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WEST COAST DEBATE
PHILOSOPHER VIEWS
Edited by Audrey Mink, Brian Simmonds, JP Lacy, Dan Lair, Matt
Taylor and Jim Hanson
Researched by:
Adam Symonds
Lisa Gates
Andreas Meyer
Audrey Mink
Brian Simmonds
Brian Ward
Chris Gorman
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Geof Brodak
Greg Miller
James Banks
Jeff Shaw
Jessica Clarke
JOHN HRABE
KATIE BAUER
Keola Whittaker
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KRISTINE CLANCY
Matt Johnson
Matt Roskoski
Matt Stannard
NADER HADDAD
Nicholas Thomas
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Ryan Hagemann
Sarah Stone
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WEST COAST DEBATE
PHILOSOPHER VIEWS
COMPILES VOLUME 1 - 12
Edited by Audrey Mink, Brian Simmonds, JP Lacy, Dan Lair, Matt Taylor and Jim Hanson
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WEST COAST DEBATE ................................................................................................................................. 1
PHILOSOPHER VIEWS ................................................................................................................................. 1
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ................................................................................................................................ 26
LIFE AND WORK .................................................................................................................................................................26
MUMIA’S PHILOSOPHY ......................................................................................................................................................26
ON INSTITUTIONAL RACISM ..............................................................................................................................................26
ON PRISONS AND THE “JUSTICE SYSTEM” .........................................................................................................................27
ON TERRORISM ..................................................................................................................................................................28
ON POLITICAL CHANGE ......................................................................................................................................................28
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................30
THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IS INHERENTLY OPPRESSIVE ...........................................................................................31
THE WAR ON TERRORISM SHIFTS THE FOCUS FROM STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM ....................................................32
RESISTING OPPRESSION BY STATE INTERESTS REQUIRES LOCAL, GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION ....................................33
THE DEATH PENALTY IS JUSTIFIED .....................................................................................................................................34
WAR ON TERROR IS JUSTIFIED BY THE POST 9/11 ERA; SUPPORTS HUMAN RIGHTS .......................................................35
MORTIMER ADLER ................................................................................................................................... 36
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................40
PHILOSOPHICAL "TRUTH'S" DON'T EXIST ..........................................................................................................................42
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE IS A KEY COMPONENT OF PHILOSOPHY ...........................................................................43
IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH TRUTH IN VALUE JUDGEMENTS ..........................................................................................44
THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE IS HOPELESS ....................................................................................................................45
ANTI-FEDERALISTS ................................................................................................................................... 46
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................50
THE ANTI-FEDERALIST VISION OF SMALLER GOVERNMENT IS SUPERIOR .........................................................................52
ANTI-FEDERALISM GIVES RIGHTS AND PREVENTS DISCRIMINATION ................................................................................53
AN ANTI-FEDERALIST GOVERNMENT WOULD BE UNSAFE AND INEFFECTIVE ..................................................................54
FEDERALIST THEORY PROTECTS INDIVIDUAL AND MINORITY RIGHTS ..............................................................................55
HANNAH ARENDT .................................................................................................................................... 56
Political Philosopher (1906-1975)......................................................................................................................................56
Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................................................57
VALUE SYSTEMS REQUIRE MAJORITY SUPPORT ................................................................................................................58
MUST EXAMINE ACTIONS TO UNDERSTAND VALUES .......................................................................................................58
FREEDOM IS THE CENTRAL VALUE IN SOCIETY ..................................................................................................................59
ARISTIPPUS .............................................................................................................................................. 60
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................65
PLEASURE IS THE HIGHEST VALUE .....................................................................................................................................66
HEDONISM IS NOT AN ETHICAL SYSTEM ...........................................................................................................................67
HEDONISM RESULTS IN GREED ..........................................................................................................................................68
ARISTOTLE ............................................................................................................................................... 69
Bibliograhy .........................................................................................................................................................................73
VIRTUE ETHICS ARE NECESSARY ........................................................................................................................................74
VIRTUE ETHICS WORK BEST ...............................................................................................................................................75
VIRTUE ETHICS ARE HARMFUL ..........................................................................................................................................76
VIRTUE ETHICS ARE PHILOSOPHICALLY FLAWED ...............................................................................................................77
MOLEFI KETE ASANTE............................................................................................................................... 78
Afrocentricity .....................................................................................................................................................................78
Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................................................79
AFROCENTRISM LIBERATES THE OPPRESSED ....................................................................................................................80
LANGUAGE IS KEY TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN LIBERATION ..................................................................................................81
CURRENT LANGUAGE STRUCTURES OPPRESS AFRICAN AMERICANS ................................................................................81
AJ AYER ................................................................................................................................................... 82
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................85
STATEMENTS OF VALUE ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE .......................................................................................................86
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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE WHY THINGS HAPPEN ..........................................................................................................86
CLAIMS TO UNIVERSAL TRUTH SUSTAIN NEGATIVE POWER RELATIONS ..........................................................................87
CLAIMS TO UNVERSAL KNOWLEDGE CREATE AN EPISTIMOLOGICAL TRAP ......................................................................88
KURT BAIER ............................................................................................................................................. 89
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................................................94
REASON IS THE BEST JUSTIFICATION FOR ACTION ............................................................................................................95
VALUE JUDGMENTS ARE BENEFICIAL ................................................................................................................................96
BAIER’S MORALITY UNDERESTIMATES THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC.....................................................................................97
MORAL SYSTEMS FAIL ........................................................................................................................................................98
MICHAEL BAKUNIN .................................................................................................................................. 99
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST-ANARCHIST (1814- 1876) .....................................................................................................99
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 101
COMMON LIBERTY IS THE KEY VALUE ............................................................................................................................ 102
EQUALITY IS A PARAMOUNT CONCERN ......................................................................................................................... 103
ROUSSEAU’S PHILOSOPHY IS FLAWED............................................................................................................................ 103
MARXISM IS AUTHORITARIAN AND WRONG.................................................................................................................. 104
THE STATE IS ABSOLUTELY IRREDEEMABLE .................................................................................................................... 105
JAMES BALDWIN .................................................................................................................................... 106
SOCIAL COMMENTATOR AND ESSAYIST 1924 - 1987 ..................................................................................................... 106
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 109
THE DEHUMANIZATION OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS IS PERVASIVE .................................................................................. 110
BLACK MALES LOSE SELF-IDENTITY IN SOCIETY .............................................................................................................. 111
BLACK HATRED OF WHITES STEMS FROM RAGE ............................................................................................................ 111
BALDWIN WAS INCONSISTENT IN HIS OPINIONS ........................................................................................................... 112
BALDWIN WAS PAROCHIAL IN HIS VIEWS OF RACE ISSUES............................................................................................ 112
MURRAY BOOKCHIN .............................................................................................................................. 113
SOCIAL ECOLOGY (b. 1921) ............................................................................................................................................. 113
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 116
CRISIS AND THE RESULTING SOCIAL SHIFT IS INEVITABLE .............................................................................................. 117
CO-OPTATION THROUGH REFORMS IS THE BIGGEST DANGER ...................................................................................... 118
ECOLOGICAL STRATEGIES MUST BE SOCIAL AND NOT SINGLE-ISSUE ............................................................................ 119
DECENTRALIZATION IS NECESSARY TO SOLVE ................................................................................................................ 120
“DEEP” AND MYSTICAL ECOLOGISM HURTS TRUE ENVIRONMENTALISM ..................................................................... 120
ANSWERING BOOKCHIN ......................................................................................................................... 121
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 126
ECOCOMMUNITARIANISM IS BETTER THAN BOOKCHIN'S IDEAS ................................................................................... 127
MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S IDEAS ARE MISGUIDED AND DANGEROUS ................................................................................. 128
BOOKCHIN’S NOTION OF “LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM” IS FLAWED........................................................................... 129
BOOKCHIN’S VIEWS IGNORE LABOR’S KEY ROLE ............................................................................................................ 130
KENNETH BURKE .................................................................................................................................... 131
TRAINED INCAPACITY AND COMIC CORRECTIVES .......................................................................................................... 131
BURKEAN COMMUNICATION ......................................................................................................................................... 132
HIERARCHY, PERFECTION, AND THE NEGATIVE .............................................................................................................. 133
CRITICISMS OF BURKE..................................................................................................................................................... 133
BURKE IN LD DEBATE ...................................................................................................................................................... 133
ANSWERING BURKE IN THE DEBATE ROUND ................................................................................................................. 135
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 136
RHETORIC CREATES MORALITY OUT OF THE NEGATIVE ................................................................................................. 137
BURKE’S METHODS MAKE THE BEST STRATEGIES FOR ANALYZING RHETORIC .............................................................. 138
BURKE’S PROJECT IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED ........................................................................................................... 139
BURKE’S PROJECT MAKES HARMFUL ASSUMPTIONS ..................................................................................................... 140
JUDITH BUTLER ...................................................................................................................................... 141
BUTLER AND A POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE .................................................................................................................. 143
BUTLER AND FEMINISM.................................................................................................................................................. 144
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CRITICISMS OF BUTLER ................................................................................................................................................... 144
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 146
GENDER IS PERFORMANCE ............................................................................................................................................. 147
BUTLER PROVIDES A BASIS FOR FEMINIST POLITICS ...................................................................................................... 148
BUTLER’S FEMINISM DESTROYS ANY CHANCES FOR REAL CHANGE .............................................................................. 149
BUTLER’S FEMINISM IS MORAL QUIETISM ..................................................................................................................... 150
ANTONIO CASO...................................................................................................................................... 151
(1883-1946) .................................................................................................................................................................... 151
LIFE AND TIMES .............................................................................................................................................................. 151
IDEALISM (ANTI-POSITIVISM) ......................................................................................................................................... 152
EXISTENCE ....................................................................................................................................................................... 152
PERSONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY ....................................................................................................................... 153
ETHICS ............................................................................................................................................................................. 154
EDUCATION..................................................................................................................................................................... 154
AESTHETICS ..................................................................................................................................................................... 154
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 156
POSITIVISM IS FALSE ....................................................................................................................................................... 158
INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMUNISM RESULT IN EGOISM ............................................................................................... 159
PERSONALISM IS A BAD MORAL OBJECTIVE ................................................................................................................... 160
POSITIVISM IS KEY TO SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION ......................................................................................................... 161
NOAM CHOMSKY ................................................................................................................................... 162
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................................. 162
LIFE AND WORK .............................................................................................................................................................. 162
CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM .......................................................................................................................... 162
ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM ................................................................................................................................................ 164
CRITICISM OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ............................................................................................................................... 165
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................... 166
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 167
THE US GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT ............................................................................................................................... 168
CAPITALISM HAS BEEN ESSENTIAL IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ................................................................................ 171
WARD CHURCHILL .................................................................................................................................. 172
AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES ........................................................................................................................................... 172
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 172
Basic Ideas And Philosophy ............................................................................................................................................ 172
Application To Debate .................................................................................................................................................... 173
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 174
UNITED STATES CLAIMS TO NATIVE LANDS ARE SUSPECT ............................................................................................. 175
GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS STILL OCCURS TODAY ............................................................................................. 176
MUST CHALLENGE STEREOTYPICAL CULTURAL IMAGES ................................................................................................ 177
LIBERATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS WILL HELP LIBERATE OTHERS .............................................................................. 178
CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALISM RESPONSES .......................................................................................... 179
Answering Consent ......................................................................................................................................................... 180
Determining "Original Intent" ........................................................................................................................................ 180
Individual Rights and Equality ......................................................................................................................................... 181
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 184
THE CONSTITUTION’S TEXT REFUTES ORIGINALISM....................................................................................................... 185
ORIGINALISM DOES NOT PREVENT JUDICIAL ACTIVISM ................................................................................................. 186
ORIGINALISM IS IMPRACTICAL ....................................................................................................................................... 187
PROBLEMS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE MAKE ORIGINALISM IMPOSSIBLE ................................................................. 188
MARY DALY AND SONIA JOHNSON ......................................................................................................... 189
BIOGRAPHIES: MARY DALY ............................................................................................................................................. 189
SONIA JOHNSON ............................................................................................................................................................. 189
FEMINISM AS A VALUE FRAMEWORK ............................................................................................................................ 190
WAR AND VIOLENCE VERSUS PEACE .............................................................................................................................. 191
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INTERCONNECTEDNESS .................................................................................................................................................. 191
NON-HIERARCHICAL RELATIONS .................................................................................................................................... 192
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................... 192
PROBLEMS WITH FEMINISM........................................................................................................................................... 193
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 194
FEMINISM IS A DESIRABLE VALUE .................................................................................................................................. 195
SEXISM IS THE CAUSE AND CONTEXT OF GREATER HUMAN PROBLEMS ....................................................................... 196
"FEMINIST VALUES" ARE WRONG .................................................................................................................................. 197
FEMINIST VALUES ARE UNNECESSARY ........................................................................................................................... 198
ANGELA DAVIS ....................................................................................................................................... 199
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................................. 199
LIFE AND WORK .............................................................................................................................................................. 199
CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM ..................................................................................................................... 200
THE GENDERED PENAL SYSTEM ...................................................................................................................................... 201
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................... 203
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 204
THE US SUFFERS FROM INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM .................................................................................................... 205
THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM IS NOT INFECTED WITH RACIST INTENTIONS .......................................................................... 206
A GENDERED RESPONSE TO THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS NECESSARY ........................................................... 207
THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM PROMOTES JUST OUTCOMES ................................................................................................. 208
SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR ............................................................................................................................ 209
FRENCH EXISTENTIALIST AND FEMINIST (1908-1987) .................................................................................................... 209
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 209
The Impossibility And Necessity Of Ethics ...................................................................................................................... 210
The Woman Question ..................................................................................................................................................... 210
Not Enough Of A Feminist?............................................................................................................................................. 211
Implications For Debate.................................................................................................................................................. 211
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 213
SOCIETY MUST REJECT NIHILISM .................................................................................................................................... 214
POLITICS OF SEPARATISM CANNOT LIBERATE WOMEN ................................................................................................. 215
JACQUES DERRIDA ................................................................................................................................. 216
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION? ......................................................................................................................................... 216
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEBATE ROUND ....................................................................................................................... 219
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 221
DECONSTRUCTION IS GOOD ........................................................................................................................................... 222
DECONSTRUCTION OPENS NEW WAYS OF THINKING .................................................................................................... 223
DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT PROPERLY POLITICAL ........................................................................................................... 224
DECONSTRUCTION IS ELITIST .......................................................................................................................................... 225
RENE DESCARTES ................................................................................................................................... 226
PHILOSOPHER 1596 - 1650 ............................................................................................................................................. 226
Biographical Background ................................................................................................................................................ 226
Philosophical and Methodological Summary ................................................................................................................. 226
Divinity of God ................................................................................................................................................................ 227
Contributions to Science ................................................................................................................................................. 227
Summary of Writings and Publications........................................................................................................................... 227
Criticism and Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 228
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 229
DOUBTFUL EVIDENCE MUST BE REJECTED ..................................................................................................................... 230
OBJECTIVE REALITY IS USED TO JUDGED IDEAS .............................................................................................................. 230
EVIDENCE BASED ON PERCEPTIONS CANNOT BE TRUSTED ........................................................................................... 231
JOHN DEWEY ......................................................................................................................................... 232
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 232
Dewey’s Philosophy of Pragmatism................................................................................................................................ 233
Dewey’s Views on Education .......................................................................................................................................... 235
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Objections to Dewey ...................................................................................................................................................... 235
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 236
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 237
TRUTH IS PROGRESSIVE AND EVOLVING ........................................................................................................................ 238
THERE ARE NO TRANSCENDENT MORAL TRUTHS .......................................................................................................... 239
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY REQUIRE MATERIAL EQUALITY ........................................................................................ 239
DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY IS GENERALLY REMOVED FROM REALITY .................................................................................. 240
DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION IS FLAWED ........................................................................................................ 240
DEWEY’S JUSTIFICATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY ARE FLAWED ........................................................................................... 241
DEWEY’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IGNORES HUMAN NATURE AND HISTORY ............................................................... 241
W.E.B. DU BOIS ...................................................................................................................................... 242
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER 1868 - 1963 ................................................................................................................................. 242
Socialism as Black Liberation .......................................................................................................................................... 242
The Dynamics of Racism ................................................................................................................................................. 243
Opposition from Black Moderates and Others ............................................................................................................... 243
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 244
COMMUNITY IS THE HIGHEST VALUE ............................................................................................................................. 245
SOCIALISM IS NECESSARY FOR LIBERATION ................................................................................................................... 246
RACISM IS MORALLY REPUGNANT ................................................................................................................................. 247
THEORIES OF RACIAL INFERIORITY ARE WRONG ............................................................................................................ 247
RIANE EISLER ......................................................................................................................................... 248
FEMINIST......................................................................................................................................................................... 248
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 248
Basic Ideas And Principles............................................................................................................................................... 248
Application To Debate .................................................................................................................................................... 249
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 250
ONLY CHALLENGING DOMINATOR STRUCTURES CAN CHANGE SOCIETY ...................................................................... 251
DOMINATOR SOCIETIES MISUSE TECHNOLOGY ............................................................................................................. 252
PARTNERSHIP CULTURE IS PRACTICAL AND FEASIBLE .................................................................................................... 253
DOMINATOR SOCIETIES THREATEN SURVIVAL ............................................................................................................... 254
RALPH WALDO EMERSON ...................................................................................................................... 255
Emerson’s Life and Times ............................................................................................................................................... 255
Emerson’s Ideas .............................................................................................................................................................. 256
Objections to Emerson ................................................................................................................................................... 258
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 258
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 260
BEAUTY IS THE HIGHEST VALUE...................................................................................................................................... 261
MORALITY IS INNATE AND TRANSCENDENT ................................................................................................................... 262
EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY LEGITIMIZES RUTHLESS POWER AND COMPETITION ........................................................... 263
EMERSON’S PHILOSOPHY IS IRRELEVANT TO EVERYDAY AND POLITICAL LIFE............................................................... 264
EPICURUS .............................................................................................................................................. 265
ETHICS ............................................................................................................................................................................. 266
DESIRE ............................................................................................................................................................................. 266
JUSTICE ........................................................................................................................................................................... 267
THEORY OF MIND AND DEATH ....................................................................................................................................... 267
EPICURUS IN DEBATE ...................................................................................................................................................... 268
THE PRINCIPLES DOCTRINE ............................................................................................................................................. 268
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 271
HAPPINESS IS THE PARAMOUNT VALUE IN THE WORLD ................................................................................................ 273
LOGIC IS NECESSARY IN ORDER TO LEAD A MORAL LIFE ................................................................................................ 274
EPICURUS' PHILOSOPHY DISPLAYS A NEGATIVE VIEW OF DIVINITY ............................................................................... 275
DIVINE POWERS HAVE NO CONTROL OVER HUMAN BEINGS ........................................................................................ 276
ARTURO ESCOBAR ................................................................................................................................. 277
HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT ........................................................................................................................................... 277
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THE TROUBLE WITH DEVELOPMENT .............................................................................................................................. 278
CRITICISMS OF ESCOBAR ................................................................................................................................................ 279
LD APPLICATIONS............................................................................................................................................................ 279
ANSWERING DEVELOPMENT CRITIQUES ........................................................................................................................ 280
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 282
DEVELOPMENT THINKING MANAGES THE OTHER ......................................................................................................... 283
DEVELOPMENT THINKING demeans the other ............................................................................................................... 284
WE SHOULD STILL ACT TO SOLVE WORLD PROBLEMS LIKE POVERTY ............................................................................ 285
.DEVELOPMENT IS GOOD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT .................................................................... 285
FEMINISM RESPONSES ........................................................................................................................... 287
WHY FEMINISM? A VERY BRIEF HISTORY ....................................................................................................................... 288
ROSIE THE RIVETER ......................................................................................................................................................... 289
THE SIXTIES ..................................................................................................................................................................... 289
BASIC FEMINISM ............................................................................................................................................................. 290
VARIETIES OF FEMINISM ................................................................................................................................................ 290
PROBLEMS WITH FEMINISM........................................................................................................................................... 293
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 295
FEMINISM FAILS AS A PHILOSOPHY ................................................................................................................................ 296
FEMINISM IGNORES LEGITIMATE DIFFERENCES AMONG WOMEN ............................................................................... 296
FEMINISM FAILS AS A POLITICAL APPROACH ................................................................................................................. 297
PATRIARCHY INADEQUATELY EXPLAINS INEQUALITY IN SOCIETY .................................................................................. 298
MOST WOMEN REJECT FEMINISM ................................................................................................................................. 299
FEMINISM IS RACIST ....................................................................................................................................................... 300
FEMINIST EMPHASIS ON MALE VIOLENCE SHOULD BE REJECTED ................................................................................. 301
FEMINISM ENTRENCHES DESTRUCTIVE BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM ............................................................................. 302
MICHEL FOUCAULT ................................................................................................................................ 303
Post-Structuralist Philosopher (1926-1984) ................................................................................................................... 303
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 305
POWER IS THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL VALUE ....................................................................................................................... 306
POWER IS THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL VALUE Part 2 ............................................................................................................. 307
LANGUAGE IS A CENTRAL COMPONENT OF SOCIETY ..................................................................................................... 308
UNDERSTANDING THE PAST DOES NOT PROVIDE OBJECTIVE TRUTH ............................................................................ 308
ANSWERING FOUCAULT ......................................................................................................................... 309
Foucault’s Basics ............................................................................................................................................................. 309
Arguing Against Foucault on a Factual Basis................................................................................................................... 310
Political Implications: Why Foucault? ............................................................................................................................. 310
Feminism and Foucault ................................................................................................................................................... 311
Butler: Using Freud ......................................................................................................................................................... 312
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 314
FOUCAULT PRECLUDES FEMINIST THEORY..................................................................................................................... 315
FOUCAULT VIOLATES HIS OWN CRITIQUE ...................................................................................................................... 316
FOUCAULT’S ASSUMPTIONS ARE INCORRECT ................................................................................................................ 317
FOUCAULT’S METHOD OF CRITIQUE IS POWERLESS TO CHANGE ANYTHING ................................................................ 318
FREEDOM OF SPEECH RESPONSES .......................................................................................................... 319
A Brief History Of Free Speech In The United States ...................................................................................................... 319
Preparing To Debate Free Speech .................................................................................................................................. 320
Absolutism and individualism ......................................................................................................................................... 321
Racism and hate speech ................................................................................................................................................. 321
Sexual Harassment ......................................................................................................................................................... 322
Pornography And Other Obscene Speech ...................................................................................................................... 322
Debating Free Speech ..................................................................................................................................................... 323
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 324
COMMUNITY VALUES TRUMP FREE SPEECH .................................................................................................................. 325
FREE SPEECH HAS NO INTRINSIC WORTH ....................................................................................................................... 326
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PORNOGRAPHY AND HATE SPEECH JUSTIFY RESTRICTING SPEECH ............................................................................... 327
HATE SPEECH DOES NOT DESERVE PROTECTION ........................................................................................................... 328
MARILYN FRENCH .................................................................................................................................. 329
Feminism ........................................................................................................................................................................ 329
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 331
ALL SOCIAL STRUCTURES ARE OPPRESSIVE TO WOMEN ................................................................................................ 332
REVOLUTIONARY FEMINIST ACTION IS NECESSARY FOR SOCIAL CHANGE ..................................................................... 333
FEMINISM IS DIVIDED BY RACIAL ISSUES ........................................................................................................................ 334
BETTY FRIEDAN ...................................................................................................................................... 335
POLITICAL WRITER 1921 - ............................................................................................................................................... 335
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 335
A Practical Philosophy of Women’s Liberation ............................................................................................................... 335
Criticism from Radical Feminism .................................................................................................................................... 336
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 336
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 337
LIBERATION MUST EMPHASIZE POLITICAL ACTION OVER PHILOSOPHY ........................................................................ 338
WE MUST MOVE BEYOND THE POLITICS OF GENDER DIFFERENCE ............................................................................... 338
TRADITIONAL FEMINISM IS NO LONGER APPROPRIATE FOR LIBERATION ..................................................................... 339
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ARE KEY TO WOMEN’S LIBERATION ........................................................................................ 339
WOMEN’S LIBERATION DOES NOT THREATEN MEN ...................................................................................................... 340
JONATHAN GLOVER ............................................................................................................................... 341
BIOGRAPHY OF JONATHAN GLOVER............................................................................................................................... 341
GLOVER ON ETHICS......................................................................................................................................................... 341
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 345
UTILITARIANISM IS A FLAWED MORAL THEORY ............................................................................................................. 346
EXTERNAL, AUTHORITY-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS ARE FLAWED ................................................................................... 347
DEONTOLOGY PROVIDES NO STABLE BASIS FOR JUDGING ACTIONS ............................................................................. 348
THE MORAL RESOURCES PROVIDE A PRACTICAL CRITERIA TO EVALUATE THE MORALITY OF ACTIONS AND
ALTERNATIVES ................................................................................................................................................................ 349
THE MORAL RESOURCES OFFER A MORE HUMANIZED ETHICAL THEORY ..................................................................... 350
TRADITIONAL ETHICAL THEORIES PROVIDE ADEQUATE RESTRAINTS ............................................................................ 351
EMMA GOLDMAN .................................................................................................................................. 352
FEMINIST AND ANARCHIST (1869- 1940) ....................................................................................................................... 352
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 352
One Of The Most Dangerous Women In America .......................................................................................................... 353
Goldman In Private And Public ....................................................................................................................................... 353
Philosophy And Contributions To Anarchist Thought ..................................................................................................... 354
Application To Debate .................................................................................................................................................... 354
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 355
INDIVIDUALISM IS BETTER THAN SOCIETY ..................................................................................................................... 356
DUALISM MUST BE STOPPED TO LIBERATE WOMEN ..................................................................................................... 357
PAUL GOODMAN ................................................................................................................................... 358
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PAUL GOODMAN ..................................................................................................................... 358
PSYCHOLOGY .................................................................................................................................................................. 358
ANARCHISM .................................................................................................................................................................... 359
MILITARISM .................................................................................................................................................................... 361
ECOLOGY AND SCIENCE .................................................................................................................................................. 362
EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND PRISONS ............................................................................................................................ 362
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 364
ANARCHISM IS GOOD ..................................................................................................................................................... 365
MUNICIPAL LIBERTARIANISM IS KEY TO COUNTER APATHY .......................................................................................... 366
LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM REINFORCES THE STATE .................................................................................................. 367
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY IS BAD ........................................................................................................................................ 368
ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA......................................................................................................................... 369
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MARXIST REVOLUTIONARY AND ECONOMIST (1928- 1967) .......................................................................................... 369
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 369
Building Socialist Consciousness ..................................................................................................................................... 370
Are Che’s Ideas Feasible? ............................................................................................................................................... 371
Implications For Debate.................................................................................................................................................. 371
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 372
A CONSCIOUSNESS SHIFT TOWARDS SOCIALISM IS NECESSARY .................................................................................... 373
CAPITALISM IMPEDES GLOBAL PEACE AND HUMAN PROGRESS .................................................................................... 374
CAPITALISM DESTROYS INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING AND LIBERTY .................................................................................... 375
LANI GUINIER......................................................................................................................................... 376
GUINIER’S THOUGHT ...................................................................................................................................................... 376
SOME OF GUINIER’S SOLUTIONS .................................................................................................................................... 377
GUINIER AND THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY ............................................................................................................ 378
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 380
GUINIER’S VIEWS AREN’T BAD: THE MEDIA LIES TO US ABOUT THEM .......................................................................... 381
LANI GUINIER’S IDEAS ARE GOOD FOR MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY .............................................................................. 382
GUINIER’S IDEAS WON’T HELP SOLVE RACISM OR PROMOTE DEMOCRACY ................................................................. 383
GUINIER’S IDEAS WILL NOT BE EFFECTIVE ...................................................................................................................... 384
GUSTAVO ESTEVA .................................................................................................................................. 385
LIFE AND WORK .............................................................................................................................................................. 385
Grassroots Post-Modernism ........................................................................................................................................... 385
The Strength of Thinking and Acting Locally ................................................................................................................... 387
Escaping Parochialism..................................................................................................................................................... 387
Decentralization vs. Decentralism .................................................................................................................................. 388
Application to Debate ..................................................................................................................................................... 388
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 389
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ARE HARMFUL ........................................................................................................ 390
GLOBAL THINKING IS IMPOSSIBLE .................................................................................................................................. 391
THE WISDOM OF THINKING SMALL ................................................................................................................................ 392
LOCAL AUTONOMY AND SELF-GOVERNANCE ARE KEY TO SUSTAINABLE QUALITY OF LIFE .......................................... 393
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ARE EFFECTIVE ........................................................................................................ 394
ALEXANDER HAMILTON ......................................................................................................................... 395
THE LIFE OF HAMILTON .................................................................................................................................................. 395
HIS IDEAS ........................................................................................................................................................................ 395
HAMILTON’S ECONOMIC IDEAS...................................................................................................................................... 396
HAMILTON’S OPPRESSIVE IDEAS .................................................................................................................................... 397
DENOUMENT .................................................................................................................................................................. 398
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 399
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION AND STRONG CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS ARE NEEDED .......................................................... 400
HAMILTON’S ECONOMIC IDEAS WERE GOOD ................................................................................................................ 401
HAMILTON WAS OPPOSED TO DEMOCRACY .................................................................................................................. 402
HAMILTON WAS AN ECONOMIC ELITIST ........................................................................................................................ 403
VACLAV HAVEL ...................................................................................................................................... 404
WHO IS VACLAV HAVEL?................................................................................................................................................. 404
HAVEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: MELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE ............................................................................ 405
THE NATURE OF POLITICAL POWER IN POST-TOTALITARIAN SYSTEMS ......................................................................... 405
REFUSING TO PLAY: THE POSSIBILITY OF RESISTANCE ................................................................................................... 407
CRITICISMS AND RESPONSES .......................................................................................................................................... 408
MODERN APPLICATIONS AND RELEVANCE TO L.D. DEBATE........................................................................................... 408
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 409
HAVEL’S LIVING IN TRUTH IS THE ANTIDOTE TO POLITICAL REPRESSION ...................................................................... 410
THE VALUE OF SELF-TRANSCENDENCE IS PARAMOUNT ................................................................................................ 411
HAVEL’S TRANSCENDENT MORALITY FAILS .................................................................................................................... 412
LIVING IN TRUTH IS A BAD PHILOSOPHY ........................................................................................................................ 413
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TOM HAYDEN ........................................................................................................................................ 414
TOM HAYDEN’S LIFE ....................................................................................................................................................... 414
IDEAS OF TOM HAYDEN .................................................................................................................................................. 415
THE CHARGE OF MORAL AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM................................................................................................... 416
OTHER CRITICISMS OF HAYDEN ...................................................................................................................................... 417
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 418
THE 1960s ACTIVISM OF SDS AND HAYDEN WAS POSITIVE ........................................................................................... 419
HAYDEN’S CRITICS ARE WRONG – THE 60s WEREN’T ABOUT MORAL RELATIVISM ....................................................... 420
HAYDEN’S POLITICAL AGENDA WAS SECONDARY: HE JUST WANTED TROUBLE ............................................................ 421
HAYDEN SAID HE WANTED PEACE, BUT HE REALLY WANTED VIOLENCE ....................................................................... 422
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL ....................................................................................................... 423
GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1770-1831) ............................................................................................................................. 423
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 423
Dialectical Reason: The Struggle And Synthesis Of Opposites ....................................................................................... 424
History: The Realm Of The Absolute ............................................................................................................................... 424
Objections From Left To Right ........................................................................................................................................ 425
Implications For Debate.................................................................................................................................................. 426
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 427
PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH IS DIALECTICAL ......................................................................................................................... 428
THE STATE IS THE HIGHEST POLITICAL VALUE ................................................................................................................ 429
INDIVIDUALISM IS FLAWED ............................................................................................................................................ 429
A STRONG STATE IS NECESSARY FOR BOTH FREEDOM AND ORDER .............................................................................. 430
PATRIARCHY IS NATURAL AND BENEVOLENT ................................................................................................................. 431
ANSWERING HEGEL................................................................................................................................ 432
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................................................. 432
BASIC HEGEL ................................................................................................................................................................... 433
DIALECTICAL LOGIC ......................................................................................................................................................... 433
THE CASE FOR ALLEGIANCE TO THE STATE ..................................................................................................................... 435
POINTS OF ATTACK ......................................................................................................................................................... 435
HEGEL’S IDEALISM .......................................................................................................................................................... 435
THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE DIALECTIC ............................................................................................................................. 436
HEGEL’S POLITICAL BIAS CONTRADICTS HIS DIALECTICAL APPROACH ........................................................................... 437
USING MARX TO REFUTE HEGEL ..................................................................................................................................... 438
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 439
HEGEL’S WORK IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATE ................................................................................. 441
HEGELIANISM IS PHILOSOPHICALLY UNSOUND ............................................................................................................. 441
HEGEL IS ETHICALLY UNSOUND ...................................................................................................................................... 442
HEGELIANISM IS LITTLE MORE THAN A POLITICAL TOOL ............................................................................................... 443
HEGELIANISM IS TOTALITARIAN ..................................................................................................................................... 444
HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IS INCORRECT .......................................................................................................... 444
MARTIN HEIDEGGER .............................................................................................................................. 445
GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1889-1976) ............................................................................................................................. 445
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 445
Being And The Human Being .......................................................................................................................................... 446
Against “Isms” And Systems ........................................................................................................................................... 447
Implications For Debate.................................................................................................................................................. 447
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 448
WE MUST QUESTION AND CRITIQUE ALL COMMONLY HELD TRUTHS ........................................................................... 449
“VALUE” THINKING MUST BE CRITICALLY REJECTED ...................................................................................................... 450
“-ISMS” (EG, SOCIALISM) MUST BE CRITICALLY REJECTED ............................................................................................. 451
INDIVIDUALISM IS PHILOSOPHICALLY FLAWED AND SHOULD BE REJECTED .................................................................. 452
ANSWERING HEIDEGGER ........................................................................................................................ 453
Why Saying "Heidegger Was A Nazi" Isn't (Just) An Ad Hominem Attack ...................................................................... 454
Attacking The Defenders Of Heidegger .......................................................................................................................... 454
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Why This Matters So Much ............................................................................................................................................ 455
Philosophical Problems With Heidegger (Of The Non-Nazi Variety) .............................................................................. 456
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 458
HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY WAS INTRINSICALLY A NAZI ONE ........................................................................................ 459
HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY ENTRENCHES POWER HIERARCHIES ................................................................................... 460
SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS EXIST WITH HEIDEGGER ..................................................................................... 461
MARXIST CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER IS SUPERIOR ........................................................................................................... 462
RICHARD HILDRETH ................................................................................................................................ 463
BACKGROUND................................................................................................................................................................. 463
ACTIVISM AND CAREER .................................................................................................................................................. 463
VIEWS ON SLAVERY ........................................................................................................................................................ 464
THEORY OF MORALS ....................................................................................................................................................... 464
ON RELIGION .................................................................................................................................................................. 465
HISTORY .......................................................................................................................................................................... 465
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 467
ACTIVISM IS NECESSARY FOR THE SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY ......................................................................................... 469
CURRENT "OBJECTIVE" HISTORICAL MODELS ARE FLAWED ........................................................................................... 470
THOMAS HOBBES .................................................................................................................................. 471
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER 1588 - 1679 ............................................................................................................................ 471
Biographical Background ................................................................................................................................................ 471
Philosophical Comparisons ............................................................................................................................................. 471
Hobbes Natural Philosophy Theory ................................................................................................................................ 471
Hobbes Moral Philosophy ............................................................................................................................................... 472
Leviathan and Other Political Writings ........................................................................................................................... 472
Criticism of Hobbes Theories .......................................................................................................................................... 473
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 474
NATURAL LAW AND CIVIL LAW ARE LINKED TOGETHER ................................................................................................ 475
CONFLICT IS INEVITABLE AMONG PEOPLE IN THEIR NATURAL STATE ........................................................................... 475
UNCIVIL STATES PRODUCE WAR..................................................................................................................................... 476
SELF DEFENSE IS A LAW OF NATURE .............................................................................................................................. 476
RIGHT TO SELF DEFENSE VIOLATES THE LAW OF CIVIL SOCIETY .................................................................................... 477
STRONG SOVEREIGNTY DESTROYS FREE SOCIETY .......................................................................................................... 477
BELL HOOKS ........................................................................................................................................... 478
WRITING STYLE ............................................................................................................................................................... 478
RACISM ........................................................................................................................................................................... 479
FEMINISM ....................................................................................................................................................................... 479
RACISM DIVIDING FEMINISM ......................................................................................................................................... 480
hooks in LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE ............................................................................................................................. 481
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 482
RACISM PERMEATES US CULTURE .................................................................................................................................. 483
THE INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH IS BEST ...................................................................................................................... 484
HOOKS' CRITICISM IS INEFFECTIVE ................................................................................................................................. 485
MULTIDIMENSIONALITY IS SUPERIOR TO INTERSECTIONALITY ...................................................................................... 486
IVAN ILLICH............................................................................................................................................ 487
BIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................................................... 487
PHILOSOPHY ................................................................................................................................................................... 487
ILLICH IN DEBATE ............................................................................................................................................................ 490
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 491
MORALITY IS DEPENDENT ON INDIVIDUAL CHOICE ....................................................................................................... 493
INSTITUTIONS ARE OPPRESSIVE ..................................................................................................................................... 494
DESCHOOLING IS PHILOSOPHICALLY BANKRUPT ........................................................................................................... 495
INSTITUTIONS ARE NECESSARY ...................................................................................................................................... 496
IMMANUEL KANT .................................................................................................................................. 497
Political Philosopher (1724- 1804) .................................................................................................................................. 497
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Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 499
MORALITY IS EMBEDDED IN TILE HUMAN MIND ........................................................................................................... 500
VALUES MUST BE RATIONAL AND REASONABLE ............................................................................................................ 501
ACTION MUST BE REGULATED BY THE GOOD ................................................................................................................ 502
MORALITY IS/SHOULD BE UNIVERSAL ............................................................................................................................ 503
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. ..................................................................................................................... 504
HISTORICAL CONTEXT, LIFE, AND WORK ........................................................................................................................ 504
RACIAL EQUALITY............................................................................................................................................................ 505
THE DEVELOPMENT OF KINGS PHILOSOPHY OF NONVIOLENCE .................................................................................... 505
RECONCILIATION ............................................................................................................................................................ 505
PREREQUISITES OF A NONVIOLENT CAMPAIGN ............................................................................................................. 505
THE PURPOSE OF NONVIOLENCE ................................................................................................................................... 506
JUSTIFICATIONS FOR NONVIOLENCE .............................................................................................................................. 506
JUSTICE ........................................................................................................................................................................... 506
CRITIQUES OF KING'S METHOD ...................................................................................................................................... 507
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 508
NONVIOLENCE IS A SUPERIOR TACTIC FOR SOCIAL CHANGE ......................................................................................... 509
WE MUST TAKE DIRECT ACTION TO CONFRONT INJUSTICE ........................................................................................... 510
KING’S DISCOURSE ONLY RE-ENTRENCHES OPPRESSION ............................................................................................... 511
KING’S FOCUS ON BLACK/WHITE RACISM IS INSUFFICIENT ........................................................................................... 512
ANSWERING KING .................................................................................................................................. 513
How King’s Philosophy Is (Mis) Used .............................................................................................................................. 513
Additional Important Things King Said: Economics ........................................................................................................ 514
King And Pacifism ........................................................................................................................................................... 514
Answering King's Nonviolence Views ............................................................................................................................. 515
Some Logical Problems With Pacifism ............................................................................................................................ 516
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 518
KING’S LEGACY IS PERVERTED TO ATTACK AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ................................................................................. 519
KING'S NONVIOLENCE FAILS IN ISOLATION .................................................................................................................... 520
PACIFISM GENERALLY FAILS ........................................................................................................................................... 521
MARTIN LUTHER KING AND MALCOLM X WERE NOT OPPOSITES.................................................................................. 522
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI ........................................................................................................................ 523
Russian Socialist (1873-1952) ......................................................................................................................................... 523
Feminism ........................................................................................................................................................................ 523
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 525
SOCIALISM IS GOOD FOR WOMEN ................................................................................................................................. 526
THERE IS A LACK OF UNITY WITHIN THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT ................................................................................... 527
INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATION IS LIMITED IN BUREAUCRACIES ........................................................................................ 528
GOVERNMENT SHOULD SUPPORT WORKING MOTHERS ............................................................................................... 528
CBERIS KRAMARAE ................................................................................................................................ 529
Feminism ........................................................................................................................................................................ 529
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 530
TECHNOLOGY IS A MALE-DOMINATED PROCESS ........................................................................................................... 531
TECHNOLOGY DOES NOT IMPROVE WOMEN’S QUALITY OF LIFE .................................................................................. 532
MEN’S WORDS AND DICTIONARIES EXCLUDE THE FEMALE VOICE ................................................................................ 533
PETER KROPOTKIN ................................................................................................................................. 534
ANARCHIST (1842-192 1) ................................................................................................................................................ 534
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 534
The Struggle Between Anarchism And Socialism ........................................................................................................... 534
“The Noblest Man” And His Basic Philosophy ................................................................................................................ 535
Critical Of Socialism And Other Schools Of Anarchism ................................................................................................... 536
Application To Debate .................................................................................................................................................... 536
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 537
MORAL OBLIGATION NOTIONS ARE HARMFUL .............................................................................................................. 538
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MUTUAL AID IS THE BASIS FOR ALL LIFE ......................................................................................................................... 539
THE STATE TRIES TO CRUSH THE HUMAN SPIRIT ........................................................................................................... 540
HUMANS SEEK PLEASURE AND TRY TO AVOID PAIN ...................................................................................................... 541
LEGAL NEUTRALITY RESPONSES .............................................................................................................. 542
Legal ‘neutrality’ and White privilege ............................................................................................................................. 542
Interest-Convergence Theory: Blacks progress only when Whites benefit .................................................................... 544
Victim-based perspectives as correctives ....................................................................................................................... 545
Answering Legal Neutrality with Critical Race Theory .................................................................................................... 545
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 546
THE LAW IS INHERENTLY RACIST .................................................................................................................................... 547
RACISM IS USUALLY UNINTENTIONAL ............................................................................................................................ 548
