1. Arthur Fisher Bentley
***
Arthur Fisher Bentley (1870-1957)
Academic, journalist, political activist, independent scholar. Worked with John Dewey on the foundations of logic and communications theory. Known in American political science as the pioneer figure in the study of group behavior, of "pressure groups" and "interest group activity."
* Bentley was convinced that the activity of human beings in groups is the fundamental datum available to describe and understand the social behavior of people. His early book, The Process of Government, was his attempt to fashion a tool for analysis of human behavior in strictly empirical, descriptive terms.
* Bentley sought to reject all reliance on ideas, ideals, concepts, and what he derisively called "mind stuff." What groups were, what they did, what they sought, were to be found in observation and description, with no anticipatory conceptual framework or limiting paradigm to bias the observation and so distort the description. "Bentleyan" came to mean descriptive of activity, free of "mind stuff" but with purposes and goals contained in the activity and stated in the description. "The Augean stables of classical and post-Machiavellian political theory were to be cleaned of their noetic dross and concern with 'human nature,'" writes Leo Weinstein in his entry on Bentley in The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth Century Political Thinkers. "Thereafter, group activity in all its overlapping and intersecting phases would allow an anoetic description, free of mind stuff — the complete and true science of humans."
***
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
New Kids theorists (1884-93)
1. David Ben Gurion
2. Ernst Bloch
***
David Ben Gurion (1886-1973)
Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben Gurion would eventually become the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion's passion for Zionism, the movement he helped found, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world.
In 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben Gurion supported this policy.
Ben Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting Palestinian exodus.
* Ben Gurion was a labor Zionist — in his view, exile had distorted Jewish society, primarily by preventing Jews from engaging in productive labor. Only a state sustained by a population of productive Jewish citizens held out any hope of Jewish survival. Only a Zionist socialist ethos could instil a level of altruism sufficient to build a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. Like H.G. Wells, for example, he believed that a capitalist economy would not induce an adequate degree of cooperation or dedication. He wanted to condition Jews to the virtues of work and to alienate them from the idea of exploiting others. A Jewish state with a dominant working class would create an exemplary society which would serve as a model of equity and justice to the world.
* After the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Ben Gurion extolled the virtues of statehood. Israel's highly divergent population adhered to values inimial to the ethos of a modern state, he believed, and Israelis had to learn not to subvert the authoritative exercise of state power. A new national ideology which prepared Jews for self-government had to be formulated.
***
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
After finishing his doctorate in 1909 (in Munich), he went to work with Georg Simmel, the famous sociologist and exponent of "life philosophy" in Berlin. Then he moved to Heidelberg where he established a close friendship with the already prominent aesthetician, and future Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács (1885), who introduced him to the intellectual circle around Max Weber.
Like all members of the New Kids cohort, he grew up in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism," and tended to be nostalgic for a golden age — in the mythical past, in fairy tales, in childhood itself. Bloch transformed this backward-looking nostalgia, however, into a forward-looking utopian vision.
* WWI created the conditions for Bloch's unique eschatological reading of Marx, which he then fused with elements of neo-Kantianism, "life philosopy," and an "authentic expressionist impulse" to produce his first great work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918). This book set the stage for Bloch's later attempts to ground the concept of utopia in the unfinished character of reality as such and to forward a dynamic vision of nature as a set of unrealized potentialities which could become purposive if humanity decided to make them so.
* Ultimately, Bloch would fashion an ontology in which Being would be seen not as a static or finished entity but rather as inherently retaining an unexplored horizon that constantly projects a utopian novum. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, human existence is understood as necessarily manifesting "anticipatory" qualities that point to a utopia which does "not yet" exist, but which nevertheless stands open to realization.
* Bloch's encyclopedic masterpiece, The Principle of Hope (1959), would analyze such anticipatory utopian projections in the realms of religion, art, and philosophy, as well as the daydreams and manifold occurrences of everyday life. Marx appears as just one example of utopian thinkers stretching back to medieval mystics, neo-platonists, and the thinkers of antiquity. From such a (cosmic?) perspective, people are seen as anthropologically motivated by a complex of instinctual drives which bring about a hope of the best world and a sense of frustration or Angst at not attaining it.
