#liberal thought

[dynamicity-keysmash]

Being Jewish has really saved me from unhealthy radicalization because most extremist factions in western politics have been entirely unsubtle about there being no place for me in the world remade by their eventual revolution

[haggishlyhagging]

Sexual Politics is out of print. The Dialectic of Sex is out of print. What women have to do is come to terms with the fact that we live in a society that simply censors better than state censorship. People have got to come to terms with the power of the publishing industry and the media in controlling thought and expression. They have to understand that it is an issue of power and money and people have to be less passive in relation to books. People have to take their money which they don't have much of and they have to buy books by feminist writers. They have to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how the book industry works. A hard-cover book like Letters from a War Zone was virtually published dead. If it's still in bookstores in two months it will be a miracle. They have to understand that everything that they hear all the time about how everything can be published in this country is a lie and that part of the social function of the publishing industry is to buy up the rights to and then obliterate certain books so that nobody can get them. They have to stop thinking that they live in the liberal dreamworld of equality where fairness has already been achieved. It hasn't been achieved. You can be equal in your heart but it doesn't make you equal in the world. I think that the refusal to understand what happens to books by women goes along with this liberal refusal to acknowledge that power is a reality and we're not the ones who have it. What I'm saying is that women have got to start facing reality. You cannot build any kind of movement for change on wishful thinking. The wishful thinking is that we already have what it is we want and what it is we need. We don't have it. Women who want to write and communicate, which in a big country is hard to do—it's getting harder for them, not easier. There isn't more access, there is less access. People have got to take the economics of the publishing industry seriously and understand that very few writers will survive who do not write according to the demands of the marketplace, by which I mean essentially the demands of turning out books that you can consume as passively as a television show. That's sort of the standard.

-Andrea Dworkin, “Dworkin on Dworkin” in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed

[oupacademic]

This April, the OUP Philosophy team honors John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as their Philosopher of the Month. Among the most important philosophers, economists, and intellectual figures of the nineteenth century, today Mill is considered a founding father of liberal thought. A prolific author, Mill’s collected works encompass thirty-three volumes ranging in subject from philosophy to social issues and beyond.

For more on our Philosopher of the Month, follow @OUPPhilosophy and the hashtag #philosopherotm on Twitter.

John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life Edited by Ben Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, and David Weinstein.

The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism by Joseph Persky.

Mill’s Progressive Principles by David O. Brink.

“John Stuart Mill’s Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy” by Dale E. Miller. From Oxford Handbooks Online.

“Public Health and Liberty: Beyond the Millian Paradigm” by Bruce Jennings. From Public Health Ethics.

“On Being Bored out of Your Mind” by Elijah Millgram. From Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

“J. S. Mill” by Henry R. West. From Oxford Handbooks Online.

“Mill's Rule Utilitarianism in Context” by Rex Martin. From Oxford Scholarship Online.

“Marx and Mill” by Joseph Persky. From Oxford Scholarship Online.

“The early 19th century: reforming women” by Margaret Walters. From Very Short Introductions.

“A free market in ideas?” by Nigel Warburton. From Very Short Introductions.

“Public Health and Liberty: Beyond the Millian Paradigm” by Bruce Jennings. From Public Health Ethics.

“On Being Bored out of Your Mind” by Elijah Millgram. From Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

[haggishlyhagging]

To achieve a single standard of human freedom and one absolute standard of human dignity, the sex-class system has to be dismembered. The reason is pragmatic, not philosophical: nothing less will work. However much everyone wants to do less, less will not free women. Liberal men and women ask, Why can't we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past injustices, wouldn't that subvert the sex-class system, change it from the inside out? The answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is its creature; to be "just human beings" in it, women have to hide what happens to them as women because they are women—happenings like forced sex and forced reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system operates. The liberation of women requires facing the real condition of women in order to change it. "We're all just people" is a stance that prohibits recognition of the systematic cruelties visited on women because of sex oppression.

-Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women

[progressivenation-blog]

Are Liberals Helping Trump? Are Liberals helping Trump? Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump.