LAW PRESERVES THE PRIVILEGES CURRENTLY ENJOYED BY WHITES ............................................................................. 549
WHITES WILL NOT END THEIR OWN LEGAL PRIVILEGE .................................................................................................. 550
EMMANUEL LEVINAS ............................................................................................................................. 551
BIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................................................... 551
LEVINAS'S PHILOSOPHY: THE OTHER AS PRIOR TO THE SELF ......................................................................................... 552
INCOMMENSURABILITY .................................................................................................................................................. 553
THE FUTILITY OF SYSTEMIC ETHICS................................................................................................................................. 553
AGAINST INDIVIDUALISM ............................................................................................................................................... 554
PROBLEMS WITH LEVINAS .............................................................................................................................................. 554
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 557
WE SHOULD REJECT SYSTEMIC VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS ............................................................................ 558
LEVINASIAN PHILOSOPHY IS GOOD FOR SOCIETY .......................................................................................................... 559
LEVINAS'S LACK OF CLARITY DOOMS HIS PHILOSOPHY .................................................................................................. 560
LEVINAS'S PHILOSOPHY CANNOT SOLVE FOR THE INJUSTICE HE DESCRIBES................................................................. 560
LEVINAS IS UNREASONABLE AND ABSOLUTIST .............................................................................................................. 561
UNIVERSAL VALUES EXIST: THE INCOMMENSURABILITY THESIS IS WRONG ................................................................. 561
ROBERT JAY LIFTON ............................................................................................................................... 562
ROOTS OF THE THEORY .................................................................................................................................................. 562
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE .................................................................................................................................... 563
NAZI HOLOCAUST AND NUCLEAR THREAT ..................................................................................................................... 563
DEBATE APPLICATION OF THESE THEORIES .................................................................................................................... 564
HOW TO GET AROUND THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY .................................................................................................... 565
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 567
NUCLEARIST PSYCHOLOGY LEADS US TO THE NUCLEAR PRECIPICE ............................................................................... 568
NUCLEARISM, the LANGUAGE OF NUKES, HAS TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES ................................................................... 569
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY ....................................................................................................... 570
LIFTON'S VIEWS ARE WRONG ......................................................................................................................................... 571
JOHN LOCKE........................................................................................................................................... 572
British Philosopher (1632-1704) ..................................................................................................................................... 572
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 573
LAWS OF NATURE REGULATE HUMAN VALUING ........................................................................................................... 574
MORALITY AND VALUES ARE NOT UNIVERSAL ............................................................................................................... 574
VALUE OF LIBERTY DEMANDS FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND WILL ................................................................................ 576
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD ...................................................................................................................... 577
Post-Modern Philosopher ............................................................................................................................................... 577
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 579
HUMAN VALUING DOES NOT FOLLOW OBJECTIVE/LINEAR PROGRESSION ................................................................... 580
MUST UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE TO UNDERSTAND VALUES ......................................................................................... 581
OBJECTIVE TRUTHS DO NOT EXIST ................................................................................................................................. 582
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI .......................................................................................................................... 583
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER 1469 - 1577 ............................................................................................................................ 583
Biographical Background ................................................................................................................................................ 583
Contributions to Political Science ................................................................................................................................... 583
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Themes in Machiavelli s Philosophy ............................................................................................................................... 584
Criticism and analysis...................................................................................................................................................... 584
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 586
LACK OF FREEDOM CREATES MISERIES FOR A CITY ........................................................................................................ 587
A REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT IS A PREFERABLE FORM OF GOVERNMENT ................................................................... 587
RELIGION IS NECESSARY FOR A STRONG SOCIETY .......................................................................................................... 588
IT IS BETTER TO TEMPORIZE AN EVIL FORCE THAN TO OPPOSE IT ................................................................................. 588
ALASDAIR MACLNTYRE .......................................................................................................................... 589
Moral Philosopher .......................................................................................................................................................... 589
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 591
UNIVERSAL MORAL PRINCIPLES DO NOT EXIST .............................................................................................................. 592
PHILOSOPHY CAN CHANGE THE HUMAN COND1T ION .................................................................................................. 593
UNDERSTANDING HISTORY IS CRITICAL FOR INTERPRETING OUR VALUES .................................................................... 594
CATHARINE A. MACKINNON ................................................................................................................... 595
LEGAL THEORIST 1946 - .................................................................................................................................................. 595
Biographical Background ................................................................................................................................................ 595
Male-Female Relations ................................................................................................................................................... 596
Criticism and Critique ..................................................................................................................................................... 596
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 598
PORNOGRAPHY IS ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN ................................................................................................................. 599
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND LAWS ARE MALE-ORIENTED ........................................................................................... 599
ABORTION LAWS MAINTAIN MAN’S CONTROL OVER WOMEN ..................................................................................... 600
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT HAS BEEN SACRIFICED TO FIRST AMENDMENT ................................................................ 600
MACKINNON’S CENSORSHIP WILL NOT IMPROVE WOMEN’S LIVES .............................................................................. 601
PORNOGRAPHY DOES NOT LEAD TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ............................................................................... 601
MACKINNON’S APPROACH TO PORNOGRAPHY IS FLAWED ........................................................................................... 602
JAMES MADISON ................................................................................................................................... 603
THE LIFE OF MADISON .................................................................................................................................................... 603
MADISON ON THE POLITICAL SYSTEM............................................................................................................................ 604
MADISON ON THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY ............................................................................................................ 604
MADISON ON RELIGION ................................................................................................................................................. 605
CRITICS OF MADISON ..................................................................................................................................................... 605
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 608
MADISON’S IDEA OF A FEDERAL REPUBLIC MAKES FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE ............................................................. 609
FEDERALISM IS KEY TO STABLE AND PROSPEROUS GOVERNMENT ............................................................................... 610
MADISONIAN FEDERALISM IS JUST AN EXCUSE TO CURB REAL DEMOCRACY ............................................................... 611
MADISON WAS AN ELITIST WHOSE THEORIES FAVORED ONLY RICH LANDOWNERS .................................................... 612
MALCOLM X........................................................................................................................................... 613
MALCOLM X IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.............................................................................................................. 613
WHY MALCOLM REJECTS CIVIL RIGHTS AS A VALUE/CRITERIA ...................................................................................... 613
MALCOLM X ON REVOLUTION (CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE) ................................................................................................... 614
MALCOLM X AND THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE ............................................................................................................ 615
HOW TO EMPLOY MALCOLM X’S VALUES OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND IN L-D DEBATE ........................................................... 616
HOW TO REFUTE THE USE OF MALCOLM X’S PHILOSOPHIES IN L-D DEBATE ................................................................ 616
MALCOLM X IN RELATION TO SEVERAL COMMON VALUES AND/OR CRITERIA ............................................................. 617
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 618
CIVIL RIGHTS ARE A POOR VALUE ................................................................................................................................... 619
HUMAN RIGHTS OUTWEIGH CIVIL RIGHTS ..................................................................................................................... 620
CIVIL/HUMAN RIGHTS DISTINCTIONS IS FLAWED; CIVIL RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS ................................................. 621
HUMAN RIGHTS ARE NOT PARAMOUNT ........................................................................................................................ 622
MAO TSE-TUNG ..................................................................................................................................... 623
Chinese-Political Philosopher (1893-1976) ..................................................................................................................... 623
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 624
DEMOCRATIC VALUES AND STRONG ECONOMY ARE INTERDEPENDENT ...................................................................... 625
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VALUE SYSTEM MUST SOLVE OPPRESSION .................................................................................................................... 625
MAJORITARIANISM SHOULD BE THE CORE GUIDE FOR SOCIAL ACTION ........................................................................ 626
HERBERT MARCUSE ............................................................................................................................... 627
Social Philosopher ........................................................................................................................................................... 627
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 629
VALUES ARE INSEPARABLE FROM ACTION ..................................................................................................................... 630
VALUE OF FREEDOM IS IMPORTANT TO AN ADVANCED SOCIETY ................................................................................. 631
KARL MARX ........................................................................................................................................... 632
Communist-Political Philosopher (1818-1883) ............................................................................................................... 632
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 633
MUST EMBRACE A COMMUNIST VISION OF VALUES ..................................................................................................... 634
MUST REJECT VALUES THAT ARE BASED IN CAPITALIST ECONOMIES ............................................................................ 635
CAPITALISM AND MARKET FORCES PERPETUATE ALIENATION ...................................................................................... 636
WORK IS THE CORE HUMAN INSTINCT OR VALUE .......................................................................................................... 637
ABRAHAM H. MASLOW .......................................................................................................................... 638
Human Motivation (1908-1970) ..................................................................................................................................... 638
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 640
BASIC HUMAN NEEDS ARE HIERARCHICAL ..................................................................................................................... 641
NEEDS ARE CONSISTENT ACROSS CULTURES ................................................................................................................. 641
UNMET NEEDS NEGATIVELY IMPACT PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH .................................................................................... 642
JOHN STUART MILL ................................................................................................................................ 643
British-Political Philosopher (1806-1873) ....................................................................................................................... 643
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 644
CANNOT SILENCE INDIVIDUAL VOICES ........................................................................................................................... 645
JUSTICE IS THE HIGHEST VALUE ...................................................................................................................................... 646
JUST SOCIETIES CAN REGULATE BEHAVIOR .................................................................................................................... 646
RALPH NADER ........................................................................................................................................ 647
Nader’s Life and Work .................................................................................................................................................... 647
The Philosophical Basis of Nader’s Politics ..................................................................................................................... 648
Nader’s Political Principles.............................................................................................................................................. 649
Objections to Nader ........................................................................................................................................................ 650
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 651
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 652
EGALITARIAN CRITERIA OF JUSTICE IS BEST.................................................................................................................... 653
CORPORATE POWER THREATENS THE PUBLIC GOOD .................................................................................................... 653
GLOBAL FREE TRADE HAS HORRIBLE IMPACTS ............................................................................................................... 654
NADER’S PHILOSOPHY HURTS DEMOCRACY .................................................................................................................. 655
NADER IS ELITIST AND TOTALITARIAN ............................................................................................................................ 655
NADER’S ANTI-CORPORATE AGENDA IS UNDESIRABLE .................................................................................................. 656
NADER PRACTICES A RHETORIC OF FEAR AND OVERSIMPLIFICATION ........................................................................... 656
ARNE NAESS .......................................................................................................................................... 657
WHO IS ARNE NAESS? ..................................................................................................................................................... 657
WHAT IS DEEP ECOLOGY? ............................................................................................................................................... 657
ANTHROPOCENTRISM, BIOCENTRISM, ECOCENTRISM .................................................................................................. 658
GESTALT ONTOLOGY....................................................................................................................................................... 658
THE PROBLEMS WITH TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH .................................................................................. 659
TO REFORM OR NOT TO REFORM? ................................................................................................................................ 659
MAINSTREAM CRITICISMS .............................................................................................................................................. 660
CRITICISMS FROM SOCIAL ECOLOGISTS ......................................................................................................................... 660
CRITICISMS FROM ECOFEMINISTS .................................................................................................................................. 660
NAESS IN LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE ........................................................................................................................... 661
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 662
DEEP ECOLOGY IS THE BEST FORM OF ENVIRONMENTALISM ....................................................................................... 663
OBJECTIONS TO DEEP ECOLOGY ARE MISTAKEN ............................................................................................................ 664
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DEEP ECOLOGY IS NOT THE BEST WAY TO PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT ................................................................... 665
DEEP ECOLOGY OPPRESSES HUMANS ............................................................................................................................ 666
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ............................................................................................................................ 667
PHILOSOPHER (1844-1900)............................................................................................................................................. 667
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 667
The Attack On Values...................................................................................................................................................... 668
Critical History Of Values ................................................................................................................................................ 668
The Transvaluation Of Values ......................................................................................................................................... 669
How Accurate Is Nietzsche’s Assessment? ..................................................................................................................... 669
Critiquing Values: Implications For Debate .................................................................................................................... 670
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 671
THERE IS NO NATURAL BASIS FOR MORALITY ................................................................................................................ 672
UNIVERSAL MORAL SYSTEMS SHOULD BE REJECTED ..................................................................................................... 673
MORAL SYSTEMS ARE BAD FOR HUMANITY ................................................................................................................... 674
UTILITARIANISM SHOULD BE REJECTED ......................................................................................................................... 675
SUFFERING IS GOOD AND WE SHOULDN’T TRY TO ELIMINATE IT .................................................................................. 675
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ............................................................................................................................ 676
THE "OLD" NIETZSCHE .................................................................................................................................................... 676
THE “NEW” NIETZSCHE ................................................................................................................................................... 677
AUTHENTICITY ................................................................................................................................................................ 677
FEMINISM ....................................................................................................................................................................... 678
CRITICISM OF NIETZSCHE ................................................................................................................................................ 679
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................... 680
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 682
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS RELEVANT TO CURRENT VALUE QUESTIONS.................................................................... 683
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY FOSTERS FEMINIST VALUES ................................................................................................. 684
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS SEXIST ............................................................................................................................... 685
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS ELITIST .............................................................................................................................. 685
NIETZSCHE'S VIEW OF RELIGION IS FLAWED .................................................................................................................. 686
ROBERT NOZICK ..................................................................................................................................... 687
LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHER (b. 1938) ............................................................................................................................ 687
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 687
Moral Libertarianism ...................................................................................................................................................... 687
Some Objections ............................................................................................................................................................. 688
Implications For Debate.................................................................................................................................................. 689
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 689
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM IS THE BEST POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC OPTION ..................................................................... 690
SOCIAL CONCERNS SHOULD NOT TAKE PRIORITY OVER INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS................................................................ 690
MINIMAL STATES BEST GUARANTEE FREEDOM FOR EVERYONE ................................................................................... 691
CAPITALISM IS A JUST AND FAIR SYSTEM ....................................................................................................................... 691
RAWLSIAN JUSTICE SHOULD BE REJECTED ..................................................................................................................... 692
ECONOMIC REDISTRIBUTION IS IMMORAL AND INFEASIBLE ......................................................................................... 693
JOSEPH NYE, JR. ..................................................................................................................................... 694
THE LIFE OF JOSEPH NYE, JR. .......................................................................................................................................... 694
NYE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ............................................................................................................................. 695
NYE ON GLOBALIZATION ................................................................................................................................................ 696
CRITICS OF NYE ............................................................................................................................................................... 696
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 698
SOFT POWER AND DEMOCRACY PROMOTION ARE INCREASINGLY KEY ........................................................................ 699
ISOLATION AND CONTAINMENT DON’T WORK IN POLICY-MAKING .............................................................................. 700
NYE’S NOTION OF SOFT POWER IS WRONG ................................................................................................................... 701
NYE’S FOREIGN POLICY THINKING IS FLAWED ................................................................................................................ 702
THOMAS PAINE...................................................................................................................................... 703
POLITICAL PROPAGANDIST 1737 - 1809 ......................................................................................................................... 703
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Biographical Background ................................................................................................................................................ 703
Political and Social Philosophy ........................................................................................................................................ 703
Religious Beliefs .............................................................................................................................................................. 704
Summary of Writings and Publications........................................................................................................................... 704
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 706
GOVERNMENT EXISTS TO SERVE SOCIETY ...................................................................................................................... 707
PURPOSE OF SOCIETY IS TO SECURE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE ............................................................................................... 707
PRESENT LAWS CANNOT CONTROL FUTURE GENERATIONS .......................................................................................... 708
RIGHTS OF MAN EXISTED AT TIME OF CREATION .......................................................................................................... 708
H.A. PRICHARD ...................................................................................................................................... 709
BACKGROUND................................................................................................................................................................. 709
PRICHARD AND PUBLISHING .......................................................................................................................................... 709
THEORY ........................................................................................................................................................................... 709
DOES MORAL PHILOSOPHY REST ON A MISTAKE? ......................................................................................................... 710
MOTIVE AND PURPOSE DISTINCTION ............................................................................................................................. 710
TYPES OF INTUITIONISM ................................................................................................................................................. 710
NORMATIVE INTUITIONISM............................................................................................................................................ 711
NO STANDARD SUBCONCIOUS CRITERION ..................................................................................................................... 712
MORAL REALISM ............................................................................................................................................................. 712
MORAL APPLICATION TO EVALUATION .......................................................................................................................... 712
LINCOLN DOUGLAS DEBATE APPLICATIONS ................................................................................................................... 713
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 714
ESTABLISHMENT OF ETHICAL OR MORAL TRUTHS IS IMPOSSIBLE ................................................................................. 715
GOOD MOTIVE DOESN’T IMPLY GOOD MORALITY ......................................................................................................... 716
MORALITY IS NECESSARY ................................................................................................................................................ 717
EXCLUDING MORALS FROM LEGITIMATE TRUTHS JUSTIFIES WAR ................................................................................ 718
AYN RAND ............................................................................................................................................. 719
LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHER 1905 - 1982 ....................................................................................................................... 719
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 719
Objectivism ..................................................................................................................................................................... 719
Problems of Radical Individualism .................................................................................................................................. 720
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 721
MORAL ABSOLUTES EXIST .............................................................................................................................................. 722
HUMAN NEEDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN ECOLOGY ............................................................................................. 722
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER COLLECTIVE NEEDS ............................................................................... 723
CAPITALISM IS SUPERIOR TO SOCIALISM ....................................................................................................................... 724
ANSWERING OBJECTIVISM ..................................................................................................................... 725
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................... 725
Political And Ethical Implications .................................................................................................................................... 725
Attacking Objectivism ..................................................................................................................................................... 726
Rand's Fiction .................................................................................................................................................................. 726
Rationality ....................................................................................................................................................................... 727
Perspectives Critiquing Rand .......................................................................................................................................... 728
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 730
OBJECTIVIST REASON IS FLAWED AND DANGEROUS ..................................................................................................... 731
OBJECTIVISM CANNOT LEGITIMIZE POLITICAL ACTIONS ................................................................................................ 732
OBJECTIVISM IS OPPRESSIVE .......................................................................................................................................... 733
OBJECTIVISM IS HOMOPHOBIC AND SEXIST ................................................................................................................... 734
JOHN RAWLS ......................................................................................................................................... 735
Political Philosopher ....................................................................................................................................................... 735
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 737
DEMOCRACY IS A DESIRABLE VALUE .............................................................................................................................. 738
VALUES ARE DEFINED BY SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIONS ..................................................................................... 738
VALUES SHOULD BE ASSESSED BY “JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS” ............................................................................................ 739
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VALUES SHOULD BE ASSESSED BY “JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS” Part 2.................................................................................. 740
ANSWERING RAWLS............................................................................................................................... 741
Rawls’ Theory of Justice .................................................................................................................................................. 741
Rawls’ Political Liberalism ............................................................................................................................................... 742
The Problem of Material Distribution ............................................................................................................................. 743
The Problem of the Public Forum ................................................................................................................................... 743
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 746
RAWLSIAN JUSTICE IS IMMORAL .................................................................................................................................... 747
RAWLSIAN JUSTICE DOES NOT EMANCIPATE THE POOR AND DISADVANTAGED .......................................................... 748
POLITICAL LIBERALISM IS FLAWED ................................................................................................................................. 749
RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM IS BAD FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ................................................................................. 750
REALISM RESPONSES ............................................................................................................................. 751
Realism in international relations ................................................................................................................................... 751
The alleged epistemology of realism .............................................................................................................................. 752
Selectivity of data ........................................................................................................................................................... 752
The problem of elites ...................................................................................................................................................... 753
The problem of patriarchy .............................................................................................................................................. 753
Ignoring the history of cooperation ................................................................................................................................ 754
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 756
REALISM CAUSES WAR ................................................................................................................................................... 757
NATIONS CAN AND SHOULD ABANDON REALISM IN FAVOR OF COOPERATION ........................................................... 758
REALISM IS PHILOSOPHICALLY UNSOUND ...................................................................................................................... 759
REALISM DESTROYS THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ....................................................................................................... 760
REALISM HURTS WOMEN ............................................................................................................................................... 760
RELATIVISM RESPONSES ........................................................................................................................ 761
Types of relativism .......................................................................................................................................................... 761
Problems with relativism ................................................................................................................................................ 762
The inevitability of judgment .......................................................................................................................................... 762
The inevitability of universals ......................................................................................................................................... 763
The problem of manipulation ......................................................................................................................................... 764
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 766
RELATIVISM IS EPISTEMOLOGICALLY FLAWED ............................................................................................................... 767
UNIVERSAL VALUES EXIST ............................................................................................................................................... 768
RELATIVISM IS UNNECESSARY FOR TOLERANCE ............................................................................................................. 769
RELATIVISM HURTS WOMEN’S RIGHTS .......................................................................................................................... 770
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT ........................................................................................................................... 771
ROOSEVELT’S IMPORTANCE ........................................................................................................................................... 771
ROOSEVELT’S IDEAS ........................................................................................................................................................ 772
ECONOMIC POLICY: THE DEFENDERS ............................................................................................................................. 772
ECONOMIC POLICY: THE CRITICS .................................................................................................................................... 773
WAR POLICY .................................................................................................................................................................... 774
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 775
FDR’S ECONOMIC LEGACY IS CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT ................................................................................................... 776
FDR’S OVERSEAS POLICY WAS EXCELLENT ..................................................................................................................... 777
THE NEW DEAL WAS BAD FOR THE ECONOMY, PROLONGING THE DEPRESSION .......................................................... 778
FDR’S ECONOMIC POLICIES WERE NOT TRULY EFFECTIVE ............................................................................................. 779
RICHARD RORTY .................................................................................................................................... 780
Linguistic-Epistemological Philosopher .......................................................................................................................... 780
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 781
VALUES AND CRITERIA DEFY PRECISE OBJECTIVE MEASURES ........................................................................................ 782
MUST REJECT CURRENT PHILOSOPHY ............................................................................................................................ 783
MUST REJECT CURRENT PHILOSOPHY Part 2 .................................................................................................................. 784
ANSWERING RORTY ............................................................................................................................... 785
Rorty’s Pragmatism......................................................................................................................................................... 785
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The Problem of Public and Private Spheres .................................................................................................................... 786
How Rorty Kills the Possibility of Change ....................................................................................................................... 787
How Rorty Becomes an Apologist for Inequality ............................................................................................................ 788
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 790
RORTY’S PRAGMATISM UNDERMINES POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE ................................................................................. 791
RORTY EMBRACES A DESTRUCTIVE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DICHOTOMY................................................................................ 792
RORTY’S DISMISSAL OF “TRUTH” IS UNTENABLE AND HYPOCRITICAL ........................................................................... 793
RORTY’S DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM PREVENTS LIBERATION ........................................................................................... 794
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ..................................................................................................................... 795
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER 1712 - 1778 ............................................................................................................................ 795
The Social Contract ......................................................................................................................................................... 796
Theories on Education .................................................................................................................................................... 797
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 799
SOCIAL CONTRACT PROVIDES PROTECTION OF THE COMMON GOOD.......................................................................... 800
SEPARATION OF LEGISLATIVE AND EXECUTIVE BRANCHES MUST EXIST ........................................................................ 800
USE OF STRENGTH DOES NOT PRODUCE CIVIL SOCIETY ................................................................................................ 801
SOVEREIGNTY IS A FALLIBLE FORM OF GOVERNMENT .................................................................................................. 801
ROUSSEAU S CONCEPT OF THE GENERAL WILL IS FLAWED ............................................................................................ 802
RULE BY GENERAL WILL IS TOTALITARIAN ...................................................................................................................... 802
BERTRAND RUSSELL ............................................................................................................................... 803
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................................... 803
RUSSELL ON LOGIC AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY ........................................................................................................... 803
RUSSELL ON KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD ................................................................................................... 804
RUSSELL ON MORALITY .................................................................................................................................................. 804
RUSSELL ON EDUCATION ................................................................................................................................................ 805
RUSSELL ON METAPHYSICS ............................................................................................................................................. 805
RUSSELL ON THE THEORY OF INCOMPLETE SYMBOLS ................................................................................................... 805
RUSSELL ON PACIFISM .................................................................................................................................................... 805
RUSSELL ON DIVERSITY ................................................................................................................................................... 806
RUSSELL ON FREEDOM ................................................................................................................................................... 806
USING BERTRAND RUSSELL IN LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE .......................................................................................... 807
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 808
RUSSELL'S PHILOSOPHY IS KEY TO INCREASED HUMAN FREEDOM................................................................................ 809
SKEPTICISM IS THE BEST WAY TO AVOID PROBLEMS OF "TRUTH'S" .............................................................................. 810
THE IDEA OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT IS FLAWED ........................................................................................................ 811
PASSIVE RESISTANCE DOES NOT WORK ......................................................................................................................... 812
EDWARD SAID ....................................................................................................................................... 813
ORIENTALISM .................................................................................................................................................................. 814
SOLUTIONS?.................................................................................................................................................................... 815
APPLICATIONS OF ORIENTALISM TO DEBATE ................................................................................................................. 815
ANSWERING SAID ........................................................................................................................................................... 816
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 818
ORIENTALISM OPPRESSES AND CONTROLS THE "ORIENT" ............................................................................................ 819
ORIENTALISM IS WIDESPREAD ....................................................................................................................................... 820
STUDYING OTHERS IS OPPRESSIVE ................................................................................................................................. 820
NOTIONS OF IDENTITY AND ORIENT ARE CONSTRUCTIONS........................................................................................... 821
SAID 'S PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT SUGGEST SOLUTIONS .................................................................................................. 822
KIRKPATRICK SALE ................................................................................................................................. 823
BIO-REGIONALIST AND LUDDITE .................................................................................................................................... 823
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 823
Basic Ideas And Issues .................................................................................................................................................... 823
Application To Debate .................................................................................................................................................... 824
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 826
HIGH TECHNOLOGY IS IMMORAL AND WRONG ............................................................................................................. 827
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PEOPLE INHERENTLY WILL TRY TO DECENTRALIZE ......................................................................................................... 828
MUST HAVE BIOREGIONS TO SAVE HUMAN CULTURE................................................................................................... 828
CENTRALIZED, LARGE SYSTEMS ARE BAD: DECENTRALIZATION IS BETTER .................................................................... 829
HUMAN-SCALE BIOREGIONS ARE NOT UTOPIAN SOLUTIONS ........................................................................................ 830
GEORGE SAND ....................................................................................................................................... 831
WRITER 1804 - 1876 ....................................................................................................................................................... 831
Liberation of the Spirit .................................................................................................................................................... 831
A Feminist Critic of Feminism ......................................................................................................................................... 832
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 832
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 833
LIBERATION IS THE HIGHEST VALUE ............................................................................................................................... 834
LIBERATION OF HUMANITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN FEMINIST CAUSES ................................................................. 835
THE LIBERATION OF WORKING PEOPLE IS VITAL ............................................................................................................ 835
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE ................................................................................................................................ 836
PHILOSOPHER 1905 - 1980 ............................................................................................................................................. 836
Existentialism and the Priority of the Individual ............................................................................................................. 836
The Shift to Collective Responsibility .............................................................................................................................. 837
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 837
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 838
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM IS ABSOLUTE .............................................................................................................................. 839
INDIVIDUAL CHOICE OF VALUES IS CRITICAL FOR EVERYONE ........................................................................................ 840
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY ARE WHOLISTICALLY CONNECTED ....................................................................................... 840
RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS IS IMPORTANT .................................................................................................................. 841
ANSWERING SCHLAG ............................................................................................................................. 842
Explanation Of Schlag's Arguments ................................................................................................................................ 842
Some Initial Problems With Schlag ................................................................................................................................. 842
Ways To Answer Schlag, Starting With Contradictions .................................................................................................. 843
Social Implications Of Schlag .......................................................................................................................................... 844
And, Finally, A Reference To Wiffle Ball Bats .................................................................................................................. 845
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 847
SCHLAG'S PHILOSOPHY IS FLAWED ................................................................................................................................ 848
NORMATIVE DISCOURSE IS GOOD .................................................................................................................................. 849
SCHLAG'S ADVOCACY STEP IS WRONG ........................................................................................................................... 850
LAW IS NOT THE PROBLEM: LANGUAGE IS, WHICH SCHLAG MISUNDERSTANDS .......................................................... 851
HENRY SIDGWICK................................................................................................................................... 852
LIFE AND WORKS ............................................................................................................................................................ 852
EGOISM ........................................................................................................................................................................... 852
INTUITIONISM ................................................................................................................................................................. 853
UTILITARIANISM ............................................................................................................................................................. 853
SIDGWICK’S THREE PRINCIPLES ...................................................................................................................................... 854
SIDGWICK ON KANT ........................................................................................................................................................ 855
DUALISM ......................................................................................................................................................................... 856
SIDGWICK IN DEBATE ..................................................................................................................................................... 856
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 857
PROVISONS AND REGULATIONS ARE NECESSARY FOR A BENIFICIAL SOCIETY. .............................................................. 858
WE CAN DISCUSS THE TRUTH OF VALUES OUTSIDE OF LOGIC ....................................................................................... 859
UNIVERSAL CLAIMS TO MORALS AND ETHICS ARE INVALID .......................................................................................... 860
REGULATIONS DECREASE INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY .............................................................................................................. 861
PETER SINGER ........................................................................................................................................ 862
SINGER AND HISTORICAL OPPRESSION .......................................................................................................................... 862
THE DEFINITION OF EQUALITY ........................................................................................................................................ 863
CRITERIA FOR EXTENSION OF EQUALITY ........................................................................................................................ 863
INTERPRETATIONS OF SINGER’S CRITERIA ...................................................................................................................... 864
SINGER AND BIOCENTRISM ............................................................................................................................................ 864
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“THE GOOD OF THE ANIMAL”......................................................................................................................................... 864
PRACTICAL ETHICS .......................................................................................................................................................... 865
SINGER IN DEBATE .......................................................................................................................................................... 865
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 867
SPECIESISM IS THE NEW RACISM.................................................................................................................................... 868
REJECTING THE CRITERIA OF RATIONALITY IS BENEFICIAL ............................................................................................. 869
RATIONALITY IS BEST STANDARD ................................................................................................................................... 870
THE INCLUSION OF ANIMALS AS WORTHY OF EQUALITY IS BAD ................................................................................... 871
B.F. SKINNER.......................................................................................................................................... 872
BIOGRAPHY OF BURHUS FREDERIC SKINNER ................................................................................................................. 872
SKINNER AND THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR ..................................................................................................................... 872
OPERANT CONDITIONING ............................................................................................................................................... 872
SKINNER AND ANIMALS .................................................................................................................................................. 873
SKINNER, FREEDOM AND DIGNITY ................................................................................................................................. 873
SKINNER'S UTOPIC SOCIETY ............................................................................................................................................ 874
CRITICISMS OF SKINNER'S UTOPIA ................................................................................................................................. 874
SKINNER'S ETHICAL SKEPTICISM ..................................................................................................................................... 874
SKINNER AND "MENTALISITIC" CONSTRUCTS ................................................................................................................ 874
SKINNER AND CONTROL ................................................................................................................................................. 875
SKINNER'S THEORIES ON EDUCATION ............................................................................................................................ 875
SKINNER IN LD DEBATE ................................................................................................................................................... 875
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 877
CONTROLS ARE INEVITABLE............................................................................................................................................ 878
VALUES CAN'T SOLVE CONTROL ..................................................................................................................................... 879
BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION IS A REGIME OF DISCIPLANRY POWER ................................................................................ 880
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY IS KEY ............................................................................................................................................ 881
THEDA SKOCPOL .................................................................................................................................... 882
EXPLAINING SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS ................................................................................................................................ 882
MATERNALIST SOCIAL POLICY FRAMEWORK ................................................................................................................. 883
THE MISSING MIDDLE ..................................................................................................................................................... 884
LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE APPLICATIONS ................................................................................................................... 885
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 887
SKOCPOL’S THEORY OF THE STATE IS GOOD .................................................................................................................. 888
SKOCPOL'S UNDERSTANDING OF MATERNALISM SHOULD BE ADOPTED ...................................................................... 889
SKOCPOL’S THEORY CANNOT CREATE CHANGE ............................................................................................................. 890
MATERNALISM IS BAD FOR WOMEN.............................................................................................................................. 891
ADAM SMITH ......................................................................................................................................... 892
PHILOSOPHER/ECONOMIST 1723 - 1790........................................................................................................................ 892
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 892
Capitalism ....................................................................................................................................................................... 892
An Imperfect System ...................................................................................................................................................... 893
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 893
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 894
CONTEXT IS KEY TO HUMAN MORALS ............................................................................................................................ 895
UNRESTRAINED LIBERTY IS THE HIGHEST SOCIAL GOOD ............................................................................................... 895
CAPITALISM IS THE MOST JUST ECONOMIC SYSTEM ..................................................................................................... 896
ANSWERING SMITH ............................................................................................................................... 897
Who Was Adam Smith, Anyway? ................................................................................................................................... 897
Answering Adam Smith .................................................................................................................................................. 897
Myths About Adam Smith .............................................................................................................................................. 898
Argument The First: "The Market Should Have No Government Constraints" .............................................................. 899
Argument The Second: "Markets Produce Equality" ...................................................................................................... 900
Argument The Third: "The Invisible Hand" ..................................................................................................................... 900
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 902
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ADAM SMITH DID NOT DEFEND OR FOUND CAPITALISM .............................................................................................. 903
ADAM SMITH HAD MANY CONDITIONS FOR JUST MARKETS ......................................................................................... 904
SMITH’S FACTS WEREN’T RIGHT AND HIS THEORY WAS WRONG .................................................................................. 905
ADAM SMITH’S NOTIONS OF JUSTICE AREN’T HYPER-INDIVIDUALIST ........................................................................... 906
SUSAN SONTAG ..................................................................................................................................... 907
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AND CRITIC (b. 1933) ............................................................................................................ 907
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 907
Criticism, Education And Democracy .............................................................................................................................. 908
The Danger Of Elitism ..................................................................................................................................................... 908
Ideas For Debate ............................................................................................................................................................. 909
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 910
OPEN AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SOCIAL VALUE .................................................................. 911
ISSUES WHICH SEEM THREATENING MAY ACTUALLY BE HARMLESS ............................................................................. 911
“APOCALYPTIC SCENARIO” DISCOURSE SHOULD BE REJECTED ...................................................................................... 912
“ORDER” AS A POLITICAL VALUE SHOULD BE REJECTED ................................................................................................ 913
BARUCH SPINOZA .................................................................................................................................. 914
ETHICS ............................................................................................................................................................................. 914
PROOF OF GOD ............................................................................................................................................................... 915
NATURE........................................................................................................................................................................... 916
KNOWLEDGE ................................................................................................................................................................... 917
SPINOZA IN DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................................ 918
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 919
HUMAN BEINGS ARE DISTRACTED BY SHORT TERM DESIRES ........................................................................................ 921
THE TRUE GOOD IS BASED ON THE END, NOT THE MEANS OF HUMAN ACTION........................................................... 922
SPINOZA'S NATURALIZED EPISTIMOLOGY DENIES METAPHYSICAL FREE WILL. ............................................................. 923
NATURALIZED EPISTIMOLOGY SELECTIVLEY IGNORES VALUES ...................................................................................... 924
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON .................................................................................................................... 925
POLITICIAL ACTIVIST 1815 - 1902 ................................................................................................................................... 925
Life and Work.................................................................................................................................................................. 925
Women’s Liberation as a Basic American Value ............................................................................................................. 925
But Was She a Feminist? ................................................................................................................................................ 926
Implications for Debate .................................................................................................................................................. 926
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 927
WOMEN MUST BE SELF-SUFFICIENT TO BE LIBERATED .................................................................................................. 928
ALL POLITICAL STRUGGLES ARE INTERCONNECTED ....................................................................................................... 929
NATURAL LAW IS TILE BEST PHILOSOPHY FOR WOMEN ................................................................................................ 930
LEO STRAUSS ......................................................................................................................................... 931
GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1899- 1973) ............................................................................................................................ 931
Life And Work ................................................................................................................................................................. 931
The Philosophy Of Natural Right .................................................................................................................................... 931
The Good With A Capital G ............................................................................................................................................. 932
Some Objections ............................................................................................................................................................. 933
Ideas For Debate ............................................................................................................................................................. 933
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 934
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY SHOULD SEEK TRANSCENDENT MORAL PRINCIPLES ............................................................... 935
NATURAL RIGHT IS THE BEST POLITICAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY .............................................................................. 936
OBJECTIONS TO NATURAL RIGHT ARE INCORRECT ........................................................................................................ 937
TAOISM ................................................................................................................................................. 938
Chinese Philosophy ......................................................................................................................................................... 938
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 939
OUR VALUES ARE TIED TO INNER STRENGTH ................................................................................................................. 940
OUR VALUES ARE TIED TO INNER STRENGTH Part 2....................................................................................................... 941
VALUES CANNOT BE VIEWED AS OBJECTIVE TRUTHS ..................................................................................................... 942
HENRY DAVID THOREAU ........................................................................................................................ 943
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BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 947
HIGHER INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE IS MOST IMPORTANT .............................................................................................. 948
INTUITION AND NATURE SHOULD DETERMINE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE .................................................................... 949
THOREAU’S WORK IS INCONSISTENT AND PARADOXICAL ............................................................................................. 950
THOREAU IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH MODERN POLICY CONCERNS .................................................................................. 951
UTILITARIANISM RESPONSES .................................................................................................................. 952
The philosophy of utility ................................................................................................................................................. 952
The problem of unpredictability of consequences ......................................................................................................... 953
The problem of measuring ............................................................................................................................................. 954
The example of animal welfare ...................................................................................................................................... 955
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 957
UTILITARIANISM IS AN INADEQUATE VALUE THEORY .................................................................................................... 958
UTILITARIANISM IS TOTALITARIAN ................................................................................................................................. 959
UTILITARIANISM FAILS TO RECOGNIZE DIFFERENCES .................................................................................................... 960
UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES CRUELTY TO ANIMALS ......................................................................................................... 961
MAX WEBER .......................................................................................................................................... 962
Political Philosopher (1864-1920)................................................................................................................................... 962
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 964
CANNOT SEPARATE MEANINGS AND ACTION ................................................................................................................ 965
ALL MODERN STATES REQUIRE POWER FOR EXISTENCE ............................................................................................... 966
CORNEL WEST ........................................................................................................................................ 968
Afro-American Critical Thought ...................................................................................................................................... 968
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................................... 970
BLACK NIHILISM IS BAD FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS ....................................................................................................... 971
NO ABSOLUTE SET OF VALUES IS POSSIBLE .................................................................................................................... 971
VALUES MUST BE ASSESSED ACCORDING TO THE SITUATION ....................................................................................... 972
BERNARD WILLIAMS .............................................................................................................................. 973
BIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................................................... 973
CAN LUCK MAKE A MORAL DIFFERENCE? ...................................................................................................................... 973
WILLIAMS ON RATIONALITY AND MORALITY ................................................................................................................. 973
CRITIQUE OF WILLIAMS .................................................................................................................................................. 974
THE PROBLEM OF MORAL LUCK ..................................................................................................................................... 975
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 977
UTILITARIANISM IS A BANKRUPT MORAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................................................ 978
WILLIAMS ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY IS FLAWED ................................................................................................................. 979
WOODROW WILSON .............................................................................................................................. 980
THE LIFE OF WOODROW WILSON .................................................................................................................................. 980
THE WAR YEARS .............................................................................................................................................................. 981
THE IDEAS OF WOODROW WILSON ............................................................................................................................... 981
FOURTEEN POINTS.......................................................................................................................................................... 982
DEBATE APPLICATION ..................................................................................................................................................... 983
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 985
WILSON PROMOTED PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL AGENDAS .................................................................................................. 986
WILSONIAN THOUGHT HELPED CREATE INTERNATIONAL PEACE .................................................................................. 987
WILSON SUPPORTED AMERICAN COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM ............................................................................. 988
WILSON’S SOCIAL IDEAS WEREN’T NOT PROGRESSIVE, BUT REPRESSIVE ..................................................................... 989
HOWARD ZINN ...................................................................................................................................... 990
CRITIQUES OF HISTORIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................... 990
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, NONVIOLENCE, AND DEMOCRACY: NINE FALLACIES ................................................................... 991
PATRIOTISM AND OPTIMISM ......................................................................................................................................... 993
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................ 995
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS JUSTIFIED ................................................................................................................................... 996
DEMOCRACY DOESN’T DELEGITIMIZE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE .......................................................................................... 997
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS UNJUSTIFIED .............................................................................................................................. 998
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NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE FAILS .................................................................................................................................... 999
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MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
LIFE AND WORK
Born Wesley Cook on April 24th, 1954, Mumia Abu-Jamal occupies a place as a catalyst for international outcry against
injustice and prolific critic of institutional, state, and economic exploitation of minorities and other marginalized groups.
At age 15, Mumia began actively participating in the Black Panther Party (BPP) after attending a protest in South
Philadelphia opposing presidential candidate George Wallace. A keen ability for writing quickly helped Mumia find his
role in the BPP where he served as an information officer and journalists for the organizations newspaper and other
communiqués. This revolutionary political outlook and activism quickly led to Mumia’s placement on the FBI’s Security
Index and daily surveillance by police forces.
In spite of these efforts, Mumia earned a career as an acclaimed journalists both within the United States and
internationally. Among other networks, NPR, the National Black Network and the Associated Press broadcast Mumia
nationally. His interviews ranged from Bob Marley to international political leaders. Named one of Philadelphia’s people
to watch by the Philadelphia magazine and elected president of the Philadelphia chapter of the association of Black
Journalists, Mumia’s brand of journalism that brought access to the press to those who were formally voiceless was
gaining more power and popularity. A fact underscored by urging by political leaders that Mumia temper his comments
because his perspectives and coverage incited unrest.
This career was interrupted on December 9, 1981, when Mumia was charged with murdering a Philadelphia police
officer. During his trial, Mumia was denied several aspects of his civil protections, including choice of jury and counsel.
Likewise, much of the evidence used to secure the conviction has sense been disputed or found to be inaccurate.
Although many organizations, including Amnesty International, and individuals, ranging from celebrities to activist, have
taken up Mumia’s cause the subsequent conviction and death sentence are still in place. However, while appeals
continue, Mumia has continued his journalistic career from death row. On a regular basis, the journalists/activists
produces essays that address subjects running the gambit of political, social, and economic issues. In each instance,
Mumia continues to treat the subjects from a critical perspective informed by his experiences with the topics he
entertains. Many of these have been published in various volumes (see below) and have received both critical acclaim
and earned Mumia harsher punishments in prison. Additionally, many can be heard on
http://prisonradio.org/mumia.htm.
MUMIA’S PHILOSOPHY
Much of what Mumia writes is constrained by the circumstances of his incarceration. Rather than full texts addressing
the subject, the nature of his work is often smaller. Several vignettes on a topic shape an overall perspective on the issue
or interrogation of a problem. The next section of this overview highlights several of the major topics addressed by
Mumia that are also relevant to debate. Following a discussion of the arguments advanced by Mumia, I will consider
more closely how they may be applied to debate.