* Bloch was primarily concerned with analyzing the concept of utopia and calling for further experimental thinking. His works lack specifics regarding how the utopian order might be brought about, what institutions are necessary to ensure its liberating character, or even what socio-cutural relations should inform it. (For Russell Jacoby, this is precisely the strength of Bloch's work.) In other words, though he was a socialist, Bloch's philosophy need not lead to any particular form of socialist politics.
* For Bloch, past periods of history are not dead time but rather the repository of unresolved contradictions which can reassert themselves for good or ill. (This is a terrific reason to study history, by the way.) He produced an all-encompassing and experimental philosophical standpoint which speaks to humanity's best hopes for the future even while holding on to the most progressive unrealized possibilities of the past.
Author of, among other books:
Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918)
Spuren (1930)
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Inheritance of our Time, 1935) — a study of Nazism
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954-59, 3 vols.)
2. Ernst Bloch
***
David Ben Gurion (1886-1973)
Born in Plonsk, Poland, Ben Gurion would eventually become the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion's passion for Zionism, the movement he helped found, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world.
In 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben Gurion supported this policy.
Ben Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting Palestinian exodus.
* Ben Gurion was a labor Zionist — in his view, exile had distorted Jewish society, primarily by preventing Jews from engaging in productive labor. Only a state sustained by a population of productive Jewish citizens held out any hope of Jewish survival. Only a Zionist socialist ethos could instil a level of altruism sufficient to build a Jewish economy and polity in Palestine. Like H.G. Wells, for example, he believed that a capitalist economy would not induce an adequate degree of cooperation or dedication. He wanted to condition Jews to the virtues of work and to alienate them from the idea of exploiting others. A Jewish state with a dominant working class would create an exemplary society which would serve as a model of equity and justice to the world.
* After the establishment of Israel in May 1948, Ben Gurion extolled the virtues of statehood. Israel's highly divergent population adhered to values inimial to the ethos of a modern state, he believed, and Israelis had to learn not to subvert the authoritative exercise of state power. A new national ideology which prepared Jews for self-government had to be formulated.
***
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)
Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
After finishing his doctorate in 1909 (in Munich), he went to work with Georg Simmel, the famous sociologist and exponent of "life philosophy" in Berlin. Then he moved to Heidelberg where he established a close friendship with the already prominent aesthetician, and future Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács (1885), who introduced him to the intellectual circle around Max Weber.
Like all members of the New Kids cohort, he grew up in an era of "romantic anti-capitalism," and tended to be nostalgic for a golden age — in the mythical past, in fairy tales, in childhood itself. Bloch transformed this backward-looking nostalgia, however, into a forward-looking utopian vision.
* WWI created the conditions for Bloch's unique eschatological reading of Marx, which he then fused with elements of neo-Kantianism, "life philosopy," and an "authentic expressionist impulse" to produce his first great work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918). This book set the stage for Bloch's later attempts to ground the concept of utopia in the unfinished character of reality as such and to forward a dynamic vision of nature as a set of unrealized potentialities which could become purposive if humanity decided to make them so.
* Ultimately, Bloch would fashion an ontology in which Being would be seen not as a static or finished entity but rather as inherently retaining an unexplored horizon that constantly projects a utopian novum. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, human existence is understood as necessarily manifesting "anticipatory" qualities that point to a utopia which does "not yet" exist, but which nevertheless stands open to realization.
* Bloch's encyclopedic masterpiece, The Principle of Hope (1959), would analyze such anticipatory utopian projections in the realms of religion, art, and philosophy, as well as the daydreams and manifold occurrences of everyday life. Marx appears as just one example of utopian thinkers stretching back to medieval mystics, neo-platonists, and the thinkers of antiquity. From such a (cosmic?) perspective, people are seen as anthropologically motivated by a complex of instinctual drives which bring about a hope of the best world and a sense of frustration or Angst at not attaining it.
