Twenties Century Political Theory: A Reader

Stephen Eric Bronner (Ed.). (2006). NY: Routledge

[Conservative Disposition]
What Is Liberal Education? (1959, 103-108)
(Leo Strauss: an exile from Nazi who left great influence on American political theory)
Democracy, which originally meant a universal aristocracy, is degraded to mass culture, which is lack of intellectual and moral efforts, in modern society, Strauss postulates. Thus, he stresses that this debased situation calls for liberal education so that it can establish an aristocracy within democratic mass society by connecting great minds transcended through great books. In short, "liberal education is liberation from vulgarity," he states. [Michael Oaskeshott defines conservatism as emotional resistance to change and the propensity to the familiar rather than the unknown in his essay, On Being Conservative (77-89). Strauss, in this light, shows a strong anxiety of the mass culture and nostalgic pride as the noble. From his perspective, mass culture is vulgarity and something that should be avoided.]

The Adversary Culture and the New Class (1987, 109-116)
(Norman Podhoretz: editor of Commentary, a leading conservative magazine)
In the sixties, a massive number of intellectuals formed the adversary culture and a "New Class" whose capital is education and technical expertise to the extent that they were regarded as the agents of revolution, in particular, from the perspective of neo-Marxists. Their demand of fair share of political power combined with the Black power constituted New Politics in the early 70s. As counterpart of this movement, neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism, which may be a proper label, surfaced up to advocate middle-class values and capitalism. These adversaries of the adversary culture, which ripened in the mid 70s, culminated with the election of Ragan in 1980. [This seemingly objective historical narrative is based on a strong conservative perspective in that adversary intellectual movements were still regarded as a contingent dissident event and social justice is completely ignored in the progress of the society. He wecomes back the middle-class values and counter-revolutionary movements.]

[Communitarianism and Culture]
The Search for the Great Community
(The Collected Worlds of John Dewey: Later Works, Volume 2:1925-27; Southern Illinois University Press, 1984)
Identifying democracy with the idea of the community life itself, Dewey urges people to purposefully participate in communal life with anticipation of its consequence. He embroiders some components of the community life as follows: "Interactions, transactions, occur de facto and the results of interdependence follow. But participation in activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand communication as a prerequisite."

The Public and the Private Realm
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958)
Arendt argues that pluralism, where multiple realms have distinctive functions and purposes and every human activity has its proper location in the world, has been dissolved in the modern age to the extent that the private and public realms are submerged in the sphere of the social and wealth became a public concern beyond manageable private ownership. From this perspective, she writes, "the greatest threat here, however, is not the abolition of private ownership of wealth but the abolition of private property in the sende of a tangible, worldly place of one's own." For her, the only thing that individuals own privately is his possession of a body, which Marx called "labor-power." [From the labor class perspective, the deprivation is true, but it is hardly arguable that gigantic wealth has reached beyond private ownership because wealth is accumulated in certain group of people and possessed privately, not as a public commodity.] Arendt also stresses that the destruction of private realm, where labor, bodily functions, were hidden from the public realm, caused the laborers to be segregated from the community like criminals under constant surveillance in the modern age, which is characterized as "socialization of man" by Marx. [There are certain notions parallel with Marxism in her political philosophy, but there is no single word of class in her text, and in addition, her stress on private ownership seems very vague in that what she emphasizes that should be owned privately.]

[Critical Theory]
The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research
(Max Horkheimer. in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)
While delineating problem of contemporary social philosophy, Horkheimer reviews that whereas Kant sees individuals, spontaneous egos, as agents to derive culture, Hegel asserts that objective spirit [Geist] realizes culture and is developed by dominant spirit in each epoch. Individuals, according to Hegel, partake only in the totality, which mostly is determined by state, therefore, they can attain consciousness of their freedom only through speculative thinking, in other words, social philosophy. Horkheimer stresses that through such philosophy human beings experience "transfiguration" that makes individual existence more meaningful--"supra-personal sphere" in his term. In this regard, Horkheimer denunciates Heidegger's emphasis on the interior of indivudual beings and human existence that discard social philosophy. Horkheimer's stree on social philosophy is summarized as interdisciplinary philosophical research cooperation toward the whole on the basis of empirical materials. He writes, "the universal and the particular, the theoretical conceptualization and individual existence, permeate each other."