ON INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
As is elaborated in greater detail in the following sections, Mumia believes that racism and oppression exists not just in
the acts of individuals, but are also facilitated and caused by institutional structures whose interests such acts serve.
Mumia provides several arguments to warrant this claim. He suggests that the “so-called ‘international community,’
which actually represents a minority of the world’s people” utilize their power to create conditions that serve their
interests. Likewise, he cites structures of discipline in prison that prevent prisoners from engaging in educational
programs. Policies which studies reveal target minorities most strictly. Mumia believes that, “the state raises its narrow
institutional concern, to control by keeping people stupid, over a concern that is intensely human: the right of all beings
to grow in wisdom, insight, and knowledge for their own sakes as well as their unique contribution to the fund of human
knowledge.” That, this institutional concern targets dissidents and minorities the most, for Mumia, underscores the
racism implicit in the overarching policy.
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Similarly, Mumia suggests that institutional oppression is upheld by equally bleak opportunities for political recourse. As
he notes, democracy means “government by the people, but a brief foray into history proves otherwise.” Noting the
denial of rights to African-Americans, Native Americans, and Asian American citiziens by the Supreme Court, along with
structural oppression women, Mumia suggests that the United States could hardly be considered democratic or offering
political recourse to its citizens. As he puts it, “for, if women are 52 percent, Blacks 12.5 percent, Hispanics 9.5 percent,
and Asians/Native Americans/others 3.8 percent, then Americans have been systematically from democracy’s empty
promises. Only in America can a ‘democracy oppress a majority’”.
Last, Mumia believes that this institutional oppression is further carried out by a “war on the poor.” He notes that, for
example, many poor mothers, often minority, are targeted for criminal sanctions that if committed by wealthy
individuals would merely “merit treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic.” Likewise, policies towards youth close schools in
favor of “building boot camps and prisons” as “graduate schools” for minorities and the impoverished. Last,
homelessness and poverty become increasingly criminalized as beggars are targeted by politicians and expanding
prisons: “America’s only growth industry.”
ON PRISONS AND THE “JUSTICE SYSTEM”
Nowhere does the institutional machinery of oppression reveals itself, in Mumia’s estimation, than in the prison system.
Mumia believes that far from their proclaimed ends to serve justice, that prisons are “political organs of the state.” First,
as suggested above Mumia believes that all persons are political prisoners. He argues that when people are caged in
prisons for resisting the government and the system it attempts to instate, you have political prisoners. However, one
need not necessarily be politically active for Mumia to consider them a political prisoner. Further, he argues, “every
prosecution is a public and symbolic act, a political act by the state to give the populace an illusion of control, to show
that ‘we’re taking care of this problem.’”
Similarly, Mumia agrees with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Stephen Reinhardt, when he argues, “President
Reagan and Bush have ensured that the federal courts will not be representative. Instead, they are a bastion of White
America...[and] stand as a symbol of White Power.” Mumia argues that prisons and criminal justice are politically
motivated both at the level of who is incarcerated and the reasons why, as well as the treatment receieved once
incarcerated. Observing the unpunished brutalization of several prisoners at Pennsylvania’s Camp Hill prison, Mumia
believes that concepts like “justice,” “law,” and “crime” have different meanings depending on who committed the act,
against whom it was committed, and what position that person has in the system. For example, prisoner’s offenses
often pale in comparison to the brutalization received by guards. However, Mumia believes, that in an American where
African-Americans constitute a larger portion of prison, and especially death row, populations than the national and
state populatces from which they come, the question of a politically motivated justice system is unmistakable.
Last, Mumia believes that the justice system itself is implicated in a politically, and often racially motivated, institutional
structure. Motivated by his experience with the criminal trial that led to his prosecution, several of Mumia’s writings
target the problems with the “justice system.” Two instances reflect the problems that Mumia identifies in that criminal
justice system. First, as you might expect, Mumia believes the death penalty is applied in racist manner. Citing the
McClesky v. Kemp case, in which the Supreme Court rejected efforts to place a moratorium on the death penalty based
on discriminatory application, Mumia argues that agreeing with the case’s claims would call into question the entire
justice system. As Justice Powell said when reviewing the case, “McClesky’s claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws
into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” Mumia believes evidence for
McClesky’s claim is all to obvious in the numbers of minorities on death row.
Likewise, Mumia suggests that the criminal justice system systematically denies rights to minorities. Citing the Georgia
case of Hance v. Zant, Mumia suggest that the criminal justice system deliberately denies protections to minorities who
come before. In the specific case he cites, an African-American man’s jury of peers included several white jurors who
agreed a conviction would mean “there’d be one less nigger to breed”. A fact, Mumia explains gave pause to neither the
appeals courts of Georgia, the US Supreme Court, of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Such inequitable
protection for rights is not uncommon Mumia argues. He relates his own trial during which he was both denied his right
to self-defense and council of his choice and forced to utilize a court-appointed attorney. At the same time in a
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courtroom in the same building, he notes that another defendant enjoyed the privilege of a private lawyer and his father,
another lawyer, to aid in his defense. Mumia believes the disparate treatment can only be isolated to race and class.
ON RELIGION AND THE STATE
Mumia believes that the relationship between religion, particularly Christianity, and the state is both still alive and well,
and is one that facilitates oppression. As he explains, “the reality of religion is this: it has often been less a force for
liberation than a tool for oppression – an impetus for civil unrest, warfare and genocide.” To support his claim, several
arguments are advanced. First, he suggests that a commitment to religion has failed to avoid brutal oppressions of small
countries by self-proclaimed “peacekeeping forces.” Likewise, he cites the work of Jesuit scholar Ignacio Martin-Baro
who claims that missionaries’ conversions of workers contributed to a breakdown in the political and labor organizations
of those workers and led many plantation bosses to encourage workers to join the evangelicals and led to the
intertwining of religious and state interests.
In addition to harmful socio-political consequences, Mumia believes that the intertwined relationship between religion,
state, and economic interests, cause cultural harms as well. Noting two cases, Mumia argues that religion in the US, in
particular, has served to oppress cultural minorities to the benefit of the material interests of dominant cultures. First,
he cites the history of the Cherokee in the US. In an effort to assimilate, Cherokees in Georgia adopted religious and
political practice from whites in the region. The effect was that not only did this process efface their culture, but also
that the newly “civilized” people were deprived of their lands and livelihoods despite efforts at assimilation. Second,
Mumia suggest that Christianity and similarly organized religions undermine solidarity between struggling peoples.
Mumia cites an example of a “half-Black” Episcopalian priest from his childhood whose religious office forced the priest
to reject solidarity with other African-Americans and hide his racial background. As an alternative Mumia suggests
individuals should place in organizations that value unity, natural law, and resistance and rebellion against systems bent
on global self-destruction. For Mumia, the Move organization provides such a model.
ON TERRORISM
Mumia also believes that the definition of terrorism should be expanded to include a wide range of activities that one
might not think of when considering the subject. He argues that many individuals in the United States who think of
terrorism, think not of efforts by people attempting to attack the United States, but instead of the constant fear they live
in of police who brutalize, pummel, or suppress dissent against the political situation that faces “black...brown...and
working-class white America.” Mumia believes that these practices ostensibly carried out in the name of “justice,” are in
reality acts of police terrorism enacted on American citizens.
Likewise he believes that the history of US foreign policy should be examined as a series of terrorist acts. To support this
argument, he examines a litany of Latin American dictators supported by US funds and hosted on state visits to the
United States. At the same time, these dictators systematically curtailed labor and rights movements. He notes, “For
millions of people who live in the countries south of the Rio Grande, US claims to wage a 'war against terrorism', are
dismissed with deep cynicism, if not ill humor. For they know that the US has always been the motivating force behind
the sheer terror that has ravaged their societies since the 1800s.” Similarly, he cites President Lyndon Johnson’s
admission that operations by the US in Cuba were merely an outpost of Murder Inc. Likewise, Mumia argues that the US
supported “pirate planes” that left Florida to drop napalm on Cuban sugar factories and other covert military actions. All
these incidents Mumia suggest expands our notion of what terrorism is and also sheds light on the current war on terror.
His hope is to remind readers that, “Terrorism isn't grown merely in foreign deserts: it's as present as our own back
yards.”
ON POLITICAL CHANGE
Mumia adopts a theory of political change similar to others cited in the volume. He encourages listeners who wish to
resist the institutional racism, constructions of terrorists threat, and corrupt justice system to “organize, organize,
organize, and, then, organize.” Like Esteva, Mumia subscribes to an ethic that believes solutions must come from the
organized efforts by local communities to refuse to give power to the state. For Mumia, this includes resisting the effort
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by the media to do the work of the government by presenting images of terrorists, crime, and other problems that later
justify polices that fix them at the expense of minorities, the poor or other marginalized groups.
Like Esteva, Mumia also agrees that individuals should refuse to use the same tactics used by those who seek to oppress
them. For example, Mumia argues that “violence violates the self” and that as a tactic it should be avoided when
possible. Instead of attempting to break the old system, Mumia suggests political change must emerge from a new
system. In other words, Mumia supports revolutionary action, not merely a reform of current state polices.
APPLICATION TO LINCOLN DOUGLAS
The ideas that Mumia discusses are wide ranging enough to provide topical discussion of nearly any issue. From
Hurricane Katrina, to the UN, to Iraq/Abu Gharib, to the immigration debate, Mumia offers insightful commentary that
focuses on the implications of an contemporary events for issues of race, class, equality and social justice. More
obviously, for topics that examine issues of criminal justice Mumia offers extensive application.
You can also use Mumia to construct arguments that indict state and international actors. For example, many of the
topics that you may encounter will likely question under what circumstances the US or UN should act in a given situation.
Mumia suggests that their action will likely be problematic whatever the circumstances. Additionally, Mumia offers
alternative approaches that avoid the problems of focusing the debate only the actors prescribed by the debate.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Live From Death Row. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
---. Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience. New York: Plough, 1997.
---. All Things Censored. New York: Seven Stories, 2000.
---. We Want Freedom. Cambridge: South End, 2004.
---. Prison Radio Essay Audio Transcripts. PrisonRadio.Org. Last accessed 6/30/2006.
http://www.prisonradio.org/mumia.htm. Updated Regularly.
---. Section in Still Black, Still Strong. New York: Semiotext(e), 1993.
Boyd, Herb. Autobiography of a People. New York: Doubleday, 200.
Weinglass, Leonard. Race for Justice. Maine: Common Courage, 1995.
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THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IS INHERENTLY OPPRESSIVE
1. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT HAS BECOME A “BLACK MARCH TO DEATH’
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1995
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW, 92
Everyday in America the trek continues, a black march to death row. In Pennsylvania, where African-Americans
constitute 9 percent of the population, over 60 percent of its death row inhabitants are black. Across the nation,
although the numbers are less stark, the trend is unmistakable. In October 1991, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released
its national update, which revealed that 40 percent of America’s death row population is balck. This, out of a population
that is a mere 11 percent of the national populace. The five states with the largest death rows have larger percentages
on death row than in their statewide black populations.
2. ALL STAGES OF LAW ENFORCEMENT SUBJECTS AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND OTHER MIONRITIES TO “SPECIAL
VENGEANCE”
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1995
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW, 92-3
Statistics are often flexible in interpretation and, like scripture, can be cited for any purpose. Does this mean that
African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a setup by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest
is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the
judicial office, pretrial, trial, and sentencing state before court, treat African-American defendants with a special
vengeance not experienced by white defendants. This is the dictionary definition of “discrimination.”
3. EMPIRICALLY, THE SEVEREST PUNISHMENTS ARE DEALT OUT ALONG CLASS LINES
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2000
ALL THINGS CENSORED, 235
That’s what capital punishment really means. Those that ain’t got the capital gets the punishment, the old saying. Once
again we see the inherent truths that lie in the proverbs of the poor. That old saying echoed when it was announced that
district attorney of Delaware County, Patrick Meehan, would not seek the death penalty in the case of John E. Dupont,
the wealthy corporate heir charged with the shooting death of Olympic champion David Schultz. The Delaware County
DA’s office said, “No aggravated circumstances justifying the death penalty existed.” Could it be that DuPont’s personal
wealth, estimated at over $400 million, was a factor? In one fell swoop, the state ensured that wile millionaires may be
murders, they are not eligible for the preserve of the poor, America’s death row.
4. PRISONS DEHUMANIZE THEIR INMATES
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1995
LIVE FROM DEATH ROW, 89
A dark repressive trend in the business field known as “corrections” is sweeping the United States, and it bodes ill both
for the captives and for the communities from which they were captured. America is revealing a visage stark with
harshness. Nowhere is that face more contorted that in the dark netherworld of prison, where humans are transformed
into nonpersons, number beings cribbed into boxes of unlife, where the very soul is under destructive onslaught. We are
in the midst of the Marionization of US prisons, where the barest illusion of human rehabilitation is stripped from the
mission, to be replace by dehumanization by design.
5. DECISIONS MADE BY THE JUSTICE SYSTEM MEASURE STATUS NOT FACTS
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1997
DEATH BLOSSOMS, 6
The Death Penalty is a creation of the State, and politicians justify it by using it as a stepping stone to higher political
office. It’s very popular to sue isolated cases – always the most gruesome ones – to make generalizations about inmates
on death row and justify their sentences. Yet it is deceitful; it is untrue, unreal. Politicians talk about people on death
row as if they are the worst of the worst, monsters and so forth. But they will not talk about the thousands of men and
women in our country serving lesser sentences for similar and even identical crimes.
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THE WAR ON TERRORISM SHIFTS THE FOCUS FROM STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM
1. US HISTORY INCLUDES A LONG PATTERN OF STATE-SANCTIONED TERROR
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2004
WHAT WAR AGAINST TERRORISM?, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_5_23_04_war.html
It is ever so easy for us to talk about the 'War Against Terrorism', and accept it as a given; an obvious truth.
Yet, it is exceedingly difficult to speak on it, if one has but an inkling of the history of the US, in its own regions and
neighboring territories, for the last century, or even 50 years. There, we find a history of US-sanctioned and supported
barbarism, against people throughout the length and breadth of Central and South America, who have had to endure (if
they survived!) decades under ruthless generals, monsters who wreaked unholy havoc upon their people, or rapine,
torture, murder and more; in the name of their masters — the norteamericanos. For millions of people who live in the
countries south of the Rio Grande, US claims to wage a 'war against terrorism', are dismissed with deep cynicism, if not ill
humor. For they know that the US has always been the motivating force behind the sheer terror that has ravaged their
societies since the 1800s.
2. THE MEDIA USES THE WAR ON TERROR TO MASK US COMPLICITY IN TERRORISM
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2004
A TALE OF TERRORISTS, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_5_19_04_tale.html
To say the word, "terrorist", is to evoke an image inculcated into our consciousness of a scowling, bearded and turbaned
fundamentalist Arab. That is the sheer power of the corporate media, in its ability to shape and limit our thinking. For
what's lost is the distinction between retail terrorism and state terrorism. When a state unleashes its power against
innocents, it's acceptable collateral damage; when a group does it, it's animalistic evil, and sheer barbarity. The media's
innate bias in favor of nation-states and corporate power makes state violence the norm, and thus makes it virtually
invisible. That's because the media is owned by the wealthy and uses its influence to protect its class interests. The day
this is written, a US plane fired high-powered weaponry into a wedding party in Iraq; at least 40 people were killed. The
same day Israeli tanks open fire on a Palestinian protest march to Rafah, killing some 20 unarmed civilians, including
women and children. No corporate media agency will call these acts "terrorist", but for the Iraqis and Palestinians on the
receiving end of the tanks, fighter planes, and helicopter gunships, terror is probably the overwhelming feeling.
3. THE US ACTIVELY TRAINED TERRORISTS TO FOSTER REBELLION IN LATIN AMERICA
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2004
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER TERRORISM, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_5_12_04_time.html
The brutal US-trained, armed, and paid dictators used their militaries, and their police to wage internal wars against their
own people, to protect US and national elite profits at all costs. Using places like what was formerly known as the School
of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia, the US trained a vast coterie of torturers, saboteurs, and terrorists. Tens of
thousands of workers, peasants, and youth were tortured, imprisoned, exiled and killed by these US-trained attack dogs.
For Latin Americans, the school became known as 'la escuela de golpas' — coup school.
4. THE WAR ON TERROR PROVIDES A JUSTIFICATION FOR DEHUMANIZATION OF A PEOPLE
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2004
A TALE OF TERRORISTS, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_5_19_04_tale.html
But under the reigning media regimes, Arabs can only be projected as terrorists, and even when they are subjected to
massive state violence, it is overlooked as if they are somehow complicit in their own oppression. And because they are
permanent suspects, they are somehow responsible for calling this extreme carnage on themselves. It's war .. and 'war is
hell'. Oh, well! We are witnessing the dehumanization of a people — where Arab = terrorist - and any degree of violence
visited upon them is acceptable. When we digest this media mental poisoning, we become a party to this evil, and
acquiesce in acts of media violence. We must all reject it, for the mind-poison that it is, and call state terror the evil that
it is — whether the culprit is American or Israeli.
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RESISTING OPPRESSION BY STATE INTERESTS REQUIRES LOCAL, GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION
1. POLITICAL CHANGE REQUIRES WIDESPREAD MOVEMENTS FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2003
THE POWER OF PROTESTS, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_2_20_protest.html
If people really want Peace; if they want to transform this infernal addiction to war that drives every administration, then
they must begin to organize to deeply transform this political order, starting from the bottom, ending at the top. That
really means the end of the 'strategy' of 'the lesser evil' in American politics. It means voting, yes; but voting for what
people really want, and really need. It means seeing both major parties as traitors to democracy, as wards of the same
corporate interests who want, not only war-- but War Without End — for generations, to protect their swinish wealth
and opulence. It means Change. In a word, revolution. It means that, or it means nothing. It means washing away the
deep American addiction, not only to oil, but to hierarchy, the need to obey one's 'leaders'. It means — social
transformation.
2. FAILURE TO ORGANIZE SUPPORTS OPPRESSIVE STATE REGIMES
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1997
DEATH BLOSSOMS, 11
People say they don’t care about politics; they’re not involved or don’t want to get involved, but they are. Their
involvement just masquerades as indifference or inattention. It is the silent acquiescence of the millions that supports
the system. When you don’t oppose a system, your silence becomes approval, for it does nothing to interrupt the
system. People use all sorts of excuses for their indifference. They even appeal to God as a shorthand route for
supporting the status quo. They talk about law and order. But look at the system, look at the present social order of
society. Do you see God? Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is only the
illusion of security. It is an illusion because it built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the
enslavement and genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually it is insane not to.
3. ACTING WITHIN DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURES SILENCES MINORITY VOICES
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 2004
ANOTHER STOLEN DEMOCRACY, http://www.prisonradio.org/maj/maj_7_31_04stolen.html
If the major media is to be believed, the recent election is a done deal; done... over and done with. It was free and fair,
and folks should just accept it, and quietly move on. If Greg Palast, an American journalist usually working out of
London, is to be listened to, American democracy has been ripped off — again. Palast, author of *The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy*, really did the prodigious legwork to crack the Florida debacle back in 2000. He demonstrated, quite
convincingly, it seems to me, how the White House, Florida's Governor, Jeb Bush, and the then-Secretary of State,
Katherine Harris, essentially stole the elections there, by undercounting and spoiling sufficient votes to allow Bush to eke
out a win in the Sunshine State back in 2000. Palast now argues that, once again, this time utilizing dirty tricks, and
ambitious politicians, the same thing happened in the states of Ohio and New Mexico. In a brief, 4-page Internet article,
Palast presents facts and figures that once again demonstrates that there is a system in place in the U.S. that uses terms
like democracy; but in practice, it's something else again. It's bait and switch; it's hide and don't seek; it's actually the
disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands, and indeed, millions of Americans, based on their race, their ethnicity,
and often, their economic class.
4. SOCIAL CHANGE REQUIRES A VAST GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, JOURNALIST/ACTIVIST/POLITCAL PRISONER, 1993
STILL BLACK, STILL STRONG, 165
There [are] several orgianziations in the U.S. of varying ideological persuasions who have revolutionary theories that they
believe will transform America’s present social, political, and economic reality. Do they have the power to enforce them
and change the reality now? No. What it is going to take, more than anything, is the cohesion of many forces, the
building of mass power to change those realities, in the sense that no one organization has the power to transform it
themselves. This is a vast country with 260 million people and to suppose that organization of 200, 300 peopole is going
to affect the deep degrees of transformation that need to take place, is pretentious. Look at the fact that at its height
the BPP had 15,000, 16, 000 members and was cooperating with other revolutionary organizations as well.
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THE DEATH PENALTY IS JUSTIFIED
1. CAPTIAL PUNISHMENT DETERS “ACTS OF WAR” AGAINST CIVILIZED SOCIETY
George Pataki, Governor of New York, 1997
DEATH PENALTY IS A DETERRENT, http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Articles/Pataki.htm
I know, as do most New Yorkers, that by restoring the death penalty, we have saved lives. Somebody's mother,
somebody's brother, somebody's child is alive today because we were strong enough to be tough enough to care enough
to do what was necessary to protect the innocent. Preventing a crime from being committed ultimately is more
important than punishing criminals after they have shattered innocent lives.
No case illustrates this point more clearly than that of Arthur Shawcross. In 1973, Shawcross, one of New York's most
ruthless serial killers, was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of two children in upstate New York. Since the death
penalty had been declared unconstitutional, Shawcross was sentenced to prison. After serving just 15 years-an absurd
prison term given the crime-he was paroled in 1988. In a horrific 21-month killing spree, Shawcross took 11 more lives.
That is 11 innocent people who would be alive today had justice been served 24 years ago; 11 families that would have
been spared the pain and agony of losing a loved one. By reinstating the death penalty, New York has sent a clear
message to criminals that the lives of our children are worth more than just a IS-year prison term. Moreover, it has given
prosecutors the legal wherewithal to ensure New York State never has another Arthur Shawcross. Applying the ultimate
punishment Too often, we are confronted with wanton acts of violence that cry out for justice. The World Trade Center
bombing and the murderous rampage on the Long Island Rail Road by Colin Ferguson are but two examples. The slaying
of a police officer in the line of duty is another. To kill a police officer is to commit an act of war against civilized society.
2. THE COMPOSITION OF DEATH ROW INMATES REFLECTS SOCIAL REALITIES
Roger Clegg, General Counsel; Center for Equal Opportunity, 2001
THE COLOR OF DEATH, http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/clegg061101.shtml
The fact is that capital criminals don’t look like America, and no one should expect them to. No one is surprised to find
more men than women in this class. Nor is it a shock to find that this group contains more twenty-year-olds than
septuagenarians. And if — as the left tirelessly maintains — poverty breeds crime, and if — as it tiresomely maintains —
the poor are disproportionately minority, then it must follow — as the left entirely denies — that minorities will be
“overrepresented” among criminals. Heather Mac Donald sums up the figures that bear all this out: “Males between the
ages of 14 and 24, less than 8 percent of the population, commit almost half the nation’s murders; black males of the
same age, less than 1 percent of the population, committed some 30 percent of the country’s homicides in the 1990s.”
3. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT DOES NOT DELIBERATELY TARGET MINORITIES
Thomas R. Eddelman, 2002
TEN ANTI-DEATH PENALTY FALLACIES, http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/06-03-2002/vo18no11_fallacies.htm
The claim that the death penalty unfairly impacts blacks and minorities is a deliberate fraud. The majority of those
executed since 1976 have been white, even though black criminals commit a slim majority of murders. If the death
penalty is racist, it is biased against white murderers and not blacks. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics,
blacks committed 51.5% of murders between 1976 and 1999, while whites committed 46.5%. Yet even though blacks
committed a majority of murders, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports: "Since the death penalty was reinstated by the
Supreme Court in 1976, white inmates have made up the majority of those under sentence of death." (Emphasis added.)
Whites continued to comprise the majority on death row in the year 2000 (1,990 whites to 1,535 blacks and 68 others).
In the year 2000, 49 of the 85 people actually put to death were whites.
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WAR ON TERROR IS JUSTIFIED BY THE POST 9/11 ERA; SUPPORTS HUMAN RIGHTS
1. RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN THE WAR ON TERROR SERVE HUMAN PROGRESS
John Gray, 2005
NEW STATESMAN, accessed on May 5, 2005,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4722_134/ai_n9487577
It is no accident that torture has been reintroduced by the world's pre-eminent liberal state. To be sure, torture is used
by many regimes--not only those inspired by liberal ideals. It is routinely employed in tyrannies and the ramshackle failed
states that litter the globe; but only in liberal states is it part of a crusade for human rights. Liberalism is a project of
universal emancipation, and torture will be necessary as long as the spread of liberal values is resisted. When the Bush
administration authorises the use of torture, it does so in the cause of human progress.
2. THE STAKES IN THE WAR ON TERROR WARRANT VIOLATING LEGA PROTECTIONS
John Gray, 2005
NEW STATESMAN, accessed on May 5, 2005,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4722_134/ai_n9487577
The intensifying war in Iraq looks like being a watershed in modern history. Critics of the war have focused on the
suffering it has involved and pointed to a number of errors that have been made in the course of the country's ongoing
reconstruction. The suffering and mistakes are real enough, but they should not be allowed to conceal the much larger
change of which the war is a part. Liberal societies are evolving rapidly to a higher stage of development, in which many
traditions will become obsolete. Under the aegis of the world's most advanced liberal state, torture and collective
punishment have once again become normal practice in the conduct of war. To some this may seem anomalous, even
contradictory. In reality it is the inner logic of liberal values applied in a time of unprecedented transformation.
Liberalism is a universal creed and the crusade for freedom cannot be fettered by archaic legal procedures. Treaties such
as the Geneva Convention may have served the cause of freedom in the past, but today they are obstacles to liberal
values. A global revolution is in progress in which such quaint relics have no place.
3. CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT HAS VERIFIED THAT PROSECUTING THE WAR ON TERROR HAS NOT INFRINGED ON
CIVIL RIGHTS/LIBERTIES
Paul Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Research Fellow (Heritage Foundation), 2004
CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, accessed May 5, 2006, http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/tst031904a.cfm
I believe that a governing rule for assessing our response to terror can be readily summarized from the writings of Chief
Justice Rehnquist. He wrote: “In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between
freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor of order – in favor of the
government’s ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being. Thus far, I believe we have succeeded
in meeting that goal. With respect to the Patriot Act (now using those words in the narrower and technical sense of a
particular law), the record is, in fact, one of success. The Inspector General for the Department of Justice has reported
that there have been no instances in which the Patriot Act has been invoked to infringe on civil rights or civil liberties.
This is consistent with the conclusions of others. For example, at a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Patriot Act
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) said, “some measure of the criticism [of the Patriot Act] is both misinformed and
overblown.”
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Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Jerome Adler was born in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman. At the age of 14 he
dropped out of school at and went to work as a secretary and copy boy at the New York Sun, a prominent newspaper at
the time, hoping to become a journalist. Shortly there after, he began taking night classes at Columbia University to
improve his writing skills. At Colombia he became interested in the great philosophers and thinkers of Western
civilization, especially after reading the autobiography of the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill.
Adler was inspired to continue his reading after learning that Mill had read Plato when he was only five years old, while
Adler had not yet read him at all. A book by Plato was lent to him by a neighbor and Adler became hooked. After
receiving a scholarship he decided to study philosophy at Columbia University. Here he became so focused on
philosophy that he failed to complete the required physical education course to earn a bachelor's degree. Despite this,
his understanding of the classics was so great that Columbia University awarded him a doctorate in philosophy a few
years after he began teaching there.
Adler became an instructor at Columbia University in the1920s. He continued to participate in the Honors program,
started by John Erskine, which focused on reading the great Classics. His tenure at the university included studying with
such prominent thinkers as Erskine and John Dewey, the famous American pragmatist philosopher. This environment
inspired his early interest in the study of the “Great Books” of Western Civilization. He also promoted the idea that
philosophy should be integrated with science, literature, and religion.
This early work resulted in the publication of Dialectic in 1927. Here Adler focused on providing a summation of the great
philosophical and religious ideas of Western Civilization, ideas further influenced by his fascination with medieval
thought and sensibility. It is this combination of interests that dominated his career at educational and research
institutions like the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), the Institute for Philosophical
Research, and the Aspen Institute. Adler helped to found the latter two institutes. At the Aspen Institute, he taught
business leaders the classics for more than 40 years. He was also on the board of the Ford Foundation and the board of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, where his influence was clearly shown regarding its policies and programs. He is also the
co-founder, along with Max Weismann, of The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas. This center is accessible online at
http://www.thegeatideas.org/.
In 1930, Adler was appointed to the philosophy faculty at the University of Chicago. This appointment led to a conflict
with the faculty because of several innovations he proposed in the school’s curriculum. “The changes he proposed were
based on his central interests in the reading, discussion, and analysis of the classics and an integrated philosophical
approach to the study of the separate academic disciplines.” These conflicts with the faculty led to his reassignment, in
1931, to the Law School as professor of the philosophy of law. While Adler continued his educational reforms on a more
conservative basis he continued to integrate the concepts of seminars on “great books” and “great ideas” into his
programs at other educational institutions.
In 1952, his work in this area culminated in the publication of the “Great Books of the Western World” by the
Encyclopedia Britannica Company. The work on which he had concentrated since his Columbia University days, together
with a lecture series and essays produced in Chicago, resulted in several publications, including “The Higher Learning in
America” (1936), “What Man Has Made of Man” (1937), and his best-selling “How to Read a Book”, published in 1940
and still in print, occasionally revised and updated since it was first published. In 1943, his “How to Think about War and
Peace,” written in the social and political climate of WWII, was published as he continued his advocacy of a popular, yet
intelligent, approach to public education.
Throughout his career as a philosopher and educator, Adler wrote continually, consistently focusing on a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to philosophy, politics, religion, law, and education. Such works as “The Common
Sense of Politics” (1971), “Six Great Ideas” (1981), and “The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus” (1984), reflect this
concern. He has also been involved with Bill Moyers in creating a series of video programs focusing on the subject of the
American Constitution and biographies of the justices of the Supreme Court and has also been involved in producing
videos on the Great Ideas. In 1977, Adler published an autobiography entitled “Philosopher at Large”, which was
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followed later by another autobiographical account entitled “A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further
Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large” (1992). He has spent a lifetime making philosophy's greatest
texts accessible to everyone. As he has written, “No one can be fully educated in school, no matter how long the
schooling or how good it is.” And throughout his teaching career, Adler remained devoted to helping those outside
academia educate themselves further. No one, no matter how old, should stop learning, according to Adler. He himself
has written more than twenty books since he turned 70.
UNDERSTANDING ETHICS
To begin an ethical understanding of Adler we must start with what he calls the ethics of ‘common sense.’ The
teleological ethics of common sense, argues Adler is the only moral philosophy that is "sound" in the way in which it
develops its principles, "practical" in the manner in which it applies them, and "undogmatic" in the claims it makes for
them. Why or in what way is it the only sound moral philosophy? By "sound" he means both adequate and true. So
when he says that the teleological ethics of common sense is the only sound moral philosophy, he is saying that it is the
only ethical doctrine that answers all the questions that moral philosophy "should" and "can" attempt to answer, neither
more nor less, and that its answers are true by the standard of truth that is appropriate and applicable to normative
judgments.
In contrast, other theories or doctrines try to answer more questions than they can or fewer than they should, and their
answers are mixtures of truth and error. Thus, teleological ethics includes the truth of naturalism in that it fully
recognizes the moral relevance of empirical facts, especially the facts of human nature and human behavior, but without
committing the error of naturalism--the error of denying the distinction between fact and value, the error of attempting
to reduce normative judgments to statements of empirical fact. Avoiding this error, it also avoids the fallacy of
attempting to draw normative conclusions from premises that are entirely factual.
While agreeing with the intuitionists that ethics must have some principles that are intuitively known (that is, selfevident), teleological ethics maintains that there need be and can be only one such normative principle, and that all
other normative judgments can be derived as conclusions from it. It thus avoids the error of regarding as intuitively
known (and known without any relation to empirical fact) a whole series of propositions about moral duties or
obligations that are not self-evident and depend for their truth upon matters of fact.
The ethics of common sense also includes the truth of utilitarianism because its first principle is the end, the whole good
to be sought, and because all its conclusions are about the partial goods that are either constitutive or instrumental. But
it avoids the mistakes of utilitarianism that lie in a wrong conception of the ultimate end and in an erroneous treatment
of the relation between the individual's pursuit of his own ultimate good and his obligations to the rights of others and
the good of the community. By correcting the most serious failure of utilitarianism, one that it shares with naturalism-the failure to distinguish between needs and wants, or between real and apparent goods--it is able to combine a
practical or pragmatic approach to the problems of human action in terms of means and ends with a moral approach to
them in terms of categorical oughts. Whereas, in the absence of categorical oughts, utilitarianism and naturalism are
merely pragmatic the ethics of common sense, at once teleological and deontological is a moral philosophy that is also
practical.
By virtue of its distinction between real and apparent goods, this pragmatic moral philosophy retains what truth there is
in the various forms of "non-cognitive ethics," such as the "emotive theory of values"; it concedes that all judgments
concerning values that are merely apparent goods are nothing but expressions of emotional inclinations or attitudes on
the part of the individual who is making the evaluation. While conceding this, it avoids the error of supposing that all
value judgments or normative statements must be emotional or attitudinal expressions of this sort, incapable of having
any objective or ascertain able truth, comparable to that of descriptive statements of fact. It avoids this error by
correcting the failure to recognize that the truth of descriptive or factual statements is not the only mode of objective
truth, and that there is a standard of truth appropriate to normative judgments quite distinct from that appropriate to
descriptive statements. The foregoing explanation of the soundness of teleological ethics--by virtue of its encompassing
whatever is sound in other approaches, divorced from the errors with which it is mixed in these other approaches--also
helps to explain why Adler argues that teleological ethics is the most practical form of moral philosophy, or the only
practical form of it.
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DO THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS?
Another important contribution that Adler provides to the conversation regarding ethics is a response to the age old
question; does the end justify the means? Can it sometimes be right to use a bad means to achieve a good end? Don't
the conditions of human life require some shadiness and deceit to achieve security and success? First, Adler explains the
sense in which the word "justifies" is used in the familiar statement. After that we can consider the problem you raise
about whether it is all right to employ any means - good or bad - so long as the end is good.
When we say that something is "justified," we are simply saying that it is right Adler argues. Thus, for example, when we
say that a college is justified in expelling a student who falls below a passing mark, we are acknowledging that the college
has a right to set certain standards of performance and to require its students to meet them. Hence, the college is right
in expelling the student who doesn't. Now, Adler reminds us that nothing in the world can justify a means except the
end which it is intended to serve. A means can be right only in relation to an end, and only by serving that end. The first
question to be asked about something proposed as a way of achieving any objective whatsoever is always the same. Will
it work? Will this means, if employed, accomplish the purpose we have in mind? If not, it is certainly not the right means
to use. This brings us to the heart of the matter. Since a bad end is one that we are not morally justified in seeking, we
are not morally justified in taking any steps whatsoever toward its accomplishment. Hence, no means can be justified that is, made morally right - by a bad end.
But what about good ends? Adler argues that we are always morally justified in working for their accomplishment. Are
we, then, also morally justified in using any means which will work? Adler’s answer to that question is plainly yes; for if
the end is really good, and if the means really serves the end and does not defeat it in any way, then there can be
nothing wrong with the means. It is justified by the end, and we are justified in using it. People who are shocked by this
statement, responds Adler, overlook one thing: If an action is morally bad in itself, it cannot really serve a good end, even
though it may on the surface appear to do so.
People in power have often tried to condone their use of violence or fraud by making it appear that their injustice to
individuals was for the social good and was, therefore, justified. But since the good society involves justice for all, a
government which employs unjust means defeats the end it pretends to serve. You cannot use bad means for a good end
any more than you can build a good house out of bad materials. It is only when we do not look too closely into the
matter that we can be fooled by the statement that the end justifies the means. We fail to ask whether the end in view is
really good, or we fail to examine carefully how the means will affect the end. This happens most frequently in the game
of power politics or in war, where the only criterion is success and anything which contributes to success is thought to be
justified. Success may be the standard, by which we measure the expediency of the means, but expediency is one thing
and moral justification is another.
ARISTOTLE’S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
For guidance on moral philosophy Adler turns first and foremost to Aristotle. “In my opinion, Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics, properly construed, is the only sound, pragmatic, and undogmatic work in moral philosophy that has come down
to us in the last twenty-five centuries (it is the ethics of common sense and is both teleological and deontological). Its
basic truths are as true today as they were in the fourth century B.C. when that book was delivered as a series of lectures
in Aristotle's Lyceum.” He goes on to say that “instead of trying to expound Aristotle's Ethics in summary fashion, I am
going to state the indispensable conditions that must be met in the effort to develop a sound moral philosophy that
corrects all the errors made in modern times.”
The definition of prescriptive truth, which sharply distinguishes it from the definition of descriptive truth. Descriptive
truth consists in the agreement or conformity of the mind with reality. When we think that that which is, is, and that
which is not, is not, we think truly. To be true, what we think must conform to the way things are. In sharp contrast,
prescriptive truth consists in the conformity of our appetites with right desire. The practical or prescriptive judgments we
make are true if they conform to right desire; or, in other words, if they prescribe what we ought to desire.
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In order to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, we must formulate at least one self-evident prescriptive truth, so that, with it as
a premise, we can reason to the truth of other prescriptives. Hume correctly said that if we had perfect or complete
descriptive knowledge of reality, we could not, by reasoning, derive a single valid ought. Modern efforts to get around
this barrier have not succeeded, first because modern writers have not had a definition of prescriptive truth, and second
because they have not discovered a self-evident prescriptive truth.
The distinction between real and apparent goods must be understood, as well as the fact that only real goods are the
objects of right desire. Now, in light of the definition of prescriptive truth as conformity with right desire, we can see
that prescriptions are true only when they enjoin us to want what we need, since every need is for something that is
really good for us. If right desire is desiring what we ought to desire, and if we ought to desire only that which is really
good for us and nothing else, then we have found the one controlling self evident principle of all ethical reasoning--the
one indispensable categorical imperative. That self-evident principle can be stated as follows: we ought to desire
everything that is really good for us.
In all practical matters or matters of conduct, the end precedes the means in our thinking about them, while in action we
move from means to ends. But we cannot think about our ends until, among them, we have discovered our final or
ultimate end--the end that leaves nothing else to be rightly desired. The only word that names such a final or ultimate
end is "happiness." No one can ever say why he or she wants happiness because happiness is not an end that is also a
means to something beyond itself.
The fifth condition is that there is not a plurality of moral virtues (which are named in so many ethical treatises), but only
one integral moral virtue. There may be a plurality of aspects to moral virtue, but moral virtue is like a cube with many
faces. The unity of moral virtue is understood when it is realized that the many faces it has may be analytically but not
existentially distinct. In other words, considering the four so called cardinal virtues--temperance, courage, justice, and
prudence--the unity of virtue declares that no one can have any one of these four without also having the other three.
This explains why a morally virtuous person ought to be just even though his or her being just may appear only to serve
the good of others.
Acknowledging the primacy of the good and deriving the right therefrom. The primacy of the good with respect to the
right corrects the mistake of thinking that we are acting morally if we do nothing that injures others. Our first moral
obligation is to ourselves--to seek all the things that are really good for us, the things all of us need, and only those
apparent goods that are innocuous rather than noxious.
CONCLUSION
We are all faced with having to choose between one activity and another, with having to order and arrange the parts of
life, with having to make judgments about which external goods or possessions should be pursued with moderation and
within limits and which may be sought without limit. Adler argues that this is where virtue, especially moral virtue,
comes into the picture. The role that virtue plays in relation to the making of such choices and judgments determines, in
part at least -- our success or failure in the pursuit of happiness, our effort to make good lives for ourselves. In order to
explain Adler points out the distinction between perfections of all sorts (of body, of character, and of mind) and
possessions of all sorts (economic goods, political goods, and the goods of association) carries with it a distinction
between goods that are wholly within our power to obtain and goods that may be partly within our power but never
completely so. The latter in varying degrees depend on external circumstances, either favorable or unfavorable to our
possessing them. However, Adler goes on, not all goods that are personal perfections fall entirely within our power. Like
external goods, some of them are affected by external conditions.
According to Adler the only personal perfection that would appear not to depend upon any external circumstances is
moral virtue. Whether or not we are morally virtuous, persons of good character would appear to be wholly within our
power -- a result of exercising our freedom of choice. But even here it may be true that having free time for leisure
activities has some effect on our moral and spiritual growth as well as upon our mental improvement. Only in a capital
intensive economy can enough free time become open for the many as well as for the few.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Mortimer J., "THE HUMAN EQUATION IN DIALECTIC,"Psyche 28 (April 1927), 68-82.
---,"SPENGLER, THE SPENGLERITES, AND SPENGLERISM," Psyche 29 (July 1927), 73-84.
---, DIALECTIC. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
---, ART AND PRUDENCE: A STUDY IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937.
---, WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN: A STUDY OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLATONISM AND POSITIVISM IN PSYCHOLODY.
Psychology. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937.
---, “PARTIES AND THE COMON GOOD" The Review of Politics 1 (January 1939) 51-83.
---, “THE CRISIS IN CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION" The Social Frontier (February 1939), 140-145
---, RELIGON AND THEOLOGY. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1961.
---, ETHICS, THE STUDY OF MORAL VALUES. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1962.
---, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILOSOPHY; ITS CHECKERED PAST, ITS PRESENT DISORDER, AND ITS FUTURE PROMISE. New
York: Atheneum, 1965.
---, FREEDOM: A STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT IN THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN TRADITIONS OF
PHILOSOPHY. Albany, N.Y.: Magi Books, 1968.
---, THE TIME OF OUR LIVES; THE ETHICS OF COMMON SENSE. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
---, THE IDEA OF FREEDOM. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973.
---, THE AMERICAN TESTAMENT. New York: Praeger, 1975.
---, PHILOSOPHER AT LARGE: AN INTELECTUAL BIOGRAPHY. New York: Macmillan, 1977.
---, REFORMING EDUCATIONS: THE SCHOOLING OF A PEOPLE AND THIER EDUCATION BEYOND SCHOOLING. Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1977.
---, THE PAIDEIA PROPOSAL: AN EDUCATIONAL MANIFESTO. New York: Macmillan, 1982.
---, A VISION OF THE FUTURE: TWELVE IDEAS FOR A BETTER LIFE AND A BETTER SOCIETY. New York: Macmillan, 1984
---, TEN PHILOSOPHICAL MISTAKES. New York: Collier Books, 1987.
