15 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.

      Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

  2. Apr 2023
    1. A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

      Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?


      Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".

      Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.

  3. Nov 2021
    1. But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public.
  4. Mar 2021
  5. Feb 2021
  6. Oct 2020
    1. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

      What if, in fact, we've only just found a local maximum? What if in the changing landscape there are other places we could potentially get to competitively that supply greater maxima? And possibly worse, what if we need to lose value to get from here to unlock even more value there?

  7. Feb 2019
    1. “Constitutional patriotism”—as understood by those who originally put forward the idea and as understood in this essay—designates the idea that political attachment ought to center on the norms, the values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution. Put differently, political allegiance is owed primarily neither to a national culture, as proponents of liberal nationalism have claimed, nor to “the worldwide community of human beings,” as, for instance, Martha Nussbaum’s conception of cosmopolitanism has it. Constitutional patriotism offers a vision distinct from both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, but also from republican patriotism as traditionally understood in, broadly speaking, the history of Euro-American political thought.” (Müller)

      KCD2M33B

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  8. Aug 2018
    1. Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure?

      Churchill famously said "...democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."

      Even within this quote it is implicit that there are many others. In some sense he's admitting that we might possibly be at a local maximum but we've just not explored the spaces beyond the adjacent possible.

    2. The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.

      Total exhaustion?

    1. But events in Europe unfolded more or less according to Fukuyama’s prediction, and, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. The Cold War really was over.

      Or ostensibly, until a strong man came to power in Russia and began its downturn into something else. It definitely doesn't seem to be a liberal democracy, so we're still fighting against it.

    2. There would be a “Common Marketization” of international relations and the world would achieve homeostasis.

      Famous last words, right?!

      These are the types of statements one must try very hard not to make unless there is 100% certainty.

      I find myself wondering how can liberal democracy and capitalism manage to fight and make the case the the small tribes (everywhere, including within the US) that it can, could and should be doing more for them.

    3. Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated.

      "Last" in the sense of a big, modern threat. We're still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.

  9. Aug 2016
    1.  As Neil Selwyn (2013) notes, the expansion of technology (and the rise of EdTech) coincides with a growth in libertarian ideals and neoliberal governmental policies, a one-two punch of individual exceptionalism and belief in the power of the outsider.
  10. Jun 2016
    1. or group to seclude themselves

      Group privacy is much more infrequently discussed than individual privacy. At least in Euro-American contexts. Quite likely a very important bias.

  11. Apr 2016
    1. true liberal democracy

      A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.