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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: democracy

A dream of democratic socialism

17 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Communism, democracy, expressive individualism, Karl Marx, Martin Hägglund, Martin Luther King Jr., Pius XI

Martin Hägglund develops a neo-Marxist politics that is deeply informed by qualitative individualism – quite appropriately, since qualitative individualist ideas inform Marx himself, especially in the theory of alienation. Hägglund wants to envision what a social world without alienation would look like.

Possibly the core distinction in Hägglund’s thought is between a “realm of freedom” and a “realm of necessity” – and he identifies time as central to both of these.

Continue reading →

The peaceful transfer of power

06 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics, Social Science

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Christopher Achen, COVID-19, democracy, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Larry Bartels, United States

Four years ago, I was writing about how Donald Trump’s rise had led to some hand-wringing on whether democracy is a good idea. Now that question is more urgent, because the United States is at some risk of losing it.

In the present election, Joe Biden has held the most consistent lead in the history of modern polling. So far, not once has Trump moved ahead of Biden in the polling average. (Compare 2016.) Yes, a lot can happen in two months, but this election will involve so much early voting that there is now not much time left for Trump to turn it around. So, I feel very confident in predicting that more Americans will vote for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump. That wasn’t enough for his predecessor to actually become president, of course, since, like Al Gore before her, she was caught out by the indefensible atavism that is the Electoral College: one needs to win a specific subset of states, irrespective of the number of votes one receives. Still, Biden’s lead is such, and his support among those who dislike both candidates so much stronger than Hillary Clinton’s, that I think it is quite likely that he will get more votes in the necessary swing states as well.

Even that, however, does not mean that Biden will become president on inauguration day.

Continue reading →

Lessons from a favourite teacher

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Place, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Brexit, Canada, democracy, Johann Gottfried Herder, McGill University, obituary, Paulo Freire, pedagogy, Romanticism, Warwick Armstrong

This semester I’m teaching Indian philosophy and spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. It’s hard for me to do that for very long without thinking about the best teacher I ever had, Warwick Armstrong, who taught me as a McGill undergrad over twenty years ago. I tried to contact him recently to let him know what a difference he had made, and found that that would not be possible: Warwick Armstrong is no longer with us.

I missed my chance to tell Warwick how great he was. But I can at least let the world know. Continue reading →

The trouble with democracy

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Andrew Sullivan, democracy, Donald Trump, French Revolution, Plato, Republican Party, Robert Kagan, United States

The present American election is worth significant attention from a philosophy blog because it is a philosophically interesting one. (This is very much the sense in which “May you live in interesting times” is a curse – though not actually a Chinese one). Philosophy has already played a significant role in the election. At first philosophy’s role was mere whipping boy. In one single debate in November, three different Republican candidates attacked philosophy: Marco Rubio said “We need more welders and less philosophers”, Ted Cruz disparaged the Federal Reserve by calling them “philosopher-kings”, and John Kasich insisted “philosophy doesn’t work when you run something”.

All three candidates lost, of course, and lost to a man far less philosophical than any of them. But that man’s ascendance has led to significantly more explicit attention to philosophy than is common in ruthlessly pragmatic Anglophone North America. Continue reading →

The will of the people and the intellect of the people

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, God, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

538, David Firestone, democracy, Jody Avirgan, Julia Azari, United States

Last time I discussed how the medieval debate between intellectualism and voluntarism remains around today in the distinction between natural and positive law. But there’s another way it remains around, which I think is more fundamental.

The key question between intellectualism and voluntarism is: what is more fundamental to ethics and politics, the intellect or the will? In the Middle Ages, of course, the intellect and will in question were God’s. Between natural law and positive law, the intellect and will are those of the lawmaker: is law whatever the lawmaker wills it to be, or is there a true law that the lawmaker should be able to discern intellectually from reality and base her decisions on?

Few would want to vest authority in just any lawmaker. In modern politics, especially but not only in the West, we typically place a very high value on the idea of democracy, rule by the people. If we are not sympathetic to the slogan vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God – it is often because we do not believe in God, and see the voice of the people as higher than God’s.