* Bloch was primarily concerned with analyzing the concept of utopia and calling for further experimental thinking. His works lack specifics regarding how the utopian order might be brought about, what institutions are necessary to ensure its liberating character, or even what socio-cutural relations should inform it. (For Russell Jacoby, this is precisely the strength of Bloch's work.) In other words, though he was a socialist, Bloch's philosophy need not lead to any particular form of socialist politics.
* For Bloch, past periods of history are not dead time but rather the repository of unresolved contradictions which can reassert themselves for good or ill. (This is a terrific reason to study history, by the way.) He produced an all-encompassing and experimental philosophical standpoint which speaks to humanity's best hopes for the future even while holding on to the most progressive unrealized possibilities of the past.
Author of, among other books:
Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918)
Spuren (1930)
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Inheritance of our Time, 1935) — a study of Nazism
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954-59, 3 vols.)
Plutonian theorists (1854-63)
1. Maurice Barrès
2. Georg Simmel
***
Maurice Barrès (1862-1923)
French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator. Barrès was one of the major figures in the reorientation of French nationalism in the period 1890-1914.
In the 1880s he found literary success with his three Culte de moi novels, with their themes of intellectual self-discovery and cultural rebellion. Leaning towards the far-left in his youth as a Boulangist deputy, he progressively developed a theory close to Romantic nationalism and shifted to the right during the Dreyfus Affair, leading the Anti-Dreyfusards alongside Charles Maurras.
Barrès was, in short, an illiberal: His early activism united several of his literary themes: hostility to the rigid structures of bourgeois culture and education, and contempt for the parliamentary system and its leaders, whom he saw as responsible for France's decline as a culture and as a world power. (He was not, however, a monarchist.) His novels, essays, and unceasing journalistic activity were his principle contribution to the reorientation of French nationalism and to making anti-semitism and anti-parliamentarianism respectable among pre-World War I intellectual circles.
During World War I, Barrès was one of the proponents of the Union sacrée, which earned him the nickname "nightingale of bloodshed" ("rossignol des carnages"). The Canard enchaîné satirical newspaper called him the "chief of the brainwashers' tribe."
NB: In 1921, the Dadaists organized the Trial of Barrès, charged of "attentat à la sûreté de l'esprit," and sentenced him to 20 years of forced labour. This fictitious trial also marked the dissolving of Dada.
* The Dreyfus affair completed his transition to a mystical and authoritarian nationalism and linked his anti-parliamentarianism and anti-semitism with an environmental and biological determinism that was expressed in his novels Les Déracinés (1897), L'Appel au soldat, etc.
* He is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War.
* Influenced by Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, he developed an organicist conception of the Nation which contrasted with the universalism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Often credited with being the first to give nationalism a new and more exclusionary meaning, his novels and newspaper articles molded a generation of young French intellectuals to accept an instinctual and cultural nationalism that emphasized the concept of a national community based on the mythic solidarity of "the earth and the dead." According to Barrès, the People is not founded by an act of autonomy, but find its origins in the earth, history (institutions, life and material conditions) and traditions and inheritance ("the dead").
***
Georg Simmel
TK
Author of books:
On Social Differentiation (1890)
The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
Philosophie des Geldes (1900)
Soziologie (1908)
Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
Lebensanschauung (1918)
2. Georg Simmel
***
Maurice Barrès (1862-1923)
French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator. Barrès was one of the major figures in the reorientation of French nationalism in the period 1890-1914.
In the 1880s he found literary success with his three Culte de moi novels, with their themes of intellectual self-discovery and cultural rebellion. Leaning towards the far-left in his youth as a Boulangist deputy, he progressively developed a theory close to Romantic nationalism and shifted to the right during the Dreyfus Affair, leading the Anti-Dreyfusards alongside Charles Maurras.
Barrès was, in short, an illiberal: His early activism united several of his literary themes: hostility to the rigid structures of bourgeois culture and education, and contempt for the parliamentary system and its leaders, whom he saw as responsible for France's decline as a culture and as a world power. (He was not, however, a monarchist.) His novels, essays, and unceasing journalistic activity were his principle contribution to the reorientation of French nationalism and to making anti-semitism and anti-parliamentarianism respectable among pre-World War I intellectual circles.
