What explains Trump’s specific choices? For instance, why impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico instead of, say, Japan? Why is USAID such a prominent target?
Trump is interested in the discourse, the chatter. All his choices are about how he’ll look on Fox News and social media and how he’ll affect those conversations. Choosing Canada as a target for tariffs “is a symbol of strength and Trump’s apparent ability to ignore and contradict mainstream opinion.” Besides, Cowen says, Americans know and have opinions about Canada–negative opinions on the hard right. If Trump had chosen a less familiar country, people “would not know how to debate” his decision to pick a fight with it.
The chatter is highly heterogeneous and segmented. Right now, CBS News’ homepage leads with Trump’s threat to annex Gaza, but a “massive asteroid” gets about as much attention, and CBS offers a prominent story about an orphaned wolf pup who bonded with a shelter dog. Fox News blares a headline about the “panicked” Iranian regime facing off with Trump. Fox buries the Gaza story.The US edition of The Guardian leads with: “Trump’s declaration US will ‘take over’ Gaza Strip sparks global condemnation.” ‘
In short, Trump is driving several distinct conversations in different ways. MAGA is delighted, progressives are furious and flummoxed, and many Americans are oblivious. All of that is probably fine with Trump.
I would add five more explanations of Trump’s choices:
He is pretty canny about his own interests. Big tariffs would damage the economy. Massive deportations would raise prices. So Trump threatens tariffs and then withdraws them and deports people at the same rate as Obama but with much more fanfare. He doesn’t always manage the fallout; for instance, his new Chinese tariffs could raise prices. But it is notable that they are set at 10% (so that any effects will be difficult to assess), not at 60% or higher, as he had threatened. If something would hurt Trump, he is unlikely to do it.
He picks on the most vulnerable: government employees and contractors, people without US citizenship, trans people, and recipients of US aid. These choices are on-brand for him. They are also safer than tangling with anyone who has more clout.
He doesn’t care about outcomes. A threat to impose tariffs grabs headlines. It doesn’t matter if there is no actual tariff. If a federal judge rules against the administration, the policy might be halted, but Trump still gets the fight that he wanted in the first place.
Breaking norms and even laws is useful, because it forces Republicans to support Trump against their own expressed principles–thus increasing their dependence on him–and provokes people like me to defend the norms, which were never very popular to start with. It’s also possible that Trump will win some cases–or get away with ignoring court decisions–and then he’ll have even more power.
Trump provides cover for hundreds of committed right-wing ideologues who are busy making decisions about funding, personnel, and policy that don’t rise to the level of his attention or influence the chatter much. Those efforts will continue.
Applying these guidelines, I doubt very much that Trump would order an invasion of Gaza and begin a long, costly (as well as deeply immoral) imperialistic counter-insurgency war. Since his supporters don’t hold him accountable, he can drop his threats whenever he wants to. His performance yesterday dominated a news cycle, which was the primary goal. Refraining from invading Gaza might also help to legitimize Israeli land annexations.
I could see Trump sending US troops to Greenland to provoke legal and diplomatic challenges, monopolize attention, and demonstrate that he is unfettered by treaties and congressional oversight. The endgame would not be a permanent takeover of Greenland but more domestic power (or at least perceived power) for Trump.
Please hold the dates (June 19-21, 2025) and consider proposing one or more sessions for this conference by April 18. Be sure to register and take advantage of the “early bird” discounted rate, available until March 29.
Tisch College is launching an initiative on Generous Listening and Dialogue (GLADi), led by Jonathan Tirrell. As part of this effort, the special theme of Frontiers in 2025 is “Listening and Leading,” focused on how to characterize, navigate, and overcome challenges associated with division and polarization in our world. Join us for robust conversations (and constructive disagreements) about the role of and approaches to listening and dialogue (perhaps especially across difference) for a thriving democracy.?
This theme is not exclusive; we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star:” building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. As always, we are eager to continue past conversations, such as about violence and nonviolence, and religious pluralism and democracy. We welcome proposals in these areas, regardless of whether they relate to listening and dialogue.
