…> Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a "logic" or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of "liberty," just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the soie orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not "opposites," in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept "power" should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively "the same." Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, "tactically polyvalent." Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create "multiple modernities," modern societies with quite radically differing potentials. Biopolitics: Who Is Doing What To Whom? This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the "prepolitical" level. I would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated within German society more broadly. It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and In the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which In fact embodied the historical movement of modernization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus. 92 And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of- or at least discussed in any detail- as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of Infant health programs- an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes Intrusive, social engineering project- had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonishing this achievement- and any number of others like it - really was. There was a reason for the "Machbarkeitswahn" of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a "Wahn" (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the "inevitable" frustration of "delusions" of power. Even In the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish. Concretely, moreover, I am not convinced that power operated In only one direction - from the top down- In social work. Might we not ask whether people actually demanded welfare services, and whether and how social workers and the state struggled to respond to those demands? David Crew and Greg Eghlglan, for example, have given us detailed studies of the micropolitlcs of welfare In the Weimar period In which It becomes clear that conflicts between welfare administrators and their "clients" were sparked not only by heavyhanded Intervention, but also by refusal to help.94 What Is more, the specific nature of social programs matters a great deal, and we must distinguish between the different dynamics (and histories) of different programs. The removal of children from their families for placement In foster families or reformatories was bitterly hated and stubbornly resisted by working-class families; but mothers brought their children to Infant health clinics voluntarily and In numbers, and after 1945 they brought their older children to counseling clinics, as well. In this Instance, historians of the German welfare state might profit from the "demand side" models of welfare development that are sometimes more explicitly explored un some of the International literature. 95 In fact, even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomy and power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and exclusively as part of a microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a campaign in the 1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such ferocity, regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended physical and psychological effects of beatings, and Implicitly because they believed physical violence could compromise the development of the kind of autonomous, self-reliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely In Its cltlzenry.96 Or, to give another common example from the period, children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory: and that is historically significant. <Continues p 40…> At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this "micropolitical" dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy -in Germany, left liberals and Social Democrats - have been· also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen - including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism.

This law review article analyzes the role of fault in contract law and how fault-based considerations shape liability for breach.

Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

This international relations paper examines the biopolitical dimension of securitizing HIV/AIDS and concludes that the key question is not whether to securitize the disease but how to do so while minimizing normative dangers.

International Relations Researcher, University of Sussex

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Finally, this analysis also showed counter intuitively that this biopolitical dimension must not, however, lead to an unequivocal rejection of such political activism at the international level; such strategies contain within themselves dimensions that can be fruitfully utilized for combating the continued political marginalization of HIV/AIDS at all levels. In the end, then, perhaps the most important conclusion that emerges for those who wish to use the securitization of AIDS as resource for resisting the political marginalization of HIV/AIDS is not so much whether to securitize HIV/'AIDS, but rather how to securitize it. More thought, in other words, must be given to the ways in which AIDS might be securitized in a way that maximises the potential ethical returns of such a gesture, while simultaneously minimizing the normative dangers associated with its biopolitical dimensions. Perhaps the racist dimension of biopolitics can be best mediated by securitizing AIDS primarily through a human security framework emphasizing the needs of ordinary people rather than just elites, and by insisting that policy responses not violate human and citizenship rights. In so doing, the normative benefits that could accrue from adopting a national security framework, such as increasing the level of available resources for addressing HIV/AIDS, politicising the role of the security sector in the pandemic, and overriding the TRIPS provisions regarding the production of medicines, would not necessarily have to be sacrificed; they could be retained by additionally framing the issue of HIV/AIDS not as an overwhelming security threat, but more gently as an important international security issue, or as an international issue with a security dimension.

This international relations article argues that advocates can reduce the ethical dangers of linking HIV/AIDS and security by framing it as a security issue alongside others rather than as an overwhelming threat.

International Relations Researcher, University of Sussex

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What an awareness of this dilemma can do in the case of HIV/AIDS, however, is spur those advocating the links between HIV/AIDS and security to at least do so in ways that seek to minimize some of these aforementioned dangers. There are three ways in which this could be achieved. First, those presenting HIV/AIDS as a security issue could be sure to insist that it is not exclusively a security issue, but rather a security issue in addition to also being a health issue, a development issue, an economic issue, a social issue, a political issue, a gender issue, etc. In this way, insisting on the security implications of HIV/AIDS does not unreflectively reify the traditional hierarchy between achieving security and the attainment of other social values, such as health. Nor does it simply replace an altruistic logic with a selfinterested one. The security dimension of HIV/AIDS could then complement, rather than supersede, existing frameworks, and it would not undermine alternative rationales for global health initiatives, or unduly prioritize the needs of the security community over those of civil society. Second, the ethical dangers of securitizing AIDS could be further minimized by framing the illness as a security issue, or as an issue with an important security dimension, rather than as a dangerous and overwhelming security threat. This would still add considerable political gravitas to international efforts to respond to HIV/AIDS. It would probably also suffice in terms of invoking the security exceptions within TRIPS should this become necessary in the years ahead, and would similarly allow for the role of the security sector in the pandemic to be politicized, without doing so at the cost of playing on excessive fears and further stigmatizing persons living with HIV/AIDS. Finally, those framing HIV/AIDS as a security issue could also take great care to indicate that their primary concern lies with those people living with HIV/AIDS—that the problem lies not with the people living with the virus, but with the virus itself.

This essay on the fear of death argues that people should live free from fear of death while still planning to avoid preventable dangers such as war or accidents.

Psychology researcher; contributing writer, EzineArticles

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The only realistic fear related to death would be to be afraid of dying from things we can avoid, such as lions, tigers, or war. We can prepare and make plans to avoid such things, to increase the time we have left on this planet. We must live out each day free from the fear of death but still plan to avoid the factors that we can control. This danger avoidance helps us to prepare and make plans so that we are not currently in any danger. This can be achieved by learning how to swim to help avoid drowning (which of course is a cause of death) and to make to further prepare to learn to avoid or minimize other dangers. Another example of this would be to wear our seatbelt while driving to reduce the risk of injury or death if we are involved in an accident.

This law review article reads Nietzsche as passionate about truth rather than a nihilist, and warns that moral relativism risks degenerating into fascism and market rule.

Legal scholar

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Nietzsche is probably the most well-known modern example of skepticism towards received truth. 70 The idea of progress is a central [*1648] defining point of both modernity 71 and Nietzsche's work. Thus, Nietzsche is not a post-modernist: he is part of the discourse of modernity because he believes in progress and makes proposals on how to obtain it. The objective of Nietzsche's work is the conscious evolution of the human species. However, unlike his contemporary and fellow modernist Karl Marx, 72 who sees the progress of the species as driving towards new and better modes of production throughout history, Nietzsche defines progress as the ability of the species to genetically surpass itself via Darwinian evolution. 73 Both are modernists, scientists, and materialists, but they take different perspectives on progress. Much of what Nietzsche says appears on first glance to be postmodernist. 74 He is certainly skeptical about the truth. However, [*1649] Nietzsche's mocking skepticism of the received wisdom, as a product of rote repetition of those in power, does not mean he rejects the possibility of the existence of truth. Nietzsche is no nihilist; in fact, he was passionate about truth. For Nietzsche, if truth can exist and is knowable, then, once determined, he would defend it with the Wagnerian ardor of Gotterdamerung: "the absolute truth--against itself." 75 It is exactly the love of truth that pushed Nietzsche to ask the question, "what is truth?" Aristotle describes virtue generally as the median between equally opposite and destructive antitheses. 76 For example, Aristotle regards the virtue of prudence as a median between the extremes of rashness and cowardice. 77 Though Aristotle counsels prudence, Nietzsche counsels the exact opposite. Nietzsche's Hyperborean is a man of extremes. Nietzsche once said, "I am not a man; I am Dynamite." 78 Like Heraclites, 79 (who also influenced Marx on this point), Nietzsche believes that truth results from conflict. Thus, though skeptical about existing "truths," Nietzsche believes the truth could exist and, if it does, is worth fighting for. Some post-modernists, with their rejection of universal absolutes and ideology, go beyond Nietzsche: they do not argue for the clash of the absolute "truth" against itself. 80 Ultimately, they argue that [*1650] truth is relative to subjective standards. 81 However, that proposition eventually collapses into the conclusion that there can be no objective universal truth, and thus there can be no science (episteme), but rather only opinion (doxa). This failure of moral vision, resulting from an erroneous axiology, is exactly what has crippled the Left in the United States. At first glance, the post-modern argument that "all truth is relative" might seem unproblematic. However, with reflection, it becomes clear that saying "all truth is relative" is equivalent to saying "there is no objective truth." The relativist statement in fact creates a paradox. That fact should tip us off that something may be wrong in the world of relativism. This Article refers to this as the paradox of the "unknowing knower": if truth does not exist, then how can we know that truth does not exist? Logically speaking, we cannot. In this way, relativism leads us to truth nihilism. And truth nihilism, in turn, either disintegrates on the paradox or degenerates into a pure volonte de puissance 82 (i.e., brute force). Relativist thought thus risks degeneration into fascism--if truth is unknowable and moral values relative, then only force exists. And if force is the only real argument, then why not be fascist? 83 This paradox plagues post-modern thought and dooms it to irrelevance--or worse. This also explains why the relativist position must be rejected. Its foundational presumptions are wrong, and it leads us nowhere we want to go. The relativist position is thus easily dispatched by either the paradox of the unknowing knower or the reductio ad absurdum that truth nihilism and moral relativism can eventually result in fascism. There are, however, better positions of truth skepticism. Some, such as Nietzsche's, rise to the level of brilliance. 84 However, most of them will also fail -- [*1651] albeit not so quickly or nicely as truth nihilism. In its more refined form, the truth skeptic's argument against the existence of truth is really only an argument against the ability to cognize truth. The truth skeptic argues that truth may (or may not) exist, but even if truth did exist it may not be cognized (i.e., known, as such). The "strong" version of this argument, that truth does not exist, has already been shown to be flawed. This weaker version, that the truth is unknowable, leads to the same conclusion -- that science would be impossible. It seems almost as untenable by reductio. But what about truth skepticism? What happens if only some truths are unknowable? Namely, what if we accept the validity of our sense impressions and use our perceptions of reality as the basis for objective descriptions of reality? Then some truths would be knowable--particularly, truths about material facts--and we would be out of the dark (relativism) and back into science. That is Nietzsche's position--at least some truths are knowable. Thus, Nietzsche is faithful to the idea of truth because he rejects intersubjectivity. 85 Truth may or may not always be knowable, but at least sometimes it is, and thus science is possible. Nietzsche is willing to entertain the possibility that truth, or at least some of the truth, could be generally incapable of cognition (i.e., formal demonstration). Basically, he admits we might all be staggering around in the dark, and that might be inalterable, but he clearly hopes otherwise. If no truth at all were possible, we would not and could not know it. For this reason, our praxis must presume that truth is possible and then fight for it. Precisely because Nietzsche defends truth, he accepts that we should live in a world of skepticism because it is possible that the truth value of some statements may be unknowable (which is a different proposition than that there is no truth). Misapprehension of this fine distinction is one reason why post-modernism presents untenable positions. It overstates truth skepticism and elevates it to intersubjective relativism or nihilism. Understanding these errors makes it easier to reject them. Rejecting relativism makes it possible to argue from a moral viewpoint against economic values as the standard par excellence of political discourse.

The Left critique of morality attempts to undermine moral values with which the Left disagrees, usually in an attempt to liberate the subject from power. 114 This explains why radical individualism and/or libertarian arguments are sometimes made in bad defenses of Left wing agendas. Those arguments ultimately backfire, however, because capitalism is individualistic and based on money. This is not the only way that supposed radicals, by taking opportunistic gambits, err. Undermining moral values elevates market values 115 as the only objective scientific value. As most money is controlled by men, undermining moral values leads to elevating market values, which, in turn, leads to augmenting the power of men. 116 Thus, the pseudo-Left gambit reinforces patriarchy and reiterates the hierarchy of the rich as [*1660] more valuable than the poor. So rather than being a clever ruse or tactical advantage, that move is a clear loser as it twice loops right back into inequality. How would materialist ontology impact the truth constructivist argument? Basically, the constructivists argue that knowledge (i.e., verifiable statements of truth and falsehood) is constructed in an intersubjective world. However, if truth statements are objectively verifiable (i.e., if truth is an objective fact), then truth cannot be created but only discovered. And if truth is not created, but "merely" discovered, then the constructivist argument of a pure positive science collapses. This is wonderful for science, but it is terrible for moral relativism and explains why the relativist positions are generally indefensible. Having seen how post-modern epistemology collapses due to a subjectivism, which ultimately denies the possibility of science, this Article now turns to analyzing how this subjectivism cripples postmodern thought, preventing it from shaping vigorous normative propositions about acknowledged social problems and, in fact, reinforces patriarchy, hierarchy, and inequality by evacuating the moral sphere of all values other than market values.

This essay on state building argues that rule-bound bureaucracies create accountability and the potential for rights that non-bureaucratic systems lack.

Associate Professor of Political Science, Bowling Green State University

non-bureaucratic systems are always dangerous because there is no systematic accountability, no way to check the abuses of the powerful. Because of their size and complexity, rational-legal bureaucracies are much more rule-bound than the alternatives. Even if the rules are unjust, their systematic nature promotes accountability. [...] The monopoly of violence and rule of law together create the potential for rights. Indeed, despotic regimes often attack their own bureaucracies, precisely because they represent a point of accountability and transparency, and thus may empower those outside.

This op-ed on constitutional law and land rights responds to Billie Eilish's Grammy comments about living on "stolen land," arguing that Americans are not thieves occupying stolen territory.

Richard A. Epstein — Professor of Law, New York University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Max Raskin — Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University

This political science review article reviews how the study of political polarization has moved from ideological divides to affective, identity-based, and digital dimensions, and suggests interventions to mitigate its effects.

Emre Erdoğan — Professor of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University; lead author of a multinational European research team

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The study of political polarization has undergone significant conceptual and methodological evolution, progressing from early emphases on ideological divides toward a more complex understanding that incorporates affective, identity-based, digital, and cross-national dimensions. This shift reflects the growing recognition that polarization is not merely a divergence of policy preferences, but a multifaceted phenomenon shaped by emotional, social, technological, and epistemic processes.

In this review, we provide an elaboration of the various ways to approach the study of political polarization. This task may be daunting, but a well-organized, comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview is surely necessary.

We begin by elaborating different types of political polarization, moving from an early focus on ideological divides to multidimensional constructs. Then, we shift to an overview of key disciplinary concepts and theoretical approaches for examining political polarization. At the heart of this review, we elaborate the various methodologies and methods for studying polarization, including quantitative, computational/digital, experimental, and qualitative approaches. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of these methodologies. To conclude the review, we first offer some suggestions for interventions that could mitigate the effects of polarization, and second, point to directions for future research. We suggest expanding the national focus that has dominated the study of polarization, highlighting the benefits of cross-national comparisons with a global reach.

This international relations article argues that scholars in the rationalism–constructivism debate can proceed pragmatically, adopting ontological pluralism instead of committing to a single view of what society is made of.

It is important to understand these ontological issues, since failure to do so can lead to analytical tools or frameworks becoming tacit ontologies (Ruggie, 1983: 285), foreclosing potentially interesting lines of argument without justification. However, we do not believe this framing of the rationalist constructivist debate is the most useful, for three reasons. First, the issues are by definition philosophical, and as such not likely to be settled soon, if ever, and almost certainly not by IR scholars. Second, although some rationalists and constructivists may in fact have strong ontological commitments, others may not, since there is no inherent need to commit to an ontology to work in these traditions. Just as quantum physicists can do their work without any idea how to interpret its ontological implications, social scientists too can proceed pragmatically, remaining agnostic about what society is 'really' made of. Finally, it seems doubtful that as a discipline we know so much about international life that we should rule out certain arguments a priori on purely philosophical grounds. Thus, while recognizing the role that ontological issues play in structuring the rationalist-constructivist debate, in this chapter we will largely avoid them, adopting a stance of ontological pluralism instead.

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This article on security studies argues that good theory has policy implications and that ignoring them is intellectual laziness, since considering them exposes flaws and improves theorizing.

Professor of Political Science, Duke University; Director, Triangle Institute for Security Studies

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At the same time, virtually all good theory has implications for policy. Indeed, if no conceivable extension of the theory limits insights that would aid those working in the 'real world', what can be 'good' about good theory? Ignoring the policy implications of theory is often a sign of intellectual laziness on the part of the theorist. It is hard work to learn about the policy world and to make the connections from theory to policy. Often, the skill sets do not transfer easily from one domain to another, so a formidable theorist can show embarrassing naivete when it comes to the policy domain he or she putatively studies. Often, when the policy implications are considered, flaws in the theory (or at least in the presentation of the theory) are uncovered. 27 Thus, focusing attention on policy implications should lead to better theorizing.

This international relations article offers constructive suggestions for international theory, navigating between celebration of existing approaches and despair over them.

Yale H. Ferguson — Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University–Newark; Richard W. Mansbach — Professor of Political Science, Iowa State University

This op-ed on debate culture argues that high school debate has begun penalizing students for their personal views, so debaters must watch what they say.

Former high school debate champion; founder of Incubate Debate

This strategic studies article argues that treating uncertainty as the central fact of strategic planning leaves decision-makers relying on worst-case scenarios and unexamined beliefs rather than rigorous analysis.

Research Staff Member, Institute for Defense Analyses; doctoral candidate in Policy Studies, University of Maryland

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It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic surprise, in ‘an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions.’16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.

This op-ed on property rights responds to Billie Eilish's Grammy comments about living on stolen land by asking whether she should be evicted from her home.

Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Forbes Media

This book on the sociology of education critically examines research claiming that schools and teachers construct educational inequality.

Peter Foster — Senior Lecturer in Education, Manchester Metropolitan University; Roger Gomm — Lecturer, The Open University; Martyn Hammersley — Professor of Educational and Social Research, The Open University

Foucault describes the history of ideas as a discipline that crosses boundaries between fields, tracing how knowledge, themes, and concepts circulate between domains.

French philosopher; Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, Collège de France

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But on the other hand the history of ideas sets out to cross the boundaries of existing disciplines, to deal with them from the outside, and to reinterpret them. Rather than a marginal domain, then, it constitutes a style of analysis, a putting into perspective. It takes account of the historical field of the sciences, of literature, of philosophy: but it describes the knowledge that has served as an empirical, unreflective basis for subsequent formalizations; it tries to rediscover the immediate experience that discourse transcribes; it follows the genesis, which, on the basis of received or acquired representations, gives birth to systems and reuvres. It shows, on the other hand, how the great figures that are built up in this way gradually decompose : how the themes fall apart, pursue their isolated lives, fall into disuse, or are recomposed in a new way. The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.

Foucault argues that we should escape the dilemma of being either for or against government, since one can work with a government without subjection or total acceptance.

We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.

This encyclopedia entry surveys hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, including how texts are understood within their context.

Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University

This work of economic geography and feminist political economy argues that left representations of capitalism as a unified, totalizing system make alternatives seem impossible and disempower anticapitalist politics.

Feminist professors of economic geography

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What is important here, for my purposes, are not the different metaphors and images of economy and society but the fact that they all confer integrity upon Capitalism. Through its architectural or organismic depiction as an edifice or body, Capitalism becomes not an uncentered aggregate of practices but a structural and systemic unity, potentially co-extensive with the national or global economy as a whole.11 As a large, durable, and self-sustaining formation, it is relatively impervious to ordinary political and cultural interventions. It can be resisted and reformed but it cannot be replaced, except through some herculean and coordinated struggle. Understood as a unified system or structure, Capitalism is not ultimately vulnerable to local and partial efforts at transformation. Any such efforts can always be subverted by Capitalism at another scale or in another dimension. Attempts to transform production may be seen as hopeless without control of the financial system. Socialisms in one city or in one country may be seen as undermined by Capitalism at the international scale. Capitalism cannot be chipped away at, gradually replaced or removed piecemeal. It must be transformed in its entirety or not at all. Thus one of the effects of the unity of Capitalism is to present the left with the task of systemic transformation. Singularity If the unity of Capitalism confronts us with the mammoth task of systemic transformation, it is the singularity and totality of Capitalism that make the task so hopeless. Capitalism presents itself as a singularity in the sense of having no peer or equivalent, of existing in a category by itself; and also in the sense that when it appears fully realized within a particular social formation, it tends to be dominant or alone. As a sui generis economic form, Capitalism has no true analogues. Slavery, independent commodity production, feudalism, socialism, primitive communism and other forms of economy all lack the systemic properties of Capitalism and the ability to reproduce and expand themselves according to internal laws.12 Unlike socialism, for example, which is always struggling to be born, which needs the protection and fostering of the state, which is fragile and easily deformed, Capitalism takes on its full form as a natural outcome of an internally driven growth process. Its organic unity gives capitalism the peculiar power to regenerate itself, and even to subsume its moments of crisis as requirements of its continued growth and development. Socialism has never been endowed with that mythic capability of feeding on its own crises; its reproduction was never driven from within by a life force but always from without; it could never reproduce itself but always had to be reproduced, often an arduous if not impossible process.13 Other modes of production that lack the organic unity of Capitalism are more capable of being instituted or replaced incrementally and more likely to coexist with other economic forms. Capitalism, by contrast, tends to appear by itself. Thus, in the United States, if feudal or ancient classes exist, they exist as residual forms; if slavery exists, it exists as a marginal form; if socialism or communism exists, it exists as a prefigurative form. None of these forms truly and fully coexists with Capitalism. Where Capitalism does coexist with other forms, those places (the so-called Third World, for example, or backward regions in what are known as the "advanced capitalist" nations) are seen as not fully "developed." Rather than signaling the real possibility of Capitalism coexisting with noncapitalist economic forms, the coexistence of capitalism with noncapitalism marks the Third World as insufficient and incomplete. Subsumed to the hegemonic discourse of Development, it identifies a diverse array of countries as the shadowy Other of the advanced capitalist nations. One effect of the notion of capitalist exclusivity is a monolithic conception of class, at least in the context of "advanced capitalist" countries. The term "class" usually refers to a social cleavage along the axis of capital and labor since capitalism cannot coexist with any but residual or prefigurative noncapitalist relations. The presence and fullness of the capitalist monolith not only denies the possibility of economic or class diversity in the present but prefigures a monolithic and modernist socialism – one in which everyone is a comrade and class diversity does not exist. Capitalism's singularity operates to discourage projects to create alternative economic institutions and class relations, since these will necessarily be marginal in the context of Capitalism's exclusivity. The inability of Capitalism to coexist thus produces not only the present impossibility of alternatives but their future unlikelihood – pushing socialist projects to the distant and unrealizable future.14 Totality The third characteristic of Capitalism, and perhaps its best known, is its tendency to present itself as the social totality. This is most obvious in metaphors of containment and subsumption. People who are not themselves involved in capitalist exploitation nevertheless may be seen to live "in the pores" of capitalism (Spivak 1988: 135) or within capitalism (Wallerstein 1992: 8, Grossberg 1992: 337) or under capitalism. Capitalism is presented as the embrace, the container, something large and full. Noncapitalist forms of production, such as commodity production by self-employed workers or the production of household goods and services, are seen as somehow taking place within capitalism. Household production becomes subsumed to capitalism as capitalist "reproduction." Even oppressions experienced along entirely different lines of social antagonism are often convened within "the plenary geography of capitalism."15 Capitalism not only casts a wider net than other things, it also constitutes us more fully, in a process that is more like a sanitation than like a process of overdetermination. Our lives are dripping with Capitalism. We cannot get outside Capitalism; it has no outside.16 It becomes that which has no outside by swallowing up its conditions of existence. The banking system, the national state, domestic production, the built environment, nature as product, media culture – all are conditions of Capitalism's totalizing existence that seem to lose their autonomy, their contradictory capability to be read as conditions of its nonexistence. We laboriously pry each piece loose – theorizing the legal "system," for example, as a fragmented and diverse collection of practices and institutions that is constituted by a whole host of things in addition to capitalism – but Capitalism nevertheless exerts its massive gravitational pull. Even socialism functions as the dual or placeholder of Capitalism rather than as its active and contradictory constituent. Socialism is just Capitalism's opposite, a great emptiness on the other side of a membrane, a social space where the fullness of Capitalism is negated. When the socialist bubble in eastern Europe burst, Capitalism flooded in like a miasma. We are all capitalist now. It seems we have banished economic determinism and the economistic conception of class as the major axis of social transformation, only to have enshrined the economy once again – this time in a vast metonymic emplacement (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Capitalism which is a name for a form of economy is invoked in every social dimension. The wealthy industrial societies are summarily characterized as capitalist social formations. On the one hand, we have taken back social life front the economy while, on the other, we have allowed it – under the name of Capitalism to colonize the entire social space.17 This means that the left is not only presented with the revolutionary task of transforming the whole economy, it must replace the entire society as well. It is not surprising that there seems to be no room for a thriving and powerful noncapitalist economy, politics and culture, though it is heartening to consider that these nevertheless may exist.