---, REFORMING EDUCATION: THE OPENING OF THE AMERICAN MIND. New York: Macmillan, 1989
---, INTELLECT: MIND OVER MATTER. New York: Macmillan. 1990.
---, HAVES WITHOUT HAVE-NOTS: ESSAYS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY ON DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM. New York:
Macmillan, 1991.
---, DESIRES,RIGHT & WRONG: THE ETHICS OF ENOUGH. New York: Macmillan, 1991.
---, THE DIFFERENCE OF MAN AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES. New York: Fordham University Press, 1993.
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---, THE ANGELS AND US. New York: Collier Books, 1993
---, THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF PHILOSOPHY: METAPHYSICAL, MORAL, OBJECTIVE, CATEGORICAL. New York: Macmillan
Pub. Co, 1993.
---, ARISTOTLE FOR EVERYBODY: DIFFICULT THOUGH MADE EASY. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
---, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO LISTEN. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
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PHILOSOPHICAL "TRUTH'S" DON'T EXIST
1. THE PURSUIT OF EPISTEMIC KNOWLEDGE IS ILLUSORY
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p. 30.
Episteme represents an illusory ideal that has bemused man’s understanding of his efforts and his achievements in the
pursuit of knowledge. It has led philosophers to misconceive philosophy and to make unsupportable claims for their
theories or conclusions. In that branch of philosophy which is called epistemology (especially in the form that it takes in
contemporary Anglo-American thought), the abandonment of episteme would eliminate three problems with which it
obsessed—the problem of our knowledge of material objects, of other minds, and of the past. These are baffling,
perhaps insoluble, problems only when they claim is made that we can have knowledge of material objects, other minds,
and the past—knowledge which has the certitude and finality of doxa for episteme, and the problems cease to be
problems, or at least to be baffling. Abandoning episteme as an illusory ideal would not only shrink epistemology to its
proper size, but it would also starve, if not silence, the skeptic who feeds on the claim to achieve episteme in any
department of human inquiry.
2. A MODERATE INTERPREATION OF KNOWLEDGE AS OPINION IS MORE ACCURATE
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p. 28.
In what sense of knowledge, then, are history, science, mathematics, and philosophy branches of knowledge? If episteme
sets too high a standard, what is the moderate or weaker sense of the word “knowledge” in which it is applicable—and
equally applicable—to the disciplines just mentioned?
The properties of knowledge in this moderate sense are that it consists of propositions which are (1) testable by
reference to evidence, (2) subject to rational criticism, and either (3) corrigible and rectifiable or (4) falsifiable. The
Greeks had another word which I propose to use for “knowledge” in this sense. That word is doxa, and it is usually
rendered in English by the word “opinion.” As the properties enumerated above indicate, what is being referred to is
responsible, reliable, well-founded, reasonable opinion. When the English word “opinion” is used to signify the opposite
of knowledge, what is being referred to usually lacks these very properties. It is irresponsible, unreliable, unfounded,
unreasonable; it is mere opinion, sheer opinion, irrational prejudice.
3. PHILSOPHY IS ONLY A BRANCH OF KNOWLEDGE
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p.21-24
To be intellectually respectable, as history and science are generally recognized to be, philosophy must be a branch of
knowledge. It must be a mode of inquiry that aims at, and results in, the acquisition of knowledge which is
characteristically different from the knowledge that is aimed at and achieved by historical scholarship and scientific
research. There is a sense of the word “knowledge” which sets too high a standard of achievement for it to be applicable
to either historical scholarship or scientific research. At times in the past, it was thought that mathematics could measure
up to this high standard. At times, philosophy also was thought to be knowledge in this high or strong sense. But in the
centuries which have seen the greatest development of scientific research and historical scholarship, it has seldom, if
ever, been thought that either scientific or historical knowledge was knowledge in this sense.
All that is required by the first condition is that philosophy should aim at and acquire knowledge in the same sense that
science and history do, not in a loftier sense of that term.
The attributes of [epistemic] knowledge in the high or strong sense are: (1) certitude beyond the challenge of skeptical
doubts, (2) finality beyond the possibility of revision in the course of time. Such knowledge consists entirely of (3)
necessary truths, which have either the status of (4) self-evident principles, that is, axioms, or of (5) conclusions
rigorously demonstrated therefrom.
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THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE IS A KEY COMPONENT OF PHILOSOPHY
1. PHILOSPHY MUST BE EVALUATED IN TERMS OF “TRUTH” AND “GOODNESS”
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p. 31-32.
For philosophy to be respectable as a branch of knowledge, philosophical theories or conclusions must be capable of
being judged by appropriate criteria of goodness; or, in other words, they must be capable of being judged by reference
to an appropriately formulated standard of truth. The two words that require comment are italicized ones—“goodness”
and “truth.” The criteria of goodness appropriate to anything that claims to be knowledge are criteria of truth. To say, in
connection with historical scholarship, scientific research, or philosophical though, that one conclusion is better than
another is to say that it is sounder or truer. When I lay down the requirement that philosophical theories or conclusions
must be capable of being judged for their relative truth—one truer or sounder than another—I am saying that if
philosophy is a branch of knowledge, in the same sense that history or science is, then it can never suffice merely to find
one philosophical theory more to our liking than another; or to regard one as better than another simply because it is
more pleasing to consider, more harmonious to contemplate, or more useful for whatever purpose we have in mind. We
must be able to say that it is truer than another, or at least to hope that we can find some theory which is truer than
others. And when we say this, we must use the word “truer” in the same sense in which we apply it in making judgments
about scientific theories or historical conclusions, relative to one another. What is that sense? Since we are not here
concerned with episteme, but only with knowledge in the sense of doxa, we can eliminate at once the standard of
indubitable and incorrigible truth that is set by self-evident propositions and demonstrated conclusions. We can also
eliminate, I think, the standard of truth which would be set by statements that are completely verified by empirical data,
if complete verification were possible, as many now realize it is not.
2. PHILOSOPHY MUST QUESTION THE NATURE OF BEING AND EXISTENCE
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p. 43.
The last condition concerns the subject matter of those questions which are purely philosophical –that is, which belong
to philosophy, and to philosophy alone, as a special field of learning or mode of inquiry. Such questions must be primarily
questions about which is and happens in the world or about what men should do and seek, and only secondarily
questions about how we know, think, or speak about that which is and happens or about what men do and seek.
Questions about what men do and seek are concerned with human conduct and the organization of society. They deal,
for example, with such matters as good and evil; right and wrong; the order of goods; duties and obligations; virtues and
vices; happiness, life’s purpose or goal; justice and rights in the sphere of human relations and social interactions; the
state and its relations to the individual; the good society, the just policy, and the just economy; war and peace.
3. PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE MUST BE PUBLIC, NOT PRIVATE
Mortimer Adler, philosopher, THE CONDITIONS OF PHILSOPHY, 1965, p. 36-37.
To be worthy of respect as a mode of inquiry aiming at knowledge and developing theories capable of being tested for
their relative truth and capable of being falsified, rectified, or improved, philosophy too should be conducted as a public
enterprise. The operative word here is “public.” We have come to see that any human work is personal in some sense
and to some degree—a scientific theory, a historical interpretation, as well as a poem or a painting. But the inescapable
personal character of any work does not necessarily make it exclusively personal in the sense of being wholly private. It
can have a public as well as a private aspect. There may be some things which are exclusively private, such as certain
emotional experiences, the mystic’s vision, the voice of conscience, and the like. The exclusively private is, of course, also
incommunicable. Hence insofar as knowledge in general, and any branch of knowledge in particular, is communicable, it
cannot be exclusively private.
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IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH TRUTH IN VALUE JUDGEMENTS
1. VALUE JUDGEMENTS CAN BE TRUE FOR INDIVIDUALS
Mortimer Adler, Philosopher, THE TRUTH AND THE GOOD -IS AND OUGHT.
http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlertruthgood.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
Now let us turn in the opposite direction and ask whether there is any truth in our value judgments -- our judgments
about things as good or bad. When such judgments are challenged, most people find it difficult to defend them by giving
reasons calculated to persuade others to agree with them. Since individuals obviously differ from one another in their
desires, what one person regards as good may not be so regarded by another. Unless I am lying, my statement that I
regard something as good (which is tantamount to saying that I desire it) is a true statement about me, but that would
seem to be as far as it goes. The judgment that the object in question is good would not appear to be true in a sense that
commands universal assent -- good not just for me but for everyone else as well.
2. SUBJECTIVE VALUE JUDGEMENTS ARE TRUE
Mortimer Adler, Philosopher, THE TRUTH AND THE GOOD -IS AND OUGHT.
http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlertruthgood.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
We are thus brought face to face with the much disputed question about the objectivity or subjectivity of value
judgments. In the contemporary world, skepticism about value judgments prevails on all sides. Value judgments, it is
generally thought, express nothing more than individual likes or dislikes, desires or aversions. They are entirely subjective
and relative to the individual who makes them. If they have any truth at all, it is only the truth that is contained in a
statement about the individual who is making the judgment -- the truth that he regards a certain object as good because
he, in fact, desires it.
3. FINDING TRUTH IN VALUE STATEMENTS IS NECESSARY TO CONFRONT SKEPTICISM
Mortimer Adler, Philosopher, THE TRUTH AND THE GOOD -IS AND OUGHT.
http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlertruthgood.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
To refute the skeptical view, which makes all value judgments subjective and relative to individual desires, we must be
able to show how prescriptive statements can be objectively true. An understanding of truth as including more than the
kind of truth that can be found in descriptive statements thus becomes the turning point in our attempt to establish a
certain measure of objectivity in our judgments about what is good and bad. Only through such understanding will we be
able to show that some value judgments belong to the sphere of truth, instead of all being relegated to the sphere of
taste and thus reduced to matters about which reasonable men should not argue with one another or expect to reach
agreement.
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THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE IS HOPELESS
1. CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE IS OUTSIDE THE REALMS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
Robert Adams, Professor of Philosophy at Sophia University, NISHIDA KITARO’S STUDIES OF THE GOOD AND THE DEBATE
CONCERNING UNIVERSAL TRUTH IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY JAPAN, 1999,
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Asia/AsiaAdam.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
Takahashi Satomi (1886-1964) gives a third competing view, one based on the idea that the human condition is
characterized by radical finitude, which means that there are certain limits beyond which human knowledge or
experience cannot reach. This existential insistence on human finitude leads him to dismiss all absolutist claims, including
Nishidas panentheism and Katôs positivism. This outlook is found in Takahashis critique of Nishida, one of his earliest
publications, which appeared in the March and April 1912 issues of Tetsugaku zasshi under the title of Facts of
Phenomena of Consciousness and their MeaningOn Reading Nishidas Studies of the Good.
2. SKEPTICISM IN REGARDS TO TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE CAN NEVER BE OVERCOME
Robert Adams, Professor of Philosophy at Sophia University, NISHIDA KITARO’S STUDIES OF THE GOOD AND THE DEBATE
CONCERNING UNIVERSAL TRUTH IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY JAPAN, 1999,
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Asia/AsiaAdam.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
In the essay, Takahashi addresses the metaphysical implications of Nishidas conception of pure experience, and the
reasons for his dissatisfaction with Nishida become clear: for by claiming that in pure experience human beings connect
to the infinite mystery of God, the unifying force of the universe, Nishida has implied that human beings are at ground
infinite beings, a conclusion Takahashi vehemently disagrees with: It is not to be expected that the entirety of realities
infinitude could be manifest in the finite development [found in human beings]. Takahashi goes on to say that Nishidas
use of pure experience as the model for the sacred encounter in fact cheapens the mystery of religion by equating the
experiences of average people and those of saints: There would be nothing simpler in this world, he asserts, than
attaining enlightenment, if we could unite ourselves to the spirit of the universe merely by forgetting the distinction
between ourselves and things .If humans are not privy to the most immediate truths of the universe, they are likewise
unable to comprehend any absolute truths about the physical universe. Human finitude in this respect indicates for
Takahashi that skeptical doubts can never be completely overcome; nor does he think they should be, for skepticism of
certain truth enlivens the creative aspect of human thought. Though many in the history of philosophy have rejected
skepticism, calling it suicidal, it is he says always skepticism that calls forth new philosophies.
3. HUMANS BEINGS MUST BE CONTENT WITH LIMITED TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE
Robert Adams, Professor of Philosophy at Sophia University, NISHIDA KITARO’S STUDIES OF THE GOOD AND THE DEBATE
CONCERNING UNIVERSAL TRUTH IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY JAPAN, 1999,
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Asia/AsiaAdam.htm, Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
Accepting the limitations of human knowledge does not, however, lead Takahashi to espouse a radical form of
skepticism. He holds what should be termed a pragmatic view of truth, similar to the Human view of knowledge
appropriated by Nishida, but without Nishidas subordination of human knowledge to Gods perfection. Human beings
must be satisfied with relatively certain truth, which is generally reliable but, as a product of the human mind, limited.
Through the course of history such reliable knowledge has accumulated in a dialectical process, as new knowledge
answers old doubts but at the same time gives rise to new problems. The solving of these problems in turn leads to the
formation of more new knowledge, which creates different doubts to answer, and so on in an unending process that
leads, over time, to a gradual increase of what he calls fundamental knowledge that is, knowledge that can be relied on.
New doubts are formed as new knowledge answers old doubts, but at the same time a core of reliable knowledge is
solidified and expanded.
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ANTI-FEDERALISTS
Perhaps the greatest question that American political theory has struggled with is to what extent the power of the
federal government should be limited. There have been a variety of different approaches to that question over the years,
with that of the Anti-Federalists being one of the most extreme. Given their position in history as one of the main
political groups at the time of the crafting of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists are no mere moment in history, but
instead have had a profound influence upon the entirety of American politics. This essay will explore the context
surrounding the Anti-Federalists, some of the major figures behind the movement, and the various potential pros and
cons to such a political system.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The driving issues in early American political theory arose as a response to the treatment of the original colonies by Great
Britain. The American Revolution came about for a myriad of reasons, all connected to the desire to have independence
from the tyrannical rule of the British monarchy. Therefore the issue of liberty was foremost in the minds of Americans
when considering how to craft a government of their own. The first attempt was guided by the Articles of Confederation,
which established a very limited central government with strong powers left to the individual states. The Confederation
could not collect taxes, regulate commerce, or a great many other things that are matter of course for the federal
government today. Moreover, amending the Articles required unanimity among the states.
Viewing these and many other aspects of the Articles as deep flaws, many called for some kind of reform. During the
time of various Constitutional Conventions, a great deal of writing was done by various political figures that advocated
different positions on what direction the country ought to take. Although far from universally read at the time – the
pamphlets were mostly published in New York – a group of 85 documents which came to be known as the Federalist
Papers came to be the most famous articulation of Federalist views. These papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, and John Jay under the pseudonym “Publius,” advocated a much stronger central government than what the
Articles provided. This federalist camp by and large supported the proposed Constitution that was being debated at the
Conventions. The inability of the federal government to take care of a lot of problems, notably the Shays Rebellion that
occurred in Massachusetts for half a year before it could be quelled, seemed to the Federalists a clear signal that a new
Constitution was needed.
Although the new Constitution was passed largely the way that the Federalists hoped it would be, support for it was by
no means unanimous. The contingent of people who felt that the proposed Constitution had too strong of a Central
government were known as the Anti-Federalists. Contemporary readers might feel as if these terms are backwards, given
that in today’s lexicon “federalism” refers to the doctrine that the federal government should not encroach upon the
proper powers of the states. However, it is important to keep in mind that terminology changes, and back at the time of
the signing of the Constitution the Anti-Federalists were those opposed to it on the grounds that it gave too much power
to the federal government. They felt that the essence of democracy could only be carried out on a small scale, the
benefits of which were lost in such a massive government. Anti-federalists, therefore, supported a more direct
democracy, as opposed to the republican government that connected to the citizens only via mediating representatives.
Anti-Federalist differ from the Federalist Papers in a few significant ways. First, the Anti-Federalists were not as
organized in their publications; there is not an established number to each document or speech that constituted AntiFederalist contributions to the political debate. Secondly, the identity of the authors of the Anti-Federalist papers is not
always known. Even though the Federalist Papers bore the same pen name, who did which paper (Hamilton, Jay, or
Madison) is well documented. The Anti-Federalists also used pseudonyms borrowed from past figures from Rome (as
well as other names), but it is not always conclusive which actual person lies behind what name. This is partially due to
the less organized nature of the Anti-Federalists, and partially to the fact that history has not glorified their
accomplishments as it has the Federalists.
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WHO THEY WERE
While the issue of which Anti-Federalist authors were behind the works of pseudonyms such as “Brutus,” “Old Whig,” or
“Federal Farmer” may be an ongoing debate, some of the more important figures in the theory are well known. One such
person is Patrick Henry. While his famous quotation in which he prefers liberty to life became one of the central rallying
cries of the Revolution, Henry did not support the Constitution that was eventually passed in 1787. Henry associated the
Federalist supporters with the kind of aristocracy that the Revolutionary War was meant to free America from. The
inclusion of a Bill of Rights into the Constitution is owed in part to Patrick Henry; while he never supported the
Constitution, one of his greatest criticisms of it was the lack of any explicit limitations upon the powers of the federal
government, which the Bill of Rights provided (to some extent). While the Bill of Rights was not included in the initial
signing of the Constitution, it was promised to be included by Congress shortly thereafter.
Another prominent Anti-Federalist was George Clinton. No, not the one in the Funkadelic Parliament. George Clinton was
the first governor of New York during the ratification of the Constitution, and later would become Vice President for both
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Clinton authored some of the Anti-Federalist papers that were published under
the name “Cato.” Clinton did his best to block ratification of the Constitution, but when it was approved by the requisite
nine states at the Convention in his very own state, Clinton acquiesced. Ironically he ended up Vice-President to
Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. Clinton despised Madison, but took the post after his own
Presidential ambitions were dashed. There are a great many other important Anti-Federalist thinkers: James Winthrop,
Samuel Bryan, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Yates, and others. While of course they all had minor differences, the thread
running through them all was a mistrust of too massive a government.
THE CASE FOR THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS
So what is it that is positive about the theory of Anti-Federalism? The primary emphasis is upon promoting liberty and
freedom. But what liberties are being shoved aside in the current system? The premise behind Anti-Federalism goes
deeper than knee-jerk mistrust of the federal government. To understand Anti-Federalists merely in terms of modernday states-rights discourse would be in a sense misleading; while they share some of the same beliefs, Anti-Federalism is
an entirely different view of what government means than is considered in contemporary political discourse.
The first major premise in Anti-Federalism is that true government is only possible on a small scale. When the words
“big” or “small” are used to describe governments today, it is typically meant to designate the bureaucracy, or amount of
control, that the government has. And it is true that Anti-Federalists would argue for a less massive government, but
they would also stress that said governing body has to be concerned with a vastly smaller area than the US currently is.
This is because when a regime is in control over a large enough populace, direct democracy becomes simply unfeasible.
Today what we have is a republic, where representatives are elected with the supposed task of voicing the opinions of all
of the people in Congress. There would be no way for common individuals to stroll onto the floor of Capitol Hill any time
they wished and have a real voice in crafting national legislation.
Direct democracy of that sort is appealing to Anti-Federalists because it makes up for the myriad of shortcomings in the
current system of “representation”. For one, there is no way for Representatives to actually know the desires of the
people they are voting for. The closest way to understanding the will of the electorate – polling – is remarkably
inaccurate, and only samples a small part of the population. Even were polling perfectly accurate, the problem of
majority tyranny arises. Especially given the US’s self-proclaimed status as a melting pot of races, cultures, ideas, and so
on, it becomes all the more difficult for any group to get the policy they want. Since potential actions to be taken by
Congress are almost never a black and white issue, there are a host of different possible options to be argued for. This
ensures that oftentimes the majority opinion does not even constitute over half of the population, making most of the
people’s wishes going unheeded. This is democracy at its most tenuous.
Part of the problem stems from the type of people that are going to be the Representatives in a large republic. The AntiFederalists argued that a result of that type of government would be that only the elite would have the capability to run
for office. To achieve enough public recognition to get elected, one would have to not be tied to any sort of private
concerns that would distract from that goal. No one struggling to earn enough money to survive, let alone the middle
class who spend a great deal of time working to (for example) put their kids through college, have the time and resources
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to become a serious politician. This problem has gotten even more out of control given the importance of selfadvertisement during campaigns.
The current controversy over money spent in campaigns is telling. But even if stringent campaign finance reform
measures were to pass, there would still be cultural and economic barriers that would make it extremely difficult for
anyone but the elite class to realize the goal of playing a role in the public sector. Therefore, the type of person who is
elected into office will never be the same type of person that she or he is supposed to represent. While it is certainly
possible for a person of a different station to understand the situation of a common person, this is often not the case.
How can a rich white Senator born into privilege know how difficult it is to be poor? It becomes difficult for any interest
aside from the elite’s to be advanced in government. Indeed, many Anti-Federalists charged that it was elite interests
that motivated the structure of the government set up in the Constitution.
But even if all of the things above were not true, and Senators and Representatives were somehow able to represent the
wishes of their constituents completely accurately, Anti-Federalists would still have a large problem with the massive
republic that we live in today. The difference lies in the fact that our conception of politics is as a means to an end. In
other words, people tend to be only concerned with issues such as representation insofar as they get what they want.
Provided that a Senator votes the way someone theoretically would want them to, the political sphere and one’s own
relationship to it can be safely ignored. Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, find that situation lacking, precisely because
they see participation in politics as an end to itself.
Christopher Duncan explains why it is that Anti-Federalists place intrinsic value upon direct democracy. The reason for
this is because, interestingly enough, Anti-Federalism dovetails nicely with one of the main tenets of Hannah Arendt’s
belief on the nature of politics. Arendt, an important political theorist from this century, contends that the highest form
of human existence lies in the participation in politics. She draws upon Greek culture in her book THE HUMAN
CONDITION to explain the various degrees of human activity. The lowest is that of labor, whereby one toils to take care
of private necessities, such as food and shelter. The next highest is work, which encompasses crafts, the arts, and similar
pursuits. There is the possibility of public appreciation of work, but it is often still private in nature. Finally, the highest
type of human activity is what Arendt says the Greeks considered true “action”: politics. Once all private demands are
met, then one can spend their time caring for the polis (city). The ancient Greeks despised labor, and therefore used
slavery to divest themselves of the need to do tasks that they consider menial. Therefore the most glory came from
being an honored statesman in the city-state.
This is not to suggest that the Anti-Federalists merely wanted to copy the Greeks, but instead that understanding the
rationale behind the Greek priority of action in the public realm sheds light on why Anti-Federalists find value in pure
democracy. In fact, many of the Anti-Federalists papers make explicit reference to Greek and Roman societies – before
they developed strong tyrannical central governments – as being ideals insofar as democracy is concerned. AntiFederalists desired the smaller town-hall type governments were individual could have a say and come to some
consensus about issues that affected them and their town. Only that way can the desire to life a public life, and therefore
be happy and free, be achieved.
THE CASE AGAINST THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS
As pretty of a picture of an idyllic small town democracy this paints, one can readily find fault with such a small-scale
system of government. The same problems that were apparent at the time of the Articles of the Confederation are still
present in a system that devolves a great deal of authority. First and foremost is a problem with security from threats
both internal and external. The incapability of internal uprisings and the like to be dealt with a weak central government
was arguably shown back as early as Shay’s Rebellion. What is to stop one state from deciding to use aggressive force
against another to take, say, some economic resources? Threats from other countries are even more frightening. Even if
every state kept standing militias, it would seem difficult to coordinate efforts, and without a strong federal ability to tax,
there is no way a national army could be built and maintained that would comport to the standards necessary to be
competitive. A strong central government seems to be a prerequisite of peace and order. Even if there is some sacrifice
of liberties in order to make those things possible, is it not obvious that life and peace are more important? Being free
from one’s own government is hardly a concern when another country is invading.
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In addition to security, economic prosperity seems to be a direct result of a strong federal government. Given how
complex the economic system is today, there are a variety of important tasks that can only be performed by the national
government that seem integral to maintaining a healthy economy. Having a national bank system, issuing bonds, the
Federal Reserve – all are functions that are distinctly national in character. None could be performed during the Articles
of Confederation. A thriving economy is a necessary condition for a lot of other things, such as funding of the sciences
and arts. Would the technological and cultural progress that has been made in the past two hundred years be possible in
a country with decentralized governments?
Yet another goal that has become of more importance in recent years that seems impractical without a strong central
government is the protection of the environment. While the Anti-Federalists sought to organize small like-minded
communities, environmental theory has taught that those situations are dangerous given the transitory nature of
pollution. The negative effects of industry in one county or state could most directly affect another area completely, with
those citizens lacking any method of recourse. Environmental disputes were not much of a problem back in colonial
times when the majority of the United States had yet to even be charted by European settlers, but it is a huge issue now.
Strict laws governing the states are needed to keep them accountable for their environmental damage.
One of the revolutions in the past hundred years has been the increasing role of the federal government as the protector
of individual rights from state discrimination. This picture of rights flips on its head the problem envisioned by the AntiFederalists of a tyrannical national government. The most famous example of this comes with the controversy
concerning segregation in the South. Until the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus the Board of Education of
Topeka, schools wouldn’t allow blacks the same educational opportunities. This case was but the most visible of a
massive effort by the federal government to outlaw a host of racist policies held by many States. These protections
against discrimination apply to sexism and other forms of oppression through the Equal Protection amendment. By
passing amendments that protect rights not merely through limiting the power of the federal government but instead
positively restricting certain behavior of the states and local governments, a brand new turn is taken in the relationship
between individuals, rights, and the government. There might not be any way to have stopped that discrimination
throughout the country in the system promoted by the Anti-Federalists.
While the fundamental motivation for the Anti-Federalists was the protection of liberty through democracy, it is very
possible that their mistrust of a strong central government was not merely reactionary fear stemming from their dealings
with Great Britain. Many authors claim that the federal government has proven to be self-limiting in such a fashion so as
to avoid the pitfalls the Anti-Federalists predicted. Power over such things as taxation has certainly not spiraled into
overwhelming tyranny. Nor is there a complete disregard for the rights and powers of the states even within this system.
The 50 states retain a massive amount of control over criminal laws, internal commerce, and so forth. Few would call the
powers that the federal government claims right to now “tyrannical” by any means.
RESPONSES TO SOME OF THE ATTACKS ON THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS
While this list of problems might seem difficult for the Anti-Federalists to overcome, hope is not lost yet.
Many authors specifically respond to some of these criticisms and explain why they might not seem as problematic as
they seem. With regard to the security issue, one might question the incentive for other countries to attack the United
States if it were more decentralized. Countries don’t just go around attacking each other for land nowadays; wars tend to
start due to tensions over disagreements. In that sense there likelihood of an attack against the US might decrease;
countries would no longer have cause to resent the US throwing its superpower weight around world affairs. As for
internal problems, it is natural that uprisings like the Shay’s Rebellion would occur during a country’s birth pangs, but
there is less reason to believe such events would be a matter of course without a powerful federal government.
Issues such as the environment and minority rights could be dealt with in a collective fashion. Just because power would
be devolved to a large degree does not mean that national laws would not work pending the acceptance of the majority
of states. Given the swing in opinion towards protecting the environment and ending discrimination, it is logical that
even without things like strong Supreme Court decisions it is still plausible that those problems would be voluntary dealt
with by the states.
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It is certain that the country would be less economically prosperous if it had developed more along Anti-Federalist lines,
but economic might is not necessarily the highest aim for a country. Money alone cannot produce happiness, and it can
even create tensions in a society where the wealth is increasingly becoming concentrated in a small percentage of the
population. As the lower class gets larger and poorer, it is natural to question just how successful the country is
economically, no matter what the Gross Domestic Product statistics say. Participation in a public democracy, as Hannah
Arendt suspects, can be much more fundamental to human happiness than amassing material wealth. Perhaps the
widespread depression exhibited in American society today is a result of the alienation felt towards one’s fellow humans.
The Federalist model did establish an effective system for pursuing one’s private wishes, but those are nothing more
than glorified necessities taken too far. True happiness is found in one’s civic existence, and therefore in direct
democracy.
CONCLUSION
Anti-Federalism, as a political theory taken in general, has many potential benefits and downfalls. The most skillful use of
it will be to argue for a particular type of democracy that actually involves people, instead of merely a republic where no
one’s interests but the very powerful are furthered. It can be used in its specific historical context to criticize or justify
the Constitution, or to help argue for or against other political objectives that would affect the balance of power
between the people and their state, local, federal governments.
One thing that is important to keep in mind for the purpose of utilizing this theory in a debate round is that one does not
necessarily have to advocate every thing that the Anti-Federalists would. Instead, its principles of maintaining a genuine
democracy can be utilized to argue in favor of smaller changes, such as greater states rights in a particular area. Even if
the federal government has not proven to turn into a tyranny, there is little denying that politics in this country has
become an affair of the rich and elite, excluding most people from participating in it in any meaningful way. Moreover,
no political system is wholly comprised of one ideology or another; the Constitution may have been promoted mainly by
Federalists, but its inclusion of a Bill of Rights, as well as a few other modifications to it are distinctly Anti-Federalist in
nature. The American political tradition has always been a product of the dialectic of both of those movements. Truly
understanding the various twists and turns of American politics requires a grasp upon its roots in both the Federalist as
well as Anti-Federalist traditions. Both theories have strong advantages and disadvantages that can be used to shed light
on a variety of political issues in our own day and age.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ackerman, Bruce. WE THE PEOPLE: FOUNDATIONS, Harvard University Press, 1992.
Arendt, Hannah. THE HUMAN CONDITION, University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Bailyn, Bernard. THE DEBATE ON THE CONSTITUTION: FEDERALIST AND ANTIFEDERALIST SPEECHES, ARTICLES, AND
LETTERS DURING THE STRUGGLE OVER RATIFICATION, Library of America, 1993.
Berns, Walter. TAKING THE CONSTITUTION SERIOUSLY. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Dolbeare, Kenneth. DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT. John Wiley & Sons, inc. 1969.
Dry, Murray, and Storing, Herbert. THE COMPLETE ANTI-FEDERALIST, University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Duncan, Christopher. THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS AND EARLY AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT. Northern Illinois University
Press, 1995.
Hoffer, Robert. A POLITICS OF TENSION: THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION AND AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS, University
of Colorado Press, 1992.
Ketcham, Ralph. THE ANTI-FEDERALIST PAPERS AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION DEBATES, Penguin, 1986.
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Sinopoli, Richard. FROM MANY, ONE: READINGS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT, Georgetown Press,
1997.
Storing, Herbert. WHAT THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS WERE FOR, University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Wood, Gordon. THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Alfred Knopf, 1992.
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THE ANTI-FEDERALIST VISION OF SMALLER GOVERNMENT IS SUPERIOR
1. IT IS EMPIRICALLY SHOWN THAT ONLY SMALL GOVERNMENTS AVOID CORRUPTION
Brutus, Anti-Federalist Writer, FROM MANY, ONE: READINGS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT, 1997, p.
37.
In a large republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too great to be
placed in any single subject; he has interest of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy, great and glorious,
by oppressing his fellow citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country. In a large
republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a
small one, the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen;
abuses are of less extent, and of course are less protected.” History furnishes no example of a free republic, any thing
like the extent of the United States. The Grecian republics were of small extent; so also was that of the Romans. Both of
these, it is true, in process of time, extended their conquests over large territories of country; and the consequence was,
that their governments were changed from that of free governments to those of the most tyrannical that ever existed in
the world.
2. GOVERNMENTS THAT RULE OVER SIMILAR PEOPLE OPERATE MORE EFFICIENTLY
Brutus, Anti-Federalist Writer, FROM MANY, ONE: READINGS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT, 1997, p.
38.
In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be
a constant clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.
This will retard the operations of government, and prevent such conclusions as will promote the public good. If we apply
this remark to the condition of the United States, we shall be convinced that it forbids that we should be one
government. The United States includes a variety of climates. The productions of the different parts of the union are very
variant, and their interests, of consequence, diverse. Their manners and habits differ as much as their climates and
productions; and their sentiments are by no means coincident. The laws and customs of the several states are, in many
respects, very diverse, and in some opposite; each would be in favor of its own interests and customs, and, of
consequence, a legislature, formed of representatives from the respective parts, would not be too numerous to act with
any care or decision, but would be composed of such heterogenous and discordant principles, as would constantly be
contending with each other.
3. SMALLER SCALE POLITICS ALLOW FOR HAPPINESS VIA A GENUINE PUBLIC SPHERE
Christopher Duncan, Professor of Political Science, THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS AND EARLY AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT,
1995, p. 170-171.
The question the Anti-Federalists worried about was not how we organize our polity for order and greatness but how we
organize our polity for public happiness and political salvation. Agrippa’s claims that “freedom is necessary for industry”
and that “in absolute governments, the people, be the climate what it may be, are in general lazy, cowardly, turbulent,
and vicious to an extreme” are but his way of saying that without the sense of attachment and empowerment that
comes with public participation, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no happiness. This is the
theoretical thread that ties Anti—Federalist thought together. It is the notion that the Constitution as a centralizing,
ultimately disempowering, document will leave them bereft of their power to save themselves, that it will ultimately, in
the words of Hannah Arendt, “banish the citizens from the public realm into the privacy of their households, and demand
of them that they mind their own private business.” This would certainly be a torturous existence for a people who
believed their individual chance for redemption was tied intimately to their shared public life. Self-government for the
Anti-Federalists was not just a mechanistic device to ensure the safety of their fortunes, it was an opportunity to
transform themselves and expand their circle of concerns while encouraging others to do the same. Political
participation for the Anti-Federalists became an end to be pursued as well as a means.
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ANTI-FEDERALISM GIVES RIGHTS AND PREVENTS DISCRIMINATION
1. ONLY SMALLER LIMITED GOVERNMENTS ALLOW LIBERTY
Cato, Anti-Federalist Writer, FROM MANY, ONE: READINGS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT, 1997, p. 42.
From this picture, what can you promise yourselves, on the score of consolidation of the United States, into one
government—impracticability in the just exercise of it—your freedom insecure—even this form of government limited in
its continuance—the employments of your country disposed of to the opulent, to whose contumely you will continually
be an object—you must risque much, by indispensably placing trusts of the greatest magnitude, into the hands of
individuals, whose ambition for power, and aggrandizement, will oppress and grind you—where, from the vast extent of
your territory, and the complication of interests, the science of government will become intricate and perplexed, and too
mysterious for you to understand, and observe; and by which you are to be conducted into a monarchy, either limited or
despotic; the latter, Mr. Locke remarks, is a government derived from neither nature, nor compact. Political liberty, the
great Montesquieu again observes, consists in security, or at least in the opinion we have of security; and this security
therefore, or the opinion, is best obtained in moderate governments, where the mildness of the laws, and the equality of
the manners, beget a confidence in the people, which produces this security, or the opinion. This moderation in
governments, depends in a great measure on their limits, connected with their political distribution.
2. ANTI-FEDERALISM STOPS RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
James Etienne Viator, Associate Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, LOYOLA JOURNAL OF
PUBLIC INTEREST LAW, Spring, 2000, p. 37-8.
Furthermore, the phenomenon of white bloc voting makes race-conscious districting a properly narrow means to further
the "compelling interest" in full freedom for black Americans -- the compelling interest of solving racial problems through
representation in Congress by those who share a commitment to this unique interest in political liberty on account of
their membership in the historically "raced" community. Using an innovative mixture of campaign news stories and
public opinion surveys of voters, Keith Reeves demonstrated the continued presence of bigoted attitudes among white
voters, which results in the continuing existence of white bloc voting; and this racially biased voting excludes blacks from
the fair and equal representation recommended both by the Anti-Federalists and Section 2 of the VRA. It is this stubborn
persistence of racially polarized voting that confirms the enduring wisdom of and necessity for the Anti-Federalist view
that representatives should be "made of the same stuff collectively as their constituents." Thus, shared racial experience
and the legacy of white hostility and bigotry constitute the compelling reason for majority-black districts as a necessary
means to effectuate the Anti-Federalist insight that in order to guarantee liberty "like best represents like."
ONLY ANTI-FEDERALIST POLITICS ALLOW TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE MULTIPLICITY OF INTERESTS
Christopher Duncan, Professor of Political Science, THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS AND EARLY AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT,
1995, p. 78.
In other words, they have agreed to protect each other from external dangers to their collective—not individual—
liberties, and to work together, not on questions of the general welfare but on questions of mutual and general welfare.
If that latter clause is read correctly, it should be clear that there was no such thing as the general welfare of the country;
rather, there was a series of particular “welfares” that could only be considered general when in fact the question at
issue was one of mutual concern as determined by the state itself. The distinction here is once again of critical
importance from a theoretical perspective, in that under the Articles of Confederation there was no “truth or Platonic
form, that transcended the local community and its own particular determinations about right and wrong, useful or not,
other than those basic natural laws (but these, too, were open to a good deal of “relative” interpretation). Communal
welfare and justice were both the products of local political conversations, and any attempt to conflate the judgments of
those independent entities had to be agreed to by them and the like associations involved in order to be legitimate. Thus
the mode of operation was consensual rather than majoritarian or adversarial, which accounts for the nine-vote
decision-making threshold and the provisions for unanimity with regard to amendment that marked the Articles.
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AN ANTI-FEDERALIST GOVERNMENT WOULD BE UNSAFE AND INEFFECTIVE
1. AN ANTI-FEDERALIST SYSTEM WOULD BE VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN ATTACK
Robert Webking, Assistant Professor of Political Science, “The Federalist: Government Power and Individual Rights,” THE
CONSTITUTIONAL POLITY, 1983, p. 9.
The first of the advantages is the increased safety from foreign attack that comes with Union. “Among the many objects
to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention that of providing for their safety seems to be
the first.” Other nations must be prevented from having just causes for warring with the Americans and they must also
be discouraged from attacking injustly on the pretext of trumped up charges. With the Union the Americans will be less
likely to present just causes for war to foreign nations because there will be a single interpretation of the law of nations
and of treaties. That single interpretation will not be dominated by the unjust desires of any part of the Union.
Moreover, should the national government provide a just cause for war to a foreign nation it is far more likely that the
dispute will be settled without recourse to war with one large nation than it would be with several smaller confederacies.
Publius notes the reality that “acknowledgements, explanations, and compensations are often accepted as satisfactory
from a strong united nation” when they would not be accepted from a weaker power.
2. THE ORDER THAT COMES FROM A FEDERALIST GOVERNMENT OUTWEIGHS LIBERTY
Thomas E. Baker, Director of the Constitutional Resource Center, BYU JOURNAL OF PUBLIC LAW, 1999, p. 76.
In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime,
reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts to some degree in favor of order - in favor of the government's
ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being. It simply cannot be said, therefore, that in every
conflict between individual liberty and governmental authority the former should prevail. And if we feel free to criticize
court decisions that curtail civil liberty, we must also feel free to look critically at decisions favorable to civil liberty. To
conclude his historical exegesis, the Chief Justice brings us back one last time to Lincoln's dilemma to ask and answer
rhetorically, "Should he, to paraphrase his own words, have risked losing the Union that gave life to the Constitution
because that charter denied him the necessary authority to preserve the Union? Cast in these terms, it is difficult to
quarrel with his decision."
3. ADVANCES IN CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY MAKE ANTI-FEDERALISM IMPRACTICAL
Larry D. Kramer , Professor of Law, New York University Law School, COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW, January, 2000, p. 291-292.
The specific limits of federal power envisaged by the Founders in 1789 are gone, and any effort to roll back federal power
to what it meant at the Founding would be foolish as well as utterly impractical. Even the harshest critics of New Deal
jurisprudence acknowledge that changes in society, culture, and the economy require a different kind of national
authority today, both practically and as an interpretive matter. Hence, notwithstanding any purported claims of fidelity
to original intent, the limits on Congress proposed by today's advocates of judicially-enforced federalism in fact look
nothing like any limits that existed when the Constitution was adopted. The question thus becomes, which process
should determine the appropriate revised allocation of authority between the federal government and the states:
constitutional politics or judicial edict? Mesmerized by the mantra "our Federal government is one of limited powers,"
the Justices assume that it necessarily falls on them to define new limits - some limits, any limits, even if those limits bear
no resemblance to anything imagined by the Founders or observed in the past. But imposing novel judicially-defined
limits just for the sake of having judicially-defined limits is an ill-conceived formalism. In a world of global markets and
cultural, economic, and political interdependency, the proper reach of federal power is necessarily fluid, and it may well
be that it is best defined through politics. Certainly, as we have seen, this is more consistent with the original design than
the Court's new made-up limits-for-the-sake-of-limits. Embracing the hurly-burly of politics while paying attention to
how states protect themselves in that domain is a much "truer" interpretation of our Constitution.
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FEDERALIST THEORY PROTECTS INDIVIDUAL AND MINORITY RIGHTS
1. STRONG CENTRAL GOVERNMENT IS SELF-RESTRAINING
Larry D. Kramer , Professor of Law, New York University Law School, COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW, January, 2000, p. 252-3.
North Carolina lawyer-planter Archibald Maclaine, writing as Publicola, made the charge of Anti-Federalist duplicity even
more explicitly: I find some people are so strangely infatuated, as to think that Congress can, and therefore will, usurp
powers not given them by the states, and do any thing, however oppressive and tyrannical. I know no good grounds for
such a supposition, but this, that the legislative and judicial powers of the state have too often stepped over the bounds
prescribed for them by the constitution; and yet, strange to tell, few of those, whose arguments I am now considering,
think such measures censurable - The conclusion to be drawn here is obvious - The objectors hope to enjoy the same
latitude of doing evil with impunity, and they are fearful of being restricted, if an efficient government takes place.
2. A FEDERALIST GOVERNMENT ENSURES PROSPERITY AND INCLUSION OF MINORITIES
Robert Webking, Assistant Professor of Political Science, “The Federalist: Government Power and Individual Rights,” THE
CONSTITUTIONAL POLITY, 1983, p. 7-8.
Publius’ original argument about how a people can secure the advantage and avoid the disadvantage of majority rule
rests upon a distinction between species of popular government. In a pure democracy, where people gather to rule
themselves directly, he writes, the danger of majority faction is unavoidable. Such a form of government can exist with
only a small territory, and in a small community it is virtually certain that there will be a majority with the same partial
interest. In a republic, however, the problem can be avoided. The difference between a pure democracy and a republic is
that in the latter the people do not rule directly, but through representatives. Representation yields a number of happy
advantages for Publius, but the decisive one is size. A republic can be very much larger than a pure democracy, and
because it is larger it can include a great variety of people with many different kinds of economic activities and, hence, a
multiplicity of interests. The existence of many distinct interests means the existence of many interest groups or factions.