Although we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we generally prefer proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats.
(Atlanta) This site was hacked this week, and someone loaded malware that caused Google to list the site as dangerous. Thanks to help from Wordfence (recommended), I believe that everything is OK now. Since the site was down, I didn’t post anything new after Tuesday. I expect to resume usual activity next week.
In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”
A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.
In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:
The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).
Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.
Many people are fleeing social media, and my friend James Stanescu is trying to bring back blogging in response. He has an excellent post summarizing some of the differences between the pragmatisms of William James and C.S. Peirce. (I’ll call them “James” and “Scu” here for clarity.) Scu is drawing especially on Cheryl Misak’s capsule history, which itself is worth a read for reinvigorating the study of folks like Chauncey Wright and C.I. Lewis.
Peirce and James fought over the proper definition of pragmatism, as well as the term itself, but the simplest shared sense of the project is that truth and meaning are tied to use and inquiry. But Peirce emphasized inquiry, and James use, and that has made all the difference:
Peirce: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.”
James: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”
I’m thoroughly with Peirce on this. But for Scu, ever the debater, this post is an occasion to also pick a fight with Peirceans on behalf of James:
Against Peirce’s metaphysical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer’s critique turns out to have some weight, James’ pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical.
My sense is that Peirce is not really a metaphysical deflationist like the logical positivists. For one thing he spins up a very complicated system of triadic relationships as categories or conceptual schema, and for another thing, he was some sort of pan-psychist. That said, he was at base a Monist (THE Monist) and so in some very, very specific sense he’s more a deflationist than, say, substance dualists. But not really like the logical positivists or scientistic materialists would be. Still, his monism is in stark contrast with the pluralism of William James.
To suck the nuance out of these debates, it helps to wonder: to what extent is pragmatism relativistic? I think neither James nor Peirce are truly relativists, and I find the Rortyan shrug as irritating as everyone else did. But Williams James was… an enthusiast. He sometimes let himself write and say things that smacked of relativism–more in line with his radical empiricism than his pragmatism, to be honest–and some of his adherents have taken this too far.
Scu was partly provoked into writing this up by Patricia Lockwood’s review essay on Simon Critchley’s mysticism book. It’s one of those wonderful takedowns that shows off the reviewer’s erudition at the expense of the author:
…as the inquiry wore on I began to experience a hysterical sympathy: there was such a rhythm of anxious restatement, so much of Critchley telling you what he was about to do and then not doing it, such endless throat-clearing and adjectival gooeyness and such a tendency for his mind to explode whenever he encountered a juxtaposition like ‘the ravishing far-near’.
It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised.
I loved the review, too, and so I guess she’s provoked us both. I’ve also spent more than a little time dabbling with mystic texts and traditions, and so I sometimes flirt with the academic study of the same–even though I can’t for the life of me find much value in it. There’s some kind of performative contradiction in studying such things.
Now, I think Scu’s post captures where I get off the bus with the Jamesean tradition–in both pragmatism and mystics. (While appreciating James’ psychology and his religious sociology all the more!) Ineffable spiritual traditions are fun to play around with, but the manifold claims of all the alternative practices that academics group together under that label can’t all be true! Most of them have to be false because they contradict each other, and I’m not impressed by efforts to embrace contradiction as some kind of deep logical wisdom. “Ah, yes, well after Gödel we must understand that contradiction exposes a deeper truth!” Sigh.
Here’s Scu again:
James’ system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James’ terms). The world is, as James puts it, “ultra-Gothic.”
The line I hate most here is “there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy,” such that–as he goes on to explain–aesthetic and scientific modes of determining truth are unable to correct each other but are instead equally true.
Whenever I sit with relativists, I find that two things seem to be true of their position:
They really want to preserve space for pluralism, and so their relativism is a usually a species of liberal toleration with some metaphysical baggage they’re not really willing to embrace. Sometimes they’re also motivated by fear of error: a wise caution to which they grant an unwise metaphysical status.