[automaticmoons]

My analysis is also situated within the logics and practices of neoliberalism. This is a much-contested, much-discussed (and some might say over-used) term: nevertheless, it refers to a socio-economic-political framework which, although not the root of all contemporary evils, is an important shaping structure. This ‘market-political’ rationality (Brown, 2006: 291) has cascaded economic principles into the social realm as part of the assumption that societies function best with a minimum of state intervention (Harvey, 2005). Political and social problems are converted into market terms, becoming individual issues with consumption-based solutions (Brown, 2006: 704). As Brown contends, this privatisation and commodification of social life has structured subjectivities (2006: 693). The rationalities of neoliberalism atomise, interiorise and neutralise: the neoliberal self is an individualised one (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), constructed around the principles of agency and self-governance. Neoliberal reflexive projects of the self are characterised by introspection and narratives of self-actualisation (Giddens, 1991), often with economic metaphors (see for example Johnson, 2014; Rousmaniere, 2015). As part of this, experience and emotion have accrued value as forms of intelligence which can serve life and career goals for those in advantaged social positions (Hochschild, 1983; Ahmed, 2012 [2004]). Within this framework the personal has simultaneously grown and shrunk as difference has flattened out into ‘diversity’ alongside a ‘tabloidisation’ (Glynn, 2000) and ‘testimonialism’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001) in which, perhaps in place of politics, popular culture and debate have been saturated with feeling. The phrase ‘disaster porn’ has been coined to describe the contemporary fascination with the troubles of others, which provides a repository for guilt or schadenfreude (Molotch, 2014). In this narcissistic and therapeutic neoliberal moment, as Ahmed (2012 [2004]) argues, personal pain can be depoliticised, or co-opted as it accumulates and stagnates in what Brown (1995) calls ‘wounded identities’ which both legitimate and depend upon state power. For example, Carolyn Pedwell (2014) has highlighted how personal tragedies can be appropriated and mobilised by politicians and privileged ‘experts’, who use empathy as a technology of access to disadvantaged lives. In a marketplace of experience, the privileged inevitably have more platforms from which to narrate (see also Ahmed (2012 [2004]: 33), and the marginalised are often spoken for within agendas which are not their own. I will show in this paper that these characteristics of the neoliberal context are also evident within feminist politics.

Whose personal is more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics - Alison Phipp, in Feminist Theory 0(0) 1–19

NB: the author says: “This paper does not intend to play into what Ahmed identifies as contemporary dismissals of feminism as being primarily a politics of emotion (based on the already pathologised and assumed emotionality of femininity), which juxtapose this against mainstream politics presumed to be grounded in reason (2012 [2004]:170). Nor do I wish to rehearse the tendency she identifies in some strands of feminist thought and politics to see the emotional and experiential as a problem (Ahmed, 2012 [2004]: 171). However [...], I wish to highlight and problematise some ways in which experience has become commodified in the contemporary political field. I end with a plea to resist this commodification and the selective empathies it generates, while situating our first-person politics through structural analysis.“

[automaticmoons]

« Choice feminism » advocates for the idea that feminism is an individual thing to each woman, but we cannot build a political movement based on the idea that it is what it is for every individual person. It renders feminism meaningless. It is not possible to bring down a system of oppression through so called personal empowerment. It is internalized neo-liberalism to let individualism replace what was once a collective struggle. And this is where “choice feminism” really lies, a lack of analysis of structural inequality, of systems of oppression and the division of women as a class. It carries on a liberal idea of freedom, that you could easily twist into thatcherism « There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. »  (Margaret Thatcher). By supporting « choice feminism » we are making it easier for liberals to sell us anything, from make up to pornography, as empowering and thus as feminist. We are making it harder for us to challenge any oppressive industry or practice, since some women choose to take part in these practices or industries. So what do we do with this? We start by acknowledging that there can be misogyny in our choices, even if these choices make us feel better. By choosing to wear make up, I’m supporting a concept of femininity that has been oppressing women for centuries, but I also am creating a demand benefiting an industry making profit from the insecurities of women, and I need to own that.

How patriarchal compliance has been turned into feminist activism

Nice article, though (at the end of the text) I’m not sure “the personal is political” is actually in this context a more useful statement than “the political is personal”, it often ends up glorifying individual choices as well, but the general idea is worth remembering/thinking about.

