Cicero On the Commonwealth and On the Laws
At this point you will see the political circle turning; you should learn to recognize its natural motion and circuit from the very beginning. This is the essential element of civic prudence (the topic of our entire discussion); to see the paths and turns of commonwealths, so that when you know in what direction any action tends, you can hold it back or anticipate it. Book 2 p.47
Lucretius On the Nature of the Universe
Next, I maintain that mind and spirit are interconnected and compose between them a single substance. But what I may call the head and the dominant force in the whole body is that guiding principle which we term mind or intellect. This is firmly lodge in the mid-region of the breast. Here is the place where fear and alarm pulsate. He is felt the caressing touch of joy. Here, then, is the seat of intellect and mind. The rest of the vital sprit, diffused throughout the body, obeys the mind and moves under its direction and impulse. The mind by itself experiences thought and joy of its own at a time when nothing moves either the body or the spirit. p.70
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics
Thus the virtues arise in us neither by nature nor against nature. Rather we are by nature able to acquire them, and reach our complete perfection through habit. p.673
Plato The Republic
The next step, apparently, is for us to try to discover, and point out, what the failings are in cities nowadays, which stop them being run in this way, and what is the minimum change which could help a city arrive at political arrangements of this kind. Ideally a single change. Failing that, two. And failing that, as few as possible in number and as small as possible in impact. 472b p.175
Homer the Illiad
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”
Sophocles Oedipus Rex
“O god—it has all come true. Light, let me look on you for the last time!”
Sophocles Antigone
“What law of the mighty gods have I transgressed? Why look to the heavens any more, tormented as I am? Whom to call, what allies? Devout as I am, they call me impious—and so for my piety, I am destroyed.” — Translated by Robert Fagles
Plato, Crito
Socrates: And that the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same; does that still hold, or not? p.129
Plato, Euthyphro
Euthyphro: I don’t know him, Socrates. What charge does he bring against you?
Socrates: What charge? A not ignoble one I think, for it is no small thing for a young man to have knowledge of such an important subject. He says he knows how our young men are corrupted and who corrupts them.
Plato, Apology
Now, the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of use goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.
Plato, Gorgias
Polus: Very well, I shall. Tell me, Socrates, since you think Gorgias is confused about oratory, what do you say it is?
Socrates: Are you asking me what craft I say it is?
Polus: Yes, I am.
Socrates: To tell you the truth, Polus, I dont think it’s a craft at all.
Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline
Since the occasion has thus brought public morals under my notice, the subject itself seems to call upon me to look back, and briefly to describe the conduct of our ancestors in peace and war; how they managed the state, and how powerful they left it; and how, by gradual alteration, it became, from being the most virtuous, the most vicious and depraved.
Cicero, In Catilium
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the nightly guards placed on the Palatine Hill—do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before— where is it that you were—who was there that you summoned to meet you—what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted? [2]
Livy, Histories of Rome
The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.
Polybius, Histories
For it is only by observing how each of these constitutions comes into being that one can see when, how, and where the growth, the perfection, the change and the end of each is likely to recur. I believe that the Roman constitution is a better subject than any other for this method of analysis, because its origin and growth have from the very beginning followed natural causes.
Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens
And therefore, if the earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it is the end of them, and the nature of a thing is its end. For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family. Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is the end and the best. Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. (1252b30 – 1253a3)
Tacitus, Agricola
…”he had the rare faculty of being familiar without weakening his authority and austere without forfeiting people’s affection.” p. 59
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
…since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what the can and the weak suffer what they must. 5.84 – 5.116 pp. 350-357
Linda M.G. Zerilli Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
A freedom centered feminism would strive to bring about transformation in normative conceptions of gender without returning to the classical notion of freedom as sovereignty that all three waves of feminism have, in their different ways, at once accepted and rejected. Such feminism would be a world-building practice that changes political freedom from the “I-will” into the “I-can”. This I-can is nothing other than the public persona described earlier, what Arendt called “the mask” of citizenship and the rights and duties that correspond to being a member of a political community. I-can belongs to women neither as a sex nor a gender, neither as “natural” nor a social group. I-can belongs, rather, to women as a political collectivity, and it obtains in the practice of speaking women’s name (which involves speaking for others, being spoken for, and speaking back). I-can is the non-soverign freedom of feminists as citizens engaged in word and deed, who are committed to the irreducibly non natural basis of political membership. p.180
Bonnie Honig Democracy and the Foreigner
I take foreignness as a topic, a question, rather than a problem. What does it mean? What sort of work does it do in cultural politics?