They don’t really care what this costs people for whom the principle of a fixed, shared reality is a hard–fought and oft-missed goal: victims of false confessions or lying witnesses, citizens of tyrannical regimes with flimsy propaganda, mentally-ill individuals trying to sort out their delusions and hallucinations from the truth, eager scientists seeking truth amidst fraud, etc.
I know it seems arrogant to say “actually, your heart is not being pierced by the nails from Christ’s cross, you’re just hallucinating real good,” but that’s my position! And in some sense Scu himself recognizes that this kind of relativism/pluralism of “no actually lots of contradictory things are true” runs into its own arrogance problems. His own work depends on the idea that the exclusion of alternative forms of experience leads to error and, in fact, to evil! For instance, there are true claims to be verified about animal cruelty that a thoroughgoing relativist would be tempted to ignore because so few people are really interested in them. But I maintain that genteel relativism is an attempt to one-up folks just trying to make sense of our shared world by saying that actually we don’t need to share it at all: everyone gets their own.
For the things that matter, like fascism or climate change, that’s not really true. It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence–and its joy!–is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a (Jamesean) pragmatist about criminal guilt or innocence, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the side, like whether a particular artwork is beautiful.
(Scu cites Kandinsky’s aesthetics here, right on cue: K: “It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad.” Which Scu glosses: “Kandinsky’s truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry.”) It strikes me that we built aesthetics precisely to get such truly relativistic judgments out of the way for science and ethics and ontology.
Now, I say that as someone who really loves pluralistic work. I also love fiction, even science-fiction and fantasy! I want to inhabit a political world where plural life-worlds and sources of meaning can flourish, where people are constantly inventing and imagining something other than the pure scientific truth.
I’m also more than happy to acknowledge that the technocratic liberal reality principle tends to its own abuses: in a world of deepfakes and misinformation, fact-checking can go too far. We can be overconfident and “correct” a true claim by reasserting an error, or a value as a fact. In that sense, I think that fallibilism is just as important as pluralism, and that fallibilism requires a reality principle to which we can return, reconsider, and correct ourselves or be corrected by others. A relativistic world is one with few reasons to change your mind!
That’s why I say that, practiced badly, Jamesean pagmatism tends towards a kind of solipsistic arrogance: if every relation with the world bears its own form of verification from which there is no hierarchy, corrective, or escape, then there’s no outside from which to hear criticism and reconsider, either. Deliberation, doubt, critical reflection, and reconsideration are all missing!
It’s worth noting, here, that Scu’s Jamesean pragmatism is in service of his radical/weird empiricism, and ultimately a challenge to anthropocentrism:
Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations.
Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours–weird truths from weird worlds.
And that idea, that animals have experiences that can act as a corrective to our epistemic and practical domination of them, strikes me as requiring fallibilism and ultimately undermining relativism. So I think what Scu says makes it clear that the terms of that pluralism can’t be metaphysical or ontological. I, too, want to enable as many compatible life-worlds as are mutually compatible! But there’s a ground truth out there that makes those shared horizons possible.
In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct:
Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.
In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill had not forecast such a future as explicitly as Eliot would do, but he used it as a thought-experiment to demonstrate that the point of life is to develop one’s own capacities, not to accomplish any practical ends. A life in which important matters are handled by other minds–or by machines–is a life devoid of value:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
The possibility that AI will render us extinct remains speculative, 150 years after Eliot posited it. But there is an urgent, present threat that AI tools will “guide” us along “some good path” and thereby block “the free development of individuality,” which “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”
I’m thinking about the differences among strategies, policies, and skills, mainly because the Tufts Civic Studies Major, which I direct, aims to teach all three. I assume that definitions of these concepts have been extensively discussed, but without consulting any literature, I’m inclined to categorize them as follows:
Skill: The ability to do something useful. A skill can be quite concrete (e.g., conducting an interview) or more abstract (leading a team). Developing a skill often involves imitation, practice, and perhaps a dose of theory. Typically, we attribute skills to individuals, although I suppose that a group can be skillful.