The existence of many factions rather than merely two makes it likely that there will be no majority faction. All factions
will be minority factions and each faction will be prevented from using the government unjustly by the fact of majority
rule. “Extend the sphere,” Publius writes, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less
probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
3. A FEDERALIST THEORY OF LEGAL RIGHTS STOPS DISCRIMINATION
Daan Braveman, Dean and Professor of Law, Syracuse University College of Law, THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, February,
2002, p. 619.
Perhaps the most significant breakthrough in the transformation process occurred in Brown v. Board of Education. In
striking down state segregation, the Supreme Court dramatically altered the relations between the states and the
national government, and made the federal courts the primary guardians of federal rights. In the years following Brown,
the lower federal courts became the litigation forum for state school segregation cases, as well as actions challenging a
wide range of other state activities, including zoning, reapportionment, police misconduct, and prison conditions.
Notably, Brown was not decided in isolation but rather at a time when the world outside the courtroom was changing
dramatically. The other branches of the federal government had a national and international agenda, which included the
expansion of federal rights and a federal interest in protecting those rights from state deprivation. "A new spirit of
nationalism" replaced the isolationism of the turn of the century and, as Judge Gibbons stated: "In the global village,
deference to local solutions for problems that transcend local interests is a quaint anachronism." By the 1960s, the
structure envisioned during Reconstruction was firmly established. Individuals had federal rights, federal remedies, and a
federal forum to challenge state conduct that violated federal law.
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Hannah Arendt
Political Philosopher (1906-1975)
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover in 1906, the only child of a Jewish engineer. After completing undergraduate work,
she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, and earned her doctorate when she was
twenty-two. She left Germany in 1933 because of Hitler’s rise to power, and resided in France, where she was active in
the Zionist movement. In 1940 she moved to the United States. During her early years in America she was unable to find
an academic post despite her outstanding qualifications. However, in 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
and, the following year, was invited to deliver the Christian Guass lectures at Princeton. Throughout her remaining
career, she taught courses in philosophy at the University of California, the University of Chicago, Columbia,
Northwestern, and Cornell, among others. At the time of her death in 1975, she was University Professor of Political
Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, in New York. As one of the twentieth century’s most prominent and
controversial philosophers, Arendt is best known for her writings on revolution, violence, totalitarianism, and other
political phenomena. The following biography examines Arendt’s notions of: (1)
Balancing freedom and responsibility, (2) importance of speech, (3) ideology and totalitarianism, (4) application to
debate.
Throughout all of Arendt’s writing runs a single philosophical paradox: how do we protect and support the human
capacity to freely constitute a political community, to make new beginnings, and, at the same time, ensure that this
freedom of action is responsible? That is, how do we maintain a balance between freedom and responsibility? In an
attempt to answer this question, Arendt identified two types of excess, each of which threatens to destroy the balance
between freedom and responsibility. One is an unreflective confidence that human beings can mold themselves and the
world in any way they wish. This assumption is manifested in the scientific attitude and its uncritical endorsement of
control over nature, and most ominously in totalitarian regimes. The second type of excess is attached to thinking, not
acting, and consists in the theoretical postulation of a realm of truth, or being, accessible to reason and authority over
human action. That is, humans celebrate reasoning and logic at the expense of emotions and feelings. The emotionless
logic embraced by this form of thought, Arendt feared, would denigrate human activity and diminish the importance of
freedom.
Arendt also argued that action and speech are the supreme expressions of civilization, for they reveal open-mindedness
and freedom as constitutive elements of human existence. Speech and action have several abilities including the
opportunity to change people’s opinions, alter unjust government policies, and promote those issues at the heart of
freedom. With the interest in speech and action, Arendt continued to challenge the Western tradition of separating
speech with behavior. Instead she argued that a life without speech and action is literally dead to the world. In addition,
Arendt’s approach to the study of politics, and particularly her refusal to measure the worth of the political realm by
absolute/objective standards seemed a possible way Out of what she perceived to be an impasse in political theory; this
impasse she would describe roughly as the contest between the ancient and the modern modes of inquiry. Though these
two modes are different they share a common rejection for the inherent freedom of political activity. The ancient mode
of inquiry is reflective of a transcendental view of political justice.
In Arendt’s analysis, ideological thinking and totalitarian thinking are one and the same. In each case thought presents
itself as an all-encompassing logic of totality. All phenomena of present, past, and future are claimed to be perfectly
knowable by one in possession of true knowledge. In addition, Arendt contested the ideologist’s claims to sole
possession of the truth. Moreover, Arendt’s true goal was to redeem politics, humanity and the world. The process of
redeeming politics depended on an acceptable rhetorical vision one that embraced freedom and opportunity. The effect
of this rhetorical vision, Arendt posited, was to inspire the reader to go forth and change the current political system and
promote “desirable” political action.
Hannah Arendt’s usefulness to debate lies in her discussion of politics, government, action and violence.
Especially important is her discussion of the effect of government form on civil disobedience and violence. While her
philosophy is essentially practical, interested in the consequences of values, rather than their intrinsic usefulness, there
is still much to use. The debater may be interested in her assumptions and prioritizing of freedom, as central to political
systems. Moreover, her philosophy provides much for the discussion of the effects of values on particular issues.
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Bibliography
Hannah Arendt. “Approaches to the German Problem.” PARTISAN REVIEW 12 (1945): 93-106.
Hannah Arendt. “Authority in the Twentieth Century.” REVIEW OF POLITICS 18(1956): 403-417.
Hannah Arendt BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: EIGHT EXERCISES IN POLITICAL THOUGHT.
New York: Viking Press, 1968.
Hannah Arendt. CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC; LYING IN POLITICS, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ON VIOLENCE, THOUGHT ON POLITICS
AND REVOLUTION. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.
Hannah Arendt. EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL. New
York: Penguin Books, 1963.
Hannah Arendt. “From an Interview.” NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 25(1978): 18.
Hannah Arendt. “History and Immortality.” PARTISAN REVIEW 24 (1957): 11-53.
Hannah Arendt. THE HUMAN CONDITION. Chicago: University of Chicago Ness, 1958.
Hannah Arendt. “Imperialism: Road to Suicide.” COMMENTARY 1(1946): 27-35.
Hannah Arendt. THE JEW AS PARIAH: JEWISH IDENTITY AND POLITICS IN THE MODERN AGE.
New York: Grove Press, 1978.
Hannah Arendt. LECTURES ON KANT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. Chicago: University of Chicago Ness, 1982.
Hannah Arendt. MEN IN THE DARK TIMES. New York Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Hannah Arendt. ON REVOLUTION. New York: Viking Ness, 1963.
Hannah Arendt. ON VIOLENCE. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.
Hannah Arendt. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” JEWISH FRONTIER. (1945): 19-23.
Hannah Arendt. THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1951.
Hannah Arendt. “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.” LISTENER (1964): 185-7, 205.
Hannah Arendt. “Public Rights and Private Interests.” In SMALL COMFORTS FOR HARD TIMES:
HUMANISTS ON PUBLIC POLICY. Mooney and Stuber (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Ness, 1977.
Hannah Arendt. RACHEL VARNHAGEN: THE LIFE OF A JEWISH WOMAN. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974.
Hannah Arendt. “Religion and the Intellectuals, a Symposium.” PARTISAN REVIEW 17 (1950):
113-116.
Hannah Arendt. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.’ SOCIAL RESEARCH 38 (1971): 417-446.
Hannah Arendt. “Understanding and Politics.” PARTISAN REVIEW 20(1953): 377-392.
Hannah Arendt. “Understanding Communism.” PARTISAN REVIEW 20(1953): 580-583.
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VALUE SYSTEMS REQUIRE MAJORITY SUPPORT
1. MUST HAVE SUPPORT OF MANY INDIVIDUALS TO REVERE VALUES
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC,
1969, p. 68.
What had been decided inforo conscienhiae has now become part of public opinion, and although this particular group of
civil disobedients may still claim the initial validation--their consciences--they actually rely no longer on themselves
alone. In the market place, the fate of conscience is not much different from the fate of the philosopher’s truth: it
becomes an opinion, indistinguishable from other opinions. And the strength of opinion does not depend on conscience,
but on the number of those with whom it is associated--“unanimous agreement that ‘X’ is an evil...[sic] adds credence to
the believe that ‘X’ is an evil.”
2. PUBLIC SUPPORT NECESSARY TO MAKE SENSE OF PUBLIC VALUES
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, THE HUMAN CONDITION,
1958, p. 35.
We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous
enrichment of the private sphere through modem individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern
privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm--unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private
matter--as it is to the political, properly speaking.
3. POWER IS GWEN TO HUMANS BY GROUPS
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON VIOLENCE, 1970, p.
44.
When we say of somebody that his is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of
people to act in their name. The moment of the group, from which the power originated to begin with (potestas in
populo, without a people or group there is no power), disappears, “his power” also vanishes.
MUST EXAMINE ACTIONS TO UNDERSTAND VALUES
1. VALUES SIGNIFICANCE LIES IN SOCIETAL ACCEPTANCE
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND
FUTURE, 1954, p. 33.
The term “value” owes its origin to the sociological trend which even before Marx was quite manifest in the relatively
new science of classical economy. Marx was still aware of the fact, which the social sciences have since forgotten, that
nobody “seen in his isolation produces values,” but that products “become values only in their social relationship.” His
distinction between “use value” and “exchange value” reflects the distinction between things as men use and produce
them and their value in society, and his insistence on the greater authenticity of use values, his frequent description of
the rise of exchange value s a kind of original sin at the beginning of market production reflect his own helpless and, as it
were, blind recognition of the inevitability of an impending “devaluation of all values.”
2. MUST NOT LOOK TO THE ENDS OF ACTION TO DETERMINE VALUES
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, CRISES OF THE REPUBLIC,
1969, p. 62-63.
Our legal codes distinguish between crimes in which indictment is mandatory, because the community as a whole has
been violated and offenses in which only doers and sufferers are involved, who may or may not want to sue. In the case
of the former, the states of mind of those involved are irrelevant, except insofar as intent is part of the overt act, or
mitigating circumstances are taken into account; it makes no difference whether the one who suffered is willing to
forgive or the one who did is entirely unlikely to do it again.
3. HUMAN EXISTENCE DEPENDENT ON UNDERSTANDING ACTION
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, THE
HUMAN CONDITION, 1958, p.206-207.
Similarly, the attempt to eliminate action because of its uncertainty and to save human affairs from their frailty by
dealing with them as thought they were or could become the planned products of human making has first of all resulted
in channeling the human capacity for action, for beginning new and spontaneous processes which without men never
would come into existence, into an attitude toward nature which up to the latest stage of the modern age had been one
of exploring natural laws and fabricating objects out of natural material.
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FREEDOM IS THE CENTRAL VALUE IN SOCIETY
1. FREEDOM IS A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH OF OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND
FUTURE, 1954, p. 143.
In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience,
telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our everyday experience in the outer world, in which we orient
ourselves according to the principle of causality. In all practical and especially in political matters we hold human
freedom to be a self-evident truth, and it is upon this axiomatic assumption that laws are laid down in human
communities, that decisions are taken, that judgments are passed.
2. VALUE OF FREEDOM IS THE DIRECT AIM OF POLITICAL ACTION
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND
FUTURE, 1954, p. 146.
Freedom, moreover, is not only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly speaking,
such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom, which the only seldom--in times of crisis or revolution--becomes the
direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it,
political life as such would be meaningless. The mson d’être of politics is freedom and its field of experience is action.
3. POLITICS AND ACTIONS ARE DEPENDENT ON FREEDOM
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, BETWEEN PAST AND
FUTURE, 1954, p. 146.
The field where freedom has always been known, not as a problem, to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the
political realm. And even today, whether we know it or not, the question of politics and the fact that man is a being
endowed with the gift of action must always be present to our mind when we speak of the problem of freedom; for
action and politics, among all capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even
conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a single political issue without,
implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of man’s liberty.
4. VALUE OF FREEDOM CENTRAL TO FREE SPEECH
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON
REVOLUTION, 1963, p. 121.
To be sure, this passion for freedom for its own sake, for the sole “pleasure to be able to speak, to act, to breathe”
(Tocqueville), can arise only where men are already free in the sense that they do not have a master. And the trouble is
that this passion for public or political freedom can so easily be mistaken for the perhaps much more vehement, but
politically essentially sterile, passionate hatred of masters, the longing of the oppressed for liberation. Such hatred, no
doubt, is as old as recorded history and probably even older; it has never yet resulted in revolution since it is incapable of
even grasping, let alone realizing, the central idea of revolution, which is the foundation of freedom, that is, the
foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear.
5. FREEDOM IS AN IMPORTANT VALUE FOR LIBERATION
Hannah Arendt, Former Professor of Political Philosophy at the new School for Social Research, ON
REVOLUTION, 1963, p. 26.
But this difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and freedom in any set of historical circumstances does not
mean that liberation and freedom are the same, or that those liberties which are won as the result of liberation tell the
whole story of freedom even though those who tried their hand at both liberation and the foundation of freedom more
often than not did not distinguish between these matters very clearly either. The men of the eighteenth-century
revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered
their own capacity and desire for the “charms of liberty,” as John Jay once called them, only the very act of liberation. For
the acts and deeds which liberation demanded from them threw them into public business, where, intentionally or more
often unexpectedly, they began to constitute that space of appearances where freedom can unfold it charms and
become a visible, tangible reality.
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Aristippus
'I possess, I am not possessed'
---Aristippus
INTRODUCTION
Aristippus was a follower of Socrates, and the founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. He taught that the ultimate
goal of all actions is pleasure, and that we should not defer pleasures that are ready at hand for the sake of future
pleasures or as a reflection on the past. His philosophy came to be known as egoistic hedonism. He was willing to break
the social conventions of his day and engage in behavior that was considered undignified or shocking for the sake of
obtaining pleasurable experiences. The Cyrenaic school developed these ideas further and influenced Epicurus, later
Greek skeptics, Herbert Spencer, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and even Ayn Rand, among other well known
philosophers.
LIFE AND WORK
Not much is known about the life of Aristippus, as the main source for information on him is by Diogenes Laertius, who
wrote over 500 years after Aristippus' death. In fact, the very timeline of his life is unknown and falls somewhere within
430-370 B.C. Diogenes’ account of Aristippus lacks reliability as it was based on many “scandalous” stories that were told
in moral contempt (O’Keefe 2001) and as a way to promote rival conceptions of hedonism (Guthrie 1969). As a result,
most research on Aristippus is based in negativity, as he was a focal point of moral outrage. Without first hand accounts
of Aristippus’ philosophy, from his own writings or more accurate, less politically and/or morally motivated second and
third hand accounts, it is impossible to say for certain what his life was like or what his beliefs entailed.
What we do know of Aristippus’ life is as follows: He was born in Cyrene, a Greek colony in Northern Africa. He moved to
Athens and became one of Socrates’ most scandalous pupils, with his advocacy of sensual pleasure and his acceptance of
money for his instruction (O’Keefe 2001; Guthrie 1969). Along with his daughter, Arete, his grandson, Aristippus the
Younger, and a few other disciples, he formed the basis for the Cyrenaic school (O’Keefe 2001). Instructing and including
a female in the creation of a school (even if it was his daughter) was far ahead of his time and largely unheard of.
Granted, however, she never did receive the credit she deserved or was given as much regard as Arete the Younger.
The Cyrenaic School of Philosophy, founded in the city of Cyrene, flourished from about 400 to 300 B.C., and had for its
most distinctive tenet hedonism, or the doctrine that pleasure is the chief good (McNeil 1995). From Socrates, the
school derived its doctrine of the supremacy of pleasure from happiness as the chief good and from Protagoras, its
relativistic theory of knowledge. It is unclear how much of the developed Cyrenaic school of thought is based in
Aristippus the Elder’s teachings or his grandson’s, who is reported to have systematized much of the Cyrenaic philosophy
(O’Keefe 2001; Guthrie 1969). Arete and Aristippus the Younger are believed by some to be even more focused than
Aristippus the Elder on momentary pleasure as the goal, not an overall pleasant life (Merlan 1972). Information about
the school rarely differentiates origins based on the Elder or the Younger Aristippus (and pays little to no regard to Arete,
since she was female).
ETHICAL BASIS OF HEDONISM
Like other Greek ethical thinkers, Aristippus' ethics are centered on the question of what goal humans’ actions aim at
and what is valuable for its own sake. Aristippus’ identification of the end as pleasure makes him a hedonist. “His
definition of pleasure included not merely sensual gratification but also mental pleasures, domestic love, friendship, and
moral contentment-all that is commonly understood to comprise happiness" (Bhattacharya). He was depicted as
showing “disdain for conventional standards as being mere societal prejudices” (O’Keefe 2001).
“He argued that the difference between good and bad came down to the question of pleasure. The good is pleasurable;
the bad is painful. Therefore, the good life is one which produces pleasure and personal satisfaction to a person and
avoids pain” (Wellborn 1999). Xenophon reported that Aristippus advocated immediate gratification and not worrying
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about future pleasure (O’Keefe 2001). He argued that the only thing people have control over is what is in the present,
which is why pleasure should be the goal. One should not worry about the implications that pleasure could have for your
future, or be absorbed by lessons of the past (Margolin 2001; Guthrie 1969). In fact, Aristippus argued against seeking
happiness, which he defined as a collection of past and future pleasures, as only particular and immediate pleasure
should be sought (Irwin 1991). The good life may have been the end result of a lifetime of happiness through all of the
particular pleasures, but it should not, in and of itself, be the goal.
Aristippus largely agreed with Socrates’ lack of support for religion and science. Springing from the conception of good
and bad, Aristippus went as far as to argue for the non-existence of objects that were not based on such a dichotomy,
such as math (Guthrie 1969). In fact, he argued that math, among other elements of the physical world, should not be
studied, but only practical principles of conduct should be (Guthrie 1969). Scientific “truths” can not be classified as
good or bad, but only as observations of “truth.” In contrast, conduct can be good or bad and/or have good or bad
motivations. Like Socrates, Aristippus rejected institutionalized religion. “He called it ridiculous to pray and make
requests to the divinity: doctors, he said, do not give food or drink to a sick man when he asks for it, but when it is good
for him” (Guthrie 1969).
Aristippus’ philosophy of hedonism is often viewed as self-absorbed and lacking any sense of community responsibility,
but Aristippus’ conception of hedonism actually required good judgment and self-control (Wellborn 1999, Lester 1999,
Margolin 2001). He believed that “as long as you are clear-headed and single-minded in your pursuit of pleasure, it is not
as though pursuing pleasure in this way is making you do anything unwillingly, or making you lose your self-control” and
that, "what is best is not abstaining from pleasures, but instead controlling them without being controlled." (O’Keefe).
His famous phrase is considered to be, “I possess, I am not possessed.” To be controlled by one’s emotions and desires
threatens self-absorption to the point of detriment to the community, but self-control and good judgment enable
pleasure without such threat.
Like Socrates, Aristippus took great interest in teaching the ethical dimensions with his philosophy of hedonism. He
believed in practical ethics, not religious or community obligations based on morality. He did warn his students not to
inflict any pain or suffering (Margolin 2001). However, research on his support for self-control often turns out to be
contradictory. For instance, he is said to have asserted that “one’s property could never be too large for comfort, and on
the other to have advised his friends to limit their possessions to what they could save, with their own lives, from a
shipwreck” (Guthrie 1969). Perhaps the contradictory nature of the research on Aristippus is due to the absence of any
primary sources.
VIEWS ON FREEDOM
Aristippus disagreed with Socrates and Plato’s reliance on governmental control and the belief that there consists two
types of people, those who are fit to govern others and those who should be subject to their rule. Instead he argued that
“neither rule nor slavery appealed to him, but in his opinion there was a third, middle way: the road to happiness lay
through freedom, which was certainly not the lot of a ruler or commander, with all the risks and hard work that it
entailed” (Guthrie 1969). Thus, he rejected a society based on hierarchy and authority, and hoped for freedom instead.
In fact, he argued that his willingness and flexibility to do anything whatsoever for the sake of pleasure made him free.
He was master of himself (O’Keefe 2001) and refused to be incumbent to the control of any particular state or
sociopolitical bonds and duties (Guthrie 1969; Merlan 1972). He had a sort of detached attitude towards pleasure, which
ensured that he would always retain mastery over the pleasure and would never allow it to enslave him. “He takes what
he, as he knows, could with equal ease leave” (Merlan 1972).
Aristippus' promotion of freedom and his rejection of governmental institutions and control would seem almost
anarchistic, if it were not for his egoistic hedonism. It could be argued that such an attitude is at the base of some
individualist anarchist philosophers, even though their ideas are highly ridiculed and despised in the rest of the anarchist
community.
Although Aristippus thought highly enough of his daughter Arete to teach her (which is largely unheard of during that
era), it seemed unlikely that his support for freedom was intended to include women, based on the underlying sexist
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assumptions of his rhetoric. For instance, when Aristippus was criticized for sleeping with a courtesan, “he asked
whether there was any difference between taking a house in which many people have lived in before or none, or
between sailing on a ship in which many people have sailed and none. When it was answered that there is no important
difference, he replied that it likewise makes no difference whether the woman you sleep with has been with many
people or none.” (O’Keefe 2001) Although this exchange shows Aristippus’ support for women’s sexual freedom, it
retains objectification of women through the comparative object being based on man’s property.
THE ROOTS AND HERITAGE OF THE CYRENAIC SCHOOL
Aristippus, along with his disciples, started the Cyrenaic School. “The Cyrenaics started their philosophical inquiry by
agreeing with Protagoras that all knowledge is relative. That is true, they said, which seems to be true; of things in
themselves we can know nothing. From this they were led to maintain that we can know only our feelings, or the
impression which things produce upon us.” (McNeil 1995) “Knowledge, according to the Cyrenaics, is rooted in the
fleeting sensations of the moment, and it is therefore futile to attempt the formulation of a system of moral values in
which the desirability of present pleasures is weighed against the pain they may cause in the future” (Margolin 2001).
“Transferring this theory of knowledge to the discussion of the problem of conduct, and assuming, as has been said, the
Socratic doctrine that the chief aim of conduct is happiness, they concluded that happiness is to be attained by the
production of pleasurable feelings and the avoidance of painful ones. Pleasure, therefore, is the chief aim in life. The
good man is he who obtains or strives to obtain the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. Virtue is not good in
itself; it is good only as a means to obtain pleasure.” (McNeil 1995)
In rejection of the philosophies of the Cyrenaic School, Epicurus emphasized the superiority of social and intellectual
pleasures over those of the senses. In contrast, Aristippus promoted immediate pleasure and taught that pain should
always be avoided. Epicurus taught that pain is sometimes necessary for good health and that self-restraint and rational
control of one’s desires is the way for long-term pleasure (Bhattacharya; Gosling 1969; Margolin 2001). “He further
classified sensual pleasure as pleasure in motion; the state of ataraxia, which is pleasing in itself. He discarded transitory
stimulation in favor of enduring satiation.” (Bhattacharya) The term “epicure,” originated from Epicurus’ beliefs and is
defined as a person of refined taste. For Epicurus, a good person “was someone who lived for pleasure but was smart
enough to know which pleasures were most desirable” (Wellborn 1999).
Both the Epicureans and the Cyrenaic School were based in ethical, not psychological, hedonism. Psychological
hedonism views humans as psychologically constructed to exclusively desire pleasure; whereas, ethical hedonists argue
that humans have a fundamental moral obligation to maximize happiness or pleasure (Margolin 2001; Irwin 1991).
Many philosophers drew from the Cyrenaic School and the Epicureans promotion of pleasure as the base human goal.
Herbert Spencer argued that “pleasure, in its ultimate sense, defines ethics since that which pleases us and gives us joy,
is also beneficial for our survival and evolution” (Bhattacharya). However, he added to this theory the dimension that
humans should seek to avoid pain.
Jeremy Bentham sought to classify all pleasures and with his student, John Stuart Mill, refined it into the social
philosophy of utilitarianism, that the “greatest good for the greatest number” was the ultimate aim of all good social
policy. For Bentham and Mill, good meant pleasure, which was defined as what was most useful in providing the most
pleasure for the most people (Wellborn 1999). These philosophers were aware of the burden of having desires and
attachment to their possessions as fulfilling these desires (Margolin, 2001), but took a universalistic, social approach to
hedonism, instead of the egoistic approach of their forbearers (Gosling 1969).
Ayn Rand also promoted pleasure and wrote in Atlas Shrugged, "by the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every
man-is an end in himself; he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral
purpose." However, Rand rejected the sensual pleasure promotion of the Cyrenaic School and the Epicureans and only
took into account the morality of joy (Bhattacharya). In The Virtue of Selfishness, she wrote, “Happiness is a state of
non-contradictory joy-a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work
for your own destruction." For Rand, the defense of pleasure was not just an ethical choice, but also a reaction working
against the anti-egoistic pleasure stance of religious authorities and moral philosophies such as utilitarianism
(Bhattacharya). Rand stated in Atlas Shrugged, "For centuries the battle of morality was fought between those who
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claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors; between those who
preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is selfsacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is
to live it." (Bhattacharya)
CRITICS OF HEDONISM
The major answer to hedonism is that it will result in self-gratification and greed (Margolin 2001; Wellborn 1999).
Inevitably, Aristippus’ support for self-control will not be followed by most that seek pleasure based on his source of
morality. The idea that seeking pleasure is a moral good makes the likelihood for greed even higher, since it legitimizes
negative thoughts and actions in promotion of the end goal of pleasure. The result of greed is a breakdown in
community and the rule of law (arguable as good or bad).
Second, many argue that the promotion of pure pleasure is unrealistic (Margoline 2001; Wellborn 1999). Inevitably,
increasing one person’s or group’s pleasure will decrease another person’s or group’s pleasure. For instance, increasing
the wealth of one person has the alternate effect of decreasing the wealth of another. There can only be a classification
of wealthy if there is an alternate classification of poor. Likewise, a developer may find pleasure in chopping down old
growth forests to erect parking lots, but this destroys the pleasure of the forests, the animals in the forests, and the
culture of the people who rely on the forests.
Additionally, it is not possible to know what pleasure feels like without feeling pain. If everyone were wealthy, than the
capitalist goal of accumulation would no longer be exciting, since everyone would have all of the toys and play they
already wanted. Likewise, always experiencing pleasure may decrease the motivation of people to achieve, thereby
threatening to destabilize capitalism (again this is arguable as good or bad).
Likewise, promotion of pleasure for an individual or group is likely to have the effect of hurting the rights of another
individual or group. If the KKK seeks pleasure in their racist attitudes and actions, it would have the result of hurting the
right to life as well as the right to happiness of people of color. Likewise, pleasure for a photographer may be filming
her/his neighbor, but this could infringe on that person’s privacy. Unfortunately, Aristippus does not define or classify
hedonism. He argues that self-control is important and so is not causing harm to one’s community; but does not define
or classify what would be outside of the boundary of self-control.
Some anarchist literature could be useful in its coordination with hedonist arguments against state control and authority,
since both philosophies seek freedom as the final goal. However, it is unlikely that Aristippus would consider himself an
anarchist, as he does not identify with mutual aid or community self-sufficiency. Likewise, most anarchists are unlikely to
agree in total with Aristippus or the Cyrenaic’s school of hedonist thought, as it is based largely in individualism.
Promotion of pleasure inevitably results in greed because of capitalist socialization. Additionally, some may argue that
hedonism justifies obedience to law to avoid punishment, which would hurt pleasure-seeking (Malaspina 1908).
Anarchists are likely to argue that Aristipus and hedonism are more closely aligned to libertarianism, since libertarians
seek diminished government control and regulation, but increased support for corporations and capital accumulation.
Even though Aristippus argues for self-control and not harming the community, he also does not argue in support of
community responsibility or taking an active stance in promoting freedom. Instead, he believes that in seeking pleasure,
one should not harm others, but does not argue that a person should take an active stance in trying to help others or in
trying to create a society that is better.
Finally, some argue that hedonism has no moral or ethical basis at all, because it is not based in responsibility or duty
(Malaspina 1908; Wellborn 1999). “It rests on a false psychological analysis; tendency, appetite, end, and good are fixed
in nature antecedent to pleasurable feeling. Pleasure depends on the obtaining of some good which is prior to, and
causative of, the pleasure resulting from its acquisition. The happiness or pleasure attending good conduct is a
consequence, not a constituent, of the moral quality of the action…. (5) No general code of morality could be
established on the basis of pleasure. Pleasure is essentially subjective feeling, and only the individual is the competent
judge of how much pleasure or pain a course of action affords him. What is more pleasurable for one may be less so for
another. Hence, on hedonistic grounds, it is evident that there could be no permanently and universally valid dividing
line between right and wrong. (6) Hedonism has no ground for moral obligation, no sanction for duty. If I must pursue
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my own happiness, and if conduct which leads to happiness is good, the worst reproach that can be addressed to me,
however base my conduct may be, is that I have made an imprudent choice.” (Fox 1910)
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE
Supporting hedonism is a difficult task to take on, because it comes with a good deal of ideological baggage. As is
discussed in the “Critics of Hedonism” section, hedonism has a lot of negative moral baggage attached to it, since it is an
individualist philosophy. The fact that hedonism answers back many common debate moral philosophies like
utilitarianism, deontology, and others, makes it useful; but also shows that there is a lot of disagreement with it. This is a
difficult topic to find support for and is a topic in which finding answers to it is relatively easy. What follows are ideas on
how you could use the philosophies of Aristippus, but be wary, because they will not be easy to support in a debate
round.
First, the categorical imperative, utilitarianism, and hedonism philosophies are usually used as moral justifications.
However, the categorical imperative and the utilitarianism approaches are most often at odds with the hedonistic, selfcentered philosophies. (Lester 1999). John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham broke away from the Cyrenaic School’s
egoistic hedonism, forming the philosophy of utilitarianism, a universalistic hedonism, thus making Aristippus’
philosophy of hedonism a sound response to theirs. Whereas utilitarianism argues for the “greatest good for the
greatest number;” Aristippus’ hedonism argues for the “greatest good for the individual” where good is defined as
pleasure. Whereas utilitarianism looks to consequences, Aristippus’ hedonism (like deontology) looks only to the
present.
Second, just as Aristippus answers moralistic philosophies, his philosophy also answers religious and spiritual
justifications. As mentioned earlier, he followed Socrates in not supporting institutionalized religion, but beyond that,
spiritual and religious philosophies often seek repression of pleasure such as repression of sexuality and indulgence. His
philosophy of egoistic hedonism promotes immediate pleasure seeking while maintaining ethical limits through selfcontrol and good judgment.
Third, Aristippus could be used to argue against nationalism, the law, or state rule, as these forms of authority and
coercion inevitably impinge on an individual’s freedom to experience pleasure. If your value is pleasure and your
criterion is freedom, you can argue that a specific law, form of governance, or type of social control extends a system of
coercion and authority that threatens an individual’s freedom to experience pleasure. You would use Aristippus and the
Cyrenaic School’s theories on egoistic hedonism to argue that such an extension is immoral.
Finally, hedonism can be used to argue against Hobbes’ social contract. Hobbes argues that in the state of nature, “all
individuals are depraved, brutish, totally self-centered, and interested only in their own survival and pleasure” (Wellborn
1999). However, Aristippus would argue that the state of nature is good, because it lacks government control and
manipulation, which prevents pleasure seeking. The social contract limits pleasure, which is bad since according to
Aristippus, pleasure seeking should be the end goal of all actions and therefore it is a moral right.
Of course, you may be wondering how you are going to define pleasure, i.e. what counts as good and what counts as bad
for the contentions supporting your value of hedonism. Likewise, you may be wondering how you would calculate
pleasure for your criterion. You could look to Bentham (1748-1832), one of the followers of Aristippus, who decided to
make hedonism measurable. Bentham’s Hedonic Calculus argues that there are four measures of the intrinsic value of
an individual experience: First, intensity signifies the degree of pleasure or pain. Second, duration denotes how long the
feelings last. Next, certainty measures the likelihood to receive the feelings. Finally, propinquity is a measure of the
effort to achieve that feeling-state of pleasure. He argues that there are two measures of the instrumental value of an
individual experience: Fecundity measures the probability of the pleasurable experience being followed by additional
sensations of the same kind; whereas, purity measures the probability of it not being followed by sensations of the
opposite kind. Finally, Bentham argues that there is one measure of the social dimension of experience, which is extent,
to determine the number of people affected by the pleasure. (Graber)
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Wellborn, Charles. If It Feels Good, Do It. CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY: JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS. Issue 25, Vol 5, No.
6, (December 1999).
Wolfgang-Rainer, Mann. The Life of Aristippus. ARCHIV-FUR-GESCHIETE-DER-PHILOSOPHIE. 78(2):97-119. (1996).
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PLEASURE IS THE HIGHEST VALUE
1. ANTI-PLEASURE CONDITIONING UNDESERVINGLY MAKES HEDONISM A SOCIAL TABOO
Anupama Bhattacharya., Editor of Life Positive Plus, LIFE POSITIVE., October 2001, “The Pleasure Principle,”.
<http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/happiness/pleasure.asp>, accessed April 30, 2003. p.-np.
"A lot of anti-pleasure conditioning goes into our upbringing," says Sood. "As children, we are told not to feel proud of
our achievements. As teenagers, our tentative forays into discovering our sexuality are repressed, when we earn money,
we are told it is the root of all evil. Name anything you enjoy-sex, food, luxury, achievement, ambition, appreciation-it is
all branded with the devil's name!" No wonder, feelings of pleasure almost always bring up feelings of guilt and shame.
And the greater your sacrifice, or self-torture, the higher your stature on the scales of morality. Isn't it time we step back
and ask 'why'? SELF-DENIAL We usually think of charity, compassion, humility, wisdom, mercy, sacrifice and other
'virtues' as morally good and pleasure as, at best, morally neutral. In fact, all the virtues are a classic case of self-denial.
Why else should asceticism be considered the height of virtue? Why should human beings be born with the capability of
enjoyment, if the goal is to deny them?
2. HEDONISM IS AT THE BASIS OF BEING HUMAN, IT MAKES LIFE WORTHWHILE
Anupama Bhattacharya, Editor of Life Positive Plus, LIFE POSITIVE., October 2001, “The Pleasure Principle,”.
<http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/happiness/pleasure.asp>, accessed April 30, 2003. p- np.
"Organized religions might have their own code of conduct," says Atmara Yogini, a US-based personal growth trainer,
"but spirituality does not preach asceticism. What's the point of being human if you cannot take pleasure in the beauty
around you?" And how worthwhile would life be if shafts of light breaking through the clouds, a flower blossoming in the
wilderness, raindrops caressing your limbs, don't fill you with joy? And why should one be born with a body if one
doesn't take pleasure in it? Or have the capacity to feel joy, yet deny it? Pleasure is as much a part of the human
experience as life itself.
3. IGNATIEFF BELIEVES RADICAL SELFISHNESS TO BE AN EXPRESSION OF MORAL VIRTUE
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999,
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
Strangely enough, this kind of "feel-good" approach to matters of sexual and economic ethics does not lack its academic
defenders. In a lecture last year at the University of Toronto the respected cultural commentator, Michael Ignatieff,
argued that radical selfishness was an expression of moral virtue. Human beings, he said, have a prime duty to
themselves and a prime right to individual freedom and happiness (pleasure). Ignatieff did not hesitate to face the
consequences of his belief. We must, he said, accord respect to an individual's needs "against the devouring claims of
family life."
4. HEDONISTS ARGUE THAT TRUTH CAN’T BE KNOWN AND THEREFORE THE BEST SENSORY EXPERIENCES SHOULD
GOVERN LIFE
Jennifer Margolin. CSU Northridge. HEDONISM AT ITS BEST AND WORST. May 7, 2001.
<http://hyper.vcsun.org/HyperNews/battias/get/cs327/thought/11.html?nogifs>, accessed April 30, 2003. p-np.
“Concerning the nature of pleasure, Epicurus explains that at least some pleasures are rooted in natural and, as a rule,
every pain is bad and should be avoided, and every pleasure is good and should be preferred.” Hedonists held that we
can never know truth, the only thing we know is what we can sense, such as hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.
Therefore, we should seek out the best sensory experiences. However, without knowledge of what exactly is the best,
you have to basically try everything in order to know what brings you the most pleasure. There is that old adage, “One
man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” What is an ideal perfection of happiness to one, is completely opposite for
another. Basically, meaning to each is own and thine own self be true. Pleasures of the mind and pleasures of the body
have such different meanings and rationales for people. The whole of modern life is governed by pleasure and pain since
the enjoyment of the senses always seem to dominate.
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HEDONISM IS NOT AN ETHICAL SYSTEM
1. CYRENAIC PHILOSOPHY OF HEDONISM ISN’T AN ETHICAL SYSTEM, SINCE IT’S NOT BASED IN OBLIGATION.
Malaspina Great Books (<http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_128.asp>) [Adapted from William Turner, Catholic
Encyclopedia <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04591a.htm> (1908)] Accessed June 1, 2003. p-np.
There was no consistency in the Cyrenaic theory of conduct; probably none was looked for. Indeed, in spite of the
example of the founders of the school, the later Cyrenaics fell far below the level of what was expected from
philosophers, even in Greece, and their doctrine came to be merely a set of maxims to justify the careless manner of
living of men whose chief aim in life was a pleasant time. But, taken at its best, the Cyrenaic philosophy can hardly justify
its claim to be considered an ethical System at all. For good and evil it substituted the pleasant and the painful, without
reference, direct or indirect, to obligation or duty. In some points of doctrine the school descends to the commonplace,
as when it justifies obedience to law by remarking that the observance of the law of the land leads to the avoidance of
punishment, and that one should act honestly because one thereby increases the sum of pleasure.
2. HEDONISM HAS NO MORAL BASIS AND DESTROYS COMMUNITY
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
The crucial fact about the "feel-good" philosophy is that it ignores any sense of an over-arching moral imperative which
places limits upon the exercise of personal freedom in the name of community responsibility. Individual freedom is a
precious moral right, but freedom without responsibility has no moral basis. To act with no understanding that one's
actions inevitably impinge, at some point, upon the freedom of others is the road to moral anarchy. And with moral
anarchy there is no community.
3. HEDONISM AS A MORAL IMPERATIVE THREATENS TYRANNY OF THE WORST ORDER, SUCH AS NAZISM
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
The shape of that order will depend totally on the will of the rulers in power, and, since those rulers are themselves, like
their subjects, corrupted human beings, that order may well be tyranny of the worst order. Hobbes hoped for beneficent
rulers, but the history of the 20th century has taught us that, in the name of order, dictatorial rulers like Hitler and Stalin
may seek to impose the most diabolical kind of structure upon their people, all in the name of "the greatest good for the
greatest number. “To move from the "feel good" idea to the extremes of Nazism and Communism may seem like a huge
jump, but the logic is inexorable.
4. EVEN WITHIN DEMOCRACY, HEDONISM RESULTS IN INJUSTICE AND OPPRESSION
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
Even in a democratic society like our own, still guided to some extent by a sense of moral imperative, the dangers are
fully apparent. True, those less powerful elements in our society, whether they be economic, ethnic, or social, rightly feel
that they have no alternative except to organize themselves into power blocs of their own, more nearly equipped to
oppose discrimination and oppression. Yet, if these new power groups are concerned only with their own welfare--their
own "pleasure," with no real regard for the rights of others, the result can only be a continuation of injustice. The
political, social, economic, or racial structure may be turned upside down, but one oppressive group will only have been
substituted for another.
5. THE HEDONIST ETHIC IS INEVITABLY SELF-DEFEATING
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
The "feel-good" ethic is finally and inevitably self-defeating. The individual who lives only for his own pleasure will
eventually face the situation in which his "pleasure" is opposed by another individual or group with more power, and the
individual's pleasure will be replaced with misery. When power becomes the only ingredient in the social process, the
weak must inevitably suffer.
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HEDONISM RESULTS IN GREED
1. SHOULD SUPPORT UTILITARIANISM OVER HEDONISM, WHICH RESULTS IN CONSUMERISM AND COMPETITION
Jennifer Margolin, CSU Northdridge. HEDONISM AT ITS BEST AND WORST. May 7, 2001
<http://hyper.vcsun.org/HyperNews/battias/get/cs327/thought/11.html?nogifs>. p-np.
People are so completely spoiled by the availability of having anything and everything in their hands at any given
moment, that we have lost touch with the simple things that life has to offer. It seems that there will always be a
constant pursuit of endless gratification. We live in an industrialized nation where the ideological norm is how to get to
the top, or how to step on others to get to the top. Granted, this is not a way of life for everyone, however, this is what
we are being taught. You must pay your dues by working hard in order to achieve any kind of happiness and financial
security. People are more focused on being consumers, rather than focusing on their inner self without any of the
material possessions that they think makes themselves better or more well adjusted individuals. There needs to be a
modification of the idea that people cannot be happy without artificial luxuries, and more of a focus on individuals doing
good deeds for others as well as themselves. This not only benefits that particular individual, it also benefits that charity
in which they are helping. In any case, when you give as well as receive, this is an absolute great way to derive pleasure
and happiness by making it a completely selfless act.
2. FRAMEWORK FOR HEDONIST ETHICS UNCLEAR AND RESULTS IN OVERINDULGENCE AND MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN
Jennifer Margolin, CSU Northdridge. HEDONISM AT ITS BEST AND WORST. May 7, 2001
<http://hyper.vcsun.org/HyperNews/battias/get/cs327/thought/11.html?nogifs>. p-np.
Another problem with a hedonist lifestyle is the issue of overindulgence. With the ultimate goals being pleasure and
happiness, how does one determine what is moral and what is simply wrong? Who and what draw the line? If something
gives you pleasure, why wouldn’t you pre-occupy yourself with it and exclude everything else that didn’t bring you joy?
There is an insatiable amount of certain desires and self-interest, once one is shown these types of pleasures. We are a
world enslaved by trying to fulfill and pursue our desires, whether they are physical or mental. “Human happiness
consists in genuine freedom, liberation from pleasures and all pleasure seeking and attachments, which is ultimately to
live in accordance with nature by shedding the artificial creations of human beings which are the cause of further desires
and attachments.” The selfish pursuits of one’s constant hunger are causes for our mental and physical pain by not being
able to fulfill every wish and desire.
3. HEDONISM PROMOTES CONSUMERISM
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
We must not deceive ourselves, however, into thinking that sex is the only moral problem area in our modern society.