Sheldon Wolin De Tocqueville Between Two Worlds
Democracy is perpetuated as philanthropic gesture, contemptuously institutionalized as welfare, and denigrated as populism. p.572
Jorge Luis Borges This Craft of Verse
And when the fact that poetry, language, was not only a medium for communication but could also be a passion and a joy—when this was revealed to me, I do not think I understood the words, but I felt that something was happening to me. It was happening not to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my flesh and blood.
S. Sara Monoson Plato’s Democratic Entanglements
Plato’s depictions of intellectual labor in his dialogues contain a puzzle. On the one hand, the dialogues voice some of the most aggressive attacks on the intellectual merit of theatrical enterprises in all of Western litera-ture. Most famously, the Republic banishes poetry from the ideal city(607a–e). In the Laws, moreover, the Athenian Stranger decries the deterioration of democratic politics into a “wretched theatocracy” (theatro-
kratia, 701a1). On the other hand, Plato likens serious intellectual toil, including philosophic understanding, to being a theater-goer. Through-out his dialogues he sustains a delicate metaphor: “Intellectual labor is like
the activity of being a theate¯s,” where theate¯s refers to an audience memberat the theater, during the dramatic competitions held on grand civic festival occasions.
Michael Hanchard Afro Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora
These encounters remind us, I believe, that there are many vantage points from which one can view and experience this thing known as modernity: as nightmare or utopia; as horrible past or future present. These contrasting views caution us against modernity’s reification and implore us to view modernity as a process of lived experience, with winners and losers, as well as strivings for redemption, recovery, retribution, and revolution, each experience tumbling into another and becoming—dare I say—history.
Quentin Skinner Liberty before Liberalism
The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, andd our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. p.117
Quentin Skinner Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
Finally, there is the still more rhetorically minded view associated with Renaissance humanism: that our watchword ought to be audi alteram partem, always listen to the other side. This commitment stems from the belief that, in moral and political debate, it will always be possible to speak in utramque partem, and will never be possible to couch our moral or political theories in deductive form. The approprate model will always be that of a dialogue, the appropriate stance a willingness to negotiate over rival intuitions concerning the applicability of evaluative terms. We must strive to reaching understanding and resolve disputes in a conversational way. p. 15-16
Ricoeur, Le Juste The Just
“Let us define ‘ethical aim’ by the following three terms: aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”
Bonnie Honig Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
The lesson of the contest between virtue and virtú, is that politics never gets things right, over, and done with. The conclusion is not nihilistic but radically democratic. To accept and embrace the perpetuity of contest is to reject the dream of displacement, the fantasy that the right laws or constitution might some day free us from the responsiblity for, (and, indeed, the burden of) politics.
Jurgen Habermas Between Facts and Norms
Moreover, a moral-practical self-understanding of modernity as a whole is articulated in the controversies we have carried on since the seventeenth century about the best constitution of the political community. This self-understanding is attested to both by a universalistic moral consciousness and by the liberal design of the constitutional state. Discourse theory attempts to reconstruct this normative self-understanding in a way that resists both scientistic reductions and aesthetic assimilations.
E.J. Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism
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
Ricoeur, Soi-meme comme un autre Oneself as Another
“The self cannot be thought without the other, but rather is linked to the other in a relationship of mutual recognition and responsibility.”
Sheldon Wolin The Presence of the Past
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)
Wm Connolly Political Theory and Modernity
…it would turn the genealogist of resentment on his head by exploring democratic politics as a medium through which to expose resentment and to encourage the struggle against it. And it would turn periodically to thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx…;to locate the myriad ways and means by which the twin drives to mastery and realization have lodged themselves inside modern formations; and to listen to subdued sounds of strife and resistance emanating from these integrated systems of modern thought. p.175
Ricoeur, Du texte a l’action From Text to Action
On the featured image Géricault, Théodore. The Raft of the Medusa. 1818–1819. Oil on canvas, 491 cm × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Museum
Ricoeur Temps et recit Time and Narrative volumes 1-3
Conversely, a story only holds genuine meaning for us because it mirrors the actual structure of our lived experience. Every narrative relies on temporal coordinates—beginnings, crises, endings, and the weight of waiting—which directly correspond to our mortal condition.