Policy: A choice that an institution makes that affects people and/or nature. Such a choice need not be conscious and deliberate. However, if something happens by necessity, I wouldn’t call it a policy. A policy is something that the institution could change by choosing otherwise. Therefore, policy-analysis is about identifying the choices available to institutions, predicting their consequences, and assessing which one is preferable.
Strategy: A planned sequence of actions by an individual or group that aims to accomplish some goal. A strategy that’s worthy of that name considers the opportunities, constraints, risks, and threats, including the possible reactions of other people and groups. A strategy can leave room for revision and improvisation, but it needs enough detail to inform action. Therefore, learning about strategy involves identifying possible courses of action and their likely impact and assessing which course is preferable.
These categories relate and overlap in many ways. Policy analysis and strategic planning are skills. Good strategy involves the application of available skills. (For instance, the first part of a strategy might be to deploy skilled people to recruit members.) A strategy can aim to affect policy. A policy can be part of a larger strategy. Institutions may enact and implement policies to develop skills. And so on.
Nevertheless, these concepts are sufficiently distinct that I hope that we offer each to our students.
I would also note that skills, strategies, and policies can be good or bad. The difference depends on their ethics and their outcomes–both their means and ends. Therefore, normative analysis and argumentation must complement any education about skills, policy, and strategy.
Soon after the November election, I predicted that grassroots resistance would rise in response to Donald Trump.
Some activity is underway. There was, for example, a march in Boston over the weekend. Dana Fisher offers valuable statistics about the march in Washington. Still, I perceive less activity than I had honestly expected by this point.
I think some reasons are psychological. Many people who oppose Trump are tired and discouraged. Eight years ago, many retained a faith in the basic democratic process because Trump had lost the popular vote and had lost all the age groups under 45. It was easy to envision that future elections would go better. The courts, big media platforms, and the press were are at least making noises about defending democratic institutions.
In 2025, Trump’s popular-vote majority, his gains among some younger groups and some people of color, and his reelection after the events of 2016-21 are demoralizing and may suggest that the American people are to blame for the situation. Even if this blame is fair, it discourages democratic solutions. Meanwhile, media moguls are bending the knee, and the Supreme Court has a pro-Trump majority. And perhaps some people who would otherwise resist a 78-year-old president in his second term are counting on time to do their work.
Such psychological challenges can be addressed. If morale is low, maybe it’s time for planning and recruitment. If a march or a public meeting would draw small numbers, maybe it’s time for one-to-one meetings. We can develop messages for various types of people that renew their energy in the face of discouragement and alienation.
But there is a deeper problem. Not enough people have roles and resources that allow them to address psychological barriers to participation.
Imagine an organization that draws enough money from its own members that it can afford to hire at least one part-time organizer, and it elects a leadership team of volunteers. Its organizer and its leaders can–right now–combat resignation and spur action in their specific context. I’m sure that some of this is happening.
On the other hand, let’s say there are many people in a given community who have expressed abhorrence for Trump and are willing to give time or money–but they have no relevant organization. Then, even if some of them discuss ways to energize people, it’s not likely that anyone will get working on it. This is the situation in most places.
There is a debate about the ideology and political objectives of the first Trump resistance, with some arguing that it provoked a backlash because it was too radical. (See Adam Gurri’s rebuttal to these views.) Without going into that debate, I would note that the ideology of a movement is only one variable–and it tends to change over time. Three other variables are its methods, structures, and composition. We need a large and diverse movement that is self-sustaining and autonomous (not dependent on grants or celebrities) and that allows its participants to discuss, debate, and develop while taking the actions that are appropriate for the moment.
We do have many elements of this movement, but we must expand and strengthen it greatly.
This large exhibition presents works from ancient Athens to contemporary America, including some famous and powerful objects. In this context, Shambroom dignifies democracy as the rule of regular people. (His photograph is also the favorite of Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney.)
