/lit/ - Literature

>>20219932
Taking liberalism as a set of social conditions rather than an ideology (as the ideology is merely there to legitimate these conditions)—that is: private property, parliamentary democracy (of varying franchise), primacy of law, and religious tolerance/political areligiosity—it is flexible. Any limitations on infrastructural or despotic power which these present can be circumvented or selectively induced. State revenues tend to be high because taxation is easier, and as such state capacity also tends to be high. In times of emergency, every liberal power has been willing to temporarily rescind these facts in the face of necessity: war cabinets, industry nationalisation, extended term limits. rationing, restriction on press freedom, legal exemptions, revoking rights, etc. In these periods, some complimentary legitimating force, such as nationalism, tends to bulwark the supposed contradictions in liberal rhetoric.
But all this talk of ideologies is fairly pointless: the liberalism of Locke or Hobbes or Mill or Rousseau has never existed outside the pages of their books. All the conditions they advocate for existed before they started writing, have never existed completely or uniformly, have never acted as absolute inviolable principles. Asking whether liberalism can survive crisis is meaningless—states act, people act, ideologies do not. Why did the Prussian monarchy survive the long 19th century while the Ancien Régime fell? It had little to do with The Divine Right of Kings. Ideologies, in my estimation, actually have little causal power (which is why i don't rank books like >>20220098 very highly). As long as the economic, social, and technological conditions exist which have an elective affinity with liberal principles, liberalism (the ideology) will be able to exist (and probably for a while longer due to inertia). It won't explode because some of it's principles change or fall into contradiction, as there has never been time when they haven't been. Most likely, 'the end of liberalism' won't be through crisis but more a ship of theseus affair.

It's just a way of solving 'the problem of the meno' or 'meno's paradox'. That is, how it is possible to gain new knowledge if affirming that knowledge must assume a preexisting knowledge of it's truth or falsity. That is, that you must already know something to know if it is true, so no new knowledge can be known. But if we take this seriously, It makes the entire search for knowledge completely absurd, as we either already know something—which isn't then gaining knowledge—or we will be forever in doubt because we have no way of affirming or denying the possible answers we reach.
Motivated by this problem, Plato opts to preserve the possibility of knowledge by affirming the prior, suggesting we don't actually gain knowledge but that we have always had it. That it is recollection of knowledge forgotten not new knowledge gained solves the double problem that we apparently don't know the answer at the beginning or investigation yet are still able to reach it at the end. The immortal soul is then just an explanation of how it is possible to have knowledge we've forgotten. Thus we find knowledge through internal recollection, which is brought out through questioning. This is what motivates the Socratic method as a method of discovery, and why Socrates considers himself simply 'a midwife' to others—he is birthing the knowledge that others already have within them. This is what the example with the slave learning geometry was meant to show (as a slave would never have had formal education, his knowledge must be recollection of past lives).
Thus, though it may seem absurd, the position isn't unmotivated. All this is framed as a mythos, so its difficult to tell how serious Plato really is about it. He actually says that we 'should' believe the myth because it is useful, not because it is necessarily true. It seems to be a way to get us to continue our search for knowledge instead of being paralyzed by the paradox—a, uh, 'noble lie', for the possibility of philosophy at all.

>When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-for dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-for thing
William James, Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI

>>16920133
You could blame a misunderstanding (whether genuine or politically expedient) of Rousseau for the Terror, but i don't think you could blame Rousseau himself. You could say that he was a part of the causal chain leading up to the terror, but that isn't enough to establish blame. I don't think any honest reading of Rousseau and the General Will could be interpreted as advocating for the Terror. Unless you want to make the argument that Rousseau's lack of clarity surrounding the application of the concept makes him culpable, but i don't think that has much weight either. The extent of the blame is small if any.

Minimally a government must provide the environment in which all these are available. As, being grounded in the existence of citizens, and citizens on certain metabolic processes that requires these, government would cease to exist if it were otherwise. So you could say that Food, Water, and Shelter is a necessary precondition for society and from there leverage an argument for them to be rights. But typically it suffices to simply provide the opportunity for civil society to provide them through holding a monopoly on violence and a means of mediating disputes. So in a way, governments do already provide these amenities, just not directly.
Whether the government provides these or they are provided by the market is somewhat irrelevant in regards to whether people will continue to work. If we follow this idea of nested necessity, what is necessary for the provisioning of these goods? A certain level of economic, technological, and social organisation that has reached a sufficient level of complexity to the point that manufacturing and logistics are efficient enough to lift people far beyond (direct) agricultural subsistence labour. But this level of civilisation must be sustained, which will require people to mostly continue to do the exact same work that they are already doing. The Farmer needs tractors to efficiently harvest his crop, which needs tyres, which needs rubber which needs to be vulkanised which needs etc, etc, etc, repeat for each tiny part of these processes (see the classic 'I, pencil' essay). So it isn't really a question of whether people will need to work to survive, more a question of what will motivate them: If not through the incentive of wages, then through either enlightened recognition of the necessity of their place in a vastly complex and interdependent economic system (unlikely), or state coercion by people who do recognise that (likely). Until 'the means of production become sufficiently advanced' you won't have a society where people will have the choice not to labour.
In anycase, this isn't literature. Refrain from making threads like it in the future.

>>16466338
>>16467635
Oh never mind, after looking it up and reading it, the exerpt wasn't written even close the the enclosure of the commons. And it does refer to human overpopulation. In principle, sans the specific reference to livestock, the point is the same about necessary curtailment of freedom for freedoms sake.
Strictly speaking, he is correct to say there is a limit to the population of the earth. In absolute terms, population is a problem with no technical solution But in more casual parlance, technical changes can certainly effect that limit. The issue doesn't seem as dire as he is presenting it.
I'm not sure if he is correct that an excorcism of the spirit of Smith is necessary to solve the population problem though. In modern society the limit that people place on the amount of children they have is typically not based on moral or political concerns, but economic; there is a calculation based on—as Hardin mentions near the beginning—an sustainable quality of life and upbringing for the child and the family. The problem of the welfare state supporting unlimited population growth also seems overestimated
The part where he says conscience is self-eliminating is bizarre, as it seems to imply that this quality is heritable(?). Or that "exosomatic" transfer is also essentially tied rigidly to familial upbringing. As is the section of the Pathogenic effect of conscience where he says anyone who agrees on the basis of conscience will hold a simultaneous view that
>If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you as a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons
resulting in a double bind. I see no reason to believe any of these claims.
The use of (state) coercion to enforce population is a dangerous policy line in any case. Biopolitics (as outlined by agamben with bios vs zoe, the management of biological life vs the life-as-lived) is not the proper domain of politics. I think all this can be solved without recourse to coercive administrative intervention.
I have more to say about all these points but i need to run. I'll make another post after thinking it through more.