Feminist professors of economic geography

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One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.

Feminist economist

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Understanding capitalism has always been a project of the left, especially within the Marxian tradition. There, where knowledges of “capitalism” arguably originated, theory is accorded an explicit social role. From Marx to Lenin to the neo-Marxists of the post-World War II period, theorists have understood their work as contributing — whether proximately or distantly — to anticapitalist projects of political action. In this sense economic theory has related to politics as a subordinate and a servant: we understand the world in order to change it. Given the avowed servitude of left theory to left political action it is ironic (though not surprising) that understandings and images of capitalism can quite readily be viewed as contributing to a crisis in left politics. Indeed, and this is the argument we wish to make in this book, the project of understanding the beast has itself produced a beast, or even a bestiary; and the process of producing knowledge in service to politics has estranged rather than united understanding and action. Bringing these together again, or allowing them to touch in different ways, is one of our motivating aspirations. “Capitalism” occupies a special and privileged place in the language of social representation. References to “capitalist society” are a commonplace of left and even mainstream social description, as are references — to the market, to the global economy, to postindustrial society — in which an unnamed capitalism is implicitly invoked as the defining and unifying moment of a complex economic and social formation. Just as the economic system in eastern Europe used confidently to be described as communist or socialist, so a general confidence in economic classification characterizes representations of an increasingly capitalist world system. But what might be seen as the grounds of this confidence, if we put aside notions of “reality” as the authentic origin of its representations? Why might it seem problematic to say that the United States is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one, despite the widespread belief that Christianity and heterosexuality are dominant or majority practices in their respective domains, while at the same time it seems legitimate and indeed “accurate” to say that the US is a capitalist country?1 What is it about the former expressions, and their critical history, that makes them visible as “regulatory fictions,”2 ways of erasing or obscuring difference, while the latter is seen as accurate representation? Why, moreover, have embracing and holistic expressions for social structure like patriarchy fallen into relative disuse among feminist theorists (see Pringle 1995; Barrett and Phillips 1992) while similar conceptions of capitalism as a system or “structure of power” are still prevalent and resilient? These sorts of questions, by virtue of their scarcity and scant claims to legitimacy, have provided us a motive for this book.3 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes "capitalism" as an economic and social descriptor. Scrutinizing what might be seen as throwaway uses of the term - passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism - as well as systematic and deliberate attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic, or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism are a potent constituent of the anticapitalist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of "capitalist hegemony" deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In this sense, "capitalist hegemony" operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the anticapitalist imaginations. What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop unrestricted? If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that are not what they seem). The discursive artifact we call "capitalist hegemony" is a complex effect of a wide variety of discursive and nondiscursive conditions. In this book we focus on the practices and preoccupations of discourse, tracing some of the different, even incompatible, representations of capitalism that can be collated within this fictive summary representation. These depictions have their origins in the diverse traditions of Marxism, classical and contemporary political economy, academic social science, modern historiography, popular economic and social thought, western philosophy and metaphysics, indeed, in an endless array of texts, traditions and infrastructures of meaning. In the chapters that follow, only a few of these are examined for the ways in which they have sustained a vision of capitalism as the dominant form of economy, or have contributed to the possibility or durability of such a vision. But the point should emerge none the less clearly: the virtually unquestioned dominance of capitalism can be seen as a complex product of a variety of discursive commitments, including but not limited to organicist social conceptions, heroic historical narratives, evolutionary scenarios of social development, and essentialist, phallocentric, or binary patterns of thinking. It is through these discursive figurings and alignments that capitalism is constituted as large, powerful, persistent, active, expansive, progressive, dynamic, transformative; embracing, penetrating, disciplining, colonizing, constraining; systemic, self-reproducing, rational, lawful, self-rectifying; organized and organizing, centered and centering; originating, creative, protean; victorious and ascendant; self- identical, self-expressive, full, definite, real, positive, and capable of conferring identity and meaning.

This essay on communication and political economy argues that informationalism and consumerism confine a narcissistic public to a permanent present while corporations exploit people and the environment, and that mass slaughter threatens to return.

Graduate School of Management, University of Queensland

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By emphasising the problem of the ‘ontological self’ (Giddens 1991: 49), informationalism and ‘consumerism’ confines the navel-gazing, ‘narcissistic’ masses to a permanent present which they self-consciously sacrifice for a Utopian future (cf. Adorno 1973: 303; Hitchens 1999; Lasch 1984: 25-59). Meanwhile transnational businesses go about their work, raping the environment; swindling each other and whole nations; and inflicting populations with declining wages, declining working conditions, and declining social security. Slavery is once again on the increase (Castells, 1998; Graham, 1999; ILO, 1998).

There is no “problem of the subject”, just as there is no “global society”; there is only the mass amnesia of utopian propaganda, the strains of which have historically accompanied revolutions in communication technologies. Each person’s identity is, quite simply, their subjective account of a unique and objective history of interactions within the objective social and material environments they inhabit, create, and inherit. The identity of each person is their most intimate historical information, and they are its material expression: each person is a record of their own history at any given time. Thus, each person is a recognisably material, identifiable entity: an identity. This is their condition. People are not theoretical entities; they are people. As such, they have an intrinsic identity with an intrinsic value. No amount of theory or propaganda will make it go away.

The widespread multilateral attempts to prop up consumer society and hypercapitalism as a valid and useful means of sustainable growth, indeed, as the path to an inevitable, international democratic Utopia, are already showing their disatrous cracks. The “problem” of subjective death threatens to give way, once again, to unprecedented mass slaughter. The numbed condition of a narcissistic society, rooted in a permanent “now”, a blissful state of Heideggerian Dasein, threatens to wake up to a world in which “subjective death” and ontology are the least of all worries.

This economics literature review surveys the economics literature on the causes and consequences of populism.

Sergei Guriev — Professor of Economics, Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies); former Chief Economist, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Elias Papaioannou — Professor of Economics, London Business School

This political science book argues that modern autocrats rely on information manipulation and "spin" rather than overt terror to maintain power.

Sergei Guriev — Professor of Economics, Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies); Daniel Treisman — Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

This article on realism in foreign policy defends realism by arguing that foreign policy should be judged by its results, using the Bosnian war to show the cost of pursuing the "most moral" outcome without matching capabilities.

Executive Editor, The National Interest

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As the name implies, realists focus on promoting policies that are achievable and sustainable. In turn, the morality of a foreign policy action is judged by its results, not by the intentions of its framers. A foreign policymaker must weigh the consequences of any course of action and assess the resources at hand to carry out the proposed task. As Lippmann warned, Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.8 Commenting on this maxim, Owen Harries, founding editor of The National Interest, noted, "This is a truth of which Americans—more apt to focus on ends rather than means when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world—need always to be reminded."9 In fact, Morgenthau noted that "there can be no political morality without prudence."10 This virtue of prudence—which Morgenthau identified as the cornerstone of realism—should not be confused with expediency. Rather, it takes as its starting point that it is more moral to fulfill one's commitments than to make "empty" promises, and to seek solutions that minimize harm and produce sustainable results. Morgenthau concluded: [End Page 18] Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible, between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.11 This is why, prior to the outbreak of fighting in the former Yugoslavia, U.S. and European realists urged that Bosnia be decentralized and partitioned into ethnically based cantons as a way to head off a destructive civil war. Realists felt this would be the best course of action, especially after the country's first free and fair elections had brought nationalist candidates to power at the expense of those calling for inter-ethnic cooperation. They had concluded—correctly, as it turned out—that the United States and Western Europe would be unwilling to invest the blood and treasure that would be required to craft a unitary Bosnian state and give it the wherewithal to function. Indeed, at a diplomatic conference in Lisbon in March 1992, the various factions in Bosnia had, reluctantly, endorsed the broad outlines of such a settlement. For the purveyors of moralpolitik, this was unacceptable. After all, for this plan to work, populations on the "wrong side" of the line would have to be transferred and resettled. Such a plan struck directly at the heart of the concept of multi-ethnicity—that different ethnic and religious groups could find a common political identity and work in common institutions. When the United States signaled it would not accept such a settlement, the fragile consensus collapsed. The United States, of course, cannot be held responsible for the war; this lies squarely on the shoulders of Bosnia's political leaders. Yet Washington fell victim to what Jonathan Clarke called "faux Wilsonianism," the belief that "high-flown words matter more than rational calculation" in formulating effective policy, which led U.S. policymakers to dispense with the equation of "balancing commitments and resources."12 Indeed, as he notes, the Clinton administration had criticized peace plans calling for decentralized partition in Bosnia "with lofty rhetoric without proposing a practical alternative." The subsequent war led to the deaths of tens of thousands and left more than a million people homeless. After three years of war, the Dayton Accords—hailed as a triumph of American diplomacy—created a complicated arrangement by which the federal union of two ethnic units, the Muslim-Croat Federation, was itself federated to a Bosnian Serb republic. Today, Bosnia requires thousands of foreign troops to patrol its internal borders and billions of dollars in foreign aid to keep its government and economy functioning. Was the aim of U.S. policymakers, academics and journalists—creating a multi-ethnic democracy in Bosnia—not worth pursuing? No, not at all, and this is not what the argument suggests. But aspirations were not matched with capabilities. As a result of holding out for the "most moral" outcome and encouraging the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo to pursue maximalist aims rather than finding a workable compromise that could have avoided bloodshed and produced more stable conditions, the peoples of Bosnia suffered greatly. In the end, the final settlement was very close [End Page 19] to the one that realists had initially proposed—and the one that had also been roundly condemned on moral grounds.

This article argues that Nietzsche uses the language of consequentialism while rejecting hedonism, and that life is the only thing with intrinsic value for him.

Professor of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University

📊 104 14

Yet, there is a strong textual case to be made for the claim that Nietzsche considered life to have intrinsic value. Consider what he says at TI IX 35: "[T]he moral lie in the mouth of the decadent says: `nothing is worth anything life is not worth anything'. Here Nietzsche claims that it is decadents who deny the value of life, and that to do so constitutes a moral lie. This clearly implies that life is valuable, or has value. In fact, Nietzsche's entire treatment of decadence is a useful signpost here—he defines decadence in terms of activities and emotions harmful to life (cf. TI 35, 37; AC 30, 50; WP 4044, 153, 180, 268, 423, 435), and he consistently derides decadence as immoral. Moreover, GS 301 can be read in such a way that it is consistent with this view. There Nietzsche claims that nothing in "our world" has intrinsic value, and that the only kind of value is the value that humans assign for the purposes of satisfying their own interests. The world of value is anthropocentric, and we stand at the center of valuations, providing the grounding of intrinsic value that allows other acts and objects to be instrumentally valuable. The instrumental value of non-human objects stems from the relations they hear to humans and their interests. One lesson to be taken away from GS 301 is that if anything has intrinsic value, then the only thing that does so is life. If we agree that what Nietzsche offers us is essentially a consequentialist view, complete with an account of intrinsic and instrumental value, something must be said about his frequent attacks on utilitarianism. These criticisms constitute at least a prima facie challenge to the interpretation offered. That the challenge is merely a prima facie one is easily shown, however, because as usual Nietzsche's concerns are more subtle and sophisticated than might be initially supposed. His criticisms of utilitarianism are much like his arguments against logic: he does not oppose the whole thing, just part of it. Nietzsche does not jettison proof theory, e.g., even while he abhors semantics that posit domains of non-fictional entities." It is an all-too-easy error to assimilate his rejection of extant semantics to a rejection of logic altogether. Likewise, Nietzsche's complaint against utilitarianism is not so much a gripe about the structure of the theory as it is one about hedonism. Only the English strive after happiness, he tells us in TI I 12, and he considers hedonism to be a typical example of decadence (AC 30). The utilitarian dichotomy between pleasure and pain is too simplistic for Nietzsche, and the idea that all people work towards their happiness too simple-minded. He says quite explicitly, "man does not seek pleasure and does not avoid displeasure: one will realize which famous prejudice I am contradicting"' (WP 702, Nietzsche's italics). This theme sees work in BGE 225, and in WP35, 671, 701-704. While Nietzsche employs the language of consequentialism, he rejects the Benthamite summum bonum as a mistake. This is a perfectly consistent position.

This book argues that Deleuze’s philosophy of deterritorialization is indifferent to the politics of this world and disables action in favour of contemplation.

Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University

📊 278 32

Rather than try to refute Deleuze, this book has tried to show how his system works and to draw attention to what should now be the obvious (and perfectly explicit) limitations of this philosophy of unlimited affirmation. First of all, since it acknowledges only a unilateral relation between virtual and actual, there is no place in Deleuze's philosophy for any notion of change, time or history that is mediated by actuality. In the end, Deleuze offers few resources for thinking the consequences of what happens within the actually existing world as such. Unlike Darwin or Marx, for instance, the adamantly virtual orientation of Deleuze's 'constructivism' does not allow him to account for cumulative transformation or novelty in terms of actual materials and tendencies. No doubt few contemporary philosophers have had as an acute a sense of the internal dynamic of capitalism – but equally, few have proposed so elusive a response as the virtual 'war machine' that roams through the pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Like the nomads who invented it, this abstract machine operates at an 'absolute speed, by being "synonymous with speed', as the incarnation of 'a pure and immeasurable multiplicity [...], an irruption of the ephemeral and of the power of metamorphosis' (TP, 386, 352). Like any creating, a war machine consists and 'exists only in its own metamorphoses' (TP, 360). By posing the question of politics in the starkly dualistic terms of war machine or state – by posing it, in the end, in the apocalyptic terms of a new people and a new earth or else no people and no earth – the political aspect of Deleuze's philosophy amounts to little more than utopian distraction. Although no small number of enthusiasts continue to devote much energy and ingenuity to the task, the truth is that Deleuze's work is essentially indifferent to the politics of this world. A philosophy based on deterritorialisation, dissipation and flight can offer only the most immaterial and evanescent grip on the mechanisms of exploitation and domination that continue to condition so much of what happens in our world. Deleuze's philosophical war remains 'absolute' and 'abstract', precisely, rather than directed or 'waged' [nienie]. Once 'a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it', any distinctive space for political action can only be subsumed within the more general dynamics of creation or life. And since these dynamics are themselves anti-dialectical if not anti-relational, there can be little room in Deleuze's philosophy for relations of conflict or solidarity, i.e. relations that are genuinely between rather than external to individuals, classes, or principles. Deleuze writes a philosophy of (virtual) difference without (actual) others. He intuits a purely internal or self-differing difference, a difference that excludes any constitutive mediation between the differed. Such a philosophy precludes a distinctively relational conception of politics as a matter of course. The politics of the future are likely to depend less on virtual mobility than on more resilient forms of cohesion, on more principled forms of commitment, on more integrated forms of coordination, on more resistant forms of defence. Rather than align ourselves with the nomadic war machine, our first task should be to develop appropriate ways of responding to the newly aggressive techniques of invasion, penetration and occupation which serve to police the embattled margins of empire. In a perverse twist of fate, it may be that today, in places like Palestine, Haiti and Iraq, the agents of imperialism have more to learn from Deleuzian rhizomatics than do their opponents. As we have repeatedly seen, the second corollary of Deleuze's disqualification of actuality concerns the paralysis of the subject or actor. Since what powers Deleuze's cosmology is the immediate differentiation of creation through the infinite proliferation of virtual creatings, the creatures that actualise these creatings are confined to a derivative if not limiting role. A creature's own interests, actions or decisions are of minimal or preliminary significance at best: the renewal of creation always requires the paralysis and dissolution of the creature per se. The notion of a constrained or situated freedom, the notion that a subject's own decisions might have genuine consequences – the whole notion, in short, of strategy – is thoroughly foreign to Deleuze's conception of thought. Deleuze obliges us, in other words, to make an absolute distinction between what a subject does or decides and what is done or decided through the subject. By rendering this distinction absolute he abandons the category of the subject altogether. He abandons the decisive subject in favour of our more immediate subjection to the imperatives of creative life or thought. Deprived of any strategic apparatus, Deleuze's philosophy thus combines the self-grounding sufficiency of pure force or infinite perfection with our symmetrical limitation to pure contemplation or in-action. On the one hand, Deleuze always maintains that 'there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life'. Absolute life or creation tolerates no norm external to itself. The creative movement that orients us out of the world does not depend on a transcendent value beyond the world. After Spinoza, after Nietzsche, Deleuze rejects all forms of moral evaluation or strategic judgement. Every instance of decision, every confrontation with the question 'what should we do?', is to be resolved exclusively in terms of what we can do. An individual's power or capacity is also its 'natural right', and the answer to the question of what an individual or body should do is again simplicity itself – it should go and will always go 'as far as it can' (WP, 74; EP, 258). But on the other hand, we know that an individual can only do this because its power is not that of the individual itself. By doing what it can, an individual only provides a vessel for the power that works through it, and which alone acts – or rather, which alone is. What impels us to 'persevere in our being' has nothing to do with us as such. So when, in the conclusion of their last joint project, Deleuze and Guattari observe that 'vitalism has always had two possible interpretations', it is not surprising that they should opt for the resolutely in-active interpretation. Vitalism, they explain, can be conceived either in terms of 'an Idea that acts but is not, and that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge; or of a force that is but does not act, and which is therefore a pure internal Feeling [Sentir]'. Deleuze and Guattari embrace this second interpretation, they choose Leibnizian being over Kantian act, precisely because it disables action in favour of contemplation. It suspends any relation between a living and the lived, between a knowing and the known, between a creating and the created. They embrace it because what feeling 'preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to action and even to movement, and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge'.18 As Deleuze understands it, living contemplation proceeds at an immeasurable distance from what is merely lived, known or decided. Life lives and creation creates on a virtual plane that leads forever out of our actual world. Few philosophers have been as inspiring as Deleuze. But those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere.

This handbook chapter examines claims that ancient civilizations received knowledge from extraterrestrial visitors.

Professor of Religious Studies, University of Southern Denmark

This article argues that Nietzsche is not simply against institutions or the rule of law, since creativity disrupts structure while still needing structure.

Professor of Philosophy, Old Dominion University

📊 153 15

Modern societies, at least, cannot function without institutions and the coercive force of law. Appel, like many interpreters, construes Nietzsche's "political" thought as advancing more an "aesthetic" activity than institutional governance (NCD, p.160ff). Supposedly Nietzsche envisions an elite who compete with each other for creative results in isolation from the mass public; indeed the elite simply use the masses as material for their creative work, without regard for the fate or welfare of the general citizenry. Appel maintains that such a political aesthetics is problematic because it is incompatible with the maintenance of stable institutions. And Nietzsche is also supposed to eschew the rule of law in favor of the hubris of self-policing (NCD, p.165). If this were true, one would be hard pressed to find Nietzsche relevant for any political philosophy, much less a democratic one. It is a mistake, however, to read Nietzsche in simple terms as being against institutions and the rule of law on behalf of self-creation. First of all, even Nietzsche's early celebration of the Dionysian should not be taken as an anti- or extra-political gesture. In BT 21, Nietzsche insists that the Apollonian has coequal status with the Dionysian, and the former is specifically connected with the political order, which is needed to temper the Dionysian impulse toward "ecstatic brooding" and "orgiastic self-annihilation." Those who read Nietzsche as resisting "normalization" and "discipline" (this includes most postmodern readings and Appel's as well 13 ), are not on very firm ground either. For one thing, Nietzschean creative freedom is selective and most people should be ruled by normative orders, because universal unrestricted freedom would cause havoc. 14 Moreover, even selective creative freedom is not an abandonment of order and constraint. Creativity breaks free of existing structures, but only to establish new ones. Shaping new forms requires formative powers prepared by disciplined skills and activated by refined instruments of production. Accordingly, creativity is a kind of "dancing in chains" (WS 140). 15 Creative freedom, then, is not an abandonment of constraint, but a disruption of structure that still needs structure to prepare and execute departures from the norm.

