"Sexy, gorgeous, brilliant, and thoroughly admirable heroes" so true
The plot of Atlas Shrugged is basically a moral fable that reverses the moral premises of early twentieth-century socialism and of midcentury welfare state liberalism. The novel represents the “producers” who own and run industrial capitalism as sexy, gorgeous, brilliant, and thoroughly admirable heroes, as contrasted with the flabby, unattractive, incompetent, unproductive moochers and state-backed bureaucratic looters, parasites, and thugs. Originally titled “The Strike,” the novel outlines the impact on the world when the producers—the creators and innovators of industry, science, and intellectual life—rather than the unionized workers—withdraw their labor. The “engine of the world” progressively collapses, until the lights literally go out in New York City in a scene of desperate chaos. The producers have withdrawn to the hero John Galt’s Gulch, planning to return once the world collapses without them.
Sayfa 110
Most Third World countries that proclaimed themselves democracies immediately after their independence, while they were poor and unstable, became dictatorships within a decade. As Giovanni Sartori, Columbia University's great scholar of democracy, noted about the path from constitutional liberalism to democracy, "the itinerary is not reversible." Even European deviations from the Anglo-American pattern constitutionalism and capitalism first, only then democracy- were far less successful in producing liberal democracy. To see the complications produced by premature democratization, we could return to the heart of Europe-back in time to the early twentieth century.
Sayfa 58
In short, concept- driven sociologists start collecting their data only after having committed themselves to a particular conceptual topic. After all, as we are reminded by Howard Schwartz and Jerry Jacobs, they “are in the business of studying sociological topics, not people. . . . Their job is to make a set of integrated observations on a given topic and place them in an analytical framework.” As such, they study whiteness rather than whites, liberalism rather than liberals, and poverty rather than the poor. Establishing such focal commitment thus constitutes the very first step in their research.
It was the Syllabus , a list of eighty condemned propositions, which caused general consternation. It seemed designed to shock and offend, for example by denying that non-Catholics should be free to practise their religion (77). Above all, the last proposition seemed to sum up the Catholic Church’s war against modern society, for in it the Pope condemned the notion that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilisation’ (80).
The Syllabus was intended as a blow at liberal Catholicism, and everyone knew it. The French government, whose troops were the only bulwark between the Pope and the Risorgimento, banned the Syllabus ; it was publicly burned in Naples; Austria considered a ban but decided that this would breach the Concordat. Montalembert’s ally, Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans, wrote that ‘if we do not succeed in checking this senseless Romanism, the Church will be outlawed in Europe for half a century’.
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.
You will not fi nd this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard under graduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aris totle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental.
Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination.
Fuck the Democracy! Fuck the Liberalism! Fuck the System!
Ben sistemlere karşıyım, sistemlerin en kabul edilebilir olanı, ilkesel olarak hiç olmayandır.
Hoşgörü
Hoşgörü kavramının liberal teorideki rolü üzerine iç görülü çalışmasında Susan Mendus şöyle diyor: “Hoşgörü, hoş görülen şeyin ahlâki olarak kötü ve suçlanabilir olduğunu ima eder. Başka bir ima da, bunun değiştirilebilir olduğudur. Başka birinin hoş görülmesinden söz etmenin anlamı şudur: Kişinin, hoş görülen özelliğini değiştirmemesi kendi itibarsızlığını doğurur." ( Toleration and the Limits o f Liberalism Londra: Macmillan, 1989, s. 149-50) Hoşgörüde, ötekinin değerinin kabul edilmesi yoktur. Tersine, hoşgörü, ötekinin aşağılığını onaylamanın bir başka, belki de biraz daha ince ve kurnaz bir yoludur; Ötekinin ötekiliğini yok etme niyeti konusunda bir ön uyarıdır; Ötekini, kaçınılmaz olanı yapması için işbirliğine davet eder. Hoşgörü politikasının o meşhur insaniliği, nihai çözümün ertelenmesine razı olmanın ötesine geçmez; ancak bunun koşulu, tam da bu rıza eyleminin mevcut üstünlük düzenini daha da güçlendirmesidir
Sayfa 18 - DipnotKitabı okudu
The liberal story instructs me to seek freedom to express and realise myself. But both the ‘self’ and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times. Liberalism has a particularly confused notion of ‘free will’. Humans obviously have a will, they have desires, and they are sometimes free to fulfil their desires. If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will
Instead, the inscription of liberalism within a philosophy of nature would allow liberal ideals to prevail as principles governing human relations, while denying ultimate authoriy to such ideals in matters bearing upon human relations with nature.
Sayfa 238 - o bana sık sık "liberalizm sence nedir" diye sorardı, ben de şöyle derdim: "liberal miberal malı kap götür al rep rep."
''Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The record survive. Sepeeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.''
The Congress was being secretly funded by the CIA
John Dewey, who had headed the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, represented pragmatic American liberalism. Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist, had been an unrelenting critic of the Third Reich. A Christian, he had once publicly challenged Jean-Paul Sartre to state whether or not he accepted the Ten Commandments. Jacques Maritain, a liberal Catholic humanist, was a French resistance hero. He was also a close friend of Nicolas Nabokov. Isaiah Berlin was approached to join this rosary of philosopher-patrons, but refused on the grounds that such public support for an anti-Communist movement would place his relatives in the East in danger. He did, however, promise to support the Congress in any modest way he could. It was Lawrence de Neufville’s recollection that Berlin did so in the knowledge that the Congress was being secretly funded by the CIA. ‘He knew about our involvement,’ said de Neufville. ‘I don’t know who told him, but I imagine it was one of his friends in Washington.’
The New Press - 2000