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings. p.47
Michael Walzer Spheres of Justice
And equality is simply the outcome of the art — at least for us, working with the materials here at hand. For the rest of the book, then, I shall try to describe those materials, the things we make and distribute, one by one. I shall try to get at what security and welfare, money, office, education, free time, political power, and so on, mean to us’ how they figure in our lives; and how we might share, divide, and exchange them if we were free from every sort of domination.
Michael Sandel Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
For justice to be the first virtue, certain things must be true of us. We must be creatures of a certain kind, related to human circumstance in a certain way. We must stand at a certain distance from our circumstance, whether as transcendental subject in the case of Kant, or as essentially unencumbered subject of possession in the case of Rawls. Either way, we must regard ourselves as independent: independent from the interests and attachments we may have at any moment, never identified by our aims but always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them (Rawls 1979: 7; 1980: 544–5).
DEONTOLOGY’S LIBERATING PROJECT
Bound up with the notion of an independent self is a vision of the moral universe this self must inhabit. Unlike classical Greek and medieval Christian conceptions, the universe of the deontological ethic is a place devoid of inherent meaning, a world ‘disenchanted’ in Max Weber’s phrase, a world without an objective moral order. Only in a universe empty of telos, such as seventeenth-century science and philosophy affirmed, is it possible to conceive a subject apart from and prior to its purposes and ends. Only a world ungoverned by a purposive order leaves principles of justice open to human construction and conceptions of the good to individual choice. In this the depth of opposition between deontological liberalism and teleological world views most fully appears.
Arendt Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
In the Critique of Pure Reason imagination is at the service of the intellect; in the Critique of Judgment the intellect is “at the service of imagination.”
In the Critique of Judgement we find an analogy to the “schema”: the example. Kant accords to examples the same role in judgments that the intuitions called schemata has for experience and cognition. Examples play a role in both reflective and determinant judgments, that is, whenever we are concerned with particulars. p.84
Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue
My own critique of liberalism derives from a judment that the best type of human life, that in which the tradition of the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved. Liberal political societies are characteristicallly committed to denying any place for a determinate conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception. On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact what liberalism promotes is a kind of instutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life. p. xv Prologue
Jurgen Habermas Theory of Communicative Action
The concept of communicative action is developed in the first set (Chapter III) of “Intermedicate Reflections” [Zwischenbetrachtung], which provides access to three intertwined topic complexes: first, a concept of communication rationality that is sufficiently skeptical in its development but is nevertheless resistant to cognitive-instrumental abridgments of reason; second, a two-level concept of society that connects the “lifeworld” and “system” paradigms in more than a rhetorical fashion; and finally, a theory of modernity that explains the type of social pathologies that are today becoming increasingly visible, by way of the assumption that communicatively structured domains of life are being subordinated to the imperatives of autonomous, formally organized systems of action. Thus the theory of communicative action is intended to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity.
Ricoeur Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
“The execution of an action is a text that is written onto the world.”
Ricoeur Essays on Biblical Interpretation
The titles of the essays: Toward a hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation; The Hermeneutics of Testimony; Freedom in the Light of Hope.
Henceforth, the regeneration of freedom is inseparable from the movement by which the figures of hope are liberated from the idols of the market place, as Bacon put it.
This whole process constitutes the philosophy of religion within the limits of reason alone; it is this process which constitutes the philosophical analogon of the kerygma of the Resurrection. It is also this process which constitutes the whole adventure of freedom and which permits us to give a comprehensible meaning to the expression “religious freedom.” p.180
Ernesto Grassi Rhetoric as Philosophy
Philosophy itself becomes possible only on the basis of metaphors, on the basis of the ingenuity which supplies the foundation of every rational, derivative process. p. 34
McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas
“Critical theory is distinguished from the ‘traditional’ sciences by its reflexive character and its practical intent: it seeks not merely to understand or explain, but to transform. Its ultimate goal is a society of self-determining individuals who have achieved freedom from all forms of systemic distortion and illegitimate domination through the medium of unconstrained communication.”
