Library – Page 14 – Baiting the Bear

Keith Haring Unfinished Painting

Sheldon Wolin The Presence of the Past

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

These writings are intended as a contribution to a renewed democratic discourse, one that can be disentagled from the disillusions bred by recent neoconservative rhetoric and the cheap flattery of cynical demagogues of right-wing populism. That discourse must confront the meaning of the state and of its cohabitation with corporate power. Facing up to the state means recognizing that the dominant forms of power in the society, both public and private, are inherently antidemocratic in their structure and objectives and that if democracy is to be practiced and extended, teh conditions of politics will have to be transformed. (1989)

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Oakeshott Rationalism in Politics

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

As I understand it, the excellence of this conversation (as of others) springs from a tension between seriousness and playfulness. Each voice represents a serious engagement (though it is serious not merely in respect of its being pursued for the conclusions in promises); and without this seriousness the conversation would lack impetus. But in its participation in the conversation each voice learns to be playful, learns to recognize itself as a voice among voices. As with children, who are great conversationists, the playfulness is serious and the seriousness in teh end is only play. pp.201-202

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Ortega y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus. p.13

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Merleau-Ponty Humanism and Terror

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

The human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it, providing only that one remembers its various machineries are actually men and tries to maintain and expand man's relations to man. p.188

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E.J. Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

However, in post-communist societies ethnic or national identity is above all a device for defining the community of the innocent and identifying the guilty who are responsible for 'our' predicament. p.174

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Max Weber Politics as a Vocation

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

However, in asking for the ‘legitimations’ of this obedience, one meets with these three ‘pure’ types: ‘traditional,’ ‘charismatic,’ and ‘legal.’ These conceptions of legitimacy and their inner justifications are of very great significance for the structure of domination.

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Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Post author:Laura Reagan
Post published:November 6, 2025
Post category:Library

Then the intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue; the religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness. Then, the isolated economic man takes the place of the lonely spiritual search for the Kingdom of heaven of Bunyan's pilgrim, hurrying through the market-place of Vanity. p.176