[rightlyspeaking-blog]

God and Conservatism

A friend of mine once told me something along the lines of “I am a conservative but I find it hard to believe in God.” For whatever reason, to him the idea of a creator is so illogical that he can accept the conservative belief but not the belief in God. Indeed, this is what many people say: they accept only part of the bread, only the bits and pieces that fit their fancies. Surely that can be the case but the position is much more hard to defend at even the fundamental level were it not for the idea of God and man’s disposition in accordance to HIm.

Firstly, the idea that rights come from man and not from government holds a creator necessary for the general reckoning. Our rights are not man made; they have been prescribed to us and therefore cannot be taken away, no matter what legislation is passed, no matter how many votes are gathered.Your rights and mine—the rights to life, liberty, property, and many, many more—do not need state sanction. Our Constitution’s 9th amendment hit it right on the head: unenumerated rights still exist. Just because a right was not mentioned in legal documents does not mean it ceases to exist. Again this goes back to the idea of rights apart form government.

This idea is foreign to liberals, whether they know it or not. That is why the Left appeal so strongly for new legislation to be passed. The outcry of liberals all over is equality, equality, equality. Indeed nothing but equality for everyone. All the ails of society are caused by the lack of rights given to minorities in order to enable themselves to move in economic or social status. If rights were given by God and not by the government, then this is not possible: reasonable people know that if God were the source, rights must be ubiquitous amongst everyone. This idea, then, of giving minorities special privileges—special rights, to be exact—is only possible if the government was the source of rights. That is one fundamental reason for affirmative action, for abortion, for gay marriage. Whatever liberal thought there is, its roots can be traced to this idea.

But isn’t that strange? The very men that say there is great inequality in our society caused by government are the very ones that trust government to relieve these ails. They seem to have this contradictory belief that certain men can relieve the troubles of society only if we were to give them power. It serves their logic no justice when in one argument they say the system—run by men—cause ever lasting misery to colored people while in the next argument they say this very system—still consisting of men—can solve these problems. The robber will fix his wrongdoings by himself, so to speak.

And therein lies the second liberal idea: that man is fixable. He is not completely depraved, the extent of his selfishness curable through evolutionary impulses. In other words, man is not completely a fallen being. Liberal thought holds the gravity of man’s selfishness as curable, something only biology holds over them. Because of this, it is therefore something they can overcome as their anthropoid ancestors—you see?—have overcome hindrances caused by walking with hands or the darkness, metaphorical and physical, caused by the lack of fire.

This is only possible if man were a mere biological creature with no holy lineage: mere man of mortal guise with no sanctified ancestry whatsoever.

Conservatives believe small government is the only answer to this problem; since men can’t be changed completely and will always work for their own self interest, the only way to prevent men in power to became tyrannous is to limit whatever power they have. Jobs of governments is to promote law and order within the state and anything that goes beyond that is an overextension of its power and can and will be abused. Who then does the responsibility of aiding those in need belong to? If things such as welfare and Medicare or Medicaid do not exist in the government’s budget, who has to carry that weight?

It is ours to carry. We have a moral responsibility to aid our neighbors, our friends, our families, which is completely different from saying that the responsibility should come from somewhere in Washington with men who have, for years, shown their waste and inefficiency with tax payers’ money. How does God come into the equation? It is true that a majority of charities here in the United States are done by religious groups. In fact, more often than not, the charities found all over the United States, local and international, are religiously run. And that is because eternal damnation is a great push for men to do good. This is not to say that atheism causes men to be self centered. The point is the facts show that charitable activities for everyone come from religious men, namely Christians.

And that is exactly the point: this free society cannot exist without the idea of a God. Whether we like it or not, the idea of a creator is the very basis of our country and has made this country most free and charitable—free because its people know their rights cannot be usurped, no matter what, and prosperous because a majority of people believe altruistic acts as something they must do.

Perhaps what needs to be understood, lest I be misunderstood, is that belief in God is not necessary for conservatism, but rather, it would be mighty hard to be a conservative and an atheist and believe in a free nation if one did not believe in God. God is one aspect of conservatism, but is not the only aspect. It would be much harder without it though, and if not harder, then a contradiction. And how can one live with a contradiction?