Arendt The Life of the Mind
For the thinking ego and its experience, conscience that “fills a man full obstacles” is a side effect. No matter what thought-trains the thinking ego thinks through, the self that we all are must take care not to do anything that would make it impossible for the two-in-ne to be friends and live in harmony. This is what Spinoza meant by the term “aquiescence in one’s self” (acquiescentia in seipso): “It can spring out of reason [reasoning]. and this contentment is the greatest joy possible.” Its criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words. Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home. p.191
Michel Foucault Society Must Be Defended
A right of sovereignty and a mechanics of discipline. It is, I think, between these two limits that power is exercised. The two limits are, however, of such a kind and so heterogeneous that we can never reduce one to the other. In modern societies, power is exercised through, on the basis of, and in the very play of the heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty
and a polymorphous mechanics of discipline.
Ricoeur Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning
“To understand a text is not to rejoin the author, but to move in the direction of his work, to project oneself before it, to follow the path of the world it opens up.”
Hans Blumenberg The Genesis of the Copernican World
It is only as an experience of turning back that we shall accept that for man there are no alternatives to the Earth, just as for reason there are no alternatives to human reason. p. 685
Ricoeur La Metaphor vive The Rule of Metaphor
“The metaphoric ‘is’ at once signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like.'”
Habermas Jurgen, Legitimation Crisis
“Under ‘democracy,’ the conditions under which all legitimate interests can be fulfilled by way of realizing the fundamental interest in self-determination and participation are no longer understood. It is now only a key for the distribution of rewards conforming to the system, that is, a regulator for the satisfaction of private interests. This democracy makes possible prosperity without freedom.”
René Girard La violence et le sacré
Dans de nombreux rituels, le sacrifice se présente de deux façons opposées, tantot comme une chose tres sainte dont on ne saurait s’abstenir sans negligence grave, tantot au contraire comme une espece de crime qu’on ne saurait commettre sans s’exposer a des risques également tres graves. p.9
Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
The world’s darkening never reaches
to the light of Being.
We are too late for the gods and too
early for Being. Being’s poem,
just begun, is man.
To head toward a start — this only.
To think is to confine yourself to a
single thought that one day stands
still like a star in the world’s sky.
John Rawls Theory of Justice
If men’s inclination to self-interest makes their vigilance against one another necessary, their public sense of justice makes their secure association together possible. Among individuals with disparate aims and purposes a shared conception of justice establishes the bonds of civic friendship; the general desire for justice limits the pursuit of other ends. One may think of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental charter of a well-ordered human association. Existing societies are of course seldom well-ordered in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in dispute. Men disagree about which principles should define the basic terms of their association. Yet we may still say, despite this disagreement, that they each have a conception of justice. That is, they understand the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation.
John Searle Speech Acts
The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.
Ricoeur Le Conflit des interpretations The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics
“The philosopher trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful… but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself… Since Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, this is what is in question. After the doubt about things, we have started to doubt consciousness.”
Habermas, Jurgen Knowledge and Human Interests
“The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only… The public sphere becomes the court before which public relations faces are displayed—a court before which a public opinion is manufactured rather than formed.”
Arendt On Revolution
The question is only whether that which made for stability and answered so well the early modern preoccupation with permanence was enough to preserve the spirit which had become manifest during the Revolution itself. p.231
C.B. Macpherson The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism Hobbes to Locke
we cannot now expect a valid theory of obligation to a liberal democratic state in a possessive market society. p.275
JL Austin How to do things with words
To sum up, we may say that the verdictive is an exercise of judgment, the exercitive is an assertion of influence or exercising of power, the commissive is an assuming of an obligation or declaring of an intention, the behabitive is the adopting of an attitude, and the expositive is the clarifying of reasons, arguments, and communications. p.162
Oakeshott Rationalism in Politics
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
Habermas, Jurgen The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
“The public sphere, once a forum for rational-critical debate, has been transformed into a court before which public relations displays its wares. The public is no longer a partner in dialogue, but an audience to be manipulated.” (p. 162)
René Girard Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque
Pour qu’un vaniteux desire un objet il suffit de le convaincre que cet objet est deja desire par un tiers aquel s’attache un certain prestige. La mediateur est ici un rival que la vanite a d’abord suscite qu’elle a pour ainsi dire, appele a son existence de rival avant d’en exiger la defaite. p.20-21
Heidegger On Nietzsche
Not only must the thought emerge out of the creative moment of decision in some given individual, but as a thought that pertains to life itself it must also be a historical decision — a crisis. p.154 continued p. 155 This plan culminates in a fifth point entitled “The doctrine of eternal return as hammer in the hand of the most powerful man. Wherever the thought of thoughts is indeed thought, that is to say, is incorporated, it conducts the thinker to supreme decisions in such a way that he expands beyond himself, thus attaining power over himself and willing himself. In this way such a man is as will to power.