This book argues that Nietzschean perspectivism treats evaluations of life as local pleas rather than global refutations, and that we should let people live the life they want to live.

Professor of Philosophy, Old Dominion University

📊 328 35

Nietzsche is willing to offer judgments against weak, life-denying perspectives and in favor of strong, life-affirming perspectives. Nevertheless, Nietzsche also indicates that overall evaluations of life cannot be given any veridical status, since they stem from perspectival interests . Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one's fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. (TI 2,2) Evaluations of life, then, are local estimations that serve the interests of a certain perspective but that cannot stand as a global measure to cancel out other estimations. This would not be inconsistent with Nietzsche 's texts; although he vigorously opposes what he calls the perspectives of the weak , nevertheless these perspectives have their authenticity, according to Nietzsche." Life-denying perspectives serve the interests of certain types of life , who have been able to cultivate their own forms of power that have had an enormous effect upon the world. In order to make headway here, we have to distinguish between life-affirmation and life-enhancement. According to Nietzsche, even life-denying perspectives are life-enhancing, since they further the interests of weak forms of life. Different forms of life are continually affirming their own perspective on life; their cultural productions, even if animated by otherworldly projections, express their local affirmative posture. Even philosophical pessimism is affirmative in this sense. Schopenhauer's elaborate philosophical output on behalf of pessimism was in effect an affirmation of a pessimistic life, in part as a vigorous—and stimulating—condemnation of optimism." Short of the practical nihilism of suicide, all forms of human life seek to will their meaning, even if that meaning is a conviction about the meaninglessness of life. As Nietzsche says, "man would rather will nothingness than not will" (GM 111,28).Nietzsche does have a "global" philosophical position, namely perspectivism, in the sense that the life-world is a field of perspectives, each willing their own life interests; as perspectives in a field of becoming, however, none can pose as the "truth." Nothing here would forbid Nietzsche from making judgments about perspectives that he thinks are deficient estimations of life. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a misinterpretation (Missdeutung). Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking. (TI 7,1) Since, as we have seen, overall estimations of life can have no veridical status, Nietzsche's critique cannot amount to a project of refutation or erasure, but rather a "plea by an interested party" The promotion of life-affirmation over life-denial should be taken as Nietzsche's perspective, as a battle that he is willing to wage, as a commitment that involves an existential decision rather than a search for justification. In this way other perspectives can have their place, in their service to the interests of different types of life.

If there is one thing that best explains the attraction to Nietzsche among radical intellectuals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, it is the ubiquitous problem of the bourgeoisie—the persistent complaint by various artists, writers, and social critics about bourgeois conformity, materialism, consumerism, and superficial sensibilities. The intensity of such reproaches, however, would not fit the more kindly attitude toward mediocrity expressed by Nietzsche: When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty. (A 57) In addition, such reproaches ought to arouse a certain Nietzschean suspicion about motivation. The social critics perhaps doth protest too much. Would not a truly creative person , as we have seen, welcome conformity and "popular culture" as an agonistic correlate, and simply proceed to offer higher possibilities and productions? Might the critics be guilty of a kind of resentment? There is evident in anti-bourgeois judgments a kind of aesthetic puritanism, a moralistic tone about ordinary life that may be susceptible to a Nietzschean critique; an inability to affirm everyday conditions may be no less problematical than traditional refusals to affirm existential finitude . Perhaps democratic inclusiveness is what helps explain the neglect of, or indifference toward Nietzsche's antidemocratic posture among intellectuals who otherwise are not calling for an aristocratic political order. Democracy seems to favor ordinary sensibilities, and complaints about such things would explain the selective appropriation of Nietzsche's discourse. It should be asked, however, if there is not a latent tyranny in anti-bourgeois mentalities. This is not to equate democracy with mediocrity; we have been trying to unsettle that supposition all along. It is only to say that there seems to be no alternative to an open conception of democracy that would not be problematized by any of its results as long as all perspectives have had a fair chance to influence results. Radical harangues against the tastes and proclivities of the mass of citizens are not out of line, but this should not be considered a baseline problem for democracy. After all is said and done, we should let people live the life they want to live. This is why an agonistic, procedural conception of democracy is desirable; it precludes the latent tyranny in political stories that proclaim a certain salvific mission or transformation or elevation of the social order. In a global sense, a Nietzschean refusal of teleological prescriptions is what can protect a democracy from even the most subtle and camouflaged types of reformist closure. It deserves mention that Nietzsche may have lost sight of his own warnings against teleological metanarratives with his dramatic story of slave values corrupting life and debasing culture, his call for higher types to assert themselves and affirm the earth , his hopes for questions aside, the only way to salvage Nietzsche philosophically is to privatize his transformational rhetoric. To a significant extent, such a strategy has merit; self-creation is certainly an appropriate setting for much of Nietzsche's philosophical dynamic. Nonetheless, a good deal of that dynamic is also appropriate for the public sphere—which has been the point of the political reflections in this study. My tastes ran toward denying all "big stories"—including Nietzsche's life-affirmation story—a special place in political philosophy. Nietzsche's thinking to be sure helps us formulate an appropriate political order. His reflections on resentment and affirmation, weakness and strength, closure and openness, and his agonistic pluralism allow us to effectively delineate the contours of democratic arrangements. Political practice, however, should be left free, and this includes citizens who are not "Nietzschean" enough, who might be "resentful ," or "bourgeois," or "metaphysical." Otherwise we would seem forced to conclude that such citizens are not practicing politics in the "right" way . As long as democratic matter—otherwise we are left with a choice between coercive reform and an insincere tolerance of the wrong kind of politics . Again, appeals to people's sense of life are not out of line, but appeals through public discourse should be the limit , because Politics in the end includes force.

This article on prison education reports on inmates reviving the Norfolk Prison Debating Society after half a century.

Public radio reporter, NPR

This article on antitrust and economics argues that "hipster antitrust" commits the Nirvana fallacy by comparing real markets to idealized alternatives.

Professor of Economics, Clemson University; former Chief Economist, Federal Communications Commission

This political theory article argues that for Levinas, the ethical demand revealed by hunger can only be answered through politics, so ethics and politics are bound together rather than opposed.

Lecturer in Political Science, University of Haifa

📊 149 0

Therefore, says Levinas, on an ethical level, the Other is the "richest": With a "right-to-be preceding mine," he/she comes before me and gets everything from me. However, he/she is the "poorest" and is "utterly vulnerable and exposed" in that he/she needs me, or in that he/she always needs more of me, because I cannot give him/her everything I have, which means that he/she stays hungry and dies of hunger. In other words, he/she is poor "at an ontological or political level" (EOI 63) when I cannot give him/her everything because there are other others, and I do not do more for him/her, although I could. The "problem" arises from the fact that many hungry people surround me (and also from the fact that my neighbors sometimes eat much better than I: I am part of these hungry people). To formulate the "problem," I necessarily enter the world of comparison and weighing, the world of politics. Here, says Levinas, a paradox arises: Indeed without these political and technological structures of organization we would not be able to feed mankind. This is the great paradox of human experience: we must use the ontological for the sake of the other; to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends. (EOI 64) The paradox of politics is that it is both the origin and the cure of hunger. The Other is dying because of politics, but he/she does not die automatically, thanks to politics. Strikingly, it is this paradox that reveals the ethical demand: it is through politics, or because of politics, that "the sake of the Other" appears as the first and the predominant concern. It does not follow that because of politics and the hunger that it creates, we need ethics as a solution. The solution is political! "Justice is necessary" ("Il faut la justice"), insists Levinas. It is in a political context that I discover the misery in the face of the Other and my responsibility for him/her that comes before all politics. It is a political context that is needed to feed the Other, for whom I and only I am absolutely responsible. We have slipped into the spiral mise en aliime of the double bind—from primordial hunger in the face of the Other that demands my complete responsibility, to hunger as a political consequence appeased only by political means. Hence, contrary to what Derrida suggests, there is no "leap without transition . . . rupturing mutation of the 'without question' at the birth of the 'first question— (A 64; A' 31); there is no "lacuna" and no "hiatus" (A 46; A' 20) between ethics and politics.26 There is a concrete passage between them: misery. Misery is the basis of ethics that, "in its immediacy, [is] anterior to every question." However, misery comes from politics. I am responsible for the Other because he/she is hungry. However, the solution to hunger will come from the state, not from me. I shall show now that in Levinas's work, one can find two distinct expressions of the double bind and that these two expressions lead to two distinct conceptions of politics. III The expression of the relationship between ethics and politics that Derrida analyzes in the second part of "A Word of Welcome" appears chronologically in Uvinas's work from TEI to AE and to PP. Levinas first says "no" to the state and its ontological violence and then "yes" to the state and its necessary justice. He says "no" first to politics as war and to the misery that war generates (TEI 5; TI 21); "no" to politics that "deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules and thus as in absentia"" (TEI 335; TI 300); "no" to the state "which carries within it the seeds of the totalitarian state";28 "no" to a system in which a civil servant cannot see the tears of the Other;29 "no" to a Peace on the basis of the Truth—on the basis of the truth of a knowledge where, instead of opposing itself, the diverse agrees with itself and unites; where the stranger is assimilated; where the other is reconciled with the identical in everyone. . . . Peace on the basis of the state, which would be a gathering of humans participating in the same ideal truths and that in spite of its tranquility and solidarity generated "millennia of fratricidal, political, and bloody struggles, of imperialism, of human hatred and exploitation, up to our century of world wars, genocides, the Holocaust, and terrorism; of unemployment, the continuing poverty of the Third World" (PP 339-40; PP' 162-63). "No," therefore, to politics because of ethics, because "There is anxiety in committing the crimes even when the concepts are in agreement with each other. There is an anxiety of responsibility that is incumbent on everyone in the death or suffering of the other" (PP 341; PP' 164). But then, and at the same time, Levinas says "yes" to politics because the third is there and he/she is also dying: "What am Ito do?" He says "yes" to politics because my infinite generosity for the Other is not enough for all the others, because there is more to do; "yes" to politics because ethics and its disproportion contains a kind of violence toward the others.' "Yes" to politics precisely because ethics is unjust and must be moderated: To the extravagant generosity of the for-the-other is superimposed a reasonable order, ancillary or angelic, of justice through knowledge, and philosophy here is a measure brought to the infinity of the being-for-the-other of peace and proximity, and it is like the wisdom of love. (PP 346; PP' 169) Without politics, ethics would perhaps forget, because of its extravagance, the concrete reality of hunger and its possible solutions. In revealing hunger and demanding a solution for it, ethics both controls and appeals to politics. More precisely, ethics dominates politics because it requires justice. Ethics and politics come together, the former demanding of the latter to correct the hunger that politics itself creates; that is, ethics demands of politics something ethics cannot provide because of its extravagance.

Downfall is a film dramatizing Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker as the Third Reich collapses.

German film director

This undergraduate honors thesis offers a rhetorical criticism of how kritiks are used in parliamentary debate.

Undergraduate honors student, Northern Illinois University

This article on security studies argues that not everyone who speaks security has an equal chance of producing a securitizing effect, since presidents, generals, and police carry more weight than shop assistants.

Jef Huysmans — Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies, The Open University

📊 23 0

However, emphasising that the power of representation does not reside primarily with an intentional agent but with the structuring properties of language and culture does not solve the problem that not everyone speaking or writing security has an equal chance of producing a securitising effect. It is usually the case that presidents, police officers or generals speaking security or articulating a cultural predisposition towards enemy definition is more important than the language of shop assistants (Bigo 1994, 1996. 2000; Huysmans 2002).

This NPR broadcast segment examines the role and value of debate in public life.

National Public Radio — United States public radio news network

Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.

The president of Fort Hays State University in Kansas dislikes the debating technique of his debating coach. He fired the coach after William Shanahan got in a screaming match. He argued with another coach at a debate tournament. YouTube video shows them screaming obscenities. Shanahan jumped up and down, then turned around to moon the room - underwear still up, but shorts definitely down. He says he argued with the other coach because he respected her.

This essay on the psychology of decision-making argues that cognitive biases predispose policymakers to favor hawkish advisers.

Nobel laureate in economics; Professor of Psychology, Princeton University

psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors [...] In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.

This fact check explains that the Great Pyramid’s latitude matching the digits of the speed of light is a coincidence of modern units.

Science writer, Snopes

This article on political theory argues that humanity will not halt the technological project, that it could only be stopped by global catastrophe, and that Heidegger's idea of a saving remedy is useless.

Professor of Politics, Princeton University

📊 63 100

It is scarcely conceivable that Western humanity--and by now most of humanity, because of their pleasures and interests and their own passions and desires and motives--would halt the technological project. Even if, by some change of heart, Western humanity could adopt an altered relation to reality and human beings, how could it be enforced and allowed to yield its effects? The technological project can be stopped only by some global catastrophe that it had helped to cause or was powerless to avoid. Heidegger's teasing invocation of the idea that a saving remedy grows with the worst danger is useless. In any case, no one would want the technological project halted, if the only way was a global catastrophe.

This article on political and cultural theory argues that as long as global economic and political structures remain unchanged, local emancipations only redistribute burdens onto others, creating an implicit alliance between defenders of modernity and their postmodern critics.

English instructor, Onondaga Community College

📊 53 43

What this overlooks, of course, is the way in which, as long as global economic and political structures remain unchanged and unchallenged, local emancipations can only be redistributions—redistributions that actually support existing social relations by merely shifting the greater burdens onto others who are less capable of achieving their own local emancipation. This implicit alliance between the defenders of modernity and their postmodern critics (at least on the fundamental question) also suggests that we need to look for the roots and consequences of this alliance in the contradictions of the formation of the cultural studies public intellectual.

This article on the philosophy of nuclear deterrence considers the argument that nations are incapable of refraining from deterrence because any government that abandoned it would be replaced, as part of its analysis of the moral paradoxes of nuclear deterrence.

Professor of Social Science and Philosophy, University of California, Irvine

📊 24 0

But, it may be suggested, nations are literally incapable of refraining from taking steps believed to be necessary for national defense, even if these impose horrible risks or harms on outside innocents. For any government, that failed to undertake the requisite defensive actions (e.g., any government that abandoned nuclear deterrence) would be quickly ousted and replaced by a government willing to undertake them.

This article on the history of authoritarianism argues that modern authoritarian rulers do not much resemble Hitler and that international institutions and democratic pressures provide barriers to a similar catastrophe.

Professor of History, University of Sheffield

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Elsewhere, there are - and always will be - nasty forms of authoritarianism. But neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler. International organizations and institutions that did not exist in interwar Europe - the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund - also provide barriers to the sort of calamity that engulfed Germany. Moreover, democracies under pressure can still pose obstacles to creeping authoritarianism. Putin looks as if he will indeed step down as president and not risk a breach of the constitution (though effective power will probably remain in his own hands), while Chávez has been forced (maybe temporarily) to give up his ambitions to become a president for life.

This article on Foucault and political theory describes Foucault's concept of biopower as positive and productive, aiming to protect and propagate life rather than merely restrict it.

Professor of Philosophy, Wageningen University

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Biopower is not negative and prohibitive but positive and productive; its aim is not to curtail and restrict life with the help of numerous do's and don'ts but, conversely, to protect, support and propagate life. Under its regime, death fell into discredit: public executions were abolished, the death bed was hidden in the wings and suicide was surrounded by taboos. The cult of noble blood shed in defence of the sovereign was replaced by the cult of healthy sex in the service of life.

This book on discourse and environmental politics argues that the study of discourse lets academics stand aside from issues, making environmental problems seem less real and substituting a world of words for engagement.

Lecturer in Environmental Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University

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Noam Chomsky has noted that if "it's too hard to deal with real problems,' some academics tend to "go off on wild goose chases that don't matter ... [or] get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is." An emphasis on language can serve this sort of defensive function; for the study of discourse enables one to stand aside from issues and avoid any commitment to a cause or ideal, simply presenting all sides of a debate and pointing out the discursive strategies involved. As the physical world appears to fade into mere discourse, so it comes to seem less real than the language used to describe it; and environmental issues lose the dimensions of urgency and tragedy and become instead the proving grounds for ideas and attitudes. Rather than walking in what Aldo Leopold described as a "world of wounds," the discursive theorist can study this world dispassionately, safely insulated from the emotional and ecological havoc that is taking place elsewhere. Like experimentalism, this is a schizoid stance that exemplifies rather than challenges the characteristic social pathology of our time; and it is one that supports Melanie Klein's thesis that the internal object world can serve as a psychotic substitute for an external "real" world that is either absent or unsatisfying." Ian Craib's description of social constructionism as a "social psychosis" therefore seems entirely apt. But what object relations theorists such as Klein fail to point out is the other side of this dialectic that withdrawing from the external world and substituting an internal world of words or fantasies, because of the actions that follow from this state of affairs, makes the former even less satisfying and more psychologically distant, so contributing to the vicious spiral that severs the "human" from the "natural" and abandons nature to industrialism.

This article on teaching language argues that refusing ever to use offensive words preserves their existing meanings and their power to injure.

Scholars of English education

To think of words as having an ‘open’ future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present uses; it is to acknowledge that people can revise the meaning of words [...] For when we choose not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to injure.

This encyclopedia entry explains that for Nietzsche suffering has only extrinsic value, so a morality that reduces suffering can exempt those whose own suffering serves their life projects.

Professor of Philosophy and Law

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Nietzsche is not arguing here that — in contrast to the view of MPS — suffering is really intrinsically valuable (not even MPS claims that). The value of suffering, according to Nietzsche, is only extrinsic: suffering — “great” suffering — is a prerequisite of any great human achievement. As Nietzsche puts the point elsewhere: “Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound” (GS Pref:3). Nietzsche's attack, then, conforms to the model sketched above: (i) he rejects the view that happiness is intrinsically valuable; and (ii) he thinks that the negative attitude of MPS toward suffering obscures its important extrinsic value. (There is reason to think that, on this second point, Nietzsche is generalizing from his own experience with physical suffering, the worst periods of which coincided with his greatest productivity. Indeed, he believed that his suffering contributed essentially to his work: as he writes, admittedly hyperbolically, in Ecce Homo: “In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough” (EH I:1).) Even if there is no shortage in the history of art and literature of cases of immense suffering being the spur to great creativity, there remains a serious worry about the logic of this line of Nietzschean critique. Following Leiter (1995), we may call this the “Harm Puzzle,” and the puzzle is this: why should one think the general moral prescription to alleviate suffering must stop the suffering of great artists, hence stop them from producing great art? One might think, in fact, that MPS could perfectly well allow an exception for those individuals whose own suffering is essential to the realization of central life projects. After all, a prescription to alleviate suffering reflects a concern with promoting well-being, under some construal. But if some individuals — nascent Goethes, Nietzsches, and other geniuses — would be better off with a good dose of suffering, then why would MPS recommend otherwise? Why, then, should it be the case that MPS “harms” potentially “higher men”?

This companion volume explains that, for Nietzsche, the debris of a tradition need not be rejected but may be reappropriated in reconstructing the self.

Professors of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, and University of Texas at Austin

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In this rebirth from the depths "with a higher health" and "with a second and more dangerous innocence" one's innermost nature bursts forth like a natural spring from which the covering debris has been removed. At this point the spring proclaims as its liberator the sharp pick-axe of necessity that has pierced down through the debris and brought it pain.... And ultimately the spring will come to affirm even the debris it burst through and which now floats in it. ISN S 1) The image of the pick-axe - a graphic analogue of Nietzsche's hammer - is very much in the spirit of Zen. When one's inner creativity is able to burst through the overlay of conventional values and conceptualizations, the resultant condition is not one of pristine purity but rather one in which the pool of the psyche is still polluted by debris from the barriers that have been breached. The point is that such debris need not be rejected, but may rather be used in the reconstruction of the new self. Though Nishitani does not himself suggest this, the self's affirmation of the debris from an earlier obstruction would point up the idea that, for Nietzsche, certain features of a tradition previously regarded as repressive may in fact be reappropriated after the appropriate transformation of the self has taken place.

This article argues that seeking to change the world is itself a form of life-celebration, while refusing to experiment resigns oneself to the intolerable.