Shambroom’s village councilors are middle-aged Americans in mostly casual clothes, including polo shirts for the two men. They all seem to be listening to the speaker at the right–three of them watching her face, one staring attentively into the distance.
The flags and seal behind them convey authority. These people represent the state, which ultimately wields the power of life and death. (Compare the empty juror chairs in Jim Dow’s eloquent photo, “Grady County Courthouse, Jury Box, Cairo, Georgia, 1976,” also in the exhibition.) But the councilors are not evidently bossing anyone around. They are probably trying to decide whether a proposed building conforms to the city plan.
The councilors occupy a dais that sets them apart from any constituents who might attend, whether to petition them or to oversee their work. The woman at the center, presumably the council chair, is raised higher, and she seems to be listening with mild amusement.
The large scale of the photograph (33 x 66 in) makes it monumental, in the tradition of public history painting. In fact, the exhibition invites a comparison to “The Magnanimity of Lycurgus” (1791), a large and histrionic oil painting by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, which was made for the Paris Salon at the height of the Revolution. Shambroom’s photo suggests that representative Americans deserve the same kind of recognition as the Lawgiver of Sparta.
The word “populism” is being used today mainly to criticize political ideologies that posit that the true people of any given country form a homogeneous and intolerant bloc. The people have enemies–domestic and foreign–and can be led by a single, charismatic figure. For me, Shambroom’s city council images are quiet statements of a different form of populism. Here, the people are diverse and deliberative, and they merit the right to do the unglamorous and endless work of self-government.
I will be teaching 20th-century political philosophy as a new course this spring. One could choose many different readings for such a course. My list reflects my own interests, to some extent, plus some advocacy by the prospective students. Just as an example, Tufts’ political theory students tend to study Nietzsche intensively, so I have omitted Nietzsche from the “background” part of this syllabus.
Jan. 16: Introduction to the course (we’ll look together at “W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”)
Part I: Background
(A review of five major schools of thought that were already well developed before 1914 and that most subsequent authors knew and addressed.)
Jan. 21: Liberalism
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 1 and 2
Marx (1871), The Paris Commune, from Marx’s address on “The Civil War in France”
Jan. 30: Psychoanalysis
A dream from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). [It is the dream about Count Thun, discussed by Carl Schorske, and I provide a version with my own explanatory notes.]
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), chapters 3, 7 and 8. (The rest is recommended but not required.)
Feb. 4: Modernity
Max Weber, Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittic. New York: Bedminster Press, 1922/1968, excerpts from around pp. 223 and pp. 956ff.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (1930), pp. 13-38, 102-125
[Not required, but an interesting take: Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity (2001)]
Feb 6: Faith and/or nation
Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (1885)
The Syllabus of Errors. of Pope Pius IX (1864 (note that the numbered statements are “errors” according to the Pope)
Theodor Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ [1951], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982)
Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
March 25: Hannah Arendt
Excerpts from On Revolution (1963)
March 27: Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition, chapters II and V
March April 1:Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (1949/2011), pp. 23-39, 83-5, 330-360, 848-863
April 3: Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox (1961/2004), the preface by J.-P. Sartre and Parts I-IV and the Conclusion.
April 8: Michel Foucault
Excerpts from History of Sexuality and/or Discipline and Punish [To be selected]
April 10: late Foucault
“What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth
“What Is Critique?” in James Schmidt, From What Is Enlightenment?
Course Descriptions from the Collège de France
“The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”
“Technologies of the Self (pp. 145-169) in The Essential Foucault
“The Subject and Power” (pp. 126-144 in The Essential Foucault
“Truth and Power” (1976) in The Essential Foucault pp. 300-18
April 15: Jürgen Habermas
“The Public Sphere”
“Legitimation Crisis”
April 17: Habermas
Between Facts and Norms, pp. 17-23 and 38-41 and pp. 359-379
April 22: Left open to pursue gaps we have identified (or else texts from the Habermas-Foucault debate]
