On The Theopolitics of Reinhold Niebuhr by Political Observer (Revised)
http://www.amazon.com/Reinhold-Niebuhr-Biography-New-Introduction/dp/0801483697
I've just finished a Reinhold Niebuhr biography by Richard Fox published in 1985. That I find Mr. Niebuhr repugnant as person and Christian Moralist is a statement of my prejudice, without apology. I felt that I wanted to understand who the man was and where he came from. Those questions are answered in some detail in Mr. Fox's biography, although Mr. Fox seems to be satisfied with hagiography rather that critical engagement with Mr. Niebuhr as theopolitician. Niebuhr appears to be a religious and political conformist swept along from Socialism to Cold War Liberalism: always a little too anxious to prove his patriotism, his Americaness. Niebuhr has become the object of a cult headed by President Obama, perhaps because of the tough minded moralizing represented by Christian Realism: which could be more accurately named Christian Imperialism. It has something in common with the Protestant Christian Politics of Woodrow Wilson, with an emphasis on the necessary use of violence, to reach political ends deemed important enough to warrant it. In the name of the greater political good, even as necessary to emancipate, if only temporarily, man from his natural sinful and irredeemable self-hood. This cliché of the Christian Tradition reeks of the self-hating Augustine, and his successors, who institutionalized the persistent, morally destructive Christian anti-humanism. Imperial Politics with a thin veneer of carefully cultivated piety is an American tradition. I would call Niebuhr hopelessly Middlebrow: more about the care and maintenance of bourgeois political respectability and the self-exculpatory, as key to ex post facto rationalizations identified as 'Philosophy' . I was impressed, and moved by one person's character in Mr. Fox's biography of Reinhold, and that was the love, devotion and steadfastness of his brother Richard. Engaging with the 'Philosophy' of Mr. Niebuhr using the valuable historical frame provided by Mr. Fox will enrich my further reading.
Political Observer
Books of Interest: Habermas An Intellectual Biography by Matthew G. Specter, Central Connecticut State University
Read Peter E. Gordon's review in The New Repulic:
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/zero-hour-jurgen-habermas#
Books of Interest:Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America by Paul E. Gottfried, Elizabethtown College
See this review in The American Conservative, quite surprising. Thank you to Arts and Letters Daily and .
Books of Interest: Science and Religion in Quest of Truth by John Polkinghorne F.R.S. K.B.E.
A review in the TLS of May 18,2012 by Mark Vernon titled New Causes brought me to this book. Mr. Plokinghorne is both scientist and theologin.
Here is the link to Amazon, the link on the photo doesn't work do to the posters ignorance :
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Religion-Polkinghorne-F-R-S-K-B-E/dp/0300174780...
David Brooks, Economic Fabulist by American Litterateur
Mr. David Brooks is a propagandist of certain talent and a man given to self-serving political characterizations, indeed he expresses a positive mania for renaming. Should we consider him a Nominalist? In his essay of May 7, 2012 titled The Structural Revolution, Mr. Brooks describes a philosophical/political conflict between the Structuralists and the Cyclicalists in matters economic. Please don't confuse his Structuralists with that Parisian intellectual coterie, and the Cyclicalists, simply call it metaphorical/rhetorical clumsiness. Recall the Nutcracker Ballet in which the Mouse King and his army fight the Gingerbread men soldiers: it has some of that flavor, but not the charm of the Petipa libretto. One might also think of a marvelous Grandville illustration, as an act of wish fulfillment. Mr. Brooks little political fable does not even meet the quality these two Fabulists. But there is a certain talent at work here, some illustrative quotations:
A Structuralist defines the problem:
“There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.
Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.”
A Structuralist defines the Cyclicalists and their problems:
“Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.
The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.”
The unsurprising last two sentences. The Structuralist defines the Political Future:
“Make no mistake, the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable. The cyclicalists want to preserve the status quo, but structural change is coming.”
American Litterateur
On the defeat of Richard Lugar by Publius
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012/may/08/text-sen-richard-lugars-two-primary-election-state/
Even if Sen. Richard Lugar represents the Eisenhower Republican in it's most compromised form, he still represented the political as the art of compromise,in the realm of civic actors who placed the preservation and well being of the Republic as the central concern of that practice of politics.The zelots that have taken over the Party since 1964 are just consolidating their position of political nihilism, as opposed to a civic patriotism based on the a priori notion of the good faith of the political 'other'. The Republic is now inert, indeed moribund, in the face of the political machinations of the New Democrats and Republicans who have surrendered to hate, fear, hubris and political subversion from within. NDAA represents the efficacy of the played out national melodrama concocted after 9/11 by the Bush Restoration and simply echoed, albeit muted in tone, by the Obama Administration. War and State Terror without compunction or even a window dressing of redress, is the stark reality of this Republic May 2012.
Publius
Alan Johnson and The Perennial American Hysteria? Or on Zizek The Magnificent
Although Professor Johnson in his latest essay titled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion at his blog Ideals without Illusions at the World Affairs Journal manages to strike a tone of both respectable bourgeois intellectualism with a screeching nearly unhinged hysteria: this was no easy task but he managed to,somehow, make it work rhetorically. It is quite a feat and it is worth reading if only for an example of a specific kind of rhetorical pathology. A list of the culprits: Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Gianni Vattimo, Alessandro Russo,Judith Balso, Alberto Toscano, Terry Eagleton, Bruno Bosteels , and the propaganda arm of the Communist Apologists Verso Books.
One must read it for his initial essay and his addendum in the comments section which for it's exhaustive intellectual completeness is stunning, for want of a better term. From my point of view Slavoj Zizek is the most visible of all the people that Professor Johnson names. He is both intellectually accomplished and in all ways the personification of the failed Communist Nostalgia that Professor Johnson rails against. Zizeck is polemicist, provocateur, intellectual gadfly even a stand up comic with a compelling intellectual dimension. He continually plays off the the concept of irony in all it's permutations and exploits to the fullest the practice of the dialectic.He is the most powerful in terms of public presence and he is utterly winning in his self-presentation.This makes him exceedingly dangerous as pitch man for the renewal of the political legitimacy of Communism.
Professor Johnson fails in his essay to address what might be the root cause of this destructive Communist Nostalgia that he inveighs against, which is so obviously the failure of Capital in it's unbridled Free Market iteration to deliver on it's own promised Utopia. And the Public Intellectuals that acted as apologists for that massive failure that has plunged the world, first into chaos and then to a bleak unending economic uncertainty.
Republicans, New Democrats, New Labor and the Party of Austerity are the real culprits of the political melodrama that has unfolded since the economic collapse of 2008, and the intellectuals who acted as mediators and explicators for an utterly corrupt political class, in hock to that very Capital. Read Professor Johnson's essay and meditate on the failure of Capital ,the rise of Zizek and his fellow travelers and the power of an exploitable hysteria.
Almost Marx