Professor of Philosophy, Clemson University

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This moment when you are seeking to change the world, whether by making a suggestion in a meeting or singing at a rally or marching in silence or asking for a signature on a petition, is not a moment in which you don’t exist. It’s not a moment of yours that you sacrifice for others so that it no longer belongs to you. It remains a moment of your life, sedimenting in you to make you what you will become, emerging out of a past that is yours as well. What will you make of it, this moment? How will you be with others, those others around you who also do not cease to exist when they begin to organize or to protest or to resist? The illusion is to think that this has nothing to do with you. You’ve made a decision to participate in world-changing. Will that be all there is to it? Will it seem to you a simple sacrifice, for this small period of time, of who you are for the sake of others? Are you, for this moment, a political ascetic? Asceticism like that is dangerous. Freedom lies not in our distance from the world but in the historically fragile and contingent ways we are folded into it, just as we ourselves are folds of it. If we take Merleau-Ponty’s Being not as a rigid foundation or a truth behind appearances but as the historical folding and refolding of a univocity, then our freedom lies in the possibility of other foldings. Merleau-Ponty is not insensitive to this point. His elusive concept of the invisible seems to gesture in this direction. Of painting, he writes: the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence . . . There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below . . . and that which reaches it from above . . . where it no longer participates in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments.9 Elsewhere, in The Visible and the Invisible, he says: if . . . the surface of the visible, is doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve; and if, finally, in our flesh as the flesh of things, the actual, empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back, invagination, or padding, exhibits a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual but its principle . . . an interior horizon and an exterior horizon between which the actual visible is a partitioning and which, nonetheless, open indefinitely only upon other visibles . . .10 What are we to make of these references? We can, to be sure, see the hand of Heidegger in them. But we may also, and for present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucault’s work on freedom. There is an ontology of freedom at work here, one that situates freedom not in the private reserve of an individual but in the unfinished character of any historical situation. There is more to our historical juncture, as there is to a painting, than appears to us on the surface of its visibility. The trick is to recognize this, and to take advantage of it, not only with our thoughts but with our lives. And that is why, in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad revolutionary. To seek to change the world is to offer a new form of life-celebration. It is to articulate a fresh way of being, which is at once a way of seeing, thinking, acting, and being acted upon. It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no guarantee that this fold will not itself turn out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world with which we are inescapably entwined, a world we cannot view from above or outside, there is no certainty about the results of our experiments. Our politics are constructed from the same vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices. But to refuse to experiment is to resign oneself to the intolerable; it is to abandon both the struggle to change the world and the opportunity to celebrate living within it. And to seek one aspect without the other – life-celebration without world-changing, world-changing without life-celebration – is to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the wellspring of both. If we are to celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps the best place to begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and perhaps the point at which the war within us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That is the fragile beauty that, in their different ways, both Merleau- Ponty and Foucault have placed before us. The question before us is whether, in our lives and in our politics, we can be worthy of it. So how might you be a political body, woven into the fabric of the world as a celebrator and as a changer? You went to the meeting, and then to the demonstration. How was it there? Were the bodies in harmony or in counterpoint? Did you sing with your feet, did your voice soar? Did your mind come alive? Did you see possibilities you had not seen before? Were there people whose words or clothes, or even the way they walked hand in hand (how long has it been since you’ve walked hand in hand with someone out in public?) offer you a possibility, or make you feel alive as well as righteous? And how about those people off to the side, the ones on the sidewalk watching? Maybe they just stared, or maybe nodded as you went past. Or maybe some of them shouted at you to stop blocking the streets with your nonsense. Did you recoil within yourself, see yourself as in a mirror, or as the person at Sartre’s keyhole who’s just been caught? Did you feel superior to them, smug in your knowledge? Or did they, too, show you something you might learn from? Are they you at another moment, a moment in the past or in the future? Are they your parents that you have not explained to, sat down beside, or just shared a meal with? That one over there, the old man slightly stooped in the long overcoat: whom does he remind you of? What message might he have unwittingly brought for you? And why does it have to be a demonstration? You go to a few meetings, a few more demonstrations. You write some letters to legislators. You send an email to the President. And then more meetings. The next thing you know, you’re involved in a political campaign. By then you may have stopped asking why. This is how it goes: demonstrations, meetings with legislators, internet contacts. Does it have to be like this? Are demonstrations and meetings your only means? Do they become, sooner or later, not only means but ends? And what kinds of ends? In some sense they should always be ends: a meeting is a celebration, after all. But there are other ends as well. You go to the meeting because that fulfills your obligation to your political conscience. Does it come to that? There are other means, other ends. Other means/ends. Some people ride bicycles, en masse, slowly through crowded urban streets. You want environmentalism? Then have it. The streets are beautiful with their tall corniced buildings and wide avenues. To ride a bike through these streets instead of hiding in the armor of a car would be exhilarating. If enough of you do it together it would make for a pleasant ride, as well as a little lived environmentalism. Would you want to call it a demonstration? Would it matter? There are others as well who do other things with their bodies, more dangerous things. Some people have gone to Palestine in order to put their bodies between the Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers and settlers who attack them. They lie down next to Palestinians in front of the bulldozers that would destroy homes or build a wall through a family’s olive orchard. They feel the bodies of those they are in solidarity with. They smell the soil of Palestine as they lay there. Sometimes, they are harmed by it. A young woman, Rachel Corrie, was deliberately crushed by a US bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier as she kneeled in front of a Palestinian home, hoping to stop its demolition. To do politics with one’s body can be like this. To resist, to celebrate, is also to be vulnerable. The world that you embrace, the world of which you are a part, can kill you too. And so you experiment. You try this and you try that. You are a phenomenologist and a genealogist. You sense what is around you, attend to the way your body is encrusted in your political involvements. And you know that that sensing has its own history, a history that often escapes you even as it envelops you. There is always more to what you are, and to what you are involved in, than you can know. So you try to keep vigilant, seeking the possibilities without scorning the realities. It’s a difficult balance. You can neglect it if you like. Many do. But your body is there, woven into the fabric of all the other bodies, animate and inanimate. Whether you like it or not, whether you recognize it or not. The only question is whether you will take up the world that you are of, or leave it to others, to those others who would be more than willing to take your world up for you.

This physics paper shows how an advanced civilization could in principle convert a traversable wormhole into a time machine.

Physicists, California Institute of Technology

This short essay reports that deaths from war have plummeted over the past 60 years while child mortality, poverty and illness have declined.

Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Over the past 60 years the number of wars and number of people killed in wars have plummeted. Worldwide, fewer babies die, more children go to school, more people live in democracies, more can afford simple luxuries, fewer get sick, and more live to old age.

This article criticizes Lacanian political theory for treating lack as constitutive, which forecloses hope for real political change.

Political theorist

Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a utopian fantasmatic [...] Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of ‘containment’ which involves a conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as a barrier to transformative activity.

This book explains Camus’s objection that Nietzsche’s super-humanity, like Marx’s classless society, sacrifices people in the present to a utopian future.

Psychiatrist

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For Camus, the absurdity of the human condition consists in the incongruity between what humans naturally desire, and the reality of the world. Humans naturally desire not to be injured and killed. They desire to understand life and to find meaning in living. They desire to feel at home in the universe. Despite these natural needs, Man is confronted with a silent universe that does not answer human questions about meaning. He is surrounded by irrational destructiveness, and by the spectre of suffering and pain hurtling out of the void capriciously at human recipients with no regard for their relative merits. Man is estranged from a universe which seems so antagonistic to his natural needs. He feels homeless, in exile, a stranger in his own land. He hears his "nights and days filled always, everywhere with the eternal cry of human pain." Man has been "sentenced, for an unknown crime to an indeterminate period of punishment. And while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried out their humdrum lives as before, there were others who rebelled, and whose one idea was to break loose from the prison house." Like Ivan Karamozov (Bk V. Chap 4), Camus refuses to accept the idea that future goods such as Divine salvation or eternal happiness "can compensate for a single moment of human suffering," or a child's tears. Both Ivan Karamozov and Camus believe that "if evil is essential to Divine creation, then creation is unacceptable." They wish to replace "the reign of grace by the reign of justice." They both assert that no good man would accept salvation on these terms. "There is no possible salvation for the man who feels real compassion," because he would side with the damned and for their sake reject eternity." What is to be gained by rebellion, what are its dangers, and how does one avoid merely "beating the sea with rods" in a nihilistic orgy? With great perceptiveness, Camus discusses these issues in The Rebel. He begins by outlining the entire history of nihilistic rebellion. He admits that once God is declared dead and life meaningless, there is the tendency to rebel in anger by engaging in irrational acts of violence and destruction. Andre Breton has written that the simplest surrealistic act consists "in going out in the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd." Camus cites "the struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation, between the yes and the no, which we base discovered again and again at every stage of rebellion" Citing numerous historical examples, he continually warns against this degeneration of rebellion into crime and murder. Another danger of rebellion which Camus discusses is the substitution of human gods and concepts of salvation for the dead God. This error is more subtle than shooting at random into the crowd, but leads to much more killing and human suffering than the nihilist sniper. Camus criticizes "Nietzsche, at least in his theory of super-humanity, and Marx before him, with his classless society, [who] both replace The Beyond by the Later On." In this respect, these thinkers have not abandoned the notion that history marches toward redemption in which some messianic goal will be realized. Camus urges moderation in the quest for distant goals. He writes, "the absolute is not attained nor, above all, created trough history. Politics is not religion, or if it is, then it is nothing but the inquisition. He contrasts rebellion, which he applauds with revolution which leads to murder in the name of vague future goals. "Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist," and in murdering men who do exist. "He who dedicates himself to this history, dedicates himself to nothing, and in his turn is nothing." In The Plague, the character Tarrou renounces his revolutionary past. He states, For many years I've been ashamed, mortally ashamed of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn ... All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and its up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. Though obviously attuned to the dangers of rebellion, he insists that "these consequences are in no way due to rebellion itself, or at least they occur to the extent that the rebel forgets his original purpose." What is the original purpose that has been forgotten? Rebellion begins because the rebel denounces the lack of justice in the world. He denounces the idea that the end, whether it be the coming of the messianic age, or the revolution or eternal bliss, justifies means which involve so much suffering. Once injustice and suffering are denounced, man needs to exert all his effort against injustice and in solidarity with the sufferers in the world. Killing existing men for a questionable future good, would not be a rational method of exhibiting solidarity with the sufferers. Nor would solidarity be shown by stoical acceptance of the status quo. Camus urges his rebels to renounce murder completely and work for justice and for a decrease in suffering. Like Dr. Rieux in The Plague, one should take the victim's side and "share with his fellow citizens the only certitude they have in common—love, exile, suffering." What can be accomplished through rebellion? Camus' goals are modest. He realizes that the rebel is doomed to "a never ending defeat,'' in that death, finitude and suffering will always conquer him. He realizes that after man has mastered everything in creation that can be mastered and rectified everything that can be rectified, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only purpose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. However, there are ephemeral victories and rewards for the rebel, He who dedicates himself for the duration of his life to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed arid sustains the world again and again. Those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love, should enter, if only now and then, into their reward. They know that if there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love. Society must be arranged to limit injustice and suffering as much as possible so that each individual has the leisure and freedom to pursue his own search for meaning. Future utopias must be renounces, and "history can no longer be presented as an object of worship." "It is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies," and to aim for what is possible—more justice, solidarity, and love among men. The rebel must "reject divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men." Redemption is impossible. Human dignity and love can intermittently be achieved with struggle and constant vigilance against the plague bacillus that "never dies or disappears for good ... [but can] rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

This book argues that utopian ideals act as an asymptote approached by many small advances, so being anti-utopian amounts to being against progress itself.

Physician and philosopher; Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester

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This is a deeply disturbing conclusion, not simply because we cannot live without explicitly Utopian ideals. Many men of goodwill have done so. But because, as already indicated, modest melioristic ambitions, dreams of bringing about improvements in a small sphere of one's own expertise and concern, shade imperceptibly into the hope of leaving the world a better place than one had found it — into the hope of bringing about net overall gain. It would be an odd social conscience that was unconcerned if the improvements brought about in one sphere were exactly offset, or worse, by deterioration in other places. The socially concerned, whilst oppressively aware that there is much misery that they must leave to others to sort out, at least assume that the happiness they spread will not bring about deepening immiseration elsewhere. This assumption is not, of course, always well founded: society is not only the sum of intended actions and their intended consequences but also of the unintended consequences of actions. Nevertheless, all melioristic instincts, however narrowly expressed, have the seed of Utopianism in them; bear within them the assumption that many progressive actions will add up to overall net progress for the world, that they have a deeper meaning inasmuch as they may contribute, in howsoever small a fashion, towards the forwards and upwards movement of humanity as a whole out of want, fear, pain, impoverishment of all sorts; that the effects of these actions will converge in similar or compatible goals even if they are not strictly synergistic; and that, while Utopia will not be achieved as the outcome of a single revolutionary convulsion, it will be approximated, even if never achieved, as an asymptote approached by huge numbers of small advances. To abandon Utopian ideas, therefore, is not merely to foreswear the visionary passions of fanatics and lunatics, but to throw into question the very dimension of hope in human affairs. It is difficult to be anti-Utopian without being against progress itself; for there is no clear or sharp distinction between arrogant claims to provide universal - in both senses of 'global' and 'universally applicable' - solutions to the woes of mankind and wanting to contribute, however modestly, to making the world overall a better place.

This public health research article uses data from the Whitehall II study to examine how perceived unfairness at work relates to health outcomes.

Roberto De Vogli — Researcher in Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London; Michael Marmot — Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, and Director of the Whitehall II Study; co-authors include Jane Ferrie, Tarani Chandola, and Mika Kivimäki

This medical anthropology article argues that critiquing harmful appropriations of suffering must not paralyze action, calling for self-reflection by policymakers and for bringing local participants into designing programs.

Arthur Kleinman — Professor of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry, Harvard University; Joan Kleinman — sinologist, Harvard University

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Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be to undermine any attempt to respond to human misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified; it would paralyze social action. We must draw upon the images of human suffering in order to identify human needs and to craft humane responses. Yet, to do so, to develop valid appropriations, we must first make sure that the biases of commercial emphasis on profit-making, the partisan agendas of political ideologies, and the narrow technical interests that serve primarily professional groups are understood and their influence controlled. The first action, then, is critical self-reflection on the purposes of policies and the effects of programs. We take that to be a core component of programs of ethics in the professions. Perhaps a more difficult action is to lift the veil on the taken-for-granted cultural processes within which those policies and programs, no matter how well intended, are inevitably, and usually unintentionally, taken up and exploited. The idea that the first impulse of social and health-policy experts should be to historicize the issue before them and to critique the cultural mechanisms of action at hand goes against the grain of current practice. Nonetheless, that is a chief implication of our analysis. The starting point of policymakers and program builders needs to be the understanding that they can (and often unwillingly do) do harm. Because that potential for harm lies latent in the institutional structures that have been authorized to respond to human problems, that work behind even the best intentioned professionals, "experts" must be held responsible to define how those latent institutional effects can be controlled. Humanizing the level at which interventions are organized means focusing planning and evaluation on the interpersonal space of suffering, the local, ethnographic context of action. This requires not only engagement with what is at stake for participants in those local worlds, but bringing those local participants (not merely national experts) into the process of developing and assessing programs. Such policy-making from the ground up can only succeed, however, if these local worlds are more effectively projected into national and international discourses on human problems. (This may represent the necessary complement to the globalization of local images. Perhaps it should be called the global representation of local contexts.) To do so requires a reformulation of the indexes and instruments of policy.

This international relations article criticizes the Copenhagen school's focus on the subjective construction of threats, arguing that threats also refer to real phenomena and that situations of urgency require democratic procedures.

Professor of Political Science, Södertörn University College, Sweden

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Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unimportant whether states ‘really’ face dangers from other states or groups. In the Copenhagen school, threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors’ own fears, or from what happens when the fears of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading conception of threat, in that it discounts an independent existence or whatever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of politicians, and hardly most of the time. During the cold War, threats—in the sense of plausible possibilities of danger—referred to ‘real’ phenomena, and they refer to ‘real’ phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter. Threats have to be dealt with both in terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening. The point of Waever’s concept of security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself by political elites. In his 1997 PhD dissertation, he writes, ‘One can view “security” as that which is in language theory called a speech act: it is not interesting as a sign referring to something more real—it is the utterance itself that is the act.’ The deliberate disregard for objective actors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & Waever’s joint article of the same year. As a consequence, the phenomenon of threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics. It seems to me that the security dilemma, as a central notion in security studies, then loses its foundation. Yet I see that Waever himself has no compunction about referring to the security dilemma in a recent article. This discounting of the objective aspect of threats shifts security studies to insignificant concerns. What has long made ‘threats’ and ‘threat perceptions’ important phenomena in the study of IR is the implication that urgent action may be required. Urgency, of course, is where Waever first began his argument in favor of an alternative security conception, because a convincing sense of urgency has been the chief culprit behind the abuse of ‘security’ and the consequent ‘politics of panic,’ as Waever aptly calls it. Now, here—in the case of urgency—another baby is thrown our with the Waeverian bathwater. When situations of urgency arise, those situations are challenges to democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with the process of making security policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Waever’s world, threats are merely more or less persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just another argument. I hold that instead of ‘abolishing’ threatening phenomena ‘out there’ by reconceptualizing them, as Waever does, we should continue paying attention to them, because situations with a credible claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we need to know more about how they work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil wars, for instance), not least to find adequate democratic procedures for dealing with them.

This edited volume on critical security studies argues that critical security studies should not stand too far outside prevailing discourse or ignore the state, which remains the most capable actor in world politics.

Professor of International Politics, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva

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First, to stand too far outside prevailing discourses is almost certain to result in continued disciplinary exclusion. Second, to move toward alternative conceptions of security and security studies, one must necessarily reopen the questions subsumed under the modem conception of sovereignty and the scope of the political. To do this, one must take seriously the prevailing claims about the nature of security. Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with the centrality of the state as a locus not only of obligation but of effective political action. In the realm of organized violence, states also remain the preeminent actors. The task of a critical, approach is not to deny the centrality of the state in this realm but, rather, to understand more fully its structures, dynamics, and possibilities for reorientation. From a critical perspective, state action is flexible and capable of reorientation, and analyzing state policy need not therefore be tantamount to embracing the statist assumptions of orthodox conceptions. To exclude a focus on state action from a critical perspective on the grounds that it plays inevitably within the rules of existing conceptions simply reverses the error of essentializing the state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what remains the most structurally capable actor in contemporary world politics.

By emphasizing the technology and speed in the Gulf War, endlessly analyzing the representation of the war itself, without a simultaneous exposition of the "ground realities," postmodernist analyses wind up, unwittingly, echoing the Pentagon and the White House in their claims that this was a "clean" war with smart bombs that take out only defense installations with minimal "collateral damage." One needs to reflesh the Gulf War dead through our postmortems instead of merely echoing, with Virilio and others, the "disappearance" of territory or the modern warrior with the new technologies; or the intertext connecting the war and television; or the displacement of the spectacle of war by the war of spectacle." Second, the emphasis on the speed with which the annihilation proceeded once the war began tends to obfuscate the long build-up to the conflict and US complicity in Iraqi foreign and defense policy in prior times. Third, as the details provided above show, if there was anything to highlight about the war, it was not so much its manner of representation as the incredible levels of annihilation that have been perfected. To summarize: I am not suggesting that postmodernist analysts of the war are in agreement with the Pentagon's claims regarding a "clean" war; I am suggesting that their preoccupation with representation, sign systems, and with the signifier over the signified, leaves one with little sense of the annihilation visited upon the people and land of Iraq. And, as the Vietnam War proved and Schwarzkopf well realized, without that physicalistic sense of violence, war can be more effectively sold to a jingoistic public. In this regard, Der Derian's point that the nature of antiwar protest movements has to change, has to recognize the fact that one can no longer wait for the body bags to come home, is one that merits attention. He notes, in a sharp attack on the left's anti-Gulf War movement: "Like old generals the anti-war movement fought the last war … a disastrous war of position, constructing ideologically sound bunkers of facts and history while the 'New' World Order fought a highly successful war of maneuver ... with high speed visuals and a high-tech aesthetics of destruction." (AD: 176-77)

Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii

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Having rendered the nuke unspeakable, Chaloupka suggests that society used the metonymies of the computer and the robot to deal with the nuke. Chaloupka foregrounds this discussion with the claim that nuclear war has never happened and that modern warfare is fabulously textual (echoing Baudrillard, Der Derian, Derrida, Foucault, and Virilio), has resulted in the disappearance of the warrior, and has become a battle for sign systems rather than for territory and materiality.

Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii

In all this, Chaloupka seems to miss a rather immediate point: more than the computer or the robot, the Third World has served as the most common metonymy for Western conflicts in the age of the unspeakable nuke. Whether talking of Korea or Vietnam or the tens of “proxy” wars in the period of deterrence, which have witnessed an incredible degree of violence; or the thousands of nuclear tests and experiments on humans and the environment in the “untenanted” Pacific; or, for that matter, the most recent Gulf War to “secure” the identity of a superpower suddenly left naked in the ring – in each instance, the “nuclear” West has shifted or displaced the violence to the site of the Third World. To talk of the nuclear war that never happened or the disappearance of “the warrior” in the face of this reality of violence and extermination visited on the Third World seems misplaced, to put it mildly. Chaloupka here buys into a self-contained version of the West and is unable to extend his purview beyond a narrow and overt definition of “war” and see the multiple ways in which nuclear war has been ongoing in the last five decades, both in the West and elsewhere.

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While this point is, perhaps, debatable, Der Derian’s further assertion, that a postmodern critique of the Gulf War mobilization would be somehow more effective, sounds less convincing. An alternative, late-modern tactic against total war was to war on totality itself, to delegitimize all sovereign truths based on class, nationalist, or internationalist metanarratives … better strategically to play with apt critiques of the powerful new forces unleashed by cyberwar than to hold positions with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. (AD: 177-178; emphasis in original) The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to “nostalgic” essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the more mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing “facts” and “realities” while a “postmodern” President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program. (See KN: chapter 4) Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issue-based) criticism of what he calls “nuclear opposition” or “antinuclearists” at the very outset of his book. (KN: xvi) Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms. This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the “failure” of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives. The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between total critique and “ineffective” partial critique ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for an activist politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics.

This essay on political theory argues that dystopian imaginaries need not breed paralysis and can instead catalyze public debate and preventive foresight.

Professor of Sociology, York University

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And yet dystopianism need not imply despondency, paralysis, or fear. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the pervasiveness of a dystopian imaginary can help notions of historical contingency and fallibilism gain traction against their determinist and absolutist counterparts. Once we recognize that the future is uncertain and that any course of action produces both unintended and unexpected consequences, the responsibility to face up to potential disasters and intervene before they strike becomes compelling. From another angle, dystopianism lies at the core of politics in a global civil society where groups mobilize their own nightmare scenarios (‘Frankenfoods’ and a lifeless planet for environmentalists, totalitarian patriarchy of the sort depicted in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale for Western feminism, McWorld and a global neoliberal oligarchy for the alternative globalization movement, etc.). Such scenarios can act as catalysts for public debate and socio-political action, spurring citizens’ involvement in the work of preventive foresight.

This article on political theory criticizes Agamben's theory of biopolitics as too state-centered and legalistic, arguing that it overlooks how contemporary biopolitics operates through markets, experts, and individual choice.

