Daniel Little
Thomas Carlyle was an acerbic conservative social thinker, given to assuming the fundamental legitimacy of social and political hierarchies and hostile to democracy. A re-reading of Chartism (1839) shows that he also possessed a white-hot anger at England's indifference to the conditions of the poor, and he raged against Parliament, which whistled while catastrophe loomed. …
Continue reading "Thomas Carlyle on government and England’s poor"
Tony Judt was especially astute when it came to linking history and intellectuals. One strand of thought in his collection of essays, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, is a critical engagement with several twentieth-century thinkers associated with Marxism (and sometimes anti-Marxism), including Althusser, Kołakowski, E.P. Thompson (briefly), Raymond Aron (briefly), and Eric Hobsbawm. With …
Shlomo Avineri is one of the interpreters of Marx's thought for whom I have had a great deal of respect since the publication of Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx in 1968. (I also greatly admire his book on Hegel's political philosophy, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State.) Avineri has recently published Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, and …
Anyone interested in the development of modern political philosophy is unavoidably interested in Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan and one of the earliest proponents of what came to be known as the "social contract tradition" of thinking about the moral legitimacy of state power. (Here is a post on Hobbes's intellectual development; link. And here is a post …
One of the more memorable parts of Capital is Marx's description of the “so-called primitive accumulation of capital” — the historical process where rural people were dispossessed of access to land and forced into industrial employment in cities like Birmingham and Manchester (link). It seems as though we’ve seen another kind of primitive accumulation in the past …
An earlier post highlighted Alexandre Kojève's presentation of Hegel's rich conception of labor, freedom, and human self-creation. This account is contained in Kojève's analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel's Phenomenology in Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit"; link. Here are the key passages from Hegel's Phenomenology on which Kojève's …
Hegel provided a powerful conception of human beings in the world and a rich conception of freedom. Key to that conception is the idea of self-creation through labor. Hegel had an "aesthetic" conception of labor: human beings confront the raw given of nature and transform it through intelligent effort into things they imagine that will …
Georg Lukács in 1962 used the colorful image of a fictional "Grand Hotel Abyss" to express his disappointment in the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Here is a passage in which the idea is described in "Preface to the Theory of the Novel" (link): A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have …
Is sociology as a discipline different in France than in Germany or Britain? Or do common facts about the social world entail that sociology is everywhere the same? The social sciences feel different from physics or mathematics, in that their development seems much more path-dependent and contingent. The problems selected, the theoretical resources deployed, the …
So here is Paris today ... thousands of anonymous strangers on Boulevard Saint-Germain at 5 pm, no sense of common bond or shared identity, a void of powerful values, lives of bleak consumerism. Anomie writ large. No friends, no community, no ceremony, no shared rituals. No eye contact on the street, no presumption of common …
Understanding Society 