State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations
(Frederick Pollock, in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, Bronner. S, & Kellner, D (Eds.). NY: Routledge, 1989)

The Culture Industry Reconsidered
(Theodor W. Adorno, Translated by Anson F. Rabinbach, in New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975: pp. 12-19)
By industry Adorno means the standardization of things and the rationalization of distribution techniques. The culture industry that intentionally concentrates high and low arts, he states, makes consumers "an appendage of the machinery" through suppressing consciousness and forcing conformity. Once produced as commodoties, cultural entities are no longer commodities in his definition, because the interests the culture industry pursued are so ideologized to be free from the compulsion to sell. He further writes that the culture industry turns into public relations that manufactures "good will" and "a blissful life". To Adorno, the most destructive power of the culture industry is that it does not allow the masses to reflect its legitimation, thus stupefies the masses through "fleeting gratification" and oblige blind consensus to authority.

Liberation From the Affluent Society
(Herbert Marcuse, originally published as "Conclusion" in Counter-Revolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972)
His particular interest lays in liberation from the affluent, advanced industrial society, which is characterized for development and satisfaction of material and cultural needs. Regarding the educational system as "political," he urges to generate the "instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality and without stupidity," as exemplified in Hippies in the U.S., who refuse efficient and insane reasonableness. To him, education is also "therapy" in the sense of liberating man from a society that forces them to be transformed into a brute.

[Black Heritage]
Letter from Birmingham Jail (329-340)
(Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963, assassinated in 1968.)
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
"One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
"South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality."
"Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability."

The Ballot or the Bullet
(Malcolm X, Malcom X Speaks, George Breitman (Ed.). Pathfinder Press, 1989; 1925-1965, a founder of Black Nationalism)
He urges Black to expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human rights and take it to the UN.

Nihilism in Black America (349-355)
(Conel West, Race Matters, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)
He asserts that the fundamental threat in Black America is nihilism, which signifies "the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness and (most important) lovelessness. In other words, the Black community is sunken in psychological and existential depression with battered identity. This confronting historical reality has become much stronger and more rampant largely because of corporate market institutions, which targets bodily pleasure and endless consumption. He writes: "The eclipse of hope and collapse of meaning in much of black America is linked to the structural dynamics of corporate market institutions that affect all Americans. Under these circumstances black existential angst (anguish) derives from the lived exxperience of ontologial wounds and emotional scars inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and images oermeating U.S. society and culture." He stresses on a love ethic, initiated locally, at the center of a politics of conversion.

[Postmodern Perspectives]
The Postmodern Condition (399-400)
(Jean-François Lyotard. 1984. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis)
In describing the condition of knowledge in modern society as postmodern, Lyotard defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" in the extreme simplification. Born as a product of progress in sciences, the incredulity threatens metanarrative (grand narrative) philosophical foundation that legitimize knowledge, he argues. He sees that the society will be governed by a pragmatics of language particles, which are denotative, prescriptive and descriptive, while grandiosity of hero, dangers, voyages and goals are being lost. While looking for legitamacy of modern society, he casts doubt on Habermas' notion of consensus obtained through discussion and writes, "Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And inventions is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy."


[Others]
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
(Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Joshua Cohen(Ed.). Boston: Beacon, 1996)
Refuting Richard Rorty's call for patriotism and national identity (NYTimes 13 Feb 1994), Nussbaum admonishes its closeness to jingoism--bellicose chauvinism--and advocates cosmopolitan education based on the Stoics' concept of world citizen (kosmou politês), which stresses the vivid illustration of the difference in education. Nussbaum, thus, proposes education should emphasize world citizenship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, even if the realization is not so certain in every level. She is not blind to the idealistic face of this education by expressing: "Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business...[because] cosmopolitanism offers only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belongs." She urges one to get out of the cocoon of familiarity and comfort.

Democracy and Dictatorship (1910's, 177-181)
(Rosa Luxemburg)
"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who things differently."
Against Lenin-Trotsky's dogmatic and systematic socialism movement, Luxemburg advocates adaptation in the course of realizing socialism in the mists of future. In this process, democracy becomes an important political structure. Contesting their limited democracy--dictatorship of a few, Luxemburg proposes dictatorship of the class or the mass, where the mass can participate in the most active and unlimited way, forming public opinion and public life, and criticizes the constrainted democracy of soviets by writing: "with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life inthe soviets must also become more and more crippled."

Introduction to The Second Sex (1952, 359-368)
(Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley.)
She states that the division of the sexes is a biological, not historical, fact. Throughout the history, men have been subject while women remained as Others. With regard to the inequality, Simone de Beauvoir has written: "The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspiration of every subject (ego)--who always regards the self as the essential--and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. The ultimate goal she wants to achieve is individual liberty--not happiness--which constitutes the base of her arguments.