Professor of Sociology, University of Wuppertal

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Firstly, Agamben does not take into account that the site of sovereignty has been displaced. While in the eugenic programs in the first half of the 20th century biopolitical interventions were mainly executed by the state that controlled the health of the population or the hygiene of the race, biopolitics today is becoming more and more a responsibility of sovereign subjects. As autonomous patients, active consumers or responsible parents they demand medical or biotechnological options. Today, it is less the state that regulates by direct interventions and restrictions, since the capacity and competence of decision-making is increasingly ascribed to the individual subject to make “informed choices” beyond political authoritarianism and medical paternalism. Decisions on life and death are less the explicit result of legal provisions and political regulations but the outcome of an “invisible hand” that represents the options and practices of sovereign individuals (Lemke 2002b; Koch 2002). Agamben’s analysis is too state-centred, or rather, it relies on a limited conception of the state which does not take into account important political transformations since the Nazi era. He does not take into account that in contemporary liberal societies political power is exercised through a multiplicity of agencies and techniques that are often only loosely associated with the formal organs of the state. The self-regulating capacities of subjects as autonomous actors have become key resources for present forms of government that rely in crucial respects on forms of scientific expertise and knowledge (Rose/Miller 1992). Agamben’s concept of biopolitics is marked by a second weakness that also demonstrates his excessively legalistic approach. Biopolitical mechanisms confront not only those who have been deprived of elementary rights and reduced to the status of living beings. The analysis of biopolitics cannot be limited to those without legal rights, such as the refugee or the asylum seeker, but must encompass all those who are confronted with social processes of exclusion – even if they may be formally enjoying full political rights: the “useless”, the “unnecessary”, or the “redundant”. While in the past these ominous figures inhabited only peripheral spaces in the so-called third and forth world, today in a global economy these forms of exclusion can also be found in the industrialized centres. As a result of the crisis of the welfare state and Fordist modes of social integration, more and different segments of the populations are effectively excluded not only from labour and the working process but from education, housing and social life (Castel 2000; Imbusch 2001). By concentrating on questions of law and the figure of the sovereign ban, Agamben ignores central aspects of contemporary biopolitics. He takes for granted that the state of exception is not only the point of departure for politics, but its essence and destination. In this light, politics is reduced to the production of homines sacri – a production that in a sense has to be called non-productive since bare life is only produced to be suppressed and killed. But biopolitical interventions cannot be limited to registering the opposition of bare life and political existence. Bare life is no longer simply subject to death; it falls prey to a bioeconomical imperative that aims at the increase of life’s value and the optimalisation of its quality. Contemporary biopolitics is essentially political economy of life that is neither reducible to state agencies nor to the form of law. Agamben’s concept of biopolitics remains inside the ban of sovereignty, it is blind to all the mechanisms operating beneath or beyond the law (see also Bröckling 2003).7 5. Conclusion: biopower and thanotopolitics Our reading of Agamben leads to a surprising result. Following a binary code and a logic of subsumtion that does not allow for differentiations, his argumentation remains committed to exactly the juridical perspective that he so vividly criticizes. He reduces the “ambiguous terrain” (1998: 143) of biopolitics by operating with a notion of politics that is at once too broad in its explanatory scope and too narrow in empirical complexity. On the one hand Agamben conceptualises the political as a sovereign instance that does not allow for an outside that would be more than an “inner outside” and an “exception”. On the other hand his presentation of sovereignty is completely limited to the decision on the state of exeption and the killing of bare life. As a consequence, Agamben presents a distorted picture. The main danger today may not be that the body or its organs are targets of a distinctive state politics (1998: 164-5), but – quite on the contrary – we are witnessing an important transformation of the state under the sign of deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation. It is more and more the scientific consultants, economic interest groups, and civil societal mediators that define the beginning, the end, and the value of life, in consensus conferences, expert commissions, and ethical counsels. This “withdrawal of the state” could itself be analysed as a political strategy, though one that does not necessarily refuse individuals legal rights. In a more moderate account of exceptionality the suspension of legal rights might remain important in determining who is allowed to become part of a community, who is eligible to legal rights at all. The political strategy, however, that shifts legal and regulatory competencies from the public and legal domain to the private sphere will probably pose a much greater threat in the future. This tendency is already visible; for example, it is possible for private companies to own and exploit human body substances (see Andrews/Nelkin 2001). Moreover, this tendency can already be traced in examples that Agamben mentions, namely the admissibility of euthanasia and transplantation medicine. Here we can expect that a patient’s legal will and contract relations will take the place of explicit state prohibitions and regulation. We note that in some countries there is already a public discussion to provide financial compensations for individuals who donate organs, and there is a growing consensus in the legal community to accept the will of the patient not to prolong life under certain conditions.8 By the analytical focus on a formal and repressive conception of the state and the theoretical fixation on the sovereign border between life and death, Agamben fails to see the limits of his own argumentation. Not every single form of exclusion needs to be grounded in legal regulations, or necessitate a suspension of law. Sovereignty does not only reside in political instances and state agencies, it also dwells in “life politics” (Giddens 1991: 209-31) of sovereign subjects who are expected to act in a autonomous ways as individuals. We are not only subjected to political mechanisms that regulate and restrict our physical life; we are also inscribed in what Foucault called “arts of government” that direct us how to reflect ourselves as moral persons and parts of collective subjectivities (see Foucault 2004a). In fact, Foucault regarded biopolitics as an essential part of the liberal art of government (see Foucault 2004b, pp. 3-28).

This news report on Berkeley research identifies a promising way to reduce bitter political polarization.

Writer, Berkeley News, University of California, Berkeley

This management research article presents a meta-analysis testing whether the stigma attached to affirmative action harms the performance of its beneficiaries.

Lisa M. Leslie — NYU Stern School of Business; David M. Mayer — University of Michigan Ross School of Business; David A. Kravitz — George Mason University

This op-ed on political commentary argues that wokeness amounts to inverted fascism combined with hypocrisy.

Libertarian philosopher; author of Escape from Leviathan

This op-ed on political economy argues that blaming "capitalism" for social problems is not an alternative to proposing concrete solutions.

Senior writer, New York Magazine

This essay on environmental politics argues that environmental problems demand concrete technical and policy action rather than leaving nature alone, and that environmentalists fit Foucault's "specific intellectual."

Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics

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If the 'technological fix' is unlikely to be more successful than strategies of limitation of our use of resources, we are nevertheless unable simply to leave the environment as it is. There is a real and pressing need for more, and more accurate, technical and scientific information about the non-human world. For we are faced with a situation in which the processes we have already set in train will continue to impact upon that world, and therefore us, for centuries. It is therefore necessary, not only to stop cutting down the rain forests, but to develop real, concrete proposals for action, to reverse, or at least limit, the effects of our previous interventions. Moreover, there is another reason why our behaviour towards the non-human cannot simply be a matter of leaving it as it is, at least in so far as our goals are not only environmental but also involve social justice. For if we simply preserve what remains to us of wilderness, of the countryside and of park land, we also preserve patterns of very unequal access to their resources and their consolations (Soper 1995: 207). In fact, we risk exacerbating these inequalities. It is not us, but the poor of Brazil, who will hear the brunt of the misery which would result from a strictly enforced policy of leaving the Amazonian rain forest untouched, in the absence of alternative means of providing for their livelihood. It is the development of policies to provide such ecologically sustainable alternatives which we require, as well as the development of technical means for replacing our current greenhouse gas-emitting sources of energy. Such policies and proposals for concrete action must be formulated by ecologists, environmentalists, people with expertise concerning the functioning of ecosystems and the impacts which our actions have upon them. Such proposals are, therefore, very much the province of Foucault's specific intellectual, the one who works 'within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them' (Foucault 1980g: 126). For who could be more fittingly described as 'the strategists of life and death' than these environmentalists? After the end of the Cold War, it is in this sphere, more than any other, that man's 'politics places his existence as a living being in question' (Foucault 1976: 143). For it is in facing the consequences of our intervention in the non-human world that the fate of our species, and of those with whom we share this planet, will be decided.

This article on philosophy of technology argues that Heidegger's calls to "do nothing" target calculative praxis rather than calling for withdrawal from technology, which would be impossible and undesirable.

Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Sussex

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For this reason, when Heidegger issues his rare ethical imperatives which suggest that we 'do nothing', it is rather the form of action known as praxis that we should refrain from. This action is solely the business and the busyness of actualization, an action already occurring as the calculative operation that characterizes technological activity. Proper acting is, as we have seen, not a withdrawal from such a technological expansion of actuality — such a thing would be both impossible and undesirable from the point of view of being — but rather a repetition or continuation of this praxis which takes it to its logical conclusion: this extreme will make it clear that such will to will, ultimately for its own sake, rests upon nothing, is carried out for no ultimate purpose and so skirts an abyss to which it must blind itself, a blinding which is itself the revelatory process of actualization.

This international relations article argues that a post-Marxist critical theory of international relations must accept realist methods of protecting the state and the importance of order for emancipation.

Professor of International Politics, University of Wales

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These theoretical disagreements with Marxism generate major differences at the practical level. It is necessary to conclude that a post-Marxist critical theory of international relations must concede that technical and practical orientations to foreign policy are inescapable at least at this juncture. Such an approach must appreciate the need for classical realist methods of protecting the state under conditions of insecurity and distrust, and recognise the importance of the rationalist defence of order and legitimacy in the context of anarchy. It is important to take account of the rationalist claim that order is unlikely to survive if the major powers cannot reconcile their different national security interests. In a similar vein, a critical approach to international relations is obliged to conclude that the project of emancipation will not make significant progress if international order is in decline. One of its principal tasks would then be to understand how the community of states can be expanded so that it approximates a condition which maximises the importance of freedom and universality. In this case, a critical theory of international relations which recognises the strengths of realism and Marxism must aim for a political practice which deals concurrently with the problem of power, the need for order and the possibility of emancipation through the extension of human community.

This international relations article argues against desecuritization, urging a sense of urgency about "creeping vulnerabilities" and a shift from crisis intervention toward strategic investment.

Professor of Humanities, Salve Regina University

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Although it seems attractive to focus on exclusionary concepts that insist on desecuritization, privileged referent objects, and the ‘belief’ that threats and vulnerabilities are little more than social constructions (Grayson, 2003), all these concepts work in theory but fail in practice. While it may be true that national security paradigms can, and likely will, continue to dominate issues that involve human security vulnerabilities – and even in some instances mistakenly confuse ‘vulnerabilities’ as ‘threats’ – there are distinct linkages between these security concepts and applications. With regard to environmental security, for example, Myers (1986: 251) recognized these linkages nearly two decades ago: National security is not just about fighting forces and weaponry. It relates to watersheds, croplands, forests, genetic resources, climate and other factors that rarely figure in the minds of military experts and political leaders, but increasingly deserve, in their collectivity, to rank alongside military approaches as crucial in a nation’s security. Ultimately, we are far from what O’Hanlon & Singer (2004) term a global intervention capability on behalf of ‘humanitarian transformation’. Granted, we now have the threat of mass casualty terrorism anytime, anywhere – and states and regions are responding differently to this challenge. Yet, the global community today also faces many of the same problems of the 1990s: civil wars, faltering states, humanitarian crises. We are nowhere closer to addressing how best to solve these challenges, even as they affect issues of environmental, human, national (and even ‘embedded’) security. Recently, there have been a number of voices that have spoken out on what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty has termed the ‘responsibility to protect’:10 the responsibility of some agency or state (whether it be a superpower such as the United States or an institution such as the United Nations) to enforce the principle of security that sovereign states owe to their citizens. Yet, the creation of a sense of urgency to act – even on some issues that may not have some impact for years or even decades to come – is perhaps the only appropriate first response. The real cost of not investing in the right way and early enough in the places where trends and effects are accelerating in the wrong direction is likely to be decades and decades of economic and political frustration – and, potentially, military engagement. Rather than justifying intervention (especially military), we ought to be justifying investment. Simply addressing the immensities of these challenges is not enough. Radical improvements in public infrastructure and support for better governance, particularly in states and municipalities (especially along the Lagos–Cairo–Karachi–Jakarta arc), will both improve security and create the conditions for shrinking the gap between expectations and opportunity. A real debate ought to be taking place today. Rather than dismissing ‘alternative’ security foci outright, a larger examination of what forms of security are relevant and right among communities, states, and regions, and which even might apply to a global rule-set – as well as what types of security are not relevant – seems appropriate and necessary. If this occurs, a truly remarkable tectonic shift might take place in the conduct of international relations and human affairs. Perhaps, in the failure of states and the international community to respond to such approaches, what is needed is the equivalent of the 1972 Stockholm conference that launched the global environmental movement and established the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), designed to be the environmental conscience of the United Nations. Similarly, the UN Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996 focused on the themes of finding adequate shelter for all and sustaining human development in an increasingly urbanized world. Whether or not these programs have the ability to influence the future’s direction (or receive wide international support) is a matter of some debate. Yet, given that the most powerful states in the world are not currently focusing on these issues to a degree sufficient to produce viable implementation plans or development strategies, there may well need to be a ‘groundswell’ of bottom-up pressure, perhaps in the form of a global citizenry petition to push the elusive world community toward collective action. Recent history suggests that military intervention as the first line of response to human security conditions underscores a seriously flawed approach. Moreover, those who advocate that a state’s disconnectedness from globalization is inversely proportional to the likelihood of military (read: US) intervention fail to recognize unfolding realities (Barnett, 2003, 2004). Both middle-power and major-power states, as well as the international community, must increasingly focus on long-term creeping vulnerabilities in order to avoid crisis responses to conditions of extreme vulnerability. Admittedly, some human security proponents have recently soured on the viability of the concept in the face of recent ‘either with us or against us’ power politics (Suhrke, 2004). At the same time, and in a bit more positive light, some have clearly recognized the sheer impossibility of international power politics continuing to feign indifference in the face of moral categories. As Burgess (2004: 278) notes, ‘for all its evils, one of the promises of globalization is the unmasking of the intertwined nature of ethics and politics in the complex landscape of social, economic, political and environmental security’. While it is still not feasible to establish a threshold definition for human security that neatly fits all concerns and arguments (as suggested by Owen, 2004: 383), it would be a tragic mistake to assume that national, human, and environmental security are mutually harmonious constructs rather than more often locked in conflictual and contested opposition with each other. Moreover, aspects of security resident in each concept are indeed themselves embedded with extraordinary contradictions. Human security, in particular, is not now, nor should likely ever be, the mirror image of national security. Yet, these contradictions are not the crucial recognition here. On the contrary, rather than focusing on the security issues themselves, we should be focusing on the best multi-dimensional approaches to confronting and solving them. One approach, which might avoid the massive tidal impact of creeping vulnerabilities, is to sharply make a rudder shift from constant crisis intervention toward strategic planning, strategic investment, and strategic attention.

This article on law and social movements argues that the turn toward extralegal activism mirrors the cooptation it seeks to avoid, since opting out of legal reform discounts the continuing importance of law.

Professor of Law, University of San Diego

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In the following sections, I argue that the extralegal model has suffered from the same drawbacks associated with legal cooptation. I show that as an effort to avoid the risk of legal cooptation, the current wave of suggested alternatives has effects that ironically mirror those of cooptation itself. Three central types of difficulties exist with con- temporary extralegal scholarship. First, in the contexts of the labor and civil rights movements, arguments about legal cooptation often developed in response to a perceived gap between the conceptual ideal toward which a social reform group struggled and its actual accomplishments. But, ironically, the contemporary message of opting out of traditional legal reform avenues may only accentuate this problem. As the rise of informalization (moving to nonlegal strategies), civil society (moving to extralegal spheres), and pluralism (the proliferation of norm-generating actors) has been effected and appropriated by supporters from a wide range of political commitments, these concepts have had unintended implications that conflict with the very social reform ideals from which they stem. Second, the idea of opting out of the legal arena becomes self-defeating as it discounts the ongoing importance of law and the possibilities of legal reform in seemingly unregulated spheres. A model encompassing exit and rigid sphere distinctions further fails to recognize a reality of increasing interpenetration and the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres, profit and nonprofit sectors, and formal and informal institutions. It therefore loses the critical insight that law operates in the background of seemingly unregulated relationships. Again paradoxically, the extralegal view of decentralized activism and the division of society into different spheres in fact have worked to subvert rather than support the progressive agenda. Finally, since extralegal actors view their actions with romantic idealism, they fail to develop tools for evaluating their success. If the critique of legal cooptation has involved the argument that legal reform, even when viewed as a victory, is never radically transformative, we must ask: what are the criteria for assessing the achievements of the suggested alternatives? As I illustrate in the following sections, much of the current scholarship obscures the lines between the descriptive and the prescriptive in its formulation of social activism. If current suggestions present themselves as alternatives to formal legal struggles, we must question whether the new extralegal politics that are proposed and celebrated are capable of producing a constructive theory and meaningful channels for reform, rather than passive status quo politics.

This article on international relations theory argues that constructivism offers a necessary but insufficient account of security because it neglects material threats and marginalizes the state.

Professor of Political Science, St. Olaf College

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Similarly, studies employing political constructivism cannot be considered complete renditions of national security issues. Their emphasis on identity and culture, and their alternative forms of analysis, provide a necessary understanding of ideational threats and an emancipatory moment for changing state securitization. However, these reflexive critiques do not demonstrate an understanding of the role that material threats play in national security matters or the negative consequences of ignoring those material threats. Their alternative analytic focus often rejects the traditional state 'security dilemma' and its corresponding policy needs. The consistent deconstruction of identity performances and cultural givens may provide an opportunity for the emergence of a more democratic ethos, but the state is often marginalized in the process. Such an occurrence does not fulfill the requirements of a security framework that seeks theoretical rigor and policy relevance. It is a necessary (but insufficient) component of a more comprehensive understanding of security. The potentially positive political vision that emerges from political constructivism balances the negative vision provided by realism and suggests an opportunity to overcome culturally constructed threats.

Star Wars: A New Hope is the 1977 space-fantasy film in which a rebellion fights the tyrannical Galactic Empire.

Filmmaker; founder of Lucasfilm

Revenge of the Sith is the 2005 Star Wars film depicting the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the Republic's transformation into the Empire.

Filmmaker; founder of Lucasfilm

This edited volume on environmental philosophy discusses what Heidegger offers radical environmentalists, noting his claim that a totally technologized world would be worse than nuclear annihilation.

Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, Pennsylvania State University

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We may approach the issue of what Heidegger may teach today's radical environmentalists by examining an issue about which they and Heidegger would profoundly disagree. Heidegger claimed that there is a greater danger than the destruction of all life on earth by nuclear war.40 For radical environmentalists, it is hard to imagine anything more dangerous than the total destruction of the biosphere! Heidegger argued, however, that worse than such annihilation would be the totally technologized world in which material "happiness" for everyone is achieved, but in which humanity would be left with a radically constricted capacity for encountering the being of entities. This apparently exorbitant claim may be partially mitigated by the following con- sideration. If human existence lost all relationship to transcendent being, entities could no longer show themselves at all, and in this sense would no longer "be." Who needs nuclear war, Heidegger asked rhetorically, if entities have already ceased to be? For many environmentalists, such a question reveals the extent to which Heidegger remained part of the human-centered tradition that he wanted to overcome. By estimating so highly human Dasein's contribution to the manifesting of things, Heidegger may well have underesti- mated the contribution made by many other forms of life, for which the extinction of humankind's ontological awareness would be far preferable to their own extinction in nuclear war!

This article on settler colonial theory examines the ethical demands that settler colonial theory places on scholars and settlers.

Alissa Macoun — Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology; Elizabeth Strakosch — Lecturer in Public Policy, University of Queensland

This essay on spiritual ecology argues that repressed fears erupt into behavior and that facing catastrophe, rather than denying it, is what enables people to act.

Scholar of general systems theory and deep ecology

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There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. This is of a piece with the notion popular in New Age circles, that we create our own reality. I have had people tell me that “to speak of catastrophe will just make it more likely to happen.” Actually, the contrary is nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic theory and personal experience show us that it is precisely what we repress that eludes our conscious control and tends to erupt into behavior. As Carl Jung observed, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” But ironically, in our current situation, the person who gives warning of a likely ecological holocaust is often made to feel guilty of contributing to that very fate.

This political science article examines whether politicians say different things in public than they believe in private.

Professor of Political Economy, Stanford Graduate School of Business

This encyclopedia entry on hermeneutics surveys the theory and practice of interpretation.

Professor of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

This opinion column argues that choosing political engagement means facing reality rather than living in a rose-colored bubble, and that modest political change and social justice would make many people happy.

Journalist and columnist

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Polar bears are drowning but what the hell. Don't worry, be happy. At least that's the Republican philosophy as spelled out - at last! - by a letter-writer to the Boston Globe. According to her, Democrats are miserable. Republicans are happy. It's as easy as that. Where have liberals gone wrong? Headlined "Conservatives Have More Fun," the writer lays it out with a simplicity that is nothing short of breathtaking. "Could it be that we conservatives have a more positive world view?" she says. "How about a more positive view of the future?" How can you be happy, she asks, when you think your country "consists of imperialist occupiers trying to take over the world." But if, like her, you "realize the true road to freedom happens when democracies lead to thriving societies, you're feeling pretty good right now." As that thriving democracy in Iraq hangs by a hair over a cauldron of civil war, as Muslims all over the world are so outraged at our invasion and occupation that they take to the streets to protest a few cynical cartoons, as every Middle Eastern country that gets a choice between modernity and Sharia law goes for that old-time religion, it becomes clear that President George W. Bush could be leaving behind him a string of democratically-elected fundamentalist governments. But let's not worry. Be happy. "Let's think about the environment," the letter-writer continues in her merry, bubbly way. "Liberals believe we've ruined the earth and it's just a matter of time before it's uninhabitable. By now, if you're a liberal, you're really depressed. In reality, the United States is a model for the world and has some of the best air and water quality of any industrialized nation." Sure we do. In bottles. For sale. But the oceans are over. The polar ice caps are melting, hence the drowning polar bears. Deforested mountains are producing killer mud slides. There's a drought in the Midwest. Bird migration routes are changing. Up here in Vermont, we can't eat the fish in our rivers and streams because of mercury poisoning. The aquifers that feed our wells are polluted by acid rain. Sugaring season is disrupted by global warming. The other day I heard about a study predicting that snowfall in Vermont will end in about 20 years. This is scary stuff. What this woman is really saying is, "I've got my McMansion and my Escalade and my kids are in a private school, and America works for me." The letter-writer's thinking drips with selfishness and arrogance about her place in the universe. Jesus didn't say, "don't worry, be happy." I seem to recall him saying that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." The combination of the "I've got mine, Jack" philosophy with the "my happiness is the only thing that matters, and to hell with everybody else" is how the George Bushes of the world gain power. Why should we care if we're torturing brown skinned folk in secret prisons? Who cares if the government is listening to our phone calls and reading our e-mails - we have nothing to hide. We must hate freedom. Only namby pamby civil libertarians care about due process and rule of law. There's a war on, don't you know? By ignoring the many real problems that fester around her, the letter-writer can delude herself that everything is fine and liberals are just crabby cry-babies. But even many Republicans are finally realizing that their Dear Leader is an incompetent fool. Is this is a case of buyers remorse, or are they starting to see that despite the generally messed-up state of the Democratic Party, the GOPs could still lose control of Congress out of general voter disgust? "We have a choice each morning we're lucky enough to open our eyes," says the letter-writer. "We can look at our lives and society in a positive manner and work toward making a better world for our children, or we can endlessly dwell on every negative aspect of life... I know which one will make me a happier person." Happy, happy, happy. But on analysis, the letter-writer is confusing personal happiness with political happiness. Speaking strictly for my liberal self, I'm a pretty happy person. Most of the people I know are, too. Just because we hate the direction our government has taken doesn't mean we don't love and enjoy our families, our homes, our friends, our community and our work. I refuse to allow my disgust at Bush and his policies spoil my personal life. Life is short and wasting eight years of it being miserable doesn't make any sense. If you fall into that trap, the terrorists have won. America today isn't a case of happiness or depression. It's a matter of facing reality or living in a rose colored bubble where everything is fine. And when the jumbo jet crashes into the office tower, you wonder what the hell happened. Why do they hate us? Speaking of being happy, Tuesday was Town Meeting day in Vermont. My town, along with several others, voted to ask our Washington representative to start impeachment proceedings against Bush. The Associated Press picked up the story. Reading it, liberals across America learned that they are not alone. Hopefully, this will further support them in their struggles for political change and social justice. Frankly, a little political change and social justice will make a lot of people very, very happy.