But if the people should rule, what aspect of the people should rule? Their intellect, or their will? Continue reading →

Populism vs. technocracy in the United States

24 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, democracy, Donald Trump, Jeff Colgan, Republican Party, Ted Cruz, Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, United States

You might remember the political crisis in Thailand that made headlines six years ago as protesters clashed in the streets. At the heart of the crisis was Thaksin Shinawatra, the corrupt and authoritarian but very popular prime minister. His supporters bore the unfortunate name of Red Shirts; his opponents, Yellow Shirts.

I had identified the crisis as one of populism against technocracy: the Red Shirts fighting for the sovereignty of the democratically elected people’s choice who put wealth in the hands of the poor, the Yellow Shirts for effective, transparent government and the rule of law. The Yellow Shirts’ supporters had already dethroned Thaksin in a 2006 military coup; the protests were the Red Shirts demanding the return of democracy. They got it: there was another election in 2010. Thaksin could no longer run because he had now been convicted of many crimes – but his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra did, and won spectacularly. Yingluck was the prime minister until 2014 – when she was turfed by another military coup. The military remains in power in Thailand now. That option remains available to technocratic élites who can’t stand how dumb the masses are: end democracy so that you can ignore their votes.

Back then in 2010 I had already noted how the conflict between populism and technocracy was not limited to Thailand. I had pointed to examples of it in the United States. But my examples then – Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, even Sarah Palin – were comparatively marginal figures.

They are not anymore. Continue reading →

Freedom of choice: a classical defence

18 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Human Nature, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Ashleigh Brilliant, Ashley MacIsaac, chastened intellectualism, democracy, drugs, Janis Joplin, libertarianism, music, Xunzi

“Freedom” is among the most central concepts in our political vocabulary. I think it is deservedly so. But it’s also a concept with a notoriously large number of meanings. Libertarians identify freedom simply with the absence of state coercion; by contrast, the most widely used Sanskrit term with an equivalence to freedom is probably mokṣa, liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. And the most common use of “freedom” today is something different again: the ability to make unrestricted choices, to decide for oneself what one will do.

Freedom in this sense of choice played a fairly limited role in premodern political thought, and I think this is because the ancients understood its limitations. Continue reading →

Augustine and Xunzi at Stonehill

05 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Confucianism, Happiness, Human Nature, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Social Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aaron Stalnaker, Augustine, autobiography, chastened intellectualism, conservatism, democracy, John Locke, Leo Strauss, Mencius, pedagogy, Republican Party, Stonehill College, Thomas Hobbes, Winston Churchill, Xunzi

For the sorts of reasons I discussed last week, I have been strongly leaning for the past couple years toward Xunzi‘s negative dark view of human nature – or so I have thought. I observe my own tendencies and see just how hard it is to be good even when I really want to. Augustine, whose similarities to Xunzi run deep (as Aaron Stalnaker has noted), points to the behaviour he observes in babies: creatures not only of desire and greed, but even of jealousy and anger. It’s as we grow up that we learn to be good. And then, of course, there’s the history of human violence and bloodshed. I often find myself a little bewildered by the 20th-century philosophies that say philosophy must be entirely different after the Holocaust; the Holocaust would not have surprised Augustine. He knew what evil lurks in our minds.

One of the more common objections to such a dark view of human nature is that it leads to tyranny: if people can’t be trusted, they need an iron ruler to rule them. Such a view is most famously associated with Thomas Hobbes, and it seems that Xunzi held something like it, but I’ve tended to find it a bit puzzling. If we can’t trust people to rule themselves, how on earth could we trust an arbitrary sovereign to rule them? A dim view of human nature seems perfectly compatible with Winston Churchill’s endorsement of democracy: that it’s the worst form of government except for all the others. We need a strong system of checks and balances to hold down the dark tendencies of our leaders.

And yet. With reflection I have realized that I cannot endorse a view like Xunzi’s and Augustine’s, even modified in the latter way. Continue reading →

Populism vs. technocracy in Thailand

26 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Bill Clinton, Canada, democracy, George W. Bush, Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, United States, utilitarianism

Thailand played a major role in my own philosophical and personal development; beyond that, I just love the place. So I’ve been very sad to hear of the recent political crisis in Thailand, which has seen so many places I love rocked with violence. I deeply hope that violence does not break out again, that some peaceful resolution can be found.

But I think the conflict may be very difficult to resolve, for reasons that are philosophically interesting – they get to the heart of important questions in political theory. Continue reading →

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