Arendt, What is Freedom?
Political institutions, no matter how well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same means that brought them into being. Independent existence marks the work of art as a product of making; utter dependence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state as a product of action. p.153
Gadamer Truth and Method
In truth history does not belong to us, we belong to it.
Ricoeur, La Symbolique du mal The Symbolism of Evil
“The symbol gives rise to thought.”
Ricoeur, L’Homme fallible, Fallible Man
“The human being is a mediation between the finite and the infinite; he is this mediation because he is a disproportion.”
Arendt The Human Condition
The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. p.199
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
The thoughts that I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, sometimes in longer chains about the same subject, sometimes jumping, in a sudden change, from one area to another. — Originally it was my intention to bring all this together in a book whose form I thought of differently at different times. But it seemed to me essential that in the book the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in natural, smooth sequence.
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. — And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. — The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys.
Leo Strauss Natural Right and History
If there is no standard higher than the ideals of one’s society, there exists no possibility of taking a critical distance from those ideals. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the ideals of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether enslaved to his society, and therefore that we are able, and even obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge of the ideals of our society, as well as of any other society. This standard cannot be found in the needs of the society concerned.
Carl Schmitt The Nomos of the Earth
The earth is bound to the law in three ways; she contains law within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself in fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order.
Merleau-Ponty Humanism and Terror
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
Ernst Cassirer The Myth of State
It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary. In order to fight an enemy you must know him. That is one of the first principles of a sound strategy. To know him means no only to know his defects and weaknesses; it means to know his strength. All of us have been liable to underrate this strenth. When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously. By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake. We should not commit the same error a second time. We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the mehtods, and the technique of the political myths. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him. p.296
Karl Lowith from Hegel to Nietzsche
Since Hegel. and particularly through the work of Marx and Kierkegaard, the Christianity of this bourgeois-Christian world has come to an end. This does not mean that faith which once conquered the world perishes with its last secular manifestations. For how should the Christian pilgrimage in hoc saeculo ever become homeless in the land where it has never been at home?
Carl Schmitt The Concept of the Political
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
Ortega y Gasset The Revolt of the Masses
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
Karl Jaspers Man in the Modern Age
No definite or convincing answer can be given to the question” ‘What is going to happen?” Man, living man, will answer this question through his own being, in the course of his own activities. A forecast of the future (the ‘active forecast’ now in the making, the forecast which will become one of the determinants of the future) can aim only at rendering mankind aware of itself. p. 228
Walter Benjamin The Origin of German Tragic Drama
The intrigue alone would have been able to bring about that allegorical totality of scenic reorganization, thanks to which one of the images of the sequence stands out, in the image of the apotheosis, as different in kind, and gives mourning at one and the same time the cue for its entry and its exit. The powerful design of this form should be though through to its conclusion; only under this condition is it possible to discuss the idea of the German Trauerspiel. In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are; and for this reason the German Trauerspiel merits interpretation. In the spirit of allegory it is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last. p.235
Heidegger Being and Time
“Läßt sich die Zeit selbst als Horizont des Seins offenbaren? Ist die Zeit selbst der Modus der Zeitlichkeit, oder ist diese nur ein Modus der Zeit? Ist die Zeit selbst das Ziel des Entwurfs, oder ist sie nur der Horizont des Seins? Welcher Art ist dieser Unterschied zwischen Sein und Zeit? Die Untersuchung ist auf dem Wege — wohin?”
Carl Schmitt The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
The essential point for the liberal parliamentary system is that discussion takes the place of force-decision.
![Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus 1829 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus', 1829, (1904). From the collection of the National Gallery, London. From Social England, Volume VI, edited by H.D. Traill, D.C.L. and J. S. Mann, M.A. [Cassell and Company, Limited, London, Paris, New York & Melbourne, 1904] Artist JMW Turner. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)](https://www.baitingthebear.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/gettyimages-679510614-2048x2048forjamesjoyceulysses-300x195.jpg)
James Joyce Ulysses
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Carl Schmitt Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Schmitt, Carl. The crisis of parliamentary democracy. Mit Press, 1988
Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
Carl Schmitt Political Romanticism
Every romantic avoid teh definitive choice. He wants to keep all possibilities open, and he changes his point of view from day to day because he is fascinated only by the new. p.65
Max Weber Politics as a Vocation
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.
Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
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
Nietzsche, The Antichrist
What is good? — All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. p.127
Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You
“State authority, even if it clears away old injustices, always creates new ones, just because it is state authority. It cannot act otherwise, for it is based on violence, and violence is the negation of love.”
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
This new law-table do I put over you, O my brothers: Become hard!
Leo Tolstoy My Religion
I do not now concern myself with theology and the Gospels, but with an inner work of an entirely different nature. I have to do now, with nothing systematic or methodical, only with that sudden light which showed me the Gospel doctrine in all its simple beauty.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I live in my own place,
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself — I laugh.
OVER THE DOOR TO MY HOUSE
Marx The First International & After Political Writings Volume 3
…I went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman’s smile on one of the faces, and on the other a murderous conspirator’s scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which the theory dwelt?
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol 2
“The absolute magnitude of the value added by the transportation of commodities is, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the productive power of the transport industry and directly proportional to the distance traveled… The useful effect is the alteration of the place of the thing… The productive power of transport is inversely proportional to the time it takes to move the commodity from one place to another.”
Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor
Besides, Thou hast no right to add one syllable to that which was already uttered by Thee before…. Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work?
John Locke Second Treatise on Government
212 Besides this over-turning from without, governments are dissolved from within. p.107
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.”
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole
“In $M — M’$ we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree: the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.”
Marx Surveys from Exile Political Writings volume 2
A century earlier, in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habakkuk.
In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt the new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty
The subject of this Essay is … Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilised portions of the species have now[Pg 2] entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment.
The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.
Marx: Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
“The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. It is no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by means of a contract. This is the semblance and only the aesthetic semblance of the Robinsonades, great and small.”
Marx The Revolutions of 1848 Political Writings volume 1
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
Marx Communist Manifesto
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, Unite!
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by the collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground.
Marx Early Writings
The basis of representation, its essence, turns out to be ‘something wholly superfluous, etc.’ for representation. With one and the same breath Hegel puts forward absolutely contradictory statements: representation is grounded on trust, on the confidence placed by one man in another, and, at the same time, it is not grounded on trust. It is rather a merely formal game.
The object of representation is not the particular interest but man and his citizenship of the state, the universal interest. On the other hand, the particular interest is the material of representation and the spirit of this interest is the spirit of the representative. p.197
De Tocqueville Democracy in America
The most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them. I am therefore led to conclude that the right of association is almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty. No legislator can attack it without impairing the very foundations of society.
Hegel The Elements of the Philosophy of Right
A treatise in philosophy is usually not expected to be constructed on such a pattern, perhaps because people suppose that a philosophical product is a Penelope’s web which must be started anew every day. This treatise differs from the ordinary compendium mainly in its method of procedure. It must be under-stood at the outset that the philosophic way of advancing from one matter to another, the general speculative method, which is the only kind of scientific proof available in philosophy, is essentially different from every other. Only a clear insight into the necessity for this difference can snatch philosophy out of the ignominious condition into which it has fallen in our day.
Hegel the Science of Logic
§ 1814 By virtue of the nature of the method just indicated, the science exhibits itself as a circle returning upon itself, the end being wound back into the beginning, the simple ground, by the mediation; this circle is moreover a circle of circles, for each individual member as ensouled by the method is reflected into itself, so that in returning into the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member. Links of this chain are the individual sciences [of logic, nature and spirit], each of which has an antecedent and a successor −− or, expressed more accurately, has only the antecedent and indicates its successor in its conclusion.