During World War I, Barrès was one of the proponents of the Union sacrée, which earned him the nickname "nightingale of bloodshed" ("rossignol des carnages"). The Canard enchaîné satirical newspaper called him the "chief of the brainwashers' tribe."
NB: In 1921, the Dadaists organized the Trial of Barrès, charged of "attentat à la sûreté de l'esprit," and sentenced him to 20 years of forced labour. This fictitious trial also marked the dissolving of Dada.
* The Dreyfus affair completed his transition to a mystical and authoritarian nationalism and linked his anti-parliamentarianism and anti-semitism with an environmental and biological determinism that was expressed in his novels Les Déracinés (1897), L'Appel au soldat, etc.
* He is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War.
* Influenced by Edmund Burke and Hippolyte Taine, he developed an organicist conception of the Nation which contrasted with the universalism of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Often credited with being the first to give nationalism a new and more exclusionary meaning, his novels and newspaper articles molded a generation of young French intellectuals to accept an instinctual and cultural nationalism that emphasized the concept of a national community based on the mythic solidarity of "the earth and the dead." According to Barrès, the People is not founded by an act of autonomy, but find its origins in the earth, history (institutions, life and material conditions) and traditions and inheritance ("the dead").
***
Georg Simmel
TK
Author of books:
On Social Differentiation (1890)
The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892-93)
Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93)
Philosophie des Geldes (1900)
Soziologie (1908)
Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917)
Lebensanschauung (1918)
Psychonaut theorists (1874-83)
1. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
***
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)
Ottoman soldier and statesman. The first national leader to check by force of arms the apparently irresistible expansion of the Great Powers in to the Middle East. Founded upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a new nation state, the republic of Turkey. Transformed Anatolian Turkish society from its fundamentally religious frame into an essentially secular structure.
* Reconstructed the state as a republic for which he aimed to create, especially through education, an appropriate citizenry. (Without first changing the individual, true development of society is impossible.) He introduced no wholly novel ideas; his originality lay rather in the reinterpretation of familiar concepts. He sought to establish an inherently capitalist nation based upon the principle of popular sovereignty, whose moral substance would be a conscious synthesis of native and universal elements.
* He was determined to cultivate the principle of rational enquiry as the ultimate arbiter in society. His view of the intellectual history of Islam — over the centuries Muslims' gradual retreat from rationalism to blind acquiescence in theology had rendered them defenceless and submissive — strengthened his conviction that the weight of rigid orthodoxy must be lifted from Turkish society. Not merely for the sake of the people but for that of Islam itself, which he felt needed cleansing of its irrational and inflexible accretions. He envisaged a secular society where the existence of Islam would be dependent upon the voluntary adherence of the individual Muslim.
* Central to his concept of "contemporaneity" (the rationalist essence of civilization — contemporary civilization being equivalent but not identical to civilization in Western Europe) was the recognition of the multiplicity of its origins. Contemporaneity, fostering the integrative tendency of contemporary world civilization, involves a break with the past; nationalism, with its self-assertive tendency, serves as a counterbalance, providing a continuity with the past beneath even the most drastic social reforms. Note, though, that his conception of nationhood is one founded upon the prerequisites of common polity, vocabulary, territory, ancestry, history, morality — no matter where they might actually live at the moment.
***
***
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)
Ottoman soldier and statesman. The first national leader to check by force of arms the apparently irresistible expansion of the Great Powers in to the Middle East. Founded upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a new nation state, the republic of Turkey. Transformed Anatolian Turkish society from its fundamentally religious frame into an essentially secular structure.
* Reconstructed the state as a republic for which he aimed to create, especially through education, an appropriate citizenry. (Without first changing the individual, true development of society is impossible.) He introduced no wholly novel ideas; his originality lay rather in the reinterpretation of familiar concepts. He sought to establish an inherently capitalist nation based upon the principle of popular sovereignty, whose moral substance would be a conscious synthesis of native and universal elements.