We live in an entrepreneurial age, and the self-made man, economically speaking, is our hero. To be rich--to "make it"
economically--has been established as the ultimate hallmark of success. Our consumer-oriented society encourages us to
value economic achievement--sometimes however brought about--as the most admirable of all goals. This means that
material prosperity has been equated with the highest pleasure, and the "if it feels good, do it" philosophy reigns
supreme.
4. HEDONIST CONSUMERISM RESULTS IN STEALING
Charles Wellborn, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY, December 1999.
“If It Feels Good, Do It”. Issue 25, Vol 5, No. 6. p-np.
In an age in which all of us are bombarded with television advertisements--and, indeed, programs-which constantly tell
us that happiness consists in what we can buy, is it surprising that the underclass in our society who cannot financially
afford all the luxuries they see paraded before them on television decide to steal or loot them? If "pleasure" is the end of
all life, and if "`pleasure" means the acquisition of goods, then why not use any means to obtain them? Why should
others have them, when you do not? The "greasy thumbprint" of human sin leaves its mark here, as everywhere.
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Aristotle
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ARISTOTLE
Aristotle was born in about 384 BCE at Stageira in Thrace in Ancient Greece. He was raised among royalty, since his
father, Nciomachus, was the physician to the King of Macedonia, Amyntas II. At about age seventeen Aristotle went to
Athens, the center of culture and philosophy in Ancient Greece. He studied at The Academy and became a member of
this school, which was founded by Plato.1 It is fair to say, then, that as Plato followed Socrates, Aristotle followed Plato.
Plato was Aristotle’s mentor and good friend. Even though Aristotle wound up disagreeing with Plato, he always showed
enormous respect for the great thinker. Eventually Aristotle would proceed to start his own school, called the Lyceum.
The important works of Aristotle are from this period, where his thought had matured and he struck out on his own to
create a way of doing philosophy that remains the primary alternative to the Platonic conception of philosophy. The
major works of this time are divided into five categories 2: the De Interpretatione (on proposition and judgment), the Prior
Analytics (on inference), Posterior Analytics (on proof, knowledge) all on Logic; the Metaphysics; the Physics and many
other smaller works on natural sciences, biology, psychology, physiology; the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics on moral
and political issues; The Rhetoric and the Poetics on Persuasion and Literature.
Most of the works of Aristotle are not polished dialogues or even treatises. Instead, they are lecture notes or long
developed outlines. Part of this is due to historical accident. We know that Aristotle wrote dialogues like his master Plato
and popular works of the time. But this is also due to the way in which Aristotle did philosophy and the way in which that
tradition has been carried on by other Aristotelians.
THE MODE OF ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY
Plato marks the beginning of western philosophy, as we know it. This is marked by an interest in particular questions:
What is, How do we know what is, and what ought we to then do. Plato’s answers to the questions are developed in
dialogues, where Socrates questions people about their beliefs and shows, through a logical dialectic, the answers to
these questions.
Aristotle also starts from the opinions of others, but not by dialogue. Instead, he builds from observation of others and
their opinions a philosophy that is compressive and systematic. Aristotle’s method worked not just for the important
questions but for all of knowledge. This explains why Aristotle and not Plato dealt with the natural sciences and physics.
Aristotle’s method remains, in basic outline, the scientific method of today. He began with observation and worked his
way “up” from those observations, by means of inference to general principles. From those principles he deducted back
to the world to show us how not only the world behaved but also how we should behave.
ARISTOTLE’S INFLUENCE
Aristotle did not “catch on” in western philosophy like Plato did. The neo-platonists would come to dominate philosophy
until the rise of Christianity. The first major Christian philosopher, Augustine, took that Platonic thought and combined it
with Christian theology. Augustine’s work would be the cornerstone of Christian philosophy until Thomas Aquinas in the
thirteenth century. Where did Aristotle go?
Although Aristotle was not embraced by the western tradition, he did not disappear. Some libraries and some scholars
keep Aristotle alive and in about the 9th Century Aristotle’s thought experienced a renascence, not in Europe but in the
Islamic world. Islamic theologians and philosophers were beginning to form their own systems and were in search of the
kind of foundation that would be useful. Since the Persian tradition had always been more interested in the sciences
Aristotle became very in for a while in Islamic thought. Aristotle traveled from Persia with the Islamic religion across
North Africa, into Spain in about the eleventh century and from Spain some manuscripts, now in Persian, made their way
1
2
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 27.
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 27
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into Paris in the twelfth century. It is there that they were discovered by Aquinas and used to form what stands as the
most systematic and compressive philosophy. Aquinas was more than a “Christian Aristotle” but the mode of philosophy,
the terms used and questions asked were all Aristotelian.
Thomistic thought reigned in western philosophy until Descartes in the seventeenth century. Sure, some theologians and
philosophers were critical and argued that the secular Aristotle was corrupting Christianity. But there was a desire at the
time for a systematic philosophy that would explain the world in a clear and comprehensive manner. The thinkers in
Paris were amazed at Aristotle’s insights and used them to their advantage.
With the scientific revolution and enlightenment, however, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their ilk were dismissed as outdated,
tied to religion, and out of style. Modernity began with an explicit rejection of Aristotle’s influence on the Scholastics. In
the twentieth century, however, modernity has began to falter. The enlightenment project of universal reason and
skeptical doubt seems, according to many, to have petered out, as its naïve optimism runs headlong into the reality of a
complicated world in which we must live.
And so there has been recently an Aristotelian revival again. Thinkers are returning to the ancient Greeks to find
resources to ask, once again, the questions of philosophy: What is? How do we know? What are we to do? Aristotle’s
physics and natural sciences are outdated--but the method was right all along. In particular, ethicists are returning the
Aristotle to fashion a system of ethics that is responsive to human existence and nuanced enough to avoid naïve
assumptions, or worse, cultural imperialism.
MILL AND KANT AS DEAD ENDS
Part of the project of modernity was to create a moral system that was adequate to the assumption of universal reason.
The two possibilities became utilitarianism (Mill) and deontology (Kant). Utilitarianism argued that our ethical actions
should be that which maximizes utility--the greatest good for the greatest number, as the slogan goes. Moral actions
would be determined on a cost-benefit analysis, so that what a person should do would be based on how much good
would be created for how many people.
The obvious flaw of utilitarianism--obvious to use now but incompressible to a true believer in the power of the scientific
revolution--is that we can never really know what the consequences of our actions will be. And it seems to us that the
moral good of an action must be assessed not after the consequences have occurred but before we take any action at all.
Deontology is a system of moral based on the universal reason of humankind. Kant say that every person was a rational
moral actor and that therefore a person should make moral decisions on this basis. From this followed Kant’s categorical
imperative: always act as if the maxim by which you act was a universal law. Therefore (as the famous example goes) do
not lie because that would mean everyone could lie and human community would become impossible.
And yet, critics argue that different situations call for different actions. Circumstances seem to alter what we ought to do
in a given situation. If a lie prevents the destruction of hundreds of people, and we know when we tell that lie it will do
so, that lie seems ethical. And so, back and forth, Kantians and Utilitarians have argued for the last two centuries, coming
to impasse after impasse, unable to fashion a moral philosophy that is both workable and coherent.
Two dominant alternatives have emerged: one is a post-modern orientation, characterized either by nihilism or
pragmatism. In this perspective, we cannot know and either throw up our hands or just act anyway. The other
alternative is neo-Aristotelianism.
ARISTOTLE’S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY
Aristotle starts his analysis of any subject with the teleological question: that is, what is the end or purpose of this? He
sees that everyone “seems to aim at some good; whence the good has rightly been defined as that at which all things
aim.”3 Each person, of course has different ends: the physician intends to heal the sick, the warrior to win the battle, etc.
3
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 31
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“But if there is an end which we desire for its own sake and for the sake of which we desire all other subordinate ends or
goods, then this ultimate good will be the best good, in fact, the good. Aristotle sets himself to discover what this good is
and what the science corresponding to it is.”4 Since the good is the good as such, it would not only be the true end of
individual action but also of the state. Aristotle’s political philosophy is based in his ethics for individual.
So what is the end for man? Aristotle says that it is happiness or fulfillment. Through a long train of argument, he shows
that this happiness must be not, as we commonly think of it, a state but rather an activity. This makes sense: we are
happy when we are doing things: talking with friends, being entertained, thinking about something interesting, doing
something exciting. So what sort of activities are “happy activities?” Aristotle’s answer is that happiness consists in
activities in accord with the moral and intellectual virtues. When our activities are virtuous, then we will be happy.
ARISTOTLE’S CONCEPTION OF VIRTUE
Aristotle’s conception of virtue is what followers have called the doctrine of the mean. That is, the virtue is the mean-the middle--between two vices. Courage, for example, is the mean between foolishness (the excess) and cowardliness
(the deficiency). Each virtue is, in some way, the mean between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency.
“Virtue, then, is a disposition, a disposition to choose according to a rule, namely, the rule by which a truly virtuous man
possessed of moral insight would choose.”5 What this means is that the capacity of judgment--prudence as Aristotle calls
it, is the virtue par excellence, the ability to determine what is the mean and what is not.
Aristotle’s claim is not that the mean is universal and valid for everyone. Instead, it is that we determine the relative to
us and to our circumstances. Moral judgments are always made based on the circumstances that present themselves to
the moral actor. In this way, Aristotle avoids the legalistic ethics of a Kantian system but also accounts for more than the
consequences of an action. It is proper in Aristotle’s system to pay attention to the consequences, but this does not
dominate the decision making process.
In fact, what marks Aristotle’s system is that the truly virtuous person becomes so accustomed to acting virtuously that
she does not “stress” or even “deliberate” about what is moral in a situation. Acting according to virtue becomes habit.
ARISTOTLE’S CONCEPTION OF VICE
For Aristotle, virtue and vice are not exclusive categories into which all individuals must fall. There are further extremes
(divinity or heroism and bestiality) and intermediate levels as well. These are primarily continence and incontinence and
resistance and softness. Incontinence and intemperance are primarily understood in terms of their relation to decision
and reason. Both the incontinent and the intemperate person posses decision (although not correct decision).
The incontinent person knows what the right thing to do is, but is unable to do such things because they are overcome
by either their emotions or their appetites. These two (emotions and appetites) are distinct forms of incontinence.
Aristotle writes that "if someone is incontinent about emotion, he is overcome by reason in a way; but if he is
incontinent about appetite, he is overcome by appetite, not by reason" (1149b 3). The warrant for this claim is that to be
overcome by emotions is to hear the commands of reason but to follow them to excess while to be overcome by
appetite is simply to ignore (or worse, manipulate) reason to serve the ends of pleasure. It is for this reason that to be
overcome by appetites is worse than to be overcome by emotions, for it is appetites which are most in conflict with
reason.
This conflict between reason and desire is the distinctive feature of not on incontinence, but even of continence. For the
continent person still possess a difference between desire and reason, but is able to overcome such desire and to follow
the dictates of reason.
Temperance and intemperance, in contrast, illustrates no such difference between desire and reason. For the temperate
person wants what is right and to the correct degree. Temperance, like all the moral virtues, expresses the mean
4
5
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 31
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 31
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between two extremes. What signifies a person as temperate, intemperate, or deficient is decision about the pursuit of
pleasure.
Aristotle writes, "One person pursues excesses of pleasant things because they are excesses and because he decides on
it, for themselves and not for some further result. He is intemperate; for he is bound to have no regrets, and so is
incurable, since someone without regrets is incurable." 6. Thus, just as there is no conflict in the mind of the temperate
person, the intemperate also has no conflict. He has decided upon choosing pleasure, his reason has not been overcome
by appetite or emotion.
It is for this difference that Aristotle argues that intemperance is worse than incontinence. Aristotle writes, "Moreover,
the incontinent person is the sort to pursue excessive bodily pleasures that conflict with correct reason, but not because
he is persuaded [it is best]. The intemperate person, however, is persuaded, because he is the sort of person to pursue
them. Hence the incontinent person is easily persuaded out of it, while the intemperate person is not." 7 With the
intemperate person, all someone caring for their character must do is convince then to follow their reason. With the
intemperate person, however, one must also convince them that their reason has erred in reaching a conclusion.
ARISTOTLE’S CONCEPTION OF JUSTICE
Justice is one of the main virtues in Aristotle’s thinking. By justice, Aristotle means both obeying the law and what is fair
and equal. Justice “is a mean in the sense that it produces a state of affairs that stand midway between that in which A
has too much and in which B has too much.”8 Aristotle, as we should expect, distinguishes between unjust actions where
the damage to another is forseen and when it is not.
Another way of thinking about justice is that justice is a mean between being too strict and showing too much mercy. To
act according to justice is to ensure that a person gets their due without costing another their own due.
ARISTOTLE AND POLITICS
Aristotle is clear from the beginning that human beings exist in society. People are not self-sufficient in themselves and
need society to find happiness and exercise virtue. “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is
sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” 9 Society serves the function to make virtuous action more
possible and more likely. Without society, basic needs would dominate our existence and virtue would be difficult if not
impossible. Society is organized by the State, which for Aristotle meant the city-state.
Copleston, the authority on the Thomistic and Aristotelian thread in philosophy, summarizes Aristotle’s conception of
the state as follows:
The only real guarantee of the stability and prosperity of the State is the moral goodness and integrity of the citizens,
while conversely, unless the State is good and the system of its education is rational, moral, and healthy, the citizens will
not become good. The individual attains his proper development and perfection though his concrete life, which is a life in
Society, i.e. in the State, while Society attains its proper end through the perfection of its members. That Aristotle did not
consider the State to be a great Leviathan beyond good and evil is clear from the criticism he passes on Lacedaemonians.
It is a great mistake, he says, to suppose that war and domination are the be-all and end-all of the State. The State exists
for the good life, and it is subject to the same code of morality as the individual. As he puts it, “the same things are best
for individuals and states.”10
ARISTOTLE, SLAVERY, AND SEXISM
6
Nicomachean Ethics, 1150a 20.
Nicomachean Ethics, 1151a 12.
8
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 31
9
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 32
10
Frederick Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Chpt. 32
7
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Aristotle, without question, espoused the usefulness of slavery. He argued that some people were born to different
stations and that slavery was one way that the state could ensure the well-being of most of its members. And Aristotle
also saw the place of women as providing for the essential needs of the family and as being subservient to the men who
ruled the household.
The question is whether or not these conceptions were vitally important to Aristotle’s ethics or whether or not they can
be removed and Aristotle’s ethics can be applied without these difficulties. Aristotelian’s argue that the system is not
dependent on this hierarchy and that, in fact, Aristotle’s virtue of justice is a warrant for abandoning these hierarchies.
Critics argue, on the other hand, that Aristotle’s idea’s of virtue as self-sufficient activity means that virtue is excluded for
people who must attend, on a regular basis, to daily necessities. Virtue becomes, on this reading, a provision of the
aristocracy that Aristotle himself was a member of rather than a way we can all make decisions.
ARISTOTLE IN DEBATE
So, how does this ethical system help us in debate? First, it functions as a real alternative to the dead ends of Mill and
Kant, giving moral thinking another possibility. Debates that continually focus, round after round on the comparison
between utility and rights, lack freshness and insight. Incorporating Aristotle and virtue ethics into your debates can not
only catch people off guard but also provide new and better ways to examine the standard questions of debate.
Second, Aristotelian ethics allow a balance of circumstances and principles to guide moral decisions. Aristotle is most
often called a “common-sense” philosopher, and this is especially true of his ethics. This balance will allow you to
support your claims based on both principles such as justice and on consequences.
Third, Aristotle is a good counter to those that argue for different moral criteria for a State as opposed to individuals.
Values such as security would not, in Aristotle’s system trump other ethical concerns but instead be simply a means to
ethical society. When deciding questions about state action, we would first look to whether or not that action would
promote the development of the virtue of the citizens.
Bibliograhy
Aristotle, THE ETHICS OF ARISTOTLE, (New York: Arno Press, 1973).
Aristotle, EUDEMIAN ETHICS, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Aristotle, METAPHYSICS, (New York: Dutton, 1956).
Aristotle, THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936).
Aristotle, PHYSICS, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
Aristotle, POLITICS, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998).
Aristotle, ON RHETORIC : A THEORY OF CIVIC DISCOURSE, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991).
Aristotle, A TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1912).
J.O. Urmson, ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS, (New York: B. Blackwell, 1988).
Cooper, John Madison, REASON AND HUMAN GOOD IN ARISTOTLE, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1975).
Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, VIRTUE ETHICS, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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VIRTUE ETHICS ARE NECESSARY
1. CHARACTER TRAITS EXIST PRIOR TO OBLIGATION
Roger Crisp, Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Michael Slote, Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Maryland, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 4
We saw earlier that virtue ethics differs from other forms of moral philosophy through its insistence that aretaic notions
like virtue, admirability, and excellence are more basic than--or even replace--deontic notions like moral obligation and
rightness. Clearly, what Anscombe says about the emptiness of attributions of moral obligation favours virtue ethics, so
understood, over other approaches that have been taken in the recent history of ethics. What also argues in favour of
virtue ethics, however, is the fact that, unlike moral philosophers 'since Sidgwick', Plato and Aristotle appear to consider
certain actions out of bounds independently of considerations of consequences. Given the 'corruption' of the opposite
view, this should encourage us (once we have done our homework in philosophical psychology) to pursue an ethics more
like Plato's or Aristotle's and in particular, then, an ethics with a distinctly virtue-ethical commitment to making virtuous
character or character traits central to ethical concern.
2. THE ‘OUGHT’ NO LONGER EXISTS WITHOUT ITS TRADITION
G.E.M. Anscombe, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 31
To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the
mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua craftsman or logician)-that what is needed for this, is required by
divine law. Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver; like Jews,
Stoics, and Christians. But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result
that the concepts of 'obligation', of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root;
and if the word 'ought' has become invested in certain contexts with the sense of 'obligation', it too will remain to be
spoken with a special emphasis and a special feeling in these contexts. It is as if the notion 'criminal' were to remain
when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume discovering this situation might
conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by 'criminal', which alone gave the word its sense. So Hume
discovered the situation in which the notion 'obligation' survived, and the word 'ought' was invested with that peculiar
force having which it is said to be used in a ‘moral' sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been
abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am
right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really
intelligible one.
3. VIRTUES WORK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIOLOGY
Alasdair MacIntyre, Duke University VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 134
The time has come to ask the question of how far this partial account a core conception of the virtues-and I need to
emphasize that all have offered so far is the first stage of such an account-is faithful to; tradition which I delineated. How
far, for example, and in what ways is it Aristotelian? It is-happily-not Aristotelian in two ways in w good deal of the rest
of the tradition also dissents from Aristotle. First, although this account of the virtues is teleological, it does not require
identification of any teleology in nature, and hence it does not require any allegiance to Aristotle's metaphysical biology.
And secondly, just because of the multiplicity of human practices and the consequent multiplicity of goods in the pursuit
of which the virtues may be exercised-goods which will often be contingently incompatible and which will therefore
make rival claims upon our allegiance-conflict will not spring solely from flaws in individual character. But it was just on
these two matters that Aristotle’s general account of the virtues seemed most vulnerable; hence if it turns out to be the
case that this socially teleological account can support Aristotle’s general account of the virtues as well as does his own
biologically teleological account, these differences from Aristotle himself may well be regarded as strengthening rather
than weakening the case for a generally Aristotelian standpoint.
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VIRTUE ETHICS WORK BEST
1. NEED A TELOS TO AVOID ARBITRARY DECISION
John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 140
Ought we always at a certain point just to give up in the interests of the practice itself? The medieval exponents of the
virtue of patience claimed that there are certain types of situation in which the virtue of patience requires that I do not
ever give up on some person or task, situations in which, as they would have put it, I am required to embody in my
attitude to that person or task something of the patient attitude of God towards his creation. But this could only be so if
patience served some overriding good, some telos which warranted putting other goods in a subordinate place. Thus it
turns out that the content of the virtue of patience depends upon how we order various goods in a hierarchy and a
fortiori on whether we are able rationally so to order these particular goods. I have suggested so far that unless there is a
telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a
human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life
and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. These two considerations are reinforced
by a third: that there is at least one virtue recognized by the tradition which cannot be specified at all except with
reference to the wholeness of a human life-the virtue of integrity or constancy. 'Purity of heart', said Kierkegaard, 'is to
will one thing.' This notion of singleness of purpose in a whole life can have no application unless that of a whole life
does.
2. UNCODIFIABILITY IS GOOD
John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 161
It seems plausible that Plato's ethical Forms are, in part at least, a response to uncodifiability: if one cannot formulate
what someone has come to know when he cottons onto a practice, say one of concept-application, it is natural to say
that he has seen something. Now in the passage quoted in §4, Cavell mentions two ways of avoiding vertigo: 'the
grasping of universals' as well as what we have been concerned with so far, 'the grasping of books of rules'. But though
Plato's Forms are a myth, they are not a consolation, a mere avoidance of vertigo; vision of them is portrayed as too
difficult an attainment for that to be so. The remoteness of the Form of the Good is a metaphorical version of the thesis
that value is not in the world, utterly distinct from the dreary literal version which has obsessed recent moral philosophy.
The point of the metaphor is the colossal difficulty of attaining a capacity to cope clear-sightedly with the ethical reality
which is part of our world. Unlike other philosophical responses to uncodifiability, this one may actually work towards
moral improvement; negatively, by inducing humility, and positively, by an inspiring effect akin to that of a religious
conversion.
3. VIRTUE ETHICS EMBODIES KNOWLEDGE OF THE VIRTUOUS
John McDowell, Professor at University of Pittsburgh, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 142
A kind person can be relied on to behave kindly when that is what the situation requires. Moreover, his reliably kind
behaviour is not the outcome of a blind, non-rational habit or instinct, like the courageous behaviour-so called only be
courtesy-of a lioness defending her cubs. Rather, that the situation requires a certain sort of behaviour is (one way of
formulating) his reason for behaving in that way, on each of the relevant occasions. So it must be something of which, on
each of the relevant occasions, he is aware. A kind person has a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement which
situations impose on behaviour. The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms
according to which the sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind person knows what it is like
to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity.
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VIRTUE ETHICS ARE HARMFUL
1. VIRTUE ETHICS ARE NON-DEMOCRATIC
Roger Crisp, Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Michael Slote, Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Maryland, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 24
Clearly, virtue ethics needs to expand its recent moral horizons so as to take in larger questions of political morality.
Otherwise, contemporary virtue ethics will fail to meet Schneewind's criticism that virtue ethics, while acceptable in and
for the relatively homogeneous and peaceful societies that typified the ancient world, is unsuitable to the more diverse
and conflict-ridden conditions of modern and contemporary life, conditions that require political thought and political
principles that can help to reduce tensions and allow us to live with one another. There is danger for virtue ethics in the
attempt to meet this challenge not merely because it may be unable to produce a political philosophy, but because the
political philosophy it manages to produce may be of the wrong kind. The political ideals associated with virtue ethics in
the ancient world were by and large anti or non-democratic. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, for example, thought democracy
an ideal form of government, and it is difficult to see how a plausibly democratic social ideal could be developed, say, out
of Aristotle's ethical views.
2. VIRTUE ETHICS CANNOT DEAL WITH CONFLICT
Jerome B. Schneewind, Johns Hopkins University, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 199
To what extent is virtue itself involved in creating this misfortune? Here, I think, the history I have been tracing offers us
a clue. If we ask why the project of the Grotians was to establish a law-like code of morals, the answer must be that they
took the central difficulties of life to be those arising from disagreement-disagreement involving nations, religious sects,
parties to legal disputes, and ordinary people trying to make a living in busy commercial societies. It is not an accident
that the very first word in the body of Grotius's text is 'controversiae. I have tried to show that the natural lawyers did
not think this the only morally pertinent problem area. They saw that there is an important part of our lives in which the
problem arises not from disagreement but from the scarcity of resources for helping others. No single person, perhaps
not even any society, can help everyone who is suffering or in need. But some can be helped even if not all can. The
theory of imperfect duties provides one way of thinking about how we are to distribute resources in situations where
only some can be helped. The serious issues involved here seemed less urgent to the natural lawyers than the problems
arising from disagreement about strict justice, which they took to pose threats to the very existence of society. They
therefore gave first priority to what they thought might assist with those controversies. In tackling these problems,
classical virtue theory is of little or no use. Aristotle does not tell us what a virtuous agent (phronimos) is to do to
convince someone who is not virtuous to agree with him, other than to educate him all over again. He does not suggest
criteria which anyone and everyone can use to determine who is a virtuous agent and who is not. He does not discuss
the situation in which two virtuous agents disagree seriously with one another. And consequently he does not notice
what seems to be an implication of his view: that if two allegedly virtuous agents strongly disagree, one of them (at least)
must be morally defective.
3. THE DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN FAILS TO ACHIEVE JUSTICE
Jerome B. Schneewind, Johns Hopkins University, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 183
His criticisms are brief. He points out the implausibility of the doctrine of the mean with respect to virtues such as
truthfulness (said to be a mean between boastfulness and dissimulation), but his main fire is reserved for justice.
Aristotle himself, says Grotius, could not make the doctrine work when it came to this virtue. For he could not point to a
mean in any appropriate passion, or any action coming from the passions, which could plausibly be said to constitute
justice. So he resorted to making claims about the things justice is concerned with-possessions, honours,
security-because only about these would it be reasonable to say that there could be a too much or a too little. And even
here, Grotius continues, the doctrine of the mean fails. A single example shows this. It may be a fault not to take what is
my own property-for example, if I need it in order to support my child-but it is surely not doing an injustice to another to
claim less than is mine. Justice consists wholly in 'abstaining from that which is another's'. And Grotius adds that 'it does
not matter whether injustice arises from avarice, from lust, from anger, or from ill-advised compassion'.
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VIRTUE ETHICS ARE PHILOSOPHICALLY FLAWED
1. VIRTUE ETHICS ARE UNCLEAR
Robert B. Louden, Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Maine, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 202
But what about virtue ethics? What are the hallmarks of this approach to normative ethics? One problem confronting
anyone who sets out to analyse the new virtue ethics in any detail is that we presently lack fully developed examples of it
in the contemporary literature. Most of the work done in this genre has a negative rather than positive thrust-its primary
aim is more to criticize the traditions and research programmes to which it is opposed rather than to state positively and
precisely what its own alternative is. A second hindrance is that the literature often has a somewhat misty antiquarian
air. It is frequently said, for instance, that the Greeks advocated a virtue ethics, though what precisely it is that they were
advocating is not always spelled out. In describing contemporary virtue ethics, it is therefore necessary, in my opinion, to
do some detective work concerning its conceptual shape, making inferences based on the unfortunately small number of
remarks that are available.
2. VIRTUE ETHICS ARE REDUCTIONIST
Robert B. Louden, Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Maine, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 204
So for virtue ethics, the primary object of moral evaluation is not the act or its consequences, but rather the agent. And
the respective conceptual starting-points of agent- and act-centred ethics result in other basic differences as well, which
may be briefly summarized as follows. First of all, the two camps are likely to employ different models of practical
reasoning. Act theorists, because they focus on discrete acts and moral quandaries, are naturally very interested in
formulating decision procedures for making practical choices. The agent, in their conceptual scheme, needs a
guide-hopefully a determinate decision procedure-for finding a way out of the quandary. Agent-centered ethics, on the
other hand, focuses on long-term characteristic patterns of action, intentionally down-playing atomic acts and particular
choice situations in the process. They are not as concerned with portraying practical reason as a rule-governed
enterprise which can be applied on a case-by-case basis.
3. VIRTUE ETHICS ARE EPISTEMOLOGICALLY UNSOUND
Robert B. Louden, Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Maine, VIRTUE ETHICS, 1997, p. 210
There is also an epistemological issue which becomes troublesome when one focuses on qualities of persons rather than
on qualities of acts. Baldly put, the difficulty is that we do not seem to be able to know with any degree of certainty who
really is virtuous and who vicious. For how is one to go about establishing an agent's true moral character? The standard
strategy is what might be called the 'externalist' one: we try to infer character by observing conduct. While not denying
the existence of some connection between character and conduct, I believe that the connection between the two is not
nearly as tight as externalists have assumed. The relationship is not a necessary one, but merely contingent. Virtue
theorists themselves are committed to this claim, though they have not always realized it. For one central issue behind
the 'Being vs. Doing' debate is the virtue theorist's contention that the moral value of Being is not reducible to or
dependent on Doing; that the measure of an agent's character is not exhausted by or even dependent on the values of
the actions which he may perform. On this view, the most important moral traits are what may be called 'spiritual' rather
than 'actional'.
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Molefi Kete Asante
Afrocentricity
Molefi K. Asante (previously Arthur L. Smith) has been called a “visionary” and “revolutionary” in his thinking about
African-American philosophy. His philosophy differs from Cornel West’s in that it has less of a socio-political -- and more
of a cultural -- approach in holding onto African roots in today’s culture. While Asante emphasizes the “African” in
African-American, West emphasizes the “American.”
This biography will highlight some specific elements of Afrocentricity, the necessity of an Afrocentric perspective,
according to Asante, and the five levels of awareness that the Afrocentric person possesses. Finally, it will present two
ways that blacks can gain additional independence: the first is to change the names given to them by their ancestors’
owners back to African names, and second, blacks must create their own language, or at least not be bound to current
language usage as a step in reclaiming their cultural roots.
Asante’ s philosophy of Afrocentricity is complex, combining elements of philosophy, science, history, and mythology to
offer a critical social perspective for African-Americans. It is clear from his writings that he borrows ideas from a diverse
group of thinkers, including Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Elijah Muhammad, W.E.B. Du
Bois, and Malcolm X. Afrocentricity is both a critique of modem society and a prescription of how blacks should hold onto
their African roots. For example, in much of Asante’ s writings, he critiques the “Eurocentric” perspective which is heavily
influenced by white men. He maintains that it is too narrow and does not account for the African experience.
His prescription for blacks living in the United States is even more elaborate than the bible’s ten commandments. He
provides direction for male/female romantic relationships, he explains the notion of truth grounded in African mythology
and black struggle and argues that African Americans should be focused on such truths in order to become whole, wellfunctioning adults in society. But, according to Asante, Afrocentricity is not a “back to Africa movement,” rather, it is an
uncovering of one’s true self or center. It is an awakening into African culture for a sense of African genius and values. It
is a process of reclaiming more and more of African history and culture. Afrocentricity is the belief in the centrality of
Africans in today’s culture. He sees Afrocentricity as a way for Afro-Americans to climb out of their demise and become
who they were meant to be. In this sense, Afrocentricity improves blacks’ quality of life.
Within Asante’s philosophy of Afrocentricity, Africa is placed at the center because, as Asante maintains, it resembles
black people, speaks to them, looks like them, and wants for them what they want for themselves. Placing Africa at the
center also prevents African-Americans from being detached, isolated, and spiritually lonely people in a society which is
filled with anti-African rhetoric and symbols. Without an Afrocentric perspective, an African-American person operates in
a manner that is predictably self destructive. For example, the black person’s images, symbols, lifestyles, and manners
are contradictory, and therefore destructive, to personal and collective growth and development. In Afrocentricity,
Asante maintains that African Americans have the possibility of being proud of a culture which has produced people of
strength of mind, body and character.
Asante recommends several changes for blacks who are committed to living an Afrocentric existence. First, he
recommends the changing of one’s slave name to an African one. This, he believes, will create a greater sense of unity
among African-Americans. Asante argues that because blacks have accepted their white names as their own, they have
lost much of their African heritage. He says that the truly Afrocentric individual will change his or her name to
demonstrate a belief in Africa. Second, he maintains that freedom is based on seizing the instruments of control. In other
words, to be truly free, black language must begin to be liberated so that Afrocentrists can talk and act separately from
others. Asante recommends the use of African terms to describe contemporary life as well as creating new words to
describe black experiences.
Asante is criticized for being a separatist, meaning that he encourages blacks to resist assimilation into
American culture (Menand, 1992). Speaking to black youth, he maintains that “assimilation is death”
(Asante, 1989), and that identification with the African in each black person is the way to personal and social
transformation.
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Today, Asante is a faculty member at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a professor and chairperson of the
Department of African American Studies. There are a number of ways the debater could incorporate Asante’s work into
debate. Initially, his argument which suggests that we need and African perspective regarding values could be used. For
example, the debater could critique various values by arguing that they ignore the African perspective. A debater could
argue that by embracing an African perspective our value system could be more aware of the subtle forms of
discrimination.
Bibliography
Molefi K. Asante, “Television and black consciousness.” JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 1976,
137-141.
Molefi K. Asante, AFROCENTRICITY: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY. Buffalo, NY: Amulefi, 1979.
Molefi K. Asante & M. Appiah, “The Rhetoric of the Akan Drum.” WESTERN JOURNAL OF BLACK
STUDIES, 1979.
Molefi K. Asante & A. Barnes, “Demystification of the Intercultural Encounter.” In M. K. Asante et al., Eds., HANDBOOK
OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979. Molefi K. Asante, Ed., HANDBOOK OF
INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage Publications, 1979.
Molefi K. Asante, “The Communication Person in Society.” CONTEMPORARY BLACK THOUGHT:
ALTERNATIVE ANALYSES IN SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980, pp. 15-28.
Molefi K. Asante, “International lntercultural Relations.” CONTEMPORARY BLACK THOUGHT:
ALTERNATIVE ANALYSES IN SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980, pp. 43-58.
Molefi K. Asante, “Television’s Impact on Black Children’s Language: An Exploration.”
CONTEMPORARY BLACK THOUGHT: ALTERNATIVE ANALYSES IN SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE. Beverly Hills: Sage,
1980, pp. 181-194.
Molefi K. Asante & A. S. Vandi, Eds., CONTEMPORARY BLACK THOUGHT: ALTERNATIVE ANALYSES IN SOCIAL AND
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980.
Molefi K. Asante & K. W. Asante, AFRICAN CULTURE: THE RHYTHMS OF UNITY. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1985.
Molefi K. Asante, THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Molefi K. Asante,
AFROCENTRICITY. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1989.
Louis Menand, “School daze: The trend toward multicultural education may be more confusing than elucidating.”
HARPER’S BAZAAR, September, 1992, p. 380.
Arthur L. Smith, THE RHETORIC OF BLACK REVOLUTION. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1969.
Arthur L. Smith, “Socio-Historical Perspectives of Black Oratory,” QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 1969, 56, 264-69.
Arthur L. Smith, “Markings of an African Concept of Rhetoric,” TODAY’S SPEECH, 1971, 19, 13-18.
Arthur L. Smith, TRANSRACIAL COMMUNICATION. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
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AFROCENTRISM LIBERATES THE OPPRESSED
1. AFROCENTRICISM QUESTIONS ONE’S APPROACH TO ALL ACTIVITIES
Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989, p. 45-6.
Afrocentricity questions your approach to every conceivable human enterprise. It questions the approach you make to
reading, writing, jogging, running, eating, keeping healthy, seeing, studying, loving, struggling, and working. If you do not
come from an Afrocentric base, then you are in serious ethical and cultural trouble. No human being, who would be free,
can be free by submitting when he does not have to submit A fool is the person who cannot see that there are no longer
any chains around his ankles, yet he walks as if he has weights at the bottom of his legs.
2. AFROCENTRISM LEADS TO INTELLECTUAL WHOLENESS
Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA, 1987, p. 164.
More damaging still has been the inability of European thinkers, particularly of the new-positivist or empiricist traditions,
to see that human actions cannot be understood apart from the emotions, attitudes, and cultural definitions of a given
context The Afrocentric thinker understands that the interrelationship of knowledge with cosmology, society, religion,
medicine, and traditions stands alongside the interactive metaphors of discourse as principal means of achieving a
measure of knowledge about experience. The Afrocentrists insist on steering the minds of their readers and listeners in
the direction of intellectual wholeness.
3. AFROCENTRIC CRITICISM ACCOUNTS FOR AESTHETICS AND ETHICS Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American
Studies, Temple University, THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA, 1987, p. 177.
The aim of criticism is to pass judgment, and judgment is concerned with good and bad, right and wrong; criticism is,
therefore, preeminently an ethical act One may appropriate other qualities to the critical act, but it is essentially a
judgment. The Afrocentric critic is also concerned with ethical judgments but finds the aesthetic judgment equally
valuable, particularly as the substantial ground upon which to make a decision about the restoration of harmony and
balance. Indeed, Afrocentric criticism essentially combines ethics and aesthetics.
4. AFROCENTRIC SCIENCE IS BASED UPON HISTORY AND HERITAGE Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American
Studies, Temple University, THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA, 1987, p. 80-81.
The Afrocentric perspective upholds the significance of science; indeed in the sense that it is based upon history and
heritage, Afrocentricity is itself a science. Western science, with its notions of knowledge of phenomena for the sake of
knowledge and its emphasis on technique and efficiency is not deep enough for our humanistic and spiritual viewpoint.
Therefore its limitations are clearly revealed in our history.
5. AFROCENTRIC VICTORY WILL PRESERVE AFRICAN CULTURE
Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989, p. 55-6.
But understand that the true Afrocentric love is found only in the context of the profound cause; otherwise it
degenerates into a spectacle of buying and selling. What is one more diamond ring if there is no sense of identity, not
togetherness in a victorious union as an expression of the relationship? The answer is clearly nothing more than the
meaningless play on rituals established to support the cash, flesh, or dependent connection. To get beyond this, we must
seriously rise up in victory for Afrocentricity. This will reconstruct our families, reorganize our values, and protect our
culture.
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LANGUAGE IS KEY TO AFRICAN-AMERICAN LIBERATION
1. LANGUAGE WILL LEAD TO LIBERATION FOR BLACKS
Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989, p. 31-32.
It becomes impossible for us to direct our future until we control our language. The sense of language is in precision of
vocabulary and structure for a particular social context. If we allow others to box us into their concepts, then we will
always talk and act like them. Language is the essential instrument of social cohesion. Social cohesion is the fundamental
element of liberation.
2. CHANGING THE SLAVE NAME WILL LEAD TO GREATER UNITY AMONG BLACKS Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African
American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989,
p. 28.
Changing of names will not in itself change economic and social oppression; but it will contribute to the creation of new
economic, political, and social forces that anticipate substantive change. The name changing action is at once a rejection
and an acceptance, a necessary condition of a new perspective on our place in the world. There is little question that
how we perceive ourselves influences how others perceive us. This being so, and other things being equal, the
acceptance of African names will establish a more distinct perception of our Afrocentricity. A Muslim takes an Arabic
name; a Christian takes a Christian name; we take African names.
3. AFRICAN-AMERICANS HAVE GREAT POTENTIAL FOR CHANGING LANGUAGE Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African
American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989, p. 32.
Africans have shown a remarkable ability to humanize any language we have spoken whether it was Portuguese, English,
Spanish, French, or Russian. What Nicolas Guillen did to Spanish, what Alexander Pushkin did to Russian, what Langston
Hughes did to English, and what Aime Cedaire, the greatest of all poets, did to French, suggest that it is in the soul of our
people to seize and redirect language toward liberating ideas and thought. We have met the challenges of an alien
culture, a racist mentality, and an exploitative enterprise with our African ability to transform reality with words and
actions.
CURRENT LANGUAGE STRUCTURES OPPRESS AFRICAN AMERICANS
1. EXISTING LANGUAGE STRUCTURES EXCLUDE THE OPPRESSED Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American
Studies, Temple University, THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA, p. 114-115.
Always, the protester must use different symbols, myths, and sounds than the established order. Otherwise, to speak the
same language means that you will always be at a disadvantage, because the oppressed can never use the language of
the established order with as much skill as the establishment. The oppressed must gain attention and control by
introducing another language, another sound. To speak the same language as the oppressor does not lead to a positive
result.
2. EUROPEAN CLASSIFICATIONS OF NON-WHITES PRECLUDE AFROCENTRISM Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African
American Studies, Temple University, CONTEMPORARY BLACK THOUGHT: ALTERNATIVE ANALYSES IN SOCIAL AND
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE, 1980, P. 48-49.
Classification of peoples allowed Europeans to speak of “progressive cultures,” “backward cultures,”
“inferior and superior cultures,” and “primitive” and “advanced cultures.” Europe was teacher and others were, by virtue
of their lower places in this modern version of the Great Chain of Being, students. They were underdeveloped, culturally
deprived, disadvantaged, and “culture-poor.” This conception of the world is demonstrably unsympathetic to alternative
perspectives.
3. CONFORMITY TO THE SLAVE NAME LEADS TO BLACK SEPARATISM
Molefi K. Asante, Professor of African American Studies, Temple University, AFROCENTRICITY, 1989, p. 27.
To come to terms does not mean to acquiesce in what has been done historically, but to challenge and modify the
mistakes of the past. We are victims of our names because we have previously refused to assert that we are African
people. It used to be fashionable for blacks to say that they were only part African because of their Indian, Irish, Jewish,
Chinese, or Gypsy blood. For some reason these blacks never admitted having English blood, the most likely foreign
strain present in African-Americans.
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AJ Ayer
INTRODUCTION
“A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively
established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable. In
which sense are we using the term when we say that a putative proposition is genuine only if it is verifiable?”
“...a priori truth is a tautology. And from a set of tautologies, taken by themselves, only further tautologies can be validly
deduced. But it would be absurd to put forward a system of tautologies as constituting the whole truth about the
universe. And thus we may conclude that it is not possible to deduce all our knowledge from 'first principle;' so that
those who hold that it is the function of philosophy to carry out such a deduction are denying its claim to be a genuine
branch of knowledge.” - Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic)
AYER ON ETHICS
While some philosophers like Kant believe that the categorical imperative is an appropriate way of dealing with ethical
questions, Ayer takes a far more extreme view. The categorical imperative means that you should make a decision based
on whether or not that would be a good decision if everyone made it. In fact, Ayer will go so far as to assert that ethics
cannot exist, and that questions of what is or is not ethical behavior are entirely meaningless. For example, the
statement “Murder is wrong,” would, for most people, constitute a judgment on the ethics of murder or taking the life of
another. However, Ayer would argue that rather than making that claim, the statement only has one relevant part. All
the statement argues is that “Murder is.” The second half of the proclamation is based on feelings rather than any
physical or observable fact. For this reason, the second half of the proclamation is wrong. As a result, since the
statement contains no actual knowledge or information it is tantamount to meaningless.
For logical positivists, only statements containing knowledge or information are worth pursuing, and since any statement
containing feelings, or emotions are devoid of knowledge, they too are meaningless. In all cases, Ayer rejects the
attempts to set up what he refers to as a “realm of values” to establish certain things in society that are or are not
valuable to society at large. Statements such as, “Murder is wrong” merely communicate personal disapproval and
individual feelings about the act, but do not warrant any significant evaluation or understanding. That is because they
are non-falsifiable in nature. The statement can be neither proven nor disproved through empirical understanding and
situations or through pure logical extrapolation, thus is not relevant for examination.