This antiwar pamphlet argues that social activists need detailed alternatives and strategies for abolishing war, and that Marxist revolution offers no program for ending war.

Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of Wollongong

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Climbing to or obtaining high positions in hierarchies is not necessarily undesirable for social activists, so long as this is done without sacrificing one's principles. At higher levels, the dangers of compromise and cooption are much greater. But sometimes the opportunities are greater too. Antiwar generals, corporation executives fostering workers' control and top politicians promoting local self-reliance play a useful role in efforts for social change, especially to the extent that they work with social movements and refuse to play all the 'rules of the game' at the top.

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Some revolutionary groups, such as some Marxist parties in Western countries, consider that abolition of war is something that will happen after 'the revolution.' But even the victory of revolutionary parties in countries throughout the world would be no guarantee of a world without war. Every variety of state socialism so far, including the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese models, has resulted in an increased role for the military. Military confrontations, occupations and wars between socialist states are quite common, including Soviet Union-Hungary, Soviet Union-China, Soviet Union-Czechoslovakia and China-Vietnam. The proponents of socialist revolution led by vanguard parties have no programme for abolishing war. Far from achieving this end, their revolutionary success would more likely mean an even greater militarisation of society.

Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of Wollongong

Marx and particularly Engels took a keen interest in military matters, but they did not seriously address the problem of eliminating war. Marxist theorists since then have continued to avoid this topic. Marxists focus on class relations in capitalist societies as the source of the world's major problems. But class dynamics are not the primary driving force behind many social problems, including sexism, racism and environmental degradation. Those following a strict class analysis are hard pressed to say something useful about such problems, much less formulate a strategy for eliminating them.

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Without detailed ideas of methods and alternatives, most people will rely on the models with which they are most familiar, such as existing large-scale bureaucracies, decisions by elites and advice from experts. Presenting ideas for how social change might be achieved does not necessarily pre-empt local initiatives. The result instead can be to stimulate local initiative and foster widespread discussion of strategy and action. After all, ideas do not cause social change. Rather, social change is caused by people who can choose to use the ideas, adapt them or reject them, and take action.

In this Supreme Court decision, the Court held that much of eastern Oklahoma remains Native American reservation land for purposes of federal criminal jurisdiction.

Supreme Court of the United States

This article on international conflict examines the role racism plays as a cause or factor in wars and civil conflict.

Human rights and international law scholar; author of Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War; later Professor, American University School of International Service

This article on international security analyzes the dangers of disinformation about weapons of mass destruction.

Research Associate, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies

This article on international security argues that critically analyzing the securitization of illegal migration can itself reinforce the perception of migration as a security issue.

Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark

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From a constructivist perspective, this begs the obvious but essential question whether one in criticising the securitisation of illegal migration does not implicitly contribute to these securitising processes. The reason behind this is that referring to the issue of illegal migration in terms of security (even critically!) re- enforces the social perception of the latter as a security issue (cf. Constantinou, 2000; Wæver, 1999). For instance, Guiraudon (1998) has warned that it can be difficult to untie the migrant from its strong negative connotations and, hence, trying to do so would only help sustaining the social image of migrants as a force corroding the social edifice.

This article on security studies rejects Wæver's call to desecuritize, arguing that doing so would cede security to the military and that we should instead securitize important issues to claim resources and challenge the military.

Fellow, Center for International Cooperation and Security

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Ole Wæver’s concept of ‘securitisation’ is drawing attention to the same point: by securitizing an issue you make a case for the use of extraordinary measures to maintain that security, and you make a claim for the social resources necessary to secure it. It is for this reason that I would reject Wæver’s conclusion that we should seek to desecuritise social life, because I fear that such a decision would abandon the entire field of security to the military and reinforce the power the military wields in our societies, and the claims it has on our resources. I would suggest, instead, that we articulate alternatives to the state as the object of security and the military as the means of providing security – that we aim to securitise important issues – in order to lay claim to those resources and, perhaps as importantly, to question the claims that the military makes.

In the parable of the madman (aphorism 125), Nietzsche announces that God is dead and asks whether humanity can bear the deed of having killed him.

German philosopher; former Professor of Classical Philology, University of Basel

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The Madman.—Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!"—As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. [...] The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event,—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!"

In aphorism 103, Nietzsche denies that moral judgments rest on truths, yet grants that many actions called immoral should still be avoided and resisted, for new reasons.

German philosopher; former Professor of Classical Philology, University of Basel

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THERE ARE TWO CLASSES OF PEOPLE WHO DENY MORALITY.—To deny morality may mean, in the first place, to deny the moral inducements which, men pretend, have urged them on to their actions,—which is equivalent to saying that morality merely consists of words and forms, part of that coarse and subtle deceit (especially self-deceit) which is characteristic of mankind, and perhaps more especially of those men who are celebrated for their virtues. In the second place, it may mean our denying that moral judgments are founded on truths. It is admitted in such a case that these judgments are, in fact, the motives of the actions, but that in this way it is really errors as the basis of all moral judgments which urge men on to their moral actions. This is my point of view; but I should be far from denying that in very many cases a subtle suspicion in accordance with the former point of view—i.e. in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld—is also justifiable, and in any case of a high general utility.—Therefore I deny morality in the same way as I deny alchemy, i.e. I deny its hypotheses; but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these hypotheses and based their actions upon them. I also deny immorality—not that innumerable people feel immoral, but that there is any true reason why they should feel so. I should not, of course, deny—unless I were a fool—that many actions which are called immoral should be avoided and resisted; and in the same way that many which are called moral should be performed and encouraged; but I hold that in both cases these actions should be performed from motives other than those which have prevailed up to the present time. We must learn anew in order that at last, perhaps very late in the day, we may be able to do something more: feel anew.

In these aphorisms, Nietzsche expresses distrust of systematizers, arguing that the will to a system shows a lack of honesty.

German philosopher; former Professor of Classical Philology, University of Basel

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By seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards: in the end he also believes backwards.

Contentment preserves one even from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well-dressed ever caught cold?—No, not even when she had scarcely a rag to her back.

I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system, shows a lack of honesty.

Man thinks woman profound—why? Because he can never fathom her depths. Woman is not even shallow.

When woman possesses masculine virtues, she is enough to make you run away. When she possesses no masculine virtues, she herself runs away.

This article on political theory argues that modern bureaucracy is not intrinsically genocidal and that political and economic pluralism stand in the way of another Holocaust, challenging Bauman.

Professor of Comparative Political Theory, Keele University

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Modern bureaucracy is not 'intrinsically capable of genocidal action' (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very 'ordinary and common' attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern genocides.

This book on internet politics argues that personalized online filtering traps users in "filter bubbles" that limit the information they encounter.

Board president and former executive director, MoveOn.org

This article on political theory argues that biopolitics is not wholly bad, since its ills are the costs of progress and it brings predictability, security, and comfort.

Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School

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This article on environmental philosophy weighs whether Heidegger's critique of technology helps with environmental problems, concluding that we need both technical solutions and a deeper change of values.

Theologian and philosopher; later Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford

One of the dominant themes of the later Heidegger is the critique of technology. Tracing the danger of contemporary technology back to its essence in the enframing mind-set of metaphysics, his figuration of the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and gods might seem to offer a way of envisaging the world that could break the grip of technological thinking and prepare us for a post-technological era. Yet although Heidegger's rhetoric clearly invokes many of the anxieties aroused by the contemporary environmental crisis, his concern with the essence rather than with the fact of technology might seem to result in a situation parallel to that of his relation to religion — i.e., that his is a policy of deliberate non-involvement in the 'merely' ontic, the level on which the day-to-day decisions of societies as well as individuals operate. Even if there are passages that suggest that his preoccupation with the essence of technology was in the cause of preparing humanity to face the challenge of assuming responsibility for technology, the very fact that many of his reflections on technology come from the period of his inner emigration and his retreat from the public world of political decision-making makes it all the more difficult to see how what he has to say might help us in the face of environmental degradation and devastation. There is a real difficulty here, both in understanding the exact thrust of Heidegger's argument and in relating his insights to what we might regard as the needs of the present. If one of his complaints against Nazism was that it finally failed to confront the issue of technology, doesn't his own refusal to engage with the practicalities of technology also amount to failure? Heidegger himself liked to quote Holderlin's line 'Where danger is, grows also that which saves', and is it not the case that, if technology itself is creating a danger for humanity and for the whole bio-sphere, only science and technology can save us? Indeed, isn't it geographers, biologists, chemists, botanists and other scientists who have done most to alert us to the catastrophic potential of many current industrial practices? And isn't it precisely a better scientific understanding of what is going on that will best prepare us for the most appropriate technological response? Solar panels, wind farms, insulation systems, cleaner cars and other 'green' initiatives all depend on the application of science, rather than its abandonment. Surely the further development of such technologies is more important than musing about the metaphysical foundations of enframing? Looking at it like this, we might conclude that Heidegger's strategy is, bluntly, one of intellectual surrender, a failure to engage with what is most existentially pressing in the concrete reality of our contemporary destiny. Don't we, as in the case of religion, have to say that actual life is lived on the plane of the ontic, and involves wrestling with particular decisions and accepting particular responsibilities? It might be objected that, whether we are talking about religion, politics or technology, the distinction between the ontic and the ontological does not of itself involve neglecting the former. It doesn't have to be a matter of either/or. We don't have to stop being religious in order to reflect on the ontological structures disclosed by the religious life, and many theologians have chosen to follow Heidegger in, as they see it, seeking an ontological anchor for the exigencies of the religious life as it is lived. Similarly, it would not seem necessary to suspend our efforts to solve particular environmental problems until we have succeeded in refiguring the world in a post-technological way. So, Heidegger need not be construed as saying that there is no point in doing what we can while we can to improve things in the here and now. Isn't his position rather one of giving unto Caesar's that which is Caesar's — i.e., of warning against assuming that the immediate problems of today and tomorrow are the only things that should concern us? But if Heidegger's aim is neither to decry nor to promote the actual world of technology but simply to ask us to reflect critically on the limits of technology by considering its essence, does it follow that his strategy has no relation to the concrete, no practical significance or application? One way of answering this question would be to acknowledge that Heidegger was no more of a practical environmentalist than he was a Christian preacher or a teacher of Buddhist meditation. He will not give us concrete answers to concrete problems (although which modern philosopher has given us any real help in the face of the environmental crisis?), and the one occasion when he tried to do so, in 1933, simply demonstrated the gulf separating his way of essential thinking from everyday reality. Nevertheless, the nature of the crisis confronting us today is so all-encompassing, permeating every level of society and culture, that its solution cannot be left to the scientists and technologists alone. For science and technology will necessarily direct their best efforts to particular problems, but, over and above the question of how to maximise renewable energy sources or how to take countermeasures against ozone depletion, we also need to be considering the kind of life-style, the kind of society we want to be living in. No matter how sophisticated our science, it will never be able to achieve more than crisis management so long as we go on living in an acquisitive, self-assertive society of individuals pursuing the maximisation of their personal autonomy, in moral, financial and political terms, and for whom the earth itself is nothing but a resource for human self-realisation. So long as this is how we choose to live, we will continue to degrade our environment in a cycle of ever more total crises. Unless we change at the fundamental level of values and of vision we will find ourselves, later if not sooner, passing the point of no return and rendering our planet humanly uninhabitable. On this line of reasoning, we not only need technical solutions, we also need the vision thing. Alongside ecology we need 'deep ecology', a spiritual re-orientation that will make us fit custodians of planetary good.

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That said, I want to close by suggesting that biopolitics, while perhaps not necessarily good, is at least not wholly bad. Absent realistic alternatives, this claim is certainly worth considering. Foucault, for example, never charted a way out of biopolitics beyond developing an individual aesthetic of self-discipline and regulation—the “care of the self.”94 Other writers speak of achieving something like a “new politics,” which usually means some combination of personal freedom that includes the substance—but often not the legal baggage—of individual human rights, combined with an ideal of community that fits uneasily with the ideal of personal freedom (thus the “politics,” which are likely to be anything but new), as well as a more egalitarian economic arrangement and the social safety net of the modern welfare state, but without the modern state itself. Even assuming this vision is desirable, no one has any practical idea how to make it happen.95 My basic assertions are that the ills laid at the feet of biopolitics are not entirely its fault and that they are in any event the costs of “progress.” Consider, first, the charges. Critics point out that in the modern, centralized, biopolitical state, our individuality is suppressed to the larger goal of managing the population. As a result, we become detached and alienated, even as we are disciplined and regulated. At best we can resort to coping strategies, but larger transformation of our social environment is impossible.96 94For brief discussions, see CHOWERS, supra note 84, at 173–79; JERROLD SEIGEL, THE IDEA OF THE SELF: THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE IN WESTERN EUROPE SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 621–631 (2005). 95In the 1980s, Alan Freeman & Elizabeth Mensch suggested that rejection of the public-private distinction could lead to community-based decisions based on “something more like mutual trust, or love,” rather than “alienation and fear of one another.” Alan Freeman & Elizabeth Mensch, The Public-Private Distinction in American Law and Life, 36 BUFF. L. REV. 237, 257 (1987). Nancy Fraser worried that Foucault may provide little help with “issues such as the prospects for democratic, nonbureaucratic, nonauthoritarian socialism.” FRASER, supra note 58, at 62. More recently, Agamben has argued for dissolving the relationship between violence and law, for “deactivat[ing]” law, so that “[o]ne day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects.” His goal is “to open a space between [law and life] for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics.’” AGAMBEN, supra note 62, at 64, 88. So, too Patrick Hanafin has argued that “a right dislodged from the repressive state apparatus” or “a right beyond state power” is “impossible to conceive, by virtue of its very ungroundedness,” but he suggests that asserting this idea as a form of dissent could ground a new politics. Patrick Hanafin, The Writer’s Refusal and Law’s Malady, 31 J. L. & SOC. 3, 12 (2004), reprinted in LAW AND LITERATURE 3, 12 (Patrick Hanafin et al. eds., Blackwell 2004). Perhaps the work of Jürgen Habermas provides a better—or at least more sustained—example of efforts to re-imagine politics and escape the ills of modernity. 96See, e.g., CHOWERS, supra note 84, at 8, 193–97 (presenting such a diagnosis). The flaw in this diagnosis is that it treats the alienated individual as problematic, as if there were an acontextual, dehistoricized thing known as “an individual” that is capable of being alienated or not, with the result that we should try to make it less, rather than more, alienated. Far more likely is that the idea of the individual developed in the modern period along with the modern state and that alienation is part of what defines an individual. To the extent the “problem” of the alienated individual has significance in the contemporary world, in other words, it is a direct consequence of the enlightenment and can only be solved through biopolitics. Indeed, biopolitics simply reflects the enlightenment project of promoting reason in place of “superstition” and arbitrary power. Social structures have become rationalized, so that governments are more likely to operate by articulated policy instead of fiat, the rule of law instead of whim, and democracy instead of hereditary rule or warlordism. The creation of the individual—a rational, rights-bearing but also alienated entity—is critical to all of these developments. Importantly, under this account, these changes may not be liberating in any objective sense, because the freedoms they create come with real costs—the costs of being free in this way as well as the consequences of being part of a power structure in which these particular freedoms are defined, managed, and subject to suspension. Still, this process leads not only to centralization and state violence but also to rights that channel the exercise of state power, to pervasive regulation of our lives and environment but also to a significant amount of predictability and security for many people. Our modern anxiety can be imperfectly assuaged by the comforts that flow from management and technology, and there is no reason to believe we are any less happy than people were in the past—although neither is it clear that we are any happier. How the costs and benefits of the enlightenment and biopolitics shake out, and whether that should even be the way we assess them (it appears to be a loaded standard, after all), are political and moral issues. Even more, however, they are questions of aesthetics. The comforts and controls of biopolitics will appeal to many people. Others will find fulfillment in acts of resistance along a variety of fronts. Beyond that, and what the future will bring, who can say?

This psychology research article reviews the psychological research on why people believe and share fake news.

Gordon Pennycook — Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science, University of Regina; David G. Rand — Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This op-ed on political commentary argues that armed state authority is the most effective violence-reduction tool, that violence is universal and has an evolutionary logic, and that denying it makes it harder to reduce.

Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

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Contrary to some romantic anthropological legends, violence is universal across human cultures. Moreover, boys in all cultures spontaneously engage in rough-and-tumble play, which is obviously practice for fighting. They also divide themselves into coalitions that compete aggressively. And children are violent well before they have been infected by war toys or cultural stereotypes. The most violent age is not adolescence but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting and kicking. Violence continues to preoccupy the mind throughout life. All cultures take pleasure in thinking about killings, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, crime dramas, spy thrillers, Shakespearean tragedies, biblical stories, hero myths and epic poems. People also enjoy watching the stylised combat we call “sports”, which are contests of aiming, chasing or fighting, complete with victors and the vanquished. Almost everyone recognises the need for violence in defence of self, family and innocent victims. Moral philosophers point out that there are even circumstances in which torture is justified — when a captured terrorist has planted a time bomb in a crowded place and refuses to say where it is, for example. More generally, whether a violent mindset is called heroic or pathological depends on whose ox has been gored. Freedom fighter or terrorist, Robin Hood or thief, guardian angel or vigilante, martyr or kamikaze, general or gang leader — these are value judgments, not scientific classifications. I doubt that the brains or genes of most of the lauded protagonists would differ from those of their vilified counterparts. The first step in understanding violence is to set aside our abhorrence of it long enough to examine why it sometimes pays off in personal or evolutionary terms. This requires one to invert the statement of the problem: not why violence occurs, but why it is avoided. Morality, after all, did not enter the universe with the Big Bang and then pervade it like background radiation; it was discovered by our ancestors after billions of years of the morally indifferent process known as natural selection. If an obstacle stands in the way of something an organism needs, it should neutralise the obstacle by disabling or eliminating it. This includes obstacles that happen to be other human beings — ones that are monopolising desirable land or sources of food, for example. Even among modern nation-states, raw self-interest is an important motive for war.

Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and cognitive science expert

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Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting, or even approving, it. Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen that bores into us from the outside. But denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

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Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique yet invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 per cent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honour in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of the law. The inverse is true as well. When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing and petty warfare among gangs, warlords and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and parts of Africa in the 1990s. The generalisation that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often overlooked in today’s still-romantic climate. Government in general is anathema to many conservatives and the police and prison system are anathema to many liberals. Many people on the Left, citing uncertainty about the deterrent value of capital punishment compared with life imprisonment, say deterrence is not effective in general, and many oppose more effective policing of inner-city neighbourhoods, even though it may be the most effective way for their decent inhabitants to abjure the code of the streets. Many on the Right oppose decriminalising drugs, prostitution and gambling without factoring in the costs of the zones of anarchy that, by their own free-market logic, are inevitably spawned by prohibition policies. When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialise, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with a violent culture of honour. Schoolchildren are being fed the disinformation that people in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law.

Presley's song urges action over talk, and it is referenced here as a cultural touchstone for the demand for action rather than conversation.

American singer and actor

This op-ed on political commentary reflects on Richard Pryor's career and a pivotal night that changed his comedy.

Actress, comedian, and author; daughter of Richard Pryor

This quote compiles remarks by a pioneering Black stand-up comedian who told it like it was.

American stand-up comedian and actor

This article on international relations argues that tensions with China stem from Chinese actions, particularly threats over Taiwan and the South China Sea, rather than from Western policy.

Business Editor, The Economist

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Believers in the self-fulfilling prophecy have got the argument the wrong way around. It is certainly true that American, and indeed Asian, policies toward China could be a lot better thought out. But the West is not the source of friction: the real sources of the current tensions are Chinese actions, particularly Chinese threats to use force to assert claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The Chinese insist that they have never been an expansionist power. But China has very expansive ideas of where its legitimate borders lie. Because weak Chinese governments have always been especially prickly on issues of sovereignty, instability after the death of Deng Xiaoping may only heighten Chinese assertiveness.

This article on cognitive psychology explains the cognitive biases that make it hard to reason rationally about COVID-19.

Science writer, BBC Future

This book of political philosophy argues that the cultural Left should abandon abstract "system" talk and revolutionary rhetoric in favor of piecemeal, pragmatic reform within a market economy.

Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

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Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies "the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order." For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately theorized," you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand—a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook." 10

Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

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This dissertation argues that a genuine Nietzschean contest needs rules that ensure fair competition, since otherwise the same powerful, hostile players would always win.

Philosophy, University of North Carolina

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Without certain rules, there would be no competition since the same potent, high-ranking, and hostile players would always win. Those aggressive players may not be free spirits but ascetic priests. Even Nietzsche would have to realize that in order for a contest to be genuine, rules have to be in place to ensure fair competition and eliminate cheaters. Even the agonistic Greeks had rules of fair play. We have to know how and when we cross the finish line. We cannot have a discourse without attempting to preclude privileged claims. Some people have always been allowed to speak while others were muffled. Benhabib is not trying to rid discourse of its agonistic tendencies. She is trying to prevent the silencing of others. She is always trying to recognize difference among participants. Nietzsche himself had said that difference engenders hatred (BGE 263). By recognizing different opinions, we can battle each other in a discourse without some us being muzzled and constrained.