* He was determined to cultivate the principle of rational enquiry as the ultimate arbiter in society. His view of the intellectual history of Islam — over the centuries Muslims' gradual retreat from rationalism to blind acquiescence in theology had rendered them defenceless and submissive — strengthened his conviction that the weight of rigid orthodoxy must be lifted from Turkish society. Not merely for the sake of the people but for that of Islam itself, which he felt needed cleansing of its irrational and inflexible accretions. He envisaged a secular society where the existence of Islam would be dependent upon the voluntary adherence of the individual Muslim.
* Central to his concept of "contemporaneity" (the rationalist essence of civilization — contemporary civilization being equivalent but not identical to civilization in Western Europe) was the recognition of the multiplicity of its origins. Contemporaneity, fostering the integrative tendency of contemporary world civilization, involves a break with the past; nationalism, with its self-assertive tendency, serves as a counterbalance, providing a continuity with the past beneath even the most drastic social reforms. Note, though, that his conception of nationhood is one founded upon the prerequisites of common polity, vocabulary, territory, ancestry, history, morality — no matter where they might actually live at the moment.
***
Hardboiled theorists (1894-1903)
1. T.W. Adorno
***
T.W. Adorno (1903-69)
Born in Frankfurt, Germany. Began teaching at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, and became associated with the Marxist-oriented Institute of Social Research (later dubbed the Frankfurt School). Emigrated to England upon Hitler's rise to power, then joined the Institute for Social Research in exile at Columbia University in New York. When the institute broke up in the early 1940s, Adorno followed its director, Max Horkheimer, to California. In the early 1950s, he returned with Horkheimer to Germany, to reestablish the Institute in Frankfurt. He engaged primarily in cultural criticism and studies of philosophy and aesthetics, in the last decade of his life.
SF vision: "Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars..." (Minima Moralia)
* Marxian critique of mass culture (as an instrument of ideological manipulation and social control in democratic, fascist, and communist societies, as a system of products that idealize the existing society and suggest that happiness can be found through conformity to its institutions and way of life)
* Mandarin, aestheticist critique of the degradation of culture (industrial-style preconceived formulas and codes, quantitative approach to quality)
* Pessimistic analysis of fascist tendencies, the decline of the individual, the integration of the working class as a conservative force in the capitalist system, and antisemitism
* Theory of the dialectic of enlightenment (domination of nature, technology and "instrumental reason," the near-totalitarian power of society over the individual); resistance to positivism in the social sciences
* Championing of modernist avant-garde art (vs. realist art, and political modernism); negative dialectics (a non-totalizing, ever-unsettling approach to criticism and philosophy)
***
TK
***
T.W. Adorno (1903-69)
Born in Frankfurt, Germany. Began teaching at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, and became associated with the Marxist-oriented Institute of Social Research (later dubbed the Frankfurt School). Emigrated to England upon Hitler's rise to power, then joined the Institute for Social Research in exile at Columbia University in New York. When the institute broke up in the early 1940s, Adorno followed its director, Max Horkheimer, to California. In the early 1950s, he returned with Horkheimer to Germany, to reestablish the Institute in Frankfurt. He engaged primarily in cultural criticism and studies of philosophy and aesthetics, in the last decade of his life.
SF vision: "Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars..." (Minima Moralia)
* Marxian critique of mass culture (as an instrument of ideological manipulation and social control in democratic, fascist, and communist societies, as a system of products that idealize the existing society and suggest that happiness can be found through conformity to its institutions and way of life)
* Mandarin, aestheticist critique of the degradation of culture (industrial-style preconceived formulas and codes, quantitative approach to quality)
* Pessimistic analysis of fascist tendencies, the decline of the individual, the integration of the working class as a conservative force in the capitalist system, and antisemitism
* Theory of the dialectic of enlightenment (domination of nature, technology and "instrumental reason," the near-totalitarian power of society over the individual); resistance to positivism in the social sciences
* Championing of modernist avant-garde art (vs. realist art, and political modernism); negative dialectics (a non-totalizing, ever-unsettling approach to criticism and philosophy)
***
TK
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