CRITICISMS OF AYER AND LOGICAL POSITIVISM
There are a number of general criticisms of the philosophy of logical positivism and more specifically of AJ Ayer himself.
These criticisms allow individuals to escape the problems that logical positivist level at metaphysical philosophers as well
as other individuals who choose not to endorse the mindset proposed by the logical positivists.
The first major criticism of logical positivism comes from the fact that there is virtually no “enforcement” of the
standards of belief that it lays out. While the idea of verifiability both of the strong and weak variety is appealing to
individuals who already accept the mindset of logical positivism, metaphysical philosophers can merely choose to ignore
or otherwise refuse to acknowledge the problems or solutions set up by logical positivism. There are no external reasons
that people should be held to making sure that all important statements are verifiable.
If this approach is taken, philosophers of any school of thought outside logical positivism can easily escape the criticisms
leveled at them. The idea that the metaphysical questions are meaningless because they are not verifiable only has
relevance because they choose to accept it. Should the philosopher or reader decide that they are not appropriate ways
of determining the importance of a statement, they lose their power.
The second major criticism of logical positivism is that it endorses a relatively strange way of looking at philosophy.
Whereas every form of philosophy prior to logical positivism accepted that theorizing on questions that cannot
necessarily be proven is important, logical positivism rejects this mindset. The basis of much of philosophy is that the role
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of a philosopher is to ponder the questions that cannot be answer, not, as Ayer would often have us believe, to ponder
the importance and role of language in society as a while.
The third criticism of logical positivism is that it has far-reaching and often times undesirable ramifications on science and
other aspects of society. If the basis for validity of statements is accepted, and everything worth philosophizing about
must be falsifiable, it threatens the very basis for society. For instance, empirical science often times is based on all sorts
of things that cannot always be considered falsifiable. Much of the hypothesis that describe the way the world functions
work almost exclusively in a manner that cannot be based on experience or logic. As a result, if logical positivism is
endorsed entirely, the criticism is that it would handicap science and cripple its ability to develop theories on anything
but the most fundamental of questions.
AYER ON LINGUISTICS
As is evident by even the titles of the books written by AJ Ayer, the emphasis that Ayer would place in philosophy is on
linguistics and language. AJ Ayer believes that the function of philosophers ought to study the clarity and function of
language in an attempt to understand how society functions and gather more information.
Ayer argues that analytic propositions, or tautologies can serve the function of helping to shed light on linguistic studies.
By evaluating those things that are linguistically or logically consistent it can begin to help clarify the way in which
linguistics functions in society and for philosophers. This exploration is one of the major elements that AJ Ayer believes
ought to be emphasized on behalf of most modern philosophers, since value and metaphysics are not worthy of
examination due to their failure of the test of falsifiability.
He also argues that philosophy is a critical activity entirely. It ought to be focused on the criticism of language and
linguistics primarily, and that these criticisms can help to formulate and understanding of society at large. While most
philosophers tend to believe that philosophy is about determining the meaning of something, be it life, death or any
other element in society, Ayer provides an alternative perspective. Rather than believing that philosophy is about
meaning, he believes that philosophy is about definitions and understanding the language that characterizes meaning.
AYER ON METAPHYSICS
Ayer spends much of his time criticizing the manner in which metaphysical philosophers approach their role in society.
He believes that in most cases the approach to the world that utilizes non-falsifiable information to be meaningless, and
that approach is the crux of metaphysical philosophy. There are a number of problems that Ayer feels makes
metaphysics a meaningless field of approach that only serves to de-legitimize philosophy in general.
The first problem that Ayer finds with metaphysics is that it continues to refer to a transcendent reality that cannot be
seen or experienced in any empirical manner. This becomes particularly important when criticisms of Ayer come into
play. Many metaphysical philosophers cleverly turn their theories around and point out that anyone criticizing
metaphysics is merely another metaphysicist with an alternative theory. However, Ayer deftly avoids this criticism by
delineating precisely where he attacks metaphysics. His claim is that metaphysics improperly apply the rules governing
the use of language. The violation of the principles of linguistics is, in Ayer’s mind, a far bigger offense that having a
misdirected understanding of the world. Since metaphysics applies theory to situations that can never be tested or
explored, it violates the very role of philosophy.
The second major problem that Ayer finds with metaphysical philosophy is that it has a tendency to evaluate the
existence of a supernatural being or existence. While this particular theory is never rejected out of hand by Ayer, he
considers it to be impossible to falsify. Since it is impossible to ever determine if a God actually exists or not, it is
meaningless to attempt to discover it, or to bother pondering the existence of such a being.
AYER ON THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY
Since Ayer was a philosopher, it is not surprising that he spent much of his time attempting to determine what exactly
the role of the philosopher was in society. What questions ought to be examined, and when, if ever a conclusion can be
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drawn from outside the empirical existence. The understanding of logical positivists, and specifically AJ Ayer’s reinterpretation of logical positivism, known as “logical empiricism” contributes to this understanding of how philosophers
ought to approach their situation in the world of academia.
Since Ayer rejects metaphysical philosophy, he clearly does not accept the idea that a philosopher should interpret the
meaning of non-falsifiable information. Rather Ayer argues that the primary function of a philosopher is to discover the
understanding of definitions and the role that linguistics plays in recognizing society. Since philosophy, in Ayer’s mind is a
solely critical activity, its function is to examine and criticize the linguistics of society. The only situation that philosophers
can accurately explore is that of linguistics. Situations that are non-falsifiable, or fall under the subject of metaphysics,
are meaningless according to Ayer. At the same time anything that is necessarily correct in society is not worth
examining because it has already been determined as being correct and thus warrants no new analysis.
One of the primary ideas that Ayer puts forward is that the only way people gather information about the mind is
through their understanding and examination of the body. Ayer explains that the sense-memory from which all
understanding is based cannot be the same from one person to another. This concept, although it seems relatively
complicated, is actually quite simple. So long as individuals are fundamentally different they can never have the exact
same experience. Even if two people see the same situation and it involves the same people, the understanding that
emerges from that experience will still remain different. The two people will never have exactly the same experience,
thus any conclusions that emerge will always differ at some level. It is the role of linguistic philosophers to attempt to
clarify and understand these modifications so that an understanding of the world at large is much more possible and can
actually occur effectively.
AYER IN LD DEBATE
AJ Ayer performs a relatively interesting role in Lincoln-Douglass Debate. Since the primary ideal of Ayer is that value
debate is meaningless, since there is no where to factually evaluate the truth of a particular value, it seems to provide an
interesting avenue to kritik the entire message in debate. Since virtually every round will devolve into some element of
value consideration, Ayer provides an effective means of changing the focus from values to linguistics, and the power
and meaning of words.
The philosophy of AJ Ayer can also be used effectively to call into question any information that falls outside of Ayers
ascribed “strong” or “weak” verifiability. If a statement made by the opposing team is unable to be tested and explored
in the manner that Ayer claims is most appropriate, then it can be relatively easily discredited. While it seems interesting
that Ayer helps to contribute some effective kritik ground for either side of the resolution, his work also provides an
appropriate alternative. Any criticism is more effective if it includes some way in which the audience or the other team
would be able to avoid the criticism. In this manner, Ayers determination that there is always linguistic structure worthy
of criticism and evaluation as well as debate makes it an effective alternative for the opposing team to explore.
Ayer is also effective in deployment for topicality positions. Since Ayer has determined that philosophy at its root is not
even about what something should or should not be, or questions of ethics and morality. Rather Ayer believes that the
primary function of philosophy ought to be discussions about definitions. Thus providing an appropriate warrant for any
discussion of the definitions within a round. While the opposing team is likely to want to dismiss these claims, having
Ayer provide evidence to support the fact that linguistic debate is the most important form if not the only form is
particularly beneficial.
Finally, one of the functions of debate is to persuade the audience that your positions are correct. Since Ayers draws
intensely from personal experience as it is based exclusively on that which is empirical, or derived from experience. As a
result, the argumentation can often appeal directly to the personal nature of the type or style of argument in obtaining
persuasive appeal among the audience.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayer, AJ. LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC. Dover: Pubns. 1946.
Ayer, AJ. LOGICAL POSITIVISM. Free Press. 1966
Ayer, AJ. PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE. Viking Press. 1991.
Ayer, AJ. PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Vintage Books. 1984
Ayer, AJ. FREEDOM AND MORALITY AND OTHER ESSAYS. Clarendon Press. 1987.
Ayer, AJ. THE MEANING OF LIFE. Scribner. 1990.
Foster, John. AYER (ARGUMENTS OF THE PHILOSOPHIES). Routledge, Kegan & Paul. 1985
Hahn, Lewis. THE PHILOSOPHY OF AJ AYER. THE LIVING PHILOSOPHERS VOL 21. Open Court Publishing Company. 1992.
Hanfling, Oswald. AYER: THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS. Routledge. 1999.
MacDonald, GF. PERCEPTION AND IDENTITY: ESSAYS PRESENTED TO AJ AYER WITH HIS REPLIES. Cornell University Press.
New York. 1979.
Martin, Robert. ON AYER. Wadsworth Publishing. 2000
Rogers, Ben. AJ AYER: A LIFE. Grove Press. 2000.
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STATEMENTS OF VALUE ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE
1. DELINIATIONS OF RIGHT AND WRONG CONTAIN NO TRUTH AND ARE MEANINGLESS
Andrew Knowlton, Professor of Philosophy at Bates College, A.J. AYER – AN END OF METAPHYSICS, 1990. p. 2.
As a result of Ayer's discussion of logical empiricism, some interesting questions are raised concerning the validity of
ethics and theology. Ayer believes that statements of ethics are like those of metaphysics, factually meaningless. Take for
example the statement, "Adultery is wrong." Ayer wants to argue that this statement makes only one factual, verifiable
observation, "Adultery is." Wrongness, having no existence as an actual, observable phenomenon, communicates a
feeling, not a fact. Ayer rejects any attempt to set up a "realm of values" over the world of experience. Adultery is wrong
neither makes an empirical statement about adultery nor relates adultery to some transcendental realm. The only thing
that the statement "Adultery is wrong" expresses is our feelings about adultery, our feelings of disapproval, or our
attempt to persuade others not to commit adultery. In all of these cases, "Adultery is wrong" conveys no truth or
information, therefore it is thought of as a meaningless statement.
2. THE ONLY WAY TO DESTABALIZE POWER RELATATIONS IS TO QUESTION KNOWLEDGE
John Ransom, Professor Of Political Science, Duke University, FOUCAULT’S DISCIPLINE, 1997. p. 23-24.
The second point that is missed by Foucault’s critics is the possibility that instead of describing an omnipotent form of
power with an unbreakable hold on our subjective states, the “power-knowledge” sign marks a kind of weakness in the
construction of modern power. An unnoticed consequence of Foucault’s observations on the relation between
knowledge and power is the increased importance of knowledge. If power and knowledge are intertwined, it follow that
one way to understand power - potentially to destabilize it or change its focus - is to take a firm hold on the knowledge
that is right there at the center of its operations.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE WHY THINGS HAPPEN
1. INABILITY TO PROVE CAUSAL CONNECTION RENDERS DISCUSSION OF WHY IRELEVENT
Kenneth Rothman, Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, CAUSAL INFERENCE-INFERRING CAUSAL
CONNECTIONS -HABIT, FAITH, OR LOGIC, 1988. p. 6.
An understanding of the process of causal inference is often muddled by differing concepts of the term “inference” in
empirical science, a problem that may reflect the uncertainty of the process itself. What passes for causal inference by
scientists is often just decision - making perched upon weak criteria that lack a logical base. Many of the commonly used
modes of causal inference are fallacious, their popularity not withstanding.
2. EVEN THOUGH IT IS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH EMPIRICAL TRUTH IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE CONCLUSIONS ABOUT IT
Kenneth Rothman, Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, CAUSAL INFERENCE-INFERRING CAUSAL
CONNECTIONS -HABIT, FAITH, OR LOGIC, 1988. p. 10.
Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, seems to accumulate through a different method, one that does not guarantee
correct conclusions no matter how carefully it is applied. Even with multiple repetitions, the assignment of a causal
interpretation or the formulation of a law of nature from the series of perceptions cannot be construed as a logical
extension of the observations, despite our innate tendency to do so.
3. HUMANS CAN'T APPROPRAITE TRUTH
John Novak, Professor Colgate University “Why I am not a Russellian.” FREE INQUIRY, 1995. p. 38.
As appealing as [Russell’s] claim for foundational certainty is, there is another point of view. That is, that life is messier
and that human perception does not have this privileged access to knowledge; knowledge claims regarding the empirical
world are always inferential. In actuality, all knowledge is mediated, that is, constructed from some perspective within
problematic situations. Thus, experience is always occurring in some context and must be filtered through some
perspective to become knowledge.
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CLAIMS TO UNIVERSAL TRUTH SUSTAIN NEGATIVE POWER RELATIONS
1. RELYING SOLEY ON PROOF DEVALUES OTHER FORMS OF THINKING
Charlie Brown, Assistant Professor Of Philosophy at Emporia State Univ., “Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism,”
MIDWEST QUARTERLY, 1995, p. 2.
Scientific thinking has attained its form of universality, its unequaled scope of application by omitting from its discourse
not only the realm of values and divergent points of view but also human feeling and sentiments. By elevating this
skewed universality to a privileged position as the only valid form of thinking all other forms of thinking have been
devalued.
2. FOCUSING ONLY ON WHAT CAN AND CANNOT BE PROVED IGNORES THE "OTHER"
William Cornwall, Professor of Philosophy at Mary Washington College, MAKING SENSE OF THE OTHER: HUSSERL,
CARNAP, HEIDEGGER, AND WITTGENSTEIN. 1999, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompCorn.htmm Accessed
June 1, 2003. p-np.
Phenomenology and logical positivism both subscribed to an empirical-verifiability criterion of mental or linguistic
meaning. The acceptance of this criterion confronted them with the same problem: how to understand the Other as a
subject with his own experience, if the existence and nature of the Other's experiences cannot be verified.
3. ADHERENCE TO SCIENCE OVERLOOKES CRUCIAL COMPLEXITIES
Dennis O’Brien, President emeritus of the University of Rochester, “He Didn’t Add Up.” COMMONWEAL, September 28,
2001. p. 22.
Russell's exalted notion of truth was, he said, "as stern and pitiless as God." He ironically cited the pope as someone who
also holds to exalted truth--though of course the pontiff had it all wrong. The issue for Russellian scientists and papal
catechists is to avoid the temptation of simplifying the intricate, entangled world of concrete realities in the interest of a
simplistic and thus stern and pitiless Beyond. A contemporary philosopher, Nancy Cartwright, writes powerfully against
the Russellian kind of scientific simplification in favor of what she calls "the dappled world"--a phrase deliberately taken
from Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Dappled World, 1999). Her concern is ultimately moral. Those who seek to simplify
physical and emotional reality make a mess of the multiple multilayered nonreducible realities of human life. Bertrand
Russell's life is a proof text of that assertion.
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CLAIMS TO UNVERSAL KNOWLEDGE CREATE AN EPISTIMOLOGICAL TRAP
1. CLAIMS TO UNVERSAL KNOWLEDGE CONTROL THE SOCIAL BODY
Michael Clifford, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University, POLITICAL GENEALOGY AFTER
FOUCAULT, 2001. p. 98-99.
The phrase “power/knowledge” to a great extent expresses the intimacy of discourse and power relations. Power
proceeds through the deployment of various knowledge for the normalization and cohesion of the social body.
Knowledge both guides and sanctions practices of subjugation and objectification that at once govern and define
individuals. The production of knowledge, in turn, requires entrenched institutional apparatuses (such as education,
science, media) where it can emerge and be disseminated. Knowledge must conform to rules of acceptance, diffusion
and consumption that go beyond the laws of rarity and exclusion governing the emergence of statements within a
discursive formation. In fact, the embodiment of knowledge in real institutional and social practices makes it an essential
feature of the network of power relations itself. At the juncture of power/knowledge, discourse becomes “a formidable
tool of control and power.” Indeed, at this juncture it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish discourse and power
since real practices of spatialization and differentiation are immediately and inseparably attended by knowledges that
explain what these bodies are in truth, what they need, how they should be organized. Truth is not something outside of
power; rather, it is the concrete forms effected by the juncture of power and knowledge. Every society is governed by a
regime of truth, which consists at the same time of (1) “the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function are
true,” and (2) political structures whose function is to articulate such discourses in concrete forms onto the social body.
2. TRUTH CLAIMS CREATE PRISONS OF SUBJECTIFICATION THAT ARE IMPOSED ON PEOPLE
Michael Clifford, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University, POLITICAL GENEALOGY AFTER
FOUCAULT, 2001. p. 99-100.
A relation of self to self can be understood as a “form of reflexivity,” says Foucault - that is, as a mode of selfexamination and assessment. Discourses of truth can be understood as “forms of rationality” as a thematic complex of
representations bearing on common objects and held together by certain principles or standards of organization whose
validity is internal to the complex itself. In technologies of the self we have “forms of rationality applied by the human
subject to itself.” While it is appropriate to speak of a discourse of truth peculiar to the self, the construction of such
discourse involves the application of forms of rationality, or discourses, which come from sources independent of the
individual. Religious discourses, discourses of philosophy and medicine, political or juridical discourses, and (perhaps
most important to modern subjectivity) the disciplines of the human sciences such discourse are applied by individuals to
themselves in the constitution of themselves as subjects. Such discourses carry their own values, norms, expectations to
which, through the process of subjectivacation, the individual feels obliged to conform, thus comprising part of the
ethical dimension of a relation of the self with self. More often then not, however, these discourses are imposed on
individuals.
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Kurt Baier
INTRODUCTION
Kurt Baier (Dunedin, New Zealand) is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Author of the
acclaimed work The Moral Point of View he has published numerous articles on reason and philosophy. Kurt Baier is a
moral philosopher whose works and ideas have spanned forty years. His work has changed with the times, but still the
core remains the same. The crux of Baier’s work is focused upon practical reason and its affirmative role in morality.
Baier argues that morality can generally be based in individuals and does not have to be grounded in ‘God’. Accordingly,
we can find answers to important human questions without recourse to faith in a supernatural deity.
REASON, RATIONALITY
For Baier, individuals are acting in reason when we seek a good life that is based upon our own standards. Reason is
generally the ability to assess something as a good thing and act in accordance with it by some motive. Individuals must
be able to judge relevant actions and motivations. Early in Baier’s earliest work The Moral Point of View, on page 161,
there are important differences between motive and reason. “First, it is a difference between the types of behavior to
which the explanations are properly applicable; explanations in terms of the agent’s reason refer to behavior involving
deliberation, explanations in terms of motives do not…reasons refer to supposed facts, ‘motive’ to the agent’s behavioral
disposition.” Beyond just a generic description of reason and rationality, Baier’s work is largely premised upon what he
refers to as ‘practical reason’.
First, it is important to understand that reason can be grounded upon two sides, a subjective, and objective view. The
subjective view can be a conception of “each individual’s unflawed conception of the preferred life for herself,” (The
Rational Moral Order, p.268) or a person’s internal pure conception of the good life for herself. Though the distinction in
this sentence is rhetorically minute, the importance of the distinction to Baier’s philosophy is not. The preferred life is
not always the life that is ‘good’ for the individual. A debate coach may prefer to live a season of sacrifice for her or his
students, but that life may not be the best directly for a debate coaches physical well being. Baier refers to the former as
‘self-anchored’ and to the latter as ‘self-grounded’.
On the objective side of the base of practical reason is a view that shows there are some reasons not based in the
subject’s view of anything. The objective view also has two possible sides. The first is agent-relative, an individual does
what is best for herself/himself regardless of ideal situations. The second part is agent neutral, which is simply doing
something because it is considered inherently right or good. The reason this view is ‘agent-neutral’ is that a person may
act in this manner regardless of whether one wants or prefers to act in this manner. Baier’s moral philosophy is based
upon self-anchored subjective views. In terms of LD debate, it may useful to do research on objective moral standards as
a way to reply to Baier. These arguments can be found in Kantian as well neo-Kantian moral philosophers.
According to Baier, although we have self-anchored subjective reasons, in compromising situations, we may all want
some set of guidelines as overriding self-anchored reasons if these reasons are the best for all. (Russell) In these
situations, everyone has reason to want some set of guidelines which supercede self-anchored reasons as long as those
guidelines would further each person’s chance equally to live a choice-worthy life. So in this situation the general
guidelines override the individual but ultimately the individual must choose whether compliance with those guidelines is
productive. In his last major work, The Rational Moral Order, Baier explains, “[reason] is the best method because it
consists in following certain general guidelines made available to us by our culture for the purpose of enabling us to
guide ourselves in our attempts to find answers to such important questions.” (page 50) Ultimately for Baier, social
guidelines are “ the closest attainable approximation” to the actual guidelines we should live our lives by. When there
are available social guidelines it is prima facie rational to think that the available social guidelines are one’s best bet
without any other contradicting reason. (The Rational Moral Order, p.268)
MOTIVE
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Baier identifies something he calls “the Motivation Problem.” This is to highlight that moral philosophy has done an
inadequate job of explaining why a person is motivated to act in accordance with a moral reason. According to
conventional thinking, we can always do what we have reason to do because there is a reason to do this. Beyond being
tautological, this explanting does not create a difference between motive and reason. We can be unmotivated in a
certain moral direction even though we may recognize that it is the ‘right’ thing to do. For Baier if moral philosophy is
going to resolve this issue, the discipline must account for two conditions. The first being that philosophers would have
to bring to the fore of societal morals an objective procedure that can help reason conclusions about what we ought do.
(The Rational Moral Order, p.51) Secondly, they would have to explain how we can be motivated to act in situations that
our inclination is otherwise.
One question that has been ever-present through Baier’s academic career is ‘What Shall I do?’ (The Moral Point of View)
This question for Baier, at a deeper level of examination, is seeking a reply to, “What is the best course open to me, that
is, the course supported by the best reasons?” For Baier, at least in this work, when we think of this question two
different tasks arise. The first, which is a theoretical task of figuring out the best possible action. The second is a practical
task of executing the theoretical conclusion. Baier is really focused on grappling with the question of the ‘motive power’
of reason, which is to say the ability to be motivated by a reason. Baier is adamant about explaining that just because we
are aware of a reason does not mean we will necessarily act in accordance with that reason. The question that plaques
Baier is about “the motive power of reason is…how [are we] able to accomplish the practical task of deliberation, even
when our strongest desires oppose it [?]”(The Rational Moral Order, pg. 142) The answer to this question for Baier at
least, lies within rationality. When we act in a rational manner we are acting within the conventions of Rationality. As
Baier explains, “There is, then no mystery about why we act in accordance with the outcome of our [theory]
deliberations, that is, in accordance with what we take to be the best reasons: it is because we want to follow the best
reasons.” (page 142) Since there is really no question for Baier why we act in accordance with our reason, but questions
why we even stop to reason in the first place. He argues that is a socially constructed and engrained phenomena. Baier
explains that we have all been trained in ways to act in accordance with action that maybe in opposition to our impulses.
Generally in Euro-American culture, people have been taught “not to follow impulses or instinct or inclination, but to
think first…we have been trained to do it even in the face of strong contrary impulses”. (page 149)
MORAL DELIBERATION
In terms of moral deliberation, Baier suggests that we have two steps in deliberating morals. First is simply the
identification of pros and cons of a moral choice and the second is the weighing of competing forces and options.
Accordingly, we make our decisions within a moral rules of reason, such as, that killing may be wrong so that is a reason
against killing. We weigh by using rules of superiority, which is just a fancy way of saying we prioritize choices. Baier want
to highlight that what is conventionally referred to as moral convictions can “ function as moral rules of reason, as moral
consideration-making beliefs.” (The Rational Moral Order, pg 171) Moral deliberation is a calculative process, a method
of working through moral questions. As for the role of Moral philosophers, Baier suggests “all that can be expected …is
the clarification of the calculus, the statement of general rules, and the methods of using them in particular
calculations.”(172-173) This suggests that philosophers take a unique role in constructing a culture's methods of dealing
with moral and ethical questions. It is not that philosophers are going to answer all of our problems, but rather provide
us with a tool to guide us on our moral journeys. For Baier this also means that this calculative process of moral
deliberation can be right or wrong.
MORAL POINT OF VIEW
Moral systems for Baier, must pass through a sort of test that can not be subjected on the law or a divine moral code.
Initially in Baier's work he refers the moral point of view as that which a person of good will follows in deliberating a
moral consideration. On way of resolving problems is by attempting to understand a situation from the multiple
perspectives different people occupy. For Baier, the moral point of view overrides all of these views, it is how a ‘person
of good will’ acts.
As explained above, Baier thinks that morality is self-anchored in that it is not necessarily self-interested. As explained
over forty years ago, “if the point of view of morality were that of self interest then there could never be moral solutions
of conflicts of interest.” (The Rational Moral Order, pg 190-91) For Baier, the moral point of view goes beyond self-
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interest and is based upon principles. The contemporary text Baier applies is “a moral guideline is true if and only if it
would be more to everyone’s advantage that people generally comply with it than that people generally not comply with
it.”( Schneewind, pg 187) So again, Baier’s moral philosophy is focused around the individuals' ability to reason and that
that process is not just self centered. Furthermore, Baier explains that the three criteria for determining whether a
certain behavior should be morally prohibited by a certain group depends on: “(i) the consequences would be
undesirable if everyone did it, (ii) all are equally entitled to engage in it, and (iii) engaging in this sort of behavior is an
indulgence, not a sacrifice. Morality is a societal system that adheres with these aforementioned criteria.
A constant issue in moral philosophy arise here in terms of others willingness to reciprocate within a moral system. For
Baier, it is rational for everyone to want to reciprocate. This happens only when one has reason to believe that others
are likely to reciprocate. (The Rational Moral Order, p.179) This feeling of reciprocation is what Baier refers to as Limited
Conditional Good Will. In order for an individual to espouse this limited good will, a person must be reasonably assured
that others will cooperate. Baier vaguely refers to societal guidelines as the ways in which people can be assured of
matter of a fact that others will reciprocate, otherwise it would be irrational for one to choose to engage in an activity
that would not be reciprocated.
These systems, according to Baier, must be acted upon by everyone in a culture. He writes, “Moral Principals are not
merely principles on which individuals must act without making exceptions, but they are principles meant for everybody "
(The Moral Point of View, pg. 179) From this logic, Baier follows by arguing that these principals must be taught openly
and universally. In a moral system, “Morality is meant to be taught to all members of the group in such a way that
everyone can and ought always act in accordance with these rules”. (pg 179) This point is important within the history of
European moral philosophy and theology, because it does not limit the morality to simply a virtue within only a small
elite group but has the possibility of being a holistic societal system. In Baier’s early work, he follows this line of
argument by criticizing certain cultural systems that privilege only part of the population. He argues that in some
societies ‘morality’ is really only a premature cluster of rules and laws that privilege ruling elites. (pg. 200-201) He is
using this as a historical example, a locus point of discussion between historical legal systems. This part of his writing can
be appropriated for argument construction within a LD round. One way is to criticize current moral systems as mere
simulations and extensions of contemporary legal systems which are reliant upon a heavy currency of societal
oppression.
This clearly also indicates Baier’s view on the ‘nature’ of people. He denies that all people are moral by nature. One way
of arguing this point for Baier is to claim that animals and robots are not moral and would be if there was a morality by
nature. He also argued that if acted morally without deliberation, people themselves would be robotic like in the sense
that an individual would automatically do was considered morally reasonable. “Morality is our second rather than our
first nature.” (pg. 257) Rather for Baier, the process moral deliberation is how one acts morally.
WHY SHOULD WE BE MORAL?
According to Baier, “we should be moral because being moral is following rules designed to overrule self-interest
whenever it is in the interest of everyone alike that everyone should set aside his interest.”(pg. 314) This means that the
best possible life for everyone requires sacrifice, that it is not just self-interested reasons. Moral reasons are superior to
individual interests. Moral systems are supposed to override self-interest when it is disadvantageous to other people he
argues that is the raison d’ etre of a morality. It is in this section that Baier briefly lays out some of these universal rules.
(pg 309) These include: “Thou shall not kill’, ‘Thou shall not lie’, ‘Though shall not steal’. He also includes discussion of
cruelty, torture, cheating, and rape.
In order to examine the complications of rules we should consider the following example from Baier. Would be morally
wrong for me to kill my grandfather so that he will be unable to change his will and disinherit me? “Assuming that my
killing him will be in my best interest but detrimental to my grandfather, while refraining from killing him will be to my
detriment but in my grandfather’s interest, then if ethical conflict-regulation is sound, there can be a sound moral
guideline regulating this conflict (presumably by forbidding this killing)” (page 202). Many authors have taken up this
very example of inheritance, and oppose Baier’s simplified way of dealing with the complications of self-interest. The
added bibliography will suggest an article that deals with this issue.
DEBATE POSSIBILITIES
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I have already begun to briefly drop notes on how Baier may be helpful in debate rounds. This section will attempt to
deal with some of the different sides to arguing a particular author’s moral point of view. It is important first to
recognize that Kurt Baier has been publishing work since at least 1958. This means that deploying his arguments requires
extra attention. First, though he has been writing for so long he is still one author, which means he literally has not kept
up with all of his major critics over the decades. Simply put, you do not want to deploy an argument that your author
may have lost already in the literature base or maybe at least you want to be aware of some of the holes that you can
plug in terms of academic debate. Another issue that arises is because Baier has been writing for so long, he has taken
different positions and viewpoints at different times in his career. This presumably means that there are points of
conflict within his own philosophy that are seen by some as failures of his and seen by others as his willingness to adapt
to the times. With those important concerns mentioned, let us now move to the specifics of how his moral arguments
can be appropriated and or successfully executed.
One of the easiest ways to deploy his criticism is against authors Baier directly criticizes. Though his early work
appropriates Kant, he ultimately disagrees with Kantian and neo-Kantian reliance on categorical imperatives. His
argument is mainly that Kant does not account well for the motivation to action, instead his theory presumes motivation
inherent in rational maxims. The criticism implies that we are just robotic beings who have no real ability to reflect, feel,
reason and move towards a particular direction on one’s accord. This is a disheartening view of humanity that possibly
justifies corrupt moral systems that are not based upon caring or at least non self-centered individuals but rather on the
ability of some to construct systems that privilege a particular group, or identity inequitably.
Further, debater’s basic claims of morals and their accompanying value structures can be undermined if they are
premised upon either a supernatural deity or solely in self-interest. Values that cannot be tested according to societyanchored moral reasons are most likely unsound morals that do not help people live life’s that are fruitful for themselves
or others. Though many debaters will not accredit the values they advocate to a supernatural force there are still ways to
win links. One way is to be able to verbally question the reasons and motives behind certain espoused values. Baier’s test
is simply if it a more beneficial for a group do something than to not. On closer examination of many conventional values
such as individual liberty can be masks for inequity of all sorts within our culture.
Debaters could advocate a moral-value based upon Baier’s standards. The reason this could be helpful is that Baier
provides some generic tests or criteria for these values, discussed above. To reiterate, Baier identifies moral reasons as
self-anchored and society anchored. This means that individuals must choose to comply with a given societal moral
system, but do not necessarily act in accordance with self-interest. One can argue that instead something like an
individual liberty one should be grounded in a self-anchored system in which individuals rationally choose to act in
accordance with moral reasons that will bring good onto others, even at times when it causes the individual grief. In
debates, deploying narratives that affirm this sort of ethic may be a powerful way of explaining a powerful concept.
Though Baier’s work has its problems, his explanation of self-anchored reasons goes far beyond the norm of selfinterested moral philosophers. It allows the space to recognize that even though we may not be moral naturally all the
time, we can as people begin to create a moral system which adapts to the different needs of growing and diverse
societies.
My last suggestion differs drastically from all the aforementioned but still may be worth considering on its own terms. It
is important first to recognize that questions of nihilism are often suppressed within academic settings but sometimes
debate may allow the space to discuss the process of an enduring nihilism. Though the term nihilism can be intended in
different manners, I use it here simply to refer to the essential Nietzschean concept, in which values continually devalue
themselves. In this nihilistic setting no value or moral is choice worthy, it is a dreadful and horrible endeavor that many
feel is necessary to travel in order to ‘overcome’ the dualistic European value structure. Though discussion of nihilism
can be complex, I suggest that it is possible to apply Baier to a situation of Nietzchean nihilism. In order to argue this
point one must note that nihilism arises as a result of the death of ‘God’. (God both as a being, and as a metaphor for the
morals and values that are tied to God.) Some have said in a state of nihilism all is permitted, but the point for some
authors is to overcome nihilism in a possible inventing of something out of nothing. Though Baier’s work is possibly
undermined from the standpoint of a nihilistic perspective, there is room to maneuver Baier’s ideas, meaning that you
could add your own ideas to those of Baier. At a basic level one must use Baier’s idea of a moral system not based upon a
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God. And since Baier identifies moral systems as relatively fluid societal structures, one could argue that a new
formulated society structure could create a moral and value structure out of a state of nothingness.
CONCLUSION
Kurt Baier is a moral philosopher who has created work that has spanned a long period within the disciplines that analyze
moral philosophy. It is important to note that his work has even contributed to the fractioning of the original disciplines
that analyzed questions of morality. We must not forget that most European philosophers have historically based
morality within the confines of Religion. The point here is not to argue that Religious systems are immoral but rather to
highlight how questions of morality have almost always been limited to theology. Baier is crucial in that he
fundamentally denies the need for a religious deity or God in the process of developing a sound moral system.
Baier has filled this vacuum through the actions of the individuals. He argues throughout his various works that moral
reasons are self-anchored in that they executed through the individual but are not always in favor of the individual. The
moral point of view is one that is founded upon this principal, but this self-anchored principal is always superceded by
societal-anchored reasons. For Baier, sound moral systems that are preexisting to an individual's participation in that
culture are prime facie rational, and should be followed. It is also important to note that reasons that appear to an
individual do not inherently motivate a person to act in a way that would attain the reason in consideration. Baier
answers the question of motivation by arguing that we act in accordance to principals that are based upon the best
reasons. This also implies that our moral choices have the possibility of being true or false. Baier presents a simple test
for the validity of a Moral claim. Baier argues “ a moral guideline is true if and only if it would be more to everyone’s
advantage that people generally comply with it than that people generally not comply with it.”
In this process of trying to figure out which morals to adhere to individuals must asses the theorized reasons for acting
and second must enact the reason the was chosen in the process of deliberation. For Baier, moral philosophers have a
unique role in clarifying the calculus that is used by individuals to deem something morally rational, but the act of
performing the moral is always constrained to individuals and their own experience. In this respect, we conclude by
appreciating what we can of Baier’s suggestions for ourselves. Each of us can appreciate his contributions to the history
of moral philosophy as well as his possible contributions to our individual experience. He has articulated that we must
construct societal systems that are not based upon exploitation but upon principals that allow others not only to be
considered, but prioritized. This prioritization of the other over the self stands in contrast to most of European
philosophy much like the general position of Kurt Baier and his moral point of view.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baier, Kurt. THE RATIONAL AND THE MORAL ORDER: THE SOCIAL ROOTS OF REASON AND MORALITY. (The Paul Carus
Lecture, No 18) Open Court Publishing Company. January 1995.
Baier, Kurt. THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS. Cornell University Press, NY 1958.
Baier, Kurt. REASON, ETHICS, AND SOCIETY: THEMES FROM KURT BAIER WITH HIS RESPONSES. Schneewind, ed. Open
Court Publishing Company 1996.
Baier, Kurt. VALUES AND THE FUTURE; THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE ON AMERICAN VALUES. Open Court
Publishing Company 1996.
Baier, Kurt. PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND DEATH: A HUMANIST PERSPECTIVE. N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1997.
Baier, Kurt. AUTARCHY, REASON, AND COMMITMENT. (in Symposium on Stanley I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom) Ethics,
Vol. 100, No. 1. (Oct., 1989), pp. 93-107.
Baier, Kurt. JUSTICE AND THE AIMS OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. (in Symposium on Rawlsian Theory of Justice: Recent
Developments) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 4. (Jul., 1989), pp. 771-790.
Griffin, James. SYMPOSIUM ON RATIONALITY AND THE MORALITY REPLY TO KURT BAIER. Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 1. (Oct.,
1985), pp. 130-135.
Symposium on Stanley I. Benn. A THEORY OF FREEDOM: PRACTICAL REASON AND MORAL PERSONS. Gerald Gaus Ethics,
Vol. 100, No. 1. (Oct., 1989), pp. 127-148.
DEFENDING IRRATIONALITY AND LISTS. (in Discussion) Bernard Gert Ethics, Vol. 103, No. 2. (Jan., 1993), pp. 329-336.
Phillips, Michael. WEIGHING MORAL REASONS. Mind, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 383. (Jul., 1987), pp. 367-375.
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REASON IS THE BEST JUSTIFICATION FOR ACTION
1. REASONS PROVIDE A LEGITIMATE FRAMEWORK FOR ACTION
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-np.
It is unfortunate that the means-end model has dominated philosophical thinking in this field. It has led some
philosophers, maintaining (rightly) that we can ask which is best thing to aim at in these circumstances, to conclude
(wrongly) that there must be an ultimate aim or end, a summum bonum, to which all ordinary aims or ends are meanly
means. Hence, they claim whether this or that is the better end to aim at must be judged by its serving the ultimate end
or summun bonum. Other philosophers, maintaining rightly that there can be no such ultimate end or summum bonum,
have concluded (wrongly) that we cannot ask which is the better end to aim at. They have claimed that reason can tell us
only about what are the best means to given ends, but that the ends themselves cannot be determined or judged by
reason. However, “being a good means to a certain end’ is not only the criterion of the merit of a course of action.
2. MEANS ENDS JUSTIFICATION IS FLAWED
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-np.
The error which this means-end model of the evaluation of the lines of action forces on us is this. It compels us to think
that what is a reason for (or against) doing something is determined by what we are aiming at. Since different people aim
at different things and since they frequently argue about what to aim at, either we are compelled to assume that there is
one objectively determined end or aim which we must aim at if we are to follow reason, or, if reject objective ends as
absurd, we are compelled to renounce all reasoning about ends. However, it is not true that our ends determine what is
a reason for doing something, but, on the contrary, reasons determine we ought to, and frequently do, aim at. What is a
reason for doing this, or against doing that, is independent of what this or that man is actually aiming at. The best course
of action is not that course which most quickly, least painfully, least expensively, etc., leads to gaining of our ends, but it
is the course of action which is supported by the best reasons. And the best reasons may require us to abandon the aim
that we actually set our heart on.
3. REASONS ARE AGENT NEUTRAL
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-np.
Our conclusion is this. All consideration-making beliefs are person-neutral. They are simply true or false, not true for me
and false for you or vice versa. On the other hand, all considerations or reasons are considerations or reasons for
someone in some particular context or situation may not be the reasons for someone else or for the same person in
another context or situation. For a given fact is a reason only because it is a reason for a particular person when
deliberating about a number of alternative lines of action open to him.. Considerations or reasons are not propositions
laid up in heaven or universal truths, but they are particular facts to which, in particular contexts, universally true (or
false) consideration-making beliefs apply.
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VALUE JUDGMENTS ARE BENEFICIAL
1. VALUE JUDGMENTS ARE VERIFIABLE
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-58.
Not all comparisons and rankings are value judgments. Moreover, there is no doubt that factual, that is, nonevaluative,
comparisons and rankings are empirically verifiable. ‘This man is taller than that’ and ‘She is a tall girl for her age’ are
ordinary empirical claims. If we are clear about the logic of empirical comparisons and rankings, we will be in a position
to say whether what distinguishes evaluative from nonevaluative comparisons and rakings makes the former unverifiable
in principle. It is my contention that the misunderstanding of the logic of empirical comparisons and rankings is, at least
partly, responsible for the view that value judgments are not verifiable. An elucidation of factual comparisons and
rankings will in any case, throw a good deal of light on the nature of value judgments.
2. VALUE JUDGEMENTS ARE VERIFIABLE EVEN THOUGH THEY MAY BE VAGUE
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-59.
It is often said that value judgments are vague. One of the things we mean by vagueness of a claim is just this, that in a
comparatively large number of cases it will be impossible to determine whether the claims true or false, because the
criteria on which it is based conflict. Vagueness is not incompatible with empirical verifiability. In ranking something, we
are not directly comparing two objects, but are concerned with only one. In comparing, we want to know which of two
objects has a given property to a higher degree. In ranking we want to know the degree to which one object has the
property in question. Nevertheless, rankings too are sorts of comparison, though more complex. When we rank a man as
tall, we assign him the highest rank on a three-place scale, tall, medium, short. Knowing the meaning of ‘tall’ involves
knowing the logical relationship between being tall, of medium height, and short. One must know the number, names
and order of the places on the scale. One must know that ‘tall’ means taller than of medium height and short,’ that ‘of
medium height means taller than short but shorter than tall’ and, that ‘short’ means shorter than tall and of medium
height.’ it is not enough to know what that ‘tall’ is the opposite of ‘short’; for that would not have allowed us to
distinguish between opposites such as ‘dead’ and ‘alive,’ which are not capable of degrees, and opposites such as ‘tall’
and ‘short’, which are.
3. VALUES CAN BE VERIFIED BY EXPERTS
Kurt Baier, philosophy, 1958, THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW: A RATIONAL BASIS OF ETHICS, 1958, p-np.
“Well,” my objector may say, “maybe you can get some sort if empirical verification of value judgments, but you can’t
get anything that is really important. What makes for greater certainty and more reliable information is the formulation
of one’s claims in the scientific manner. You won’t find matters of opinion, let alone of taste, in the sciences. Scientist do
indeed need their imagination, their hunches, their flair, an so on. But they need them only in order to think up new
ideas; they don’t need them when it comes to verification of proof of these ideas.” This is perfectly true, but not as
damaging as might be thought at first/ For the same precision is possible in the field of value judgment also. Consider the
following simple case. Jones is good at judging distances and lengths. He can say how long it will take a person to walk
from one place to another, whether the dressing table or the carpet will fit in the bedroom, whether the tree to be felled
would hit the house if it happened to fall that way, and so on. Normally, that he has good judgment could be confirmed
only by waiting for the disputed event to take place.
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BAIER’S MORALITY UNDERESTIMATES THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC
1. CRITICISM OF THEM (BAIER AND RAWLS) ON THIS POINT IS THAT THEY DO NOT SEEM TO FULLY APPRECIATE THE
FORCE OF THE CLAIM THAT MORALITY MUST BE PUBLIC.