This article on the psychology of language argues that debate "arguments" claiming language creates reality lack empirical support, and that such arguments could push attitudes into non-debate contexts.

The implication for language "arguments" is clear: a debater must do more than simply read cards from feminist or critical scholars that say language creates reality. Instead, the debater must support this claim with empirical studies or other forms of scientifically valid research. Mere intuition is not enough, and it is our belief that valid empirical studiues do not support the hypothesis. After assessing the studies up to and including 1989, Takano claimed that the hypothesis "has no empirical support" (Takano 142). Further, Miller & McNeill claim that "nearly all" of the studies performed on the Whorfian hypothesis "are best regarded as efforts to substantiate the weak version of the hypothesis" (Miller & McNeill 734). We additionally will offer four reasons the hypothesis is not valid. The first reason is that it is impossible to generate empirical validation for the hypothesis. Because the hypothesis is so metaphysical and because it relies so heavily on intuition it is difficult if not impossible to operationalize. Rosch asserts that "profound and ineffable truths are not, in that form, subject to scientific investigation" (Rosch 259). We concur for two reasons. The first is that the hypothesis is phrased as a philosophical first principle and hence would not have an objective referent. The second is there would be intrinsic problems in any such test. The independent variable would be the language used by the subject. The dependent variable would be the subject's subjective reality. The problem is that the dependent variable can only be measured through self-reporting, which - naturally - entails the use of language. Hence, it is impossible to separate the dependent and independent variables. In other words, we have no way of knowing if the effects on "reality" are actual or merely artifacts of the language being used as a measuring tool. The second reason that the hypothesis is flawed is that there are problems with the causal relationship it describes. Simply put, it is just as plausible (in fact infinitely more so) that reality shapes language.

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If language "arguments" become a dominant trend, debaters will not change their attitudes. Rather they will manifest their attitudes in non-debate contexts. Under these conditions, the debaters will not have the moderating effects of the critic or the other debaters. Simply put, sexism at home or at lunch is worse than sexism in a debate round because in the round there is a critic to provide negative though not punitive feedback.

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The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about "the system" rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like "late capitalism" suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy-the liberation of the people from the power of the technocrats-until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippmann's insistence on the need for expertise.15 The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable nonmarket economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decisionmaking. They might also, given similar reforms in other countries, bring about an international federation, a world government. In such a new world, American national pride would become as quaint as pride in being from Nebraska or Kazakhstan or Sicily. But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and human affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

This article on the philosophy of language argues that the theory of "sexist language" is a dehumanizing principle that tells people what they mean and wrongly assumes language can be controlled.

Philosophy instructor, Los Angeles Valley College

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Modern Persian is a language completely without gender. There are not even different words for "he" and "she," just the unisex un. (There are not even different titles for married and unmarried women: Persian khânum can be translated as "Ms.") Nevertheless, after some progress under Western influence, the Revolutionary Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini retreated from the modern world into a vigorous reëstablishment of mediaevalism, putting everyone, especially women, back into their traditional places. So the advice could be: If someone wants "non-sexist language," move to Iran. But that probably would not be quite what they have in mind.

Why didn't the "gender free" Persian language create a feminist utopia? This goes to show us that gender in language is completely irrelevant to the sexual openness of society. [continues]

In fact, as the counterexamples indicate, such linguistic structures as gender determine little about thought and nothing about the world. Grammar is usually just grammar, nothing else. It is used to express meaning -- it does not determine meaning. But the most significant assumption and the greatest hybris in the theory of "sexist language" is just that language and linguistic change are controllable, and so can be controlled by us, if we wish to. But language is not anything that can be planned or controlled. Languages grow and change spontaneously.

Philosophy instructor, Los Angeles Valley College

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It is an evil principle to think that we can tell other people what they mean by what they say, because of some theory we have that makes it mean something in particular to us, even when they obviously mean something else. Nevertheless, there is now a common principle, in feminism and elsewhere (especially flourishing in literary criticism), that meaning is only in the response of the interpreter, not in the mind of the speaker, even if the speaker is to be sued or charged with a crime for the interpreter having the response that they do. There is also on top of this the Marxist theory of “false consciousness,” which holds that “true” meaning follows from the underlying economic structure, today usually just called the “power” relationships. Most people are unaware of the power relationships which produce the concepts and language that they use, and so what people think they mean by their own statements and language is an illusion.

The implications of these principles are dehumanizing and totalitarian: what individual people think and want is irrelevant and to be disregarded, even by laws and political authorities forcing them to behave, and speak, in certain ways. But they are principles that make it possible to dismiss the common sense view that few people speaking English who said “man” in statements like “man is a rational animal” were referring exclusively to males, even though this usage was clear to all, from the context, for centuries before feminism decided that people didn’t “really” mean that.

This op-ed on political polarization reviews the evidence on echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarization, finding echo chambers less widespread than commonly assumed.

Amy Ross Arguedas — Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Reuters Institute; Rasmus Kleis Nielsen — Director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

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Studies in the UK and several other countries show that the forms of algorithmic selection offered by search engines, social media, and other digital platforms generally lead to slightly more diverse news use – the opposite of what the “filter bubble” hypothesis posits – but that self-selection, primarily among a small minority of highly partisan individuals, can lead people to opt in to echo chambers, even as the vast majority do not.

In summary, the work reviewed here suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation.

This empirical study in moral and political philosophy tests whether ethicists and political philosophers vote more often than other professors.

Eric Schwitzgebel — Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside; Joshua Rust — Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stetson University

This article on debate theory introduces a typology of the kritik, dividing it into thinking, rhetoric, and value kritiks.

Policy debate coach credited with introducing the kritik; former coach, Fort Hays State University, fired for showing his ass at a tournament

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In summary, I think that access is restricted to those academics whose work suits

the interests of policy-makers, and I do not think that this is a matter of surprise,

nor is it a criticism of policy-makers. It is, however, a criticism of Wallace’s view that

all responsible academics should be offering their advice to the policy-making

community. I am genuinely not convinced that this is something that academics

should do as part of their responsibility to the state. If they do decide to offer policy

advice then they should be aware that their reception will be directly related to the

degree of fit between their underlying world-view and the values and policies of the

government. Their influence will therefore be determined by the closeness of the fit

between their values and those held by the policy-makers, and I am not at all sure

what this has to do with scholarship.

512 Steve Smith

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“As a starting point, the kritik can be divided into three types: thinking, rhetoric, and value. The first, thinking, offers much to debate and directly engages Heidegger's ways of thinking. Thinking kritiks attempt to think the resolution along different paths. Policy debate presently functions on a foundation of unquestioned assumptions. Quite simply, this type of kritik opens those assumptions for consideration. Rhetoric kritiks focus on the specific language used either by the debaters or in their literature. The focus shifts from the impact of arguments to the impact of words, although words often impact arguments. Debaters are held accountable for the implications of their word choice for both their arguments and themselves. The value kritik is the most commonly argued of the kritiks and is very similar to arguments which have been made in debate for a long time - that is, deontological arguments, a priori axiological or value positions, most ethical or moral standards. Value kritiks reveal critical underlying value assumptions and expose them to either external or internal evaluative standards. Briefly, external standards typically are found in some societal or cultural ideal and applied from outside, while internal standards use the revealed value assumptions to expose inherent contradictions and inconsistencies. Remember: This typology is a place to begin, offered provisionally to get the kritik of thinking underway.”

This article on international relations argues that politics includes the epistemological moves that define what counts as political, and that policy-makers rarely listen to academics whose ideas challenge their preconceptions.

Professor of International Studies, University of Exeter

By focusing on the policy debate, we restrict ourselves to the issues of the day, to the tip of the political iceberg. What politics seems to me to be crucially about is how and why some issues are made intelligible as political problems and how others are hidden below the surface (being defined as ‘economic’ or ‘cultural’ or ‘private’). In my own work I have become much more interested in this aspect of politics in the last few years. I spent a lot of time dealing with policy questions and can attest to the ‘buzz’ that this gave me both professionally and personally. But I became increasingly aware that the realm of the political that I was dealing with was in fact a very small part of what I would now see as political. I therefore spent many years working on epistemology, and in fact consider that my most political work. I am sure that William Wallace will regard this comment as proof of his central claim that I have become scholastic rather than scholarly, but I mean it absolutely. My current work enquires into how it is that we can make claims to knowledge, how it is that we ‘know’ things about the international political world. My main claim is that International Relations relies overwhelmingly on one answer to this question, namely, an empiricist epistemology allied to a positivistic methodology. This gives the academic analyst the great benefit of having a foundation for claims about what the world is like. It makes policy advice more saleable, especially when positivism’s commitment to naturalism means that the world can be presented as having certain furniture rather than other furniture. The problem is that in my view this is a flawed version of how we know things; indeed it is in fact a very political view of knowledge, born of the Enlightenment with an explicit political purpose. So much follows politically from being able to present the world in this way; crucially the normative assumptions of this move are hidden in a false and seductive mask of objectivity and by the very difference between statements of fact and statements of value that is implied in the call to ‘speak truth to power’. For these reasons, I think that the political is a far wider arena than does Wallace. This means that I think I am being very political when I lecture or write on epistemology. Maybe that does not seem political to those who define politics as the public arena of policy debate; but I believe that my work helps uncover the regimes of truth within which that more restricted definition of politics operates. In short, I think that Wallace’s view of politics ignores its most political aspect, namely, the production of discourses of truth which are the very processes that create the space for the narrower version of politics within which he works. My work enquires into how the current ‘politics’ get defined and what (political) interests benefit from that disarming division between the political and the non-political. In essence, how we know things determines what we see, and the public realm of politics is itself the result of a prior series of (political) epistemological moves which result in the political being seen as either natural or a matter of common sense.

This article on settler colonial studies and solidarity practices argues that settler colonial studies and solidarity practices risk reproducing domination unless they center Indigenous peoples' articulations and take a relational approach.

Corey Snelgrove — political science graduate researcher, University of Victoria; Rita Kaur Dhamoon — Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria; Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee Nation) — Associate Professor of Indigenous Governance, University of Victoria

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Our goal in this article is to intervene and disrupt current contentious debates regarding the predominant lines of inquiry bourgeoning in settler colonial studies, the use of ‘settler’, and the politics of building solidarities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Settler colonial studies, ‘settler’, and solidarity, then, operate as the central themes of this paper. While somewhat jarring, our assessment of the debates is interspersed with our discussions in their original form, as we seek to explore possible lines of solidarity, accountability, and relationality to one another and to decolonization struggles both locally and globally. Our overall conclusion is that without centering Indigenous peoples’ articulations, without deploying a relational approach to settler colonial power, and without paying attention to the conditions and contingency of settler colonialism, studies of settler colonialism and practices of solidarity run the risk of reifying (and possibly replicating) settler colonial as well as other modes of domination.

This article on debate pedagogy argues that policy debate better promotes research skills than language and performance critiques, which they say discourage research and carry a lower burden of proof.

Wake Forest University first-round debater

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Better research produces better papers, speeches and presentations, and general knowledge (Freeley, 1996). Experience with research also provides debaters with good models for learning how to write. Learning to do conduct research is also useful for many personal purposes. Furthermore, it is not simply the ability to conduct research that debate teaches; rather it is the ability to engage in research efficiently and effectively. It still ceases to amaze us how poor the research skills are of most non-debaters. It is not that most people cannot do research, but rather how inefficient they are at doing it. Second, learning how to do policy research, and doing the research is desirable because it provides students with a better understanding of how the American government, and the world, exist and operate. This is useful as academic knowledge, but is of even greater utility in professional and social roles that intersect with the functioning of the American democracy. As has been noted elsewhere, engagement in research not only produces disinterested knowledge, it also can facilitate individual argumentative agency (Mitchell, 1998). The policy analysis focus of research is particularly desirable in achieving this goal. Experience with policy research also can translate into “post-debate” skills. There are many debaters who have gained employment with a variety of private, governmental, and international policy institutions due in large part to their research skills (Parcher, 1996). Research is an important part of the activity, and in policy debate it is essential. The specific knowledge requirements for this form of debate are intense, and they are magnified by the switch-side nature of the activity. Do other forms of debate require/teach research skills? Yes, but the results are not the same. Language and performance critiques produce shallow debate: they are “ultra generic,” have a lower burden of proof associated with them, and provide vague alternatives. First, many of these critiques that fail to challenge the desirability of the plan are “ultra generics” that discourage research across a spectrum of issues. While there is considerable literature addressing language choices and performance, there is also always a vast amount of literature that addresses the resolution’s policy area. Reality is such that most individuals do not have the time to dedicate to researching all of these issues. Delving into one area of research will trade-off with another. Additionally, because the language and performance literature is so broad, and not necessarily linked to the policy area of the resolution or the affirmative plan, there is no way to fully research all of these issues, and still have time for policy issues. Consider last year’s mental illness topic, there were so many options regarding language choice and so many performances available for presentation that one could easily have only researched these issues and never made it into the policy literature. Some of the more recently popularized forms of performance have even resulted in the virtual elimination of research. Second, the lower burden of proof that is asked of these criticisms further undermines research. While it might be true that critique teams could engage in more research the fact is that they don’t because it is generally not needed. Critiques, for some reason, are given a lower burden of proof by many, and therefore are seen as having “the maximum competitive benefit with the least effort” (Truett, 2001, p. online). For language critiques, for instance, the negative does usually engage in some pre-round/tournament research on the subject, but to make the argument apply to a specific team they only need listen to, and read over, the 1AC to extract the words or phrases that can serve as links for the critique. Research into the specific policy area is not required. A third, and related, reason these critiques undermine research is the lack of a need to defend a political alternative. When combined with the lower burden of proof assigned to these criticisms, this serves as a simple way to sidestep a great deal of topic research. It increases the incentive to utilize these forms of argument. Why bother researching to learn the merits of a particular policy, or the desirability of a certain counterplan, when it requires much less research to develop a performance or a critique that indicts the use of words independent of policy considerations?

This article on international relations theory argues that realism and constructivism need one another to correct their excesses and that common ontological ground between them is possible.

Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut

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There is blame to dispense all around here in the refusal to seriously engage in the concerns of the other. But the point of this essay is not to blame; rather it is to highlight an essential irony. Realism and constructivism need one another to correct their own worst excesses. Without some degree of realist structuralism, constructivism is in real danger of becoming what Fred Halliday calls “presentism (everything is new)”; and without some degree of constructivist historicism, realism seems to have already fallen prey to “transhistorical complacency (nothing is new).” 4 Reconciling the two approaches so that both stasis and change in global social order are explained simultaneously seems desirable. The problem is how to do so while remaining consistent with what scholars from both approaches consider their core assumptions. The reason why cross-paradigmatic conversations so often degenerate into what James Der Derian observes is “a dialogue of the deaf between opposing schools” may be the failure to follow R. B. J. Walker’s advice that “differences among approaches to world politics must be addressed at the level of basic ontological assumptions.” 5 In this regard, even the most encouraging gestures toward bridge building must confront the dilemma that a reconstruction acceptable to one approach may not be acceptable to the other. Theoretical reconciliations are difficult to accomplish because what differentiates approaches are the particular ontological givens to which they subscribe. Steve Smith succinctly puts it, different choices are made regarding “what is the world like and what is its furniture?,” as well as about the relationship among that furniture.6 Richard Little notes that attempts at reconciliation too often “gloss over fundamental differences,” which “necessarily rest on judgements derived from deep-seated and ultimately untestable beliefs about reality.” 7 This view suggests that a theoretical collaboration between seemingly contradictory approaches like realism and constructivism can only be achieved if there is already an ontological common ground. Establishing this common ground demands comparisons that focus on their most contradictory elements and the ontological sources for those elements. It also demands adopting what Ernst B. Haas and Peter Haas refer to as a pragmatic version of theoretical tolerance, which acknowledges, accepts, and respects difference on the grounds that one’s own “social construction of reality cannot be proved superior to anyone else’s.” 8 This essay undertakes such a comparison, and I argue that common ontological ground is possible, depending on the tolerance exercised and ontological choices made by realists and constructivists. To reach that conclusion, we must wade into choppy theoretical waters because I believe realism’s commitment to transhistorical limitations on the human capacity to affect desirable, intended, or rational change derives from its ontological insistence that there is an ongoing causal relationship between biology and human political and social activities. Since most American social scientists tend to recoil from any discussion about biology, there are dangers in considering realist ontology so candidly. Yet there are also advantages to derive from realism’s insistence that the transformation to human identities and social practices occurs within broadly proscribed biological boundaries that are determined before the act of social construction. This enables us to reread realism as an explanation of the process of global institutional transformation itself, but also simultaneously confirms that realism cannot serve as an explanation for the content of institutional transformation. To complete its narratives of social reality, realism must collaborate instead with an approach like constructivism, which is capable of addressing the evolution of particular social content. Conversely, as Ted Hopf observes, because constructivism has an “open ontology,” it provides no theoretically proscribed boundaries about when to expect stasis and change in the identities and social practices that constitute any global order.9 In response to this obvious drawback, some constructivists have posited particular boundaries to what is socially constructable. Such boundaries need not approximate those defined by realists, but the open ontology of constructivists does allow them to make alternative choices about the ontological givens from which realism’s transhistoricism derives. The proposition that there may be limitations on how human beings construct their social realities opens the theoretical space necessary for a potential dialogue with realists about the subject. It may be theoretically possible to build a bridge from both sides of the river and, in so doing, correct the explanatory errors of “presentism” that are common to the constructivist literature, while reducing the transhistorical complacency of realist theorizing.

In this short column of political commentary from the lead-up to the Iraq War, Sullivan criticizes a public figure's remarks.

Political commentator and author

This article on political theory explains that liberalism stays neutral among competing conceptions of the good life, since resolving such disputes would require totalitarian imposition of one conception.

Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Warsaw

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Liberalism does not say which of these different moralities is better than others. It is neutral on this question and regards its neutrality as a virtue. Liberalism as a political doctrine assumes that - as Joseph Raz wrote -'there are many worthwhile and valuable relationships, commitments and plans of life which are mutually incompatible'.56 It recognizes that - as John Rawls put it - 'a modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines'.57 What is more, for a liberal this is not only a fact to take note of: he or she is ready to acknowledge that 'now this variety of conceptions of the good is itself a good thing, that is, it is rational for members of a well-ordered society to want their plans to be different'.58 Thus, the task of politics cannot and should not be to resolve the dispute among different conceptions of life. This is completely unattainable or is attainable only by a totalitarian enslavement of society in the name of some one conception. This being the case, according to Dworkin, 'political decisions must be as far as possible independent of conceptions of the good life, or what gives value to life. Since citizens of a society differ in these conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another.'59

This article on the philosophy of social science argues that strong relativism is self-refuting and cites Foucault's dismissal of the AIDS epidemic as a cautionary example.

Professor of Psychology and Political Science, Ohio State University; Chair, Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group, University of California, Berkeley

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If we took the aggressive-relativist critique seriously, we would commit ourselves to a brand of cognitive egalitarianism in which it is had manners to challenge anyone else's conception of good judgment. Everything would reduce to Humpty Dumpty's question: "Who is to be master?" As soon as someone raises a protest, we must either accommodate it or stand indicted of intellectual imperialism—of trying to reduce vast areas of political science to the status of disciplinary colonies of psychologists who study judgment and choice. That might not be such a bad thing. There is plenty of evidence of cognitive biases among political observers that the usual academic quality-control mechanisms are not up to correcting. But let's follow the thread of the strong-relativist argument. If we all get to keep our own scorecards and to make whatever post hoc adjustments we want to our probability scores and belief-updating equations, we wind up back in the subjectivist swamp we vowed to escape in chapter 1. Relativists not only refuse to help; they try to push us back into the quagmire every time we try to lift ourselves out. Anytime anyone proposes a trans-ideological standard for evaluating claims, relativists deride the effort as a power grab. The reductio ad absurdum is, of course, that strong relativism is self-refuting. It too can be dismissed as a power grab—a power grab by radically egalitarian intellectuals who are skeptical of science and hostile to modernity. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a doctrine that is more polar opposite to the author's agenda. Radical relativists transform scientific debates into ideological ones: the author transforms ideological debates into scientific ones. It is tempting to end this exchange by returning to Dr. Johnson's famous rebuke of Bishop Berkeley "I refute him thus," where "thus" involved kicking a stone to dispel doubts about the existence of the external world. Here the stone-kicking involves pointing to errors so egregious that no one with any sense rises to their defense. We don't have to look long. The death of the most famous strong relativist of recent times, Michel Foucault, offers just such an object lesson. In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey tells a chilling tale of the consequences of acting on the post-modern doctrine that truth is a social construct. Foucault argued there are no objective truths, only truths promoted by dominant groups intent on preserving their dominance. In the early 1980s Foucault was infected with the AIDS virus. Like many others then, he dismissed the mounting evidence that a lethal epidemic was sweeping through the gay community. The "gay plague" was rumormongering by homophobes. Die-hard relativists might insist that Foucault will be posthumously vindicated. Or, upping the ante, they might argue that Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa, will yet be vindicated for flirting with conspiracy theories of AIDS and denying poor pregnant women antiretroviral drugs. History will not be kind to this school of thought.

This article on settler colonial studies examines the project of decolonizing settler colonialism and what it would require of settlers.

Associate Professor of History and Politics, Swinburne University of Technology; founding editor, Settler Colonial Studies

This essay argues that fear of ostracism makes people self-censor and virtue-signal, showing that Foucault’s invisible power is real.

Columnist, Spiked

People fear admonition, ostracism or cancellation for not exhibiting the ‘correct’ views. And so they self-censor their sincere opinions and virtue-signal insincere opinions instead. This shows that the Foucauldian idea of an invisible power is very real.

This book argues that no final evaluation of a life can be made before it is over, and that the death of God makes ethical reflection more pressing.

Professor of Philosophy, Williams College

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Nietzsche exhorts us to live beautifully; on this point, Nehamas and I agree. A second point of our agreement is in attributing to Nietzsche an insistence that the assessment of a specific life's beauty is a matter, primarily, for the individual living that life. [Continued] A post-moral world , one wherein the minotaur was silenced, would be one in which each of us could determine his or her own good; that would have to be a world within which diversity would be encouraged rather than inhibited. But that, it might seem, would entail a new form of moral dogmatism, one with the paradoxical form, "the good for all is that there be no 'good for all'"? How could Nietzsche defend such a perspective, or such affirmation, as one appropriate for everyone? How could Nietzsche defend any general position at all? With this question, I turn to what I take to be the dangerous part of Nehamas's response to the problem of immoralism. The problem emerges, for Nehamas, through the question, what is a bad life, if life is literature? Must we not respond, the only bad life is a boring life, a life that doesn't make a good story? Are we then to denounce or condemn the couch potato, but not the mass murderer or the child molester? At times, Nehamas seems to point us in this direction. Insisting that Nietzsche's perspectivism "forbids any general evaluation [of life], positive or negative," Nehamas argues: What Nietzsche eventually comes to attack directly is not any particular judgment but the very tendency to make general judgments about the value of life in itself, as if there were such a single thing with a character of its own, capable of being praised or blamed by some uniform standard. [...] Life itself has no value, but the life of an individual or a group has as great a value as that individual or group can give it . Some lives are mean or horrible, others magnificent. Life's value depends on what one makes of it, and this is a further sense in which Nietzsche believes that value is created and not discovered. (135) This conclusion, which follows from the forbidding of any general evaluation of life, is, it seems to me, as dangerous in its implications as any of Nietzsche's "words of war," any of his "thunder and fireworks." If "life itself has no value," and if "some lives are mean and horrible," then those who strive to live beautifully need take no account of those whose lives they deem, on whatever basis, to be ugly. "Some lives," Nehamas tells us, "are mean or horrible." I agree, but only if we read Nehamas as asserting that some lives have been mean or horrible. This correction is vital, for no life can be simply "mean or horrible" until it is over. The life that appears, as it develops, to be simply "mean or horrible" may be a life whose beauty has not yet emerged. As Nietzsche notes in what he calls "a parable," "Not every end is a goal. A melody's end is not its goal; nevertheless, so long as the melody has not reached its end, it also has not reached its goal" (HHII:WS:204). Perhaps Nehamas is right in asserting that Nietzsche's perspectivism "forbids any general evaluation [of life], positive or negative"; yet, I have argued, Nietzsche attempts to develop a "general" perspective of life, he attempts to see life as it really is. The lenses of art are not the only lenses we need; Nietzsche exhorts us to view art through the lenses of life. One of the things we see through the lenses of life is that no final evaluation of a life can be made until, at least, the life is over. To say that a life still underway is simply "mean and horrible" is not to express a justifiable opinion, it is to judge prematurely. Nietzsche's parable, which presents life as melody rather than as literature, provides a basis for rejecting the inhumanity seemingly licensed by the simple classification of some lives as "mean or horrible"; yet it may intensify the problem that led to that classification, for it may also seem to provide further support for the claim that the life of the child molester or serial murderer can be a life that is beautiful. Even if we agree that child molestation is simply ugly, does it follow that a life that has included child molestation must be ugly? That there can be no objection to the execution of the child molester? A different way to put the question is this: can suicide be noble? Would the life of the pale criminal attain its highest beauty if the pale criminal were to kill himself? Granting that nothing the pale criminal may do following his crime will suffice to make his life, as a whole, one to be emulated -- one cannot , I think, will to commit a crime for the sole purpose of then being able to overcome that crime -- we must also recognize that the question that faces the pale criminal himself is not, "would I want others to act as I have acted?" Nor is his question the one posed by Nehamas, i.e., "would I want to do the same things all over again?" His question, rather, is, what now ? What is to be the significance of this murder, which I myself deem repellent, within my life as it continues to develop? Is this calamity to destroy me, or rather, perhaps, to be the basis for my transformation? We approximate the situation the pale criminal is in if we ask ourselves whether we might think better of him, perhaps even be inspired by him, if, instead of committing suicide, he were to seek to help others to learn from his example. Phrasing the question in terms of suicide indicates that the earlier formulation is too simple. Just as accounts are neither simply true nor simply false, lives are neither simply beautiful or noble nor simply ugly or base. Lives are more or less beautiful, and as long as any life continues, it can, in principle, continue to transform the initial ugliness, if there be such, of its past.

If I acknowledge that it makes no sense to ask about the purpose or meaning of the world, must I also hold that it makes no sense to ask about the purpose or meaning of, let us say, the fact that I am pursuing philosophy rather than herpetology? The Doctor in Camus's The Plague certainly denies that there is meaning or purpose to the world as a whole. He also realizes that he cannot save all little children from suffering; but he proposes to save some from suffering. Does the denial of purpose or meaning to the whole make that position ethically indistinguishable from that of one who, while unable to torture all little children, vows to torture all that he can? Differently stated, is it not the case that, in the words of Ivan Karamazov, "If God is dead, then all is permitted," or, in Nietzsche's own words, "Everything is false! Everything is permitted!" (N:VII:25[505] / WP:602; cf. N:VII:25[304], N:26[25], N:31[51], N:32[8(34)]). My answer -- introduced in the chapter devoted to Zarathustra, and developed in those that come thereafter -- is that everything is indeed permitted, but that universal permissibility does not make ethical reflection impossible or trivial; on the contrary, it makes such reflection the more pressing. Simply put: to say that everything is permitted is to say, at least, that there is no one -- better, no One -- around to forbid or prohibit anything. It is not to say that we cannot make distinctions, that all acts are equally admirable, or honorable, or desirable. If we take our ethical bearings by what is permitted and what is forbidden, we may pay little attention to what is noble. Likewise, even if everything is permitted, that does not mean that all answers to the question, "What should I do," are equally good. Instead, it makes the question more pressing, more difficult, and more interesting. As I attempt to decide what I am to do, how I am to live my life, it makes little difference whether "everything is permitted" or not. If some ways of living were prohibited, I would still have to decide which of the remaining ways to adopt as my own; if no ways are prohibited, the question becomes the more pressing -- even if all ways are somehow open, I must still decide which I am to follow. Differently stated: just as acceptance of a universal moral code -- denial that "everything is permitted" -- does not entail decent or admirable behavior, neither does the denial of such codes entail indecent of despicable behavior. We have all, I suspect, encountered moral absolutists who, while adhering strictly to their accepted laws, allow themselves extraordinary latitude with respect to acts not specifically covered by the codes. Appropriately, Nietzsche insists explicitly that just as the identification of prohibitions does not guarantee moral behavior, the denial of prohibitions does not preclude it: I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them. -- I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but that there is any true reason so to feel. It goes without saying that I do not deny -- unless I am a fool -- that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged -- but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. (D:103)

This lecture argues that capitalism contains and absorbs its own critics.

Professor of Public Policy, Pepperdine University

sustaining your own critics is unique to capitalism. There is no other economic order that does this. All other economic orders have to be overthrown either by military rebellion or by internal collapse because they do not accommodate them-selves to critics.

This article explains that facing death rather than avoiding the topic reduces fear of death.

Clinical psychologist

What can you do to become less afraid of death? [...] 1. Help the next generation [...] 2. Don’t avoid the topic [...] [A]voidance can make those things loom even larger in our minds. [...] [S]tudy with funeral directors found that those who had directed more funerals feared death less.

This science report describes primatologist Frans de Waal's case that morality grew out of evolved behavioral rules visible in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

Science reporter, The New York Times

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Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days. Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them. The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress. Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes. Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped. Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies. Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject. He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality. Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates. Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands. Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies. [Continues] “Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are,” Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book “Good Natured.” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal’s view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in “Primates and Philosophers,” with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.”

This article argues that an affirmative reading of security discourse, rather than rejecting the concept, can better challenge the established discourse.

Professor of International Relations, University of Copenhagen

The language game of security is, in other words, a jus necessitatis for threatened elites, and this it must remain. Such an affirmative reading, not at all aimed at rejecting the concept, may be a more serious challenge to the established discourse than a critical one, for it recognizes that a conservative approach to security is an intrinsic element.

This article on security studies argues that minimizing security requires an affirmative reading of the concept, since the language of security serves threatened elites and a critical rejection would miss this.

Professor of International Relations, University of Copenhagen

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An agenda of minimizing security in this sense cannot be based on a classical critical approach to security, whereby the concept is critiqued and then thrown away or redefined according to the wishes of the analyst. The essential operation can only be touched by faithfully working with the classical meaning of the concept and what is already inherent in it. The language game of security is, in other words, a jus necessitatis for threatened elites, and this it must remain. Such an affirmative reading, not at all aimed at rejecting the concept, may be a more serious challenge to the established discourse than a critical one, for it recognizes that a conservative approach to security is an intrinsic element in the logic of both our national and international political organizing principles.

This article on security studies argues that responsibility may occasionally require securitization to block the worst outcomes and preempt local securitizations that could lead to escalation and violence.

Professor of International Relations, University of Copenhagen

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Should developments be securitized (and if so, in what terms)? Often, our reply will be to aim for de-securitization and then politics meet meta-politics; but occasionally the underlying pessimism regarding the prospects for orderliness and compatibility among human aspirations will point to scenarios sufficiently worrisome that responsibility will entail securitization in order to block the worst. As a security/securitization analyst, this means accepting the task of trying to manage and avoid spirals and accelerating security concerns, to try to assist in shaping the continent in a way that creates the least insecurity and violence - even if this occasionally means invoking/producing 'structures' or even using the dubious instrument of securitization. In the case of the current European configuration, the above analysis suggests the use of securitization at the level of European scenarios with the aim of preempting and avoiding numerous instances of local securitization that could lead to security dilemmas and escalations, violence and mutual vilification.

Waterlow examines how humor helped Soviet citizens cope with life under Stalin.

Historian of the Soviet Union (Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford); author of It's Only a Joke, Comrade!

This book on international relations theory argues that ontology matters more than epistemology for international relations, and that even postmodernists implicitly accept commonsense realism, which makes denying scientific realism harder.

Professor of International Security and Political Science, The Ohio State University

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Having been a classmate of hers in graduate school I am not surprised that Roxanne Doty believes her cats exist, and I am sure that upon meeting them most other postpositivists in IR would agree with her. To my knowledge not even the most hardened postmodernists have explicitly denied that the objects of everyday experience exist.9 Given this agreement on at least a ‘commonsense realism’,10 however, it is then instructive to consider how Doty knows her cats exist. I can only speculate, but my guess is that she knows it because she has seen them with her own eyes, and because believing that her cats are real has enabled her to deal more successfully with them.

If so, note that this reasoning reproduces, in a lay science context, exactly what a positivist would say about professional science: she has used empirical observations and instrumental success to test the correspondence, the truth, of her theory of cats against the world. To be sure, things get more complicated when moving to things of greater interest to IR scholars like states, which are neither directly observable (thwarting commonsense realism) nor completely separable from observing subjects (unlike cats, states depend on actors’ beliefs for their existence). Having conceded commonsense realism, however, it becomes harder to deny scientific realism. It can be done—that is the empiricist version of positivism—but in the book I develop a lengthy argument against empiricism, which Doty does not challenge. That leaves the unique features of social kinds as the last line of defence for a radical denial of positivism in IR. Perhaps there positivism finally collapses, though I argue to the contrary, but Doty has not supplied an argument to that effect either.

Raising the question of the ontological status of cats is useful because it calls attention to the fact that postmodern epistemology is not nearly as radical in practice as it sounds in theory. I don’t want to tar postmodernists with the brush of ridiculous views: I want to know why they hold such conventional ones. Thus, in her own empirical work on representations of subordinate peoples in imperial discourses, Doty proceeds more or less as any positivist would—amassing data and developing the best narrative she can to make sense of them.11 The same could be said about the empirical work of other IR scholars who are identified with postmodernism, like David Campbell or Cynthia Weber. Yet, if in practice postmodernists do not deny the existence, and even knowability, of a world outside of discourse, then what exactly are they saying? That all observation is theory-laden? That theories cannot be tested directly against the world but only against other theories? That as a result knowledge can never have perfectly secure foundations? These are all positions held by sophisticated positivists today. The straw man here in fact tends to be naive versions of positivism, which even if still believed by some are hardly a challenging target for post-positivist ire. Be that as it may, Doty has made an important move in explicitly embracing what has previously been only an implicit commonsense realism; now going a step further and addressing why she and other postmodernists are just like the rest of us in this respect might show that there is less at stake in the positivism wars than is often thought.

Professor of International Relations, The Ohio State University

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In the book I argue that, compared to ontology-talk, the value of epistemology talk for a discipline like IR is considerably less than something as imposing as the third ‘Great Debate’ might suggest. What matters more is what there is, not how we can know it, since we clearly do know things, and the ‘how’ of this knowledge will necessarily vary with the many different kinds of questions we ask in our field, and the varied tools at our disposal for answering them.

This article on the philosophy of mind analyzes problems of overdetermination, counterfactuals, and mental causation in the philosophy of mind.

Associate Professor, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology

This article on critical security studies criticizes the state-centrism of Wæver's speech act theory and argues that critical theorists must offer realizable utopias anchored in present possibilities.

Lecturer in International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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Second, descriptions—indeed, prescriptions—of a more emancipated order must focus on realizable utopias. Critical theorists must not lose sight of the fact that the coherence of their project is dependent on their utilization of the critical potential of immanence. If they succumb to the temptation of suggesting a blueprint for an emancipated order that is unrelated to the possibilities inherent in the present—a tendency that Marx and Engels argued was characteristic of "utopian socialists' such as Robert Owen (Marx and Engels 1948: 44-46)—then critical theorists have no way of justifying their arguments epistemologically. After all, to justify a utopia that is not already present in some form within the prevailing order requires the existence of an Archimedean point according to whose standards this utopia might be envisioned—a possibility rejected by critical theorists. Thus immanent critique (understood in broad terms) remains a vital part of the metatheoretical armory of critical theory. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that a vision of an emancipated order that is not based on immanent potential will be politically efficacious. Unless anchored in a realistic assessment of actually existing possibilities, emancipatory ideas are hardly likely to convince their target audience (whoever they might be) that progressive change is not only desirable but also plausible and achievable, and therefore worth the effort or risk of trying to secure. Thus, for both epistemological and purely instrumental reasons, concrete utopias must be based on practices that have some basis in preexisting behavior.

Lecturer in International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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What of those problems that are a threat to survival? Should groups abandon the mobilization potential that is undoubtedly generated by using the term "security"? One presumes not, but then are existential threats to security simply to be abandoned to traditional, zero-sum, militarized forms of thought and action? These questions highlight two significant weaknesses in Wæver's original formulation of the speech act approach: (1) its state-centrism and (2) the apparent unwillingess to question the content or meaning of security. State-centrism is the point at issue in the next section. Suffice it to say here that in his initial formulation of the speech act theory of security. Waver attempted to yoke his insights concerning securitization to a thoroughgoing state-centrism (Waver 1994. 1995). As we have seen, he was interested only in how states securitized issues in order to justify extraordinary measures by states: Waver viewed the grammar of security as inherently statist. In doing so he actually undermined much of the usefulness of the speech act approach. Its (potential) great strength is that it encourages analysts to interrogate the politics of how particular threats are securitized in order to mobilize and legitimate particular responses to them. States, or even state elites, are not the only actors who use the grammar of security in this way. All kinds of social groups, at both sub- and supra-state levels, attempt to securitize many different types of issues, often with far-reaching sociocultural, political, and economic implications. Consider, for example, how the peace movement of the 1980s identified nuclearism as a threat to security (e.g., Falk and Lifton 1982; E. Thompson 1982b) and generated massive public support for its cause despite bitter opposition from governments.

In this Supreme Court decision, the Court reversed Smith Act convictions of Communist Party leaders, distinguishing advocacy of abstract doctrine from incitement to action.

Supreme Court of the United States

This article on international security examines how Foucault's biopolitics can be used to confront the political challenge of human extinction.

Political theorist; scholar of nuclear politics and biopolitics

This essay on systems theory argues that systems depend on unwritten rules, so true subversion can lie in small revisions or literal readings rather than radical rejection, and that the system is simultaneously more resistant and more vulnerable than it appears.

Professor of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana

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Finally, the point about inherent transgression is not the every opposition every attempt at subversion is automatically "co-opted". On the contrary, the very fear of being co-opted that makes us search for more and more radical, "pure" attitudes is the supreme strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that true subversion is not always where it seems to be. Sometimes a small distance is much more explosive for the system than an ineffective radical rejection. In religion, a small heresy can be more threatening than an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hard-line Stalinist, a Trotskyite is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the Central Committee is worth more than a thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for aiming only at improving the system, making it more efficient- he nonetheless set in motion its disintegration. So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freud's claim from The Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral than he knows- the System is not only infinitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may appear (it can co-opt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision, etc. , can have large unforeseen catastrophic consequences). Or, to put it in another way: the paradoxical role of the unwritten superego injunction is that, with regard to the explicit, public Law, it is simultaneously transgressive (superego suspends, violates, the explicit social rules) and more coercive (superego consists of additional rules that restrain the field of choice by way of prohibiting the possibilities allowed for, guaranteed even, by the public Law). From my personal history, I recall the moment of the referendum of the independence of Slovenia as the exemplary case of such a forced choice: the whole point, of course, was to have a truly free choice- but nonetheless, in the pro-independence euphoria, every argumentation for remaining within Yugoslavia was immediately denounced as treacherous and disloyal. This example is especially suitable since Slovenes were deciding about a matter that was literally "transgressive" (to break from Yugoslavia with its constitutional order), which is why the Belgrade authorities denounced Slovene's referendum as unconstitutional- one was thus ordered to transgress the Law. . . The obverse of the omnipotence of the unwritten is thus that, if one ignores them, they simply cease to exist, in contrast to the written law that exists (functions) whether one is aware of it or not- or, as the priest in Kafka's The Trial put it, law does not want anything from you, it only bothers you if you yourself acknowledge it and address yourself to it with a demand. . .

When, in the late eighteenth century, universal human rights were proclaimed, this universality, of course, concealed the fact that privilege white men of property; however, this limitation was not openly admitted, it was coded in apparently tautological supplementary qualifications like "all humans have rights, insofar as they truly are rational and free," which then implicitly excludes the mentally ill, "savages," criminals, children, women... So, if, in this situation, a poor black woman disregards this unwritten-implicit qualification and demands human rights also for herself, she just takes the letter of the discourse of rights "more literally than it was meant" (and thereby redefines its universality, inscribing it into a different hegemonic chain). "Fantasy" designates precisely this unwritten framework that tells us how are we to understand the letter of the Law. The lesson of this is that- sometimes, at least- the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy that sustains it. Is- at a certain level, at least- this not the outcome of the long conversation between Joseph K. and the priest that follows the priest's narrative on the Door of the Law in The Trial? - The uncanny effect of this conversation does not reside in the fact that the reader is at a loss insofar as he lacks the unwritten interpretive code or frame of reference that would enable him to discern the hidden Meaning, but, on the contrary, in that the priest's interpretation of the parable on the Door of the Law disregards all standard frames of unwritten rules and reads the text in an "absolutely literal" way. One could also approach this deadlock via Lacan's notion of the specifically symbolic mode of deception: ideology "cheats" precisely by letting us know that its propositions (say, on universal human rights) are not to be read a la letre, but against the background of a set of unwritten rules. Sometimes, at least, the most effective anti-ideological subversion of the official discourse of human rights consists in reading it in an excessively "literal" way, disregarding the set of underlying unwritten rules.

The need for unwritten rules thus bears witness to, confirms, this vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices that must never actually take place since they would disintegrate the system, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. One can see how unwritten rules are correlative to, the obverse of, the empty symbolic gesture and/or the forced choice: unwritten rules prevent the subject from effectively accepting what is offered in the empty gesture, from taking the choice literally and choosing the impossible, that the choice of which destroys the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, to take the most extreme example, it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more prohibited to enounce publicly this prohibition, i.e., to state that one is prohibited to criticize Stalin- the system needed to maintain the appearance that one is allowed to criticize Stalin, i.e., that the absence of this criticism (and the 99.99% of the votes at elections) simply demonstrates that Stalin is effectively the best and (almost) always right. In Hegelese, this appearance qua appearance was essential.

This dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the System also enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of "two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand simple equality, quasi-"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society", elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination....) - the only proper answer to this offer, of course, is "No, thanks! Better is the enemy of the Good! We do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("Why reach for the moon, when we can have the stars?") are wrong. It is homologous with the Native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition- no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation! A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the society's universal rights is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much more "radical" rejection of the predominant "social values" and the assertion of the superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically false", lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevation of women that makes them "too good" for the banality of men's rights.

This book on ideology and political theory argues that the Christian legacy is worth fighting for and explores its relevance to contemporary politics and ideology.

Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana

This essay on political activism argues that the threat today is pseudo-activity, and that localized acts and "resistance" often feed the machine of power rather than challenge it.

Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "do something"; academics participate in meaningless "debate," and so forth, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a "critical" participation, a dialogue, to silence - just to engage us in a "dialogue," to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The anxious exceptation that nothing will happen, that capitalism will go on indefinitely, the desperate demand to do something, to revolutionize capitalism, is a fake. The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, an "I cannot do otherwise," or it is worthless. In the terms of Bernard Williams's distinction between ought and must, an authentic revolution is by definition performed as a Must - it is not something we "ought to do," as an ideal for which we are striving, but something we cannot but do, since we cannot do otherwise. This is why today's Leftist worry that revolutions will not occur, that global capitalism will just go on indefinitely, is false insofar as it turns revolution into a moral obligation, into something we ought to do while we fight the inertia of the capitalist present. The deadlock of "resistance" brings us back to the topic of parallax: all is needed is a slight shift in our perspective, and all the activity of "resistance," of bombarding those in power with impossible "subversive" (ecological, feminist, antiracist, anti-globalist ...) demands, looks like an internal process of feeding the machine of power, providing the material to keep it in motion.

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This documentary on political theory analyzes how ideology operates through film and popular culture.

Philosopher; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

This essay on political theory argues that sexual questions are inherently political.

Philosopher; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

This op-ed on political commentary reflects on the 2024 shooting of Donald Trump and its political and ideological significance.

Philosopher; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

This interview on political theory discusses views on wisdom, conformism, and contemporary politics.

Philosopher; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

This reply argues that foreign-policy decision-makers form a theory-averse, problem-solving subculture far from academic debates.

Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decisionmakers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problemsolving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are.