Bernard Gert, MORALITY, A NEW JUSTIFICATION OF THE MORAL RULES. 1988. p-np.
Both Baier and Rawls agree that morality must be a public system, that it must consist of rules or principles that are
known and could be accepted by all those whose behavior is supposed to be governed by that system, and that for a
moral system this includes all rational persons. They both agree that the content of that system should be determined
by the agreement of impartial rational persons. These features are what make a theory a version of morality as impartial
rationality. The publicity of morality is a crucial feature for both Baier and Rawls; they are concerned with the content of
a moral system that would be openly used by everyone to determine the moral acceptability of an action. They both rule
out as being inconsistent with the very nature of morality any system that could not be openly taught and defended. If a
Utilitarian maintains that he has a system that will result in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but only if no
one knows that anyone else is using that system to guide his behavior, both Rawls and Baier would claim that the
Utilitarian is not putting forward a moral system. They are interested in a system to which everyone can openly appeal,
either as grounds for acting themselves or for judging the actions of others. My only criticism of them on this point is
that they do not seem to fully appreciate the force of the claim that morality must be public. That morality is a public
system that applies to all rational persons places considerable constraints not only on the content of a moral system, but
also on the foundations of that system, the moral theory that generates it. If a moral system must be such that it can be
understood and can be accepted by any rational person, it must be based solely on beliefs that are held by all rational
persons, what I call rationally required beliefs. This not only rules out religious views as the basis of morality, it also rules
out scientific views insofar as such findings are not known to all rational persons. Rawls, who allows those behind his veil
of ignorance to have all general knowledge, including the findings of all the sciences, could not be appealed to and
accepted by all those to whom it applies, that is, to all rational persons. In fact, Rawls makes no use of the findings of
any science in developing his moral system, but the fact that he thinks that it is allowable to use such findings indicates
that he does not fully appreciate the constraints imposed by morality being a public system that applies to all rational
persons.
2. BAIER’S PARTICULAR RANKING OF REASONS CREATES SERIOUS AND UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS.
Bernard Gert, MORALITY, A NEW JUSTIFICATION OF THE MORAL RULES. 1988. p-np.
For Baier, as for most contemporary philosophers who have attempted to put forward an account of rationality, there is
a very close connection between acting rationally and acting on reasons. According to Baier, acting rationally simply
consists in acting on the best reasons. Baier gives content to this formal account by providing a list of various kinds of
reasons and ranking them according to their weight. He regards self-regarding reasons of law, religion or morality. Baier
wants an account of rationality such that for any course of action everyone will always agree whether the reasons
supporting that way of acting are better, worse, or equal to the reasons supporting some alternative course of action.
Baier’s particular ranking of reasons creates serious and unresolved problems when one’s self-interest conflicts with the
much greater interests of others. His strong distinction between moral reasons and altruistic reasons, the former being
stronger than self-regarding reasons and the latter being weaker, prevents Baier from saying that it would be morally
good to sacrifice one’s own interests between altruistic reasons and moral ones. When he discusses an actual case of
this sort he uses the term “decent” to characterize acting in ones interests and thereby, e.g., ruining a competing
business firm. But on his own theory, he cannot consider these judgments of the alternative ways of acting to be moral
judgments. It is clear that something has gone wrong.
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MORAL SYSTEMS FAIL
1. MORAL SYSTEMS ARE INADEQUATE WHEN ONE ATTEMPTS TO USE THEM AS A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CONDUCT.
Bernard Gert, MORALITY, A NEW JUSTIFICATION OF THE MORAL RULES. 1988. p-np.
In summary, the faults commonly found in the theory of morality as impartial rationality are not faults intrinsic to the
theory; rather, they are faults that stem from an inadequate statement of the theory. Baier and Rawls both provide
inadequate accounts of rationality, neither fully recognizing that rationality should be analyzed in terms of content rather
than form and that irrationality rather than rationality should be taken as basic. Both regard impartiality as requiring
unanimity, and thus do not realize that equally informed impartial rational persons may, in many circumstances,
advocate different ways of acting, neither regards the question of enforcement as essential to basic moral theory, thus
making it unlikely that they will provide an adequate moral system, one that distinguishes between moral rules, which
may be enforced, and moral ideals, which should not be. Neither gives serious consideration to either the formulation of
particular moral rules or to the procedure for determining exceptions to these rules. Baier and Rawls never attempt to
apply their accounts to particular ethical problems; they emphasize the evaluative rather than the practical aspects of
morality as impartial rationality. This may explain, in part, why their moral systems are inadequate when one attempts
to use them as practical guides to conduct. My criticism of their presentations of morality as impartial rationality is
designed to show that one need not reject this theory if one does not accept it must be as a practical theory. Morality as
impartial rationality is, or can be presented as, a practical ethical theory. As such it can provide useful guidance to those
who are looking for help in solving real moral problems. In the following chapter 1 shall provide some practical
applications of the moral system that I have provided.
2. NEITHER SPENDS MUCH TIME OR EFFORT IN DEVELOPING HIS THEORY IN SUCH A WAY AS TO PROVIDE A MORAL
SYSTEM THAT WOULD BE USEFUL TO PEOPLE.
Bernard Gert, MORALITY, A NEW JUSTIFICATION OF THE MORAL RULES. 1988. p-np.
Baier and Rawls both present morality as impartial rationality primarily as an evaluative theory. Neither spends much
time or effort in developing his theory in such a way as a way as to provide a moral system that would be useful to
people who want a moral guide to action. The most important part of such a moral system is the formulation of specific
moral rules together with a method for theories of most philosophers, including the versions of morality as impartial
rationality presented by Baier and Rawls, have been seriously inadequate. Most time, of course, is spent developing the
basic theory from which the moral rules will be derived. The formulation of the moral rules themselves is usually done
quite quickly, and generally very carelessly. This may be due to the acceptance of Mill’s view that the various schools of
ethics “recognize….to a great extent the same moral laws; but differ as to their evidence, and the source from which they
derive their authority.”
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MICHAEL BAKUNIN
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST-ANARCHIST (1814- 1876)
Life And Work
Bakunin was born in Prjamuchino, Russia in 1814. Because he came from an aristocratic family and was prepared for
military service, he gamed a perspective on soldiers and wage-earners that was to color his later writings. He saw
soldiers as serfs who were bribed by pay and decorations. They worked like other members of the proletarian class,
except that these people were paid to keep down their fellow proletarians. Always highly passionate, he resigned his
commission and instead went to study in Moscow.
He spent his younger days under the reign of the brutal Czar Nicholas, who was the worst oppressor the Russians had
seen to that point. Since the reign of Nicholas tolerated no level of rebellion in politics, or in literature, economics,
and/or religion, Bakunin turned to philosophy. Hegalianism was at a high point, and like others, Bakunin was influenced
by it. Bakunin draws on Hegel’s notion of Dialectic, which argues that life and history consist of reconciling different
notions--thesis, antithesis, and synthesis--to create his own brand of Historical Materialism.
He spent five years studying in Moscow, and then obtained permission to study in Germany. Given more freedom than in
his native country, he attempted to develop radical ideas predicated on Hegelian philosophy. Also in Germany at the
time was Ludwig Feurbach, another Hegelian scholar, who wrote an influential text called The Essence of Christianity.
Feurbach took an atheist stance, and called for a materialist interpretation of history. Marx, Engels, and Bakunin were all
duly impressed with Fuerbach’s work, and his thoughts influenced their respective philosophies.
France, for Bakunin, might be the most important place he studied. There, he visited Paris and met Pierre Joseph
Proudhon, who that same year was to publish what many consider his magnum opus, The Creation of Order in Humanity.
Bakunin also met Karl Marx, and had many discussions with him. This period is essential to Bakunin’s development as a
thinker, because his views began to lean towards Proudhons political beliefs and Marx’s economic analyses. Though
Bakunin despised Marx’s egotistical nature, he considered him a genius on matters economic and a sincere
revolutionary. Bakunin gleaned from Marx his devotion to the notion of Historical Materialism, the belief that economic
facts produce inevitable results and ideas in humanity.
Still, he rejected the notion of the state as a mechanism to manage the economy, a vast difference between himself and
Marx. This is probably the source of his mistrust for Marx and his admiration for Proudhon:
Marx, however sincere his revolutionary desires, mistrusted the people. He believed in the necessity of state
intervention to save the masses, which made him an authoritarian in the eyes of the liberty-loving Bakunin, who thought
the masses could and should liberate themselves.
Bakunin was ordered to leave Paris in 1847 after he delivered a speech advocating freedom for Poland. However, the
revolution of February 1848 deposed King Louis Phillipe and brought Bakunin back to Paris, where he took part in many
political movements. Soon, though, he was drawn to spread revolution to Prague, where he led a movement to
overthrow the state. In Saxony, he tried it again, but was arrested and extradited to Russia. His home country claimed
him as a fugitive. He was captured, though, and condemned to death in May 1850. His sentence was commuted to
imprisonment for life, eight years of which he spent in solitary confinement. His family succeeded in gaining his release
after the death of Nicholas I. Even the mild Alexander II felt it would be best to keep the firebrand under watch in Siberia,
where he spent four years, only to escape on an American ship bound for Japan. At the end of 1861, he reached London.
Brings His Anarchism To The West
He threw himself into revolutionary schemes with greater enthusiasm than before. He met with Alexander Hertzen,
another Russian in exile, and worked with him on a Polish insurrection. He and Hertzen's publications, which demanded
the abolition of the State, were a source of growing conflict with the Marxists. He joined the Congress of the
International Association (the First International), founded by Marx, and in September of 1869, a Congress meeting
found they had more sympathy for Bakunin’s views on inheritance than they did Marx’s. Marx, notoriously possessive of
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the First International, was not pleased. This was the beginning of a divide that would last for years. It started with the
inheritance question, but that was only a minor skirmish. The real battle was over the role of the state. The Bakuninists
felt the state had to be abolished, while the Marxists clung to the notion that the state was necessary to bring about
socialism.
1870 saw the advent of the Franco-German war, a period that spawned some of Bakunin’s best work. He hoped for
social revolution in France to depose the oppressive Napoleon Ill. He wrote A Letter To A Frenchman for the purpose of
inciting such a movement He even went to Lyons to spark an anarchist movement, but when the movement sputtered
and failed, he was forced to flee. Depressed over the failure, his growing cynicism about the bourgeoisie spurred him on
to write what many consider his finest book, The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution. Though not totally
finished, Bakunin worked on it from 1870 to 1872, and covered all manner of subjects, from philosophical to political to
economic to historical. It is here where he develops his Historical Materialism in detail.
Though not optimistic about the prospects for a social revolution, Bakunin was nevertheless drawn to the cause of the
Paris Commune, which existed from March through May of 1871. Interestingly enough, this is still touted by DeLeonist
members of the Socialist Labor Party USA to be the ideal expression of socialism. Bakunin, on the other hand, saw the
Commune as the justification why his theories were superior to Marx’s, because there was no vanguard party involved.
In 1872, the split between the Marxists and the Bakuninists became too much, however, and Bakunin was expelled from
the Congress of the First International. Bakuninists were to start a new International in Switzerland, though, which would
outlive Bakunin himself. Prematurely old due to his lifelong activist struggles and his eight-year confinement, he died on
July 1st, 1876.
The Philosophy Of Bakunin
Bakunin, though not a Marxist, subscribed to many Marxist tenets, including Historical Materialism. He accepted the
Marxist notion of the class war. He also believed in the abolition of private property and the necessity of democratizing
the means of production. However, Marx favored the use of the state, which Bakunin was unwilling to accept He thought
Marx an elitist for not believing in the workers’ ability to liberate themselves, and thought him short-sighted for thinking
a state--which to Bakunin was, of necessity, competitive and a dominant ‘capitalist’ structure--could establish true
egalitarian socialism. This helps explain Bakunin’s other beliefs, like his delineation between individual liberty and ‘true’
liberty.
Unrestrained individualism was, of course, anathema to Bakunin, but he also believed that individualism without social
concern was simply an excuse for “egoism.” He thought that true liberty “could only be achieved in and through society.”
This is not to say that Bakunin felt the individual could be forced into a social compact A student of Proudhon and a lover
of liberty, Bakunin believed in free association and voluntary cooperation, mistrusting the communists for their
unwillingness to commit to the goal of liberty. Bakunin also thought, however, that there could be no liberty while
“economic slavery” to the state existed. Bakunin also rejects the notion of voting and universal suffrage. For him, to vote
is to justify the system, and since it serves no revolutionary good, there is no reason whatsoever to partake in it. Though,
as a Historical Materialist, he believed in the inevitability of class struggle, Bakunin also thought that inevitability meant
giving up. He explains several places that just because the situation looks hopeless, it is good for the human spirit and for
the collective good to struggle against evil.
15
Debate Application
Bakunin’s critique of the social contract thinkers, particularly Rousseau, is scathing. He sees no such “free” organization
of people taking place under the state. Besides, Bakunin argues, if the social contract theory is true, we don’t need the
state anyway, because we can enter into voluntary, mutual agreements with each other. This is useful against any case
that values the social contract, or argues that we get rights from the state. Bakunin’s value against socialist philosophers
is obvious. What is less obvious, however, is the depth of his criticism. Not only can he be used to characterize Marx et. al
as authoritarian, but also to attack their theories for ignoring the rights of individuals. Bakunin argues that there will
always be victims under such a program, and his commitment to stopping such injustice makes his theory superior to
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most. Bakunin also staunchly opposes notions of “patriotism” for obvious reasons, given the allegiance it implies to a
state. This can be useful against any case that attempts to rally the judge around a flag or the good of a specific nation.
Bakunin, needless to say, is useful against any case that glorifies voting, democratic participation, or allegiance to a
representative government. For Bakunin, this just ignores the economic chains we are beholden to. To Bakunin, any act
of change that doesn’t fundamentally alter the state system is as useless as running in place. All these fiery sentiments
make him a very useful thinker to debaters.
Bibliography
Michael Bakunin, BAKUNIN ON ANARCHY, Edited by Sam Dolgoff, Vintage Books: 1971.
Michael Bakunin, MARXISM, FREEDOM AND THE STATE, Freedom Press: 1950, reprinted 1990.
Isaiah Berlin, KARL MARX: HIS LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT, Home University Library: Fourth
Edition, 1996.
Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A HISTORY OF ECONOMIC DOCTRINES: FROM THE TIME OF THE PSYIOCRATES TO THE
PRESENT DAY, Translated By R. Richards, Boston: D.C. Heath, 1948.
K.J. Kenafick, MICHAEL BAKUNIN AND KARL MARX, Melbourne: 1948.
TORCH OF ANARCHY magazine, Nov. 18, 1895, pp. 92-93.
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COMMON LIBERTY IS THE KEY VALUE
1. LIBERTY OF THE MASSES IS THE PARAMOUNT GOAL
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, quoted in KJ. Kenafick, MICHAEL BAKUNIN AND KARL MARX, 1948, page 300.
We understand by liberty, on the one hand, the development, as complete as possible of all the natural faculties of each
individual, and, on the other hand, his independence, not as regards natural and social laws
but as regards all the laws imposed by other human wills, whether collective or separate. When we demand
the liberty of the masses, we do not in the least claim to abolish any of the natural influences of any individual or of any
group of individuals which exercise their action on them. What we want is the abolition of artificial, privileged, legal,
official, influences.
2. LIBERTY MUST MEAN NO RESTRICTIONS
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 17-8. No, I mean the only
liberty which is truly worthy of the name, the liberty which consists in the full development of all the material,
intellectual and moral powers which are to be found as faculties latent in
everybody, the liberty which recognizes no other restrictions than those which are traced for us by the laws of our own
nature; so that properly speaking there are no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed on us by some outside
legislator, beside us or above us; they are immanent in us, inherent, constituting the very basis of our being, material as
well as intellectual and moral; instead, therefore, of finding them a limit, we must consider them as the real conditions
and effective reason for our liberty.
3. LIBERTY STEMS FROM EQUALITY AND ABOLITION OF THE STATE
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 18. I mean that liberty of
each individual which, far from halting as at a boundary before the liberty of others, finds there its confirmation and its
extension to infinity; the illimitable liberty of each through the liberty of all, liberty by solidarity, liberty in equality;
liberty triumphing over brute force and the principle of authority which was never anything but the idealized expression
of that force, liberty which, after having overthrown all heavenly and earthly idols, will found and organize a new world,
that of human solidarity, on the ruins of all Churches and all States.
POWER CORRUPTS THOSE THAT WIELD IT
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, quoted in Isaiah Berlin, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, past
President of the British Academy, KARL MARX: HIS LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT, Fourth Edition, 1996, page 206.
We believe power corrupts those who wield it as much as those who are forced to obey it. Under its corrosive influence
some become greedy and ambitious tyrants, exploiting society in their own interest, or in that of their class, while others
are turned into abject slaves. Intellectuals, positivists, doctrinaires, all those who put science before life ... defend the
idea of the state as being the only possible salvation of society--quite logically since from their false premises that
thought comes before life, that only abstract theory can form the starting point of social practice ... they draw the
inevitable conclusion that since such theoretical knowledge is at present possessed by very few, these few must be put in
possession of social life, not only to inspire, but to direct all popular movements, and that no sooner is the revolution
over than a new social organization must at once be set up; not a free association of popular bodies ... working in
accordance with the needs and instincts of the people, but a centralized dictatorial power, concentrated in the bands of
this academic minority, as if they really expressed the popular will.... The difference between such revolutionary
dictatorship and the modern State is only one of external trappings. In substance both are a tyranny of the minority over
a majority in the name of the people--in the name of the stupidity of the many and the superior wisdom of the few; and
so they are equally reactionary, devising to secure political and economic privilege to the ruling minority and the ...
enslavement of the masses, to destroy the present order only to erect their own rigid dictatorship on its ruins.”
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EQUALITY IS A PARAMOUNT CONCERN
1. WITHOUT EQUALITY, NO OTHER HUMAN VALUE HAS MEANING
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 18. I am a convinced
upholder of economic and social equality, because I know that, without that equality, liberty, justice, human dignity,
morality, and the well-being of individuals as well as the prosperity of nations will never be anything else than so many
lies. But as upholder in all circumstances of liberty, that first condition of humanity, I think that liberty must establish
itself in the world by the spontaneous organization of labour and of collective ownership by productive associations
freely organized and federalized in districts, and by the equally spontaneous federation of districts, but not by the
supreme and tutelary action of the State.
2. PASSION FOR EQUALITY IN THE MASSES IS UNQUENCHABLE
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 61 The instinctive passion of
the masses for economic equality is so great that if they could hope to receive it from the hands of despotism, they
would indubitably and without much reflection do as they have often done before, and deliver themselves to despotism.
Happily, historic experience has been of some service even with the masses. To-day, they are beginning everywhere to
understand that no despotism has nor can have, either the will or the power to give them economic equality. The
programme of the International is very happily explicit on this question. The emancipation of the toilers cart be the work
only of the toilers themselves.
ROUSSEAU’S PHILOSOPHY IS FLAWED
1. ROUSSEAU’S VIEWS NECESSARILY HINDER LIBERTY
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 17. I am a fanatical lover of
Liberty; considering it as the only medium in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of man not
official ‘Liberty’, licensed, measured and regulated by the State, a falsehood representing the privileges of a few resting
on the slavery of everybody else; not the individual liberty, selfish, mean, and fictitious advanced by the school of
Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois Liberalism, which considers the rights of the individual as limited by the
rights of the State, and therefore necessarily results in the reduction of the rights of the individual to zero.
2. ROUSSEAU IS WRONG ABOUT SOCIETY BEING A ‘FREE AGREEMENT”
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, BAKUNIN ON ANARCHY, Edited by Sam Dolgoff, 1971, p. 128.
It was a great mistake on the part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to have thought that primitive society was established
through a free agreement among savages. But Jean-Jacques is not the only one to have said this. The majority of jurists
and modem publicists, either of the school of Kant or any other individual and liberal school, those who do not accept
the idea of a society determined by the Hegelian school as a more or less mystical realization of objective morality, nor of
the naturalists’ the idea of a society determined by the Hegelian school as a more or less concept of a primitive animal
society, all accept, nolens volens, and for lack of any other basis, the tacit agreement or contract as their starting point.
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MARXISM IS AUTHORITARIAN AND WRONG
1. MARXISTS ARE AUTHORITARIAN, AS OPPOSED TO THE LIBERTARIAN ANARCHISTS Michael Bakunin, Anarchist
philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 19. Hence, two different methods. The Communists
believe they must organize the workers’ forces to take possession of the political power of the State. The Revolutionary
Socialists organize with a view to the destruction, or if you prefer a politer word, the liquidation of the State. The
Communists are the upholders of the principle and practice of, authority, the Revolutionary Socialists have confidence
only in liberty. Both equally supporters of that science which must kill superstition and replace faith, the former would
wish to impose it; the latter will exert themselves to propagate it so that groups of human beings, convinced, will
organize themselves and will federate spontaneously, freely, from below upwards, by their own movement and
conformably to their real interests, but never after a plan traced in advance and imposed on the “ignorant masses” by
some superior intellects.
2. THE STATE IS THE CAPITALIST UNDER THE IDEAL OF MARXISM
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 26. All work to be performed
in the employ and pay of the State--such is the fundamental principle of Authoritarian Communism, of State Socialism.
The State having become sole proprietor--at the end of a certain period of transition which will be necessary to let
society pass without too great political and economic shocks from the present organization of bourgeois privilege to the
future organization of the official equality of all--the State will be also the only Capitalist, banker, money-lender,
organizer, director of all national labour and distributor of its products. Such is the ideal, the fundamental principle of
modem Communism.
3. MARXIAN SOCIALISM EQUALS LOVE OF THE STATE
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 29. Let us see now what
unites them. It is the out and out cult of the State. I have no need to prove it in the case of Bismarck, the proofs are
there. From head to foot he is a State’s man and nothing but a State’s man. But neither do I believe that I shall have need
of too great efforts to prove that it is the same with Marx. He loves government to such a degree that he even wanted to
institute one in the International Workingmen’s Association; and he worships power so much that he wanted to impose
and still means to-day to impose his dictatorship on us. It seems to me that that is sufficient to characterize his personal
attitude. But his Socialist and political programme is a very faithful expression of it. The supreme objective of all his
efforts, as is proclaimed to us by the fundamental statutes of his party in Germany, is the establishment of the great
People’s State (Volksstaat).
4. HISTORY PROVES AFFIRMING THE STATE AFFIRMS COMPETITION AND ENDLESS WAR Michael Bakunin, Anarchist
philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 29. But whoever says State, necessarily says a particular
limited State, doubtless comprising, if it is very large, many different peoples and countries, but excluding still more. For
unless he is dreaming of the Universal State as did Napoleon and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, or as the Papacy
dreamed of the Universal Church, Marx, in spite of all the international ambition which devours him to-day, will have,
when the hour of the realization of his dreams has sounded for him--if it ever does sound--he will have to content
himself with governing a single State and not several States at once. Consequently, who ever says State says, a State, and
whoever says a State affirms by that the existence of several States, and whoever says several States, immediately says:
competition, jealousy, truceless and endless war. The simplest logic as well as all history bear witness to it.
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THE STATE IS ABSOLUTELY IRREDEEMABLE
1. ANY AND ALL STATES TEND TOWARDS CONFLICT AND DOMINATION Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher,
MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page Any State, under pain of perishing and seeing itself devoured by
neighbouring States, must tend towards complete power, and, having become powerful, it must embark on a career of
conquest, so that it shall not be itself conquered; for two powers similar and at the same time foreign to each other
could not co-exist without trying to destroy each other. Whoever says conquest, says conquered peoples, enslaved and
in bondage, under whatever form or name it may be.
2. THE STATE’S MORAUTY IS TO CRUSH TRUE, HUMAN MORALITY
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 30. The State, for its own
preservation, must necessarily be powerful as regards foreign affairs; but if it is so as regards foreign affairs, it will
infallibly be so as regards home affairs. Every State, having to let itself be inspired and directed by some particular
morality, conformable to the particular conditions of its existence, by a morality which is a restriction and consequently a
negation of human and universal morality, must keep watch that all its subjects, in their thoughts and above all in their
acts, are inspired also only by the principles of this patriotic or particular morality, and that they remain deaf to the
teachings of pure or universally human morality. From that there results the necessity for a State censorship; too great
liberty of thought and opinions being, as Marx considers, very reasonably too from his eminently political point of view,
incompatible with that unanimity of adherence demanded by the security of the State. That in reality is Marx’s opinion is
sufficiently proved by the attempts which he made to introduce censorship into the International, under plausible
pretexts, and covering it with a mask.
3. STATISM ALWAYS REQUIRES SLAVES
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, MARXISM, FREEDOM, AND THE STATE, 1950, page 3 3-4. Slavery can Change its
form and its name--its basis remains the same. This basis is expressed by the words:
being a slave is being forced to work for other people--as being a master is to live on the labour of other people. In
ancient times, as to-day in Asia and Africa, slaves were simply called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of
“serfs”, to-day they are called ‘wage-earners’. The position of these latter is much more honourable and less hard than
that of slaves, but they are none the less forced by hunger as well as by the political and social institutions, to maintain
by very hard work the absolute or relative idleness of others. Consequently, they are slaves. And, in general, no State,
either ancient or modem, has ever been able, or ever will be able to do without the forced labour of the masses,
whether wage-earners or slaves, as a principal and absolutely necessary basis of the liberty and culture of the political
class: the citizens.
4. WE CAN ONLY BE HAPPY AND FREE WITHOUT THE STATE
Michael Bakunin, Anarchist philosopher, quoted in Isaiah Berlin, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, past
President of the British Academy, KARL MARX: HIS LIFE AND ENVIRONMENT, Fourth Edition, 1996, page 205.
We revolutionary anarchists are the enemies of all forms of State and State organizations ... we think that all State rule,
all governments being by their very nature placed outside the mass of the people, must necessarily seek to subject it to
customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. We therefore declare ourselves to be foes ... of all State organizations as
such, and believe that the people can only be happy and free, when, organized from below by means of its own
autonomous and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own life.
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JAMES BALDWIN
SOCIAL COMMENTATOR AND ESSAYIST 1924 - 1987
Biographical Background
Once described as “the most considerable moral essayist now writing in the United States,” 11 James Baldwin was a
prolific writer of the mid~20th century. His work included fiction, poetry and drama, as well as political essays. It was as
an essayist that he gained the most attention. The frequent topic of his writings was race relations and the struggle for
civil rights among African-Americans.
His noteworthiness as an American writer is somewhat ironic; he lived most of his adult life in France.
However, he did not consider himself an expatriate, instead preferring to think of himself as “a kind of trans-Atlantic
commuter.”12 Even though he did live abroad, his impact on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s was
profound. In addition to his works on racial matters, Baldwin also wrote about discrimination against homosexuals and
was an early critic of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
As a minority within a minority—a black homosexual—Baldwin was able to write insightful, thought-provoking, and
controversial essays that challenged traditional social practices and structures. He strongly believed that it was his
purpose to question, confront, and probe for the truth. As quoted by biographers Fred Standley and Louis Pratt, Baldwin
believed that “real writers question their age.”13
Born in Harlem, New York, Baldwin was the oldest son (out of nine children) of a preacher and was himself also trained
as a Pentecostal minister. Many of his biographers believe his religious background had a strong influence on his writing,
as evidenced in such books as Go Tell It On the Mountain and The Fire Next Time.
Baldwin left home at the age of 17 and tried his hand at various jobs including waiting on tables and writing book
reviews. In one collection of his essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explained that he was a writer, even from his
earliest childhood days: “I must also confess that I wrote—a great deal—and my first professional triumph, in any case,
the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written
about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper.”14
Philosophical Foundations and Ideas
Over the course of his career which spanned four decades, Baldwin’s writing focused on such diverse topics as the
indivisibility of the private life and the public life, the essential need to develop sexual and psychological consciousness
and identity, and the explosive and destructive state of race relations. His constant examination of the human condition
also revealed his belief that there is an indispensable interdependency among individuals, nations, and the world.
Baldwin did not think any topic was sacred or beyond the analysis of society. A sampling of his diverse subject matters
confirms this belief: American foreign policy, the influence of Christianity on blacks and whites, Third world countries,
and the images presented in Hollywood.
While Baldwin wrote about a variety of seemingly unrelated topics, the root of his work bad one message:
each individual is a worthy and valuable human being. Henry Louis Gates, professor of English and Afro-American
Literature at Cornell University, called Baldwin a conscience for black people as well as an entire country. 5
11
Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin. (Jackson, Mississippi:
University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. vii.
12
lbid., p. vii.
13
lbid., p. vii.
14
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son. (New York: The Dial Press, 1963), p. 7.
5
Lee A. Daniels, “James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead,” The New York Times December
2, 1987, p. 1
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Through his writing, Baldwin was able to influence the rhetoric of several civil rights leaders. According to Professor
Gates, Baldwin “educated an entire generation of Americans about the civil-rights struggle and the sensibility of AfroAmericans as we faced and conquered the final barriers in our long quest for civil rights.” 6
Summary of Selected Works
As was noted earlier, Baldwin was a prolific writer, producing a variety of works including novels, essays, plays, and
commentaries. The following works are a small sample of the diversity of his writing.
From 1955 through 1963 he wrote several essays that contributed to the civil rights movement burgeoning in the South.
The first collection of these were presented in Notes of a Native Son, published in 1955. In 1961, the next set of essays
was published in Nobody Knows My Name. Baldwin’s third essay book of this period was The Fire Next Time, published in
1963.
Baldwin’s first novel was partially autobiographical. Go Tell ft On The Mountain told the story of a minister’s son who
grew up poor in Harlem in the 1930s. The novel involves the relationship between the son and his autocratic father who
hated him. Baldwin himself considered this book the keystone of his career.” ‘Mountain’ is the book I had to write if I
was ever going to write anything else,” be said. “I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my
father.”7
The book that drew the most criticism was Giovanni s Room, written in 1956. It was derided for its unadulterated view of
homosexuality.
Criticism
Throughout his career, Baldwin attracted much attention—negative as well as positive. One critic claimed that Baldwin
celebrated the victimization of African-Americans. According to well-known jazz critic and essayist Stanley Crouch,
Baldwin “sanctified the oppressed and elevated victimization in African-American literature.”8 He further criticized
Baldwin by saying that be influenced the “cultural nationalists” who “transformed white America into Big Daddy and the
Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys.” 9
Eldridge Cleaver, a former member of the Black Panther Party, believed that Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country
revealed a hatred of blacks. Other critics found fault with Baldwin’s writing style. Some said his style was too halting,
others claimed it was too sweeping. Still, others thought he was better at one style of writing than another. For example,
poet Langston Hughes once observed, “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than
lames Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion
in fiction.”10
Conclusion and Summary
The writer Randall Kenan eloquently described Baldwin’s place in literary and social philosophy history. He wrote, “More
than any other writer of his generation, white or black, gay or straight, man or woman, it would not be an exaggeration
to say, James Baldwin exerted a moral hold on the American imagination nonpareil in the annals of this country’s
literature and its public debate for nearly four decades, a status clearly in league with that of Emerson and Thoreau and
Douglass.”11
6
lbid., p. 1.
lbid., p. 1.
8
ltabari Njeri, “Crouch to the Contrary; Books: In “Notes of a Hanging Judge,” Stanley Crouch Lambastes Black
Intellectuals for Separatists Attitudes That He Says Betray The Civil Rights Movement,” Los Angeles Times. May 21,
1990, p. 1.
9
lbid., p. 1.
10
Daniels, “James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead,” p.1.
11
Randall Kenan, “James Baldwin: A Biography. Book reviews,” The Nation. .May 2, 1994, p. 596.
7
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Whether one agrees with Baldwin’s assertions or not, all readers of his work can agree that there is one prevalent theme
throughout his writing: love. He espoused the need for love among individuals. He pleaded for understanding among
people of different backgrounds, based on love of humans. It is from his strong conviction in the power of love that his
voice arose and spoke to millions of people to create a better world.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1962.
__ Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1956.
_ Go Tell It On The Mountain. New York The Dial Press, 1953.
_ Nobody Knows My Name. New York: The Dial Press, 1961.
Notes of a Native Son. New York: The Dial Press, 1963.
_and Margaret Mead. A Rap on Race. London: Dell Publishing Co., 1961.
_ _and Nikki Giovanni. A Dialogue. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975.
Bigsby, C.W.E. “The Divided Mind of lames Baldwin,” Journal of American Studies 14, no. 2 (1980):
325-42.
Bloom, Harold. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. New York M. Evans and Co., Inc., 1966.
Howe, Gregory and W. Scott Nobles. “James Baldwin’s Message for White America,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58
(1973): 142-151.
Kenan, Randall. “James Baldwin: A Biography (book reviews),” The Nation, May 2, 1994, p. 596.
Kinnamon, Kenneth, Ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Lee A. Daniels. “James Baldwin, Eloquent Writer in Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead,” The New York Times. December 2,
1987, sec. A, col. 5, p. 1.
Macebuh, Stanley. James Baldwin: A Critical Study. New York: Third World Press, 1973.
Pratt, Louis. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Standley, Fred L. and Nancy V. Burt. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988.
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THE DEHUMANIZATION OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS IS PERVASIVE
1. SOCIETY HAS SOUGHT TO DEHUMANIZE AFRICAN-AMERICANS James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES OF A NATIVE
SON, 1963, p. 24-5.
Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the
general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white. When it has become black, the past as
thoroughly washed from the black face as it has been for ours, our guilt will be finished—at least it will have ceased to be
visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing.
2. AFRICAN-AMERICANS HAVE BEEN DEHUMANIZED IN AMERICAN HISTORY James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES OF A
NATIVE SON, 1963, p. 23-4.
One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds. This is
why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena.
He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices,
remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous,
outraged helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease—cancer, perhaps, or
tuberculosis—which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.
3. DEHUMANIZATION OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS DEHUMANIZES ALL AMERICANS James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES
OF A NATIVE SON, 1963, p. 24.
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible for our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is
the price we pay for our annulment of his. Time and our own force act as our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless
tension between the traditional master and slave. Impossible and fruitless because, literal and visible as this tension has
become, it has nothing to do with reality.
4. THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS HAS BEEN IGNORED
James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, 1963, p. 23.
The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very
pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which
lies athwart our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows, self created, intertwining, which now we
helplessly battle.
5. WHITE VISION OF AMERICAN SOCIETY IS INACCURATE AND USELESS James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES OF A
NATIVE SON, 1963, p. 157. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the
world—which
allows us little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint
moral issues in glaring black and white—owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between
themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on
us—very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will—that this vision of the world is
dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless.
6. EFFECT OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS ON CULTURE HAS BEEN BETRAYED James Baldwin, Moral Essayist, NOTES OF A
NATIVE SON, 1963, p. 23.
As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating
silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics, it is revealed in Negro speech and in
that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the
American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth
of our estrangement form ourselves.
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BLACK MALES LOSE SELF-IDENTITY IN SOCIETY
1. BLACK MALES SEXUALITY IS DESTROYED IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
James Baldwin, Essayist, JAMES BALDWIN NIKKI GIOVANNI, A DIALOGUE, 1973, p. 39-40. The price of being a black man
in America—the price the black male has had to pay is expected to pay, and which he has to outwit—is his sex. You know
a black man is forbidden by definition, since he’s black, to assume the roles, burdens, duties and joys of being a man. In
the same way that my child produced from your body did not belong to me but to the mater and could be sold at any
moment. This erodes a man’s sexuality, and when you erode a man’s sexuality you destroy his ability to love anyone,
despite the fact that sex and love are not the same thing. When a man’s sexuality is gone, his possibility, his hope, of
loving is also gone.
2. STANDARDS OF CIVILIZATION ARE INTERNALIZED
James Baldwin, Essayist, JAMES BALDWIN NIKKI GIOVANNI, A DIALOGUE, l973p. 52-3. The standards of the civilization
into which you are born are first outside of you, and by the time you get to be a man they’re inside of you. And this is not
susceptible to any kind of judgment, its a fact. If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
3. BLACK MALES ARE TREATED AS SLAVES IN SOCIETY
James Baldwin, Essayist, JAMES BALDWIN NIKKI GIOVANNI, A DIALOGUE, 19’73p. 53.
If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not. And in this civilization
a man who cannot support his wife and child is not a man. The black man has always been treated as a slave and of
course he reacts that way, one way or another.
BLACK HATRED OF WHITES STEMS FROM RAGE
1. BLACK HATRED OF WHITES STEMS FROM RAGE
James Baldwin, Essayist, THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, 1976, p. 61-2.
This is, perhaps, a very subtle argument, but black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as
white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which
focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. but the root
of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much bate white men as simply want them out of his way, and,
more than that, out of his children’s way.
2. BLACKS HAVE RAGE IN THEIR MINDS FOR WHITES
James Baldwin, Essayist, THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, 1976, p. 62.
When the white man begins to have in the black man’s mind the weight that the black man has in the white man’s mind,
that black man is going mad. And when he goes under, he does not go under screaming in terror: he goes under howling
with rage.
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BALDWIN WAS INCONSISTENT IN HIS OPINIONS
1. BALDWIN WAS INCONSISTENT IN CLAIMING HIS RACIAL IDENTITY
C.W.E. Bigsby, NQA, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 103-4. For it was Baldwin’s assumption that the
question of colour, crucially important on a moral level, concealed a more fundamental problem, the problem of self.
And it is in that sense that he felt most American. But he negotiates a privileged position for himself by claiming an
American identity (while naturally disavowing the guilt for a prejudice which he did not originate and for a history which
he played no part us determining), and simultaneously embracing a Negro identity (while declining the cultural
temporizing and disabling pathology which he otherwise identifies as the natural inheritance of the black American.).
2. BALDWIN WAS INCONSISTENT IS ASSESSING MORAL BEHAVIORS OF INDIVIDUALS
C.W.E. Bigsby, NQA, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 110.
His [Baldwin’s] desire to establish his belief that individuals are responsible moral creatures is simultaneously
undermined by his conviction that their crime is ineradicable and human beings ineluctably wicked. The problem does
not reside in language alone, but in his own terrible ambivalences which lead him to accuse and defend, condemn and
rescue with equal conviction. The deficiency is an intellectual one.
3. BALDWIN OFFERED CONTRADICTORY SOLUTIONS TO RACIAL PROBLEMS
C.W.E. Bigsby, NQA, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 110.
Even now, in one mood, he sees a solution in some kind of symbolic union of black and white for which he can find no
historical justification and for which he can establish no social mechanism. When asked, some twenty-five years after his
first essay, how he meant to go about securing his solution to the problem, his reply was simply, * don’t know yet,” And
then, slipping into the opposite mood, which has always been the other side to this sentimental vision, he offered the
only solution which he could see:
“Blow it up.
BALDWIN WAS PAROCHIAL IN HIS VIEWS OF RACE ISSUES
1. BALDWIN EXCLUDED NON-AMERICAN BLACKS FROM RACIAL DEBATE
Stephen Spender, NQA, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 229.
One suspects that for Mr. Baldwin it is sacrilege to suggest that there are Negroes outside America; and from this there
follows the implication that the Negro problem is his problem that can only be discussed on his terms. Hence too his
contempt for most people who, in the main, agree with him, especially for poor despised American Liberals. He has, as a
Negro, a right, of course, to despise liberals, but he exploits his moral advantage too much.
2. BALDWIN WAS BIASED TOWARD ONLY AMERICAN BLACKS AS OPPRESSED PEOPLE Stephen Spender, NQA, CRITICAL
ESSAYS ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 231.
Mr. Baldwin’s bias towards discussing the American Negro as though he had no characteristics in common with Negroes
elsewhere or other oppressed people and classes contributes to his tendency to think that the problem can only be met
by all Negroes and all white Americans being seized at the same moment by the same wave of love. My argument is that
the relationship of Negro to white exists within a situation comparable to other situations. It is partly a situation of color,
partly one of class.
3. OPPRESSION OF BLACKS MUST BE COMPARED WITH NON-AMERICAN BLACKS Stephen Spender, NQA, CRITICAL ESSAYS
ON JAMES BALDWIN, 1988, p. 229.
Sometimes by Negro Mr. Baldwin means people with black skins originating in Africa, but sometimes he defines them by
the situation—that of being oppressed. And indeed if the Negro problem is resolvable, the only useful way of discussing
it is to consider American Negroes in a situation which is comparable with that of workers and of Negroes elsewhere. To
write as though Negroes do no exist anywhere except in America is to induce despair, to suggest that in American white
and black cannot become integrated to the (rather limited) extent to which they have been, for example, in Brazil.
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MURRAY BOOKCHIN
SOCIAL ECOLOGY (b. 1921)
Life And Work
Murray Bookchin is an important social anarchist thinker with an intriguing background. Bookchin was
born in New York City on January 14, 1921. His parents, who were immigrants, had been involved in the Russian
revolutionary movement. In the first part of the 1930s, Murray entered the Communist youth movement at the age of
nine. When the end of the decade rolled around, though, he had become disillusioned with the movement. The reason,
which was to become a theme in Bookchin’s critiques of socialism, was that communism was authoritarian in nature and
had a lack of respect for individual rights.
Though Bookchin has called himself an anarchist since the I 950s, he has said that his beliefs were anarchist much earlier.
Following the Stalin-Hitler pact in September 1939 he became active in labor. He helped organize unions in northern
New Jersey, where he worked as a foundryman. Oddly enough, Bookchin served in the U.S. Army during the 1940s. After
discharge, he was an autoworker and became deeply involved in the United Auto Workers (UAW). Following the great
General Motors strike of 1948, he started to wonder whether the labor movement would ever be able to make the
fundamental changes the system required. He worried that labor advances were mere reforms, with workers being
assimilated into the capitalist system of exploitation.
Concerned with individual rights, he called himself a “libertarian socialist,” and began working with others who had
forsaken Marxist orthodoxy, many of them German exiles. At the time he was writing under pen names including M. S.
Shiloh, Lewis Herber (under which name he would publish his first American book), Robert Keller, and Harry Ludd.
Bookchin’s largest contribution to the anarchist intellectual tradition is probably his theory of social ecology. Involved
with the New Left movement of the 1 960s, he wrote many books which helped develop
these ideas, Including Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Crisis In Our Cities (1965), and Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
Drawing on these ideas, he co-founded and became director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont in
1974. Bookchin, in addition to teaching at the Institute, also taught at the Alternative University in New York, at City
University of New York, and at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he was full professor of social theory before he
retired in 1983. He still teaches two courses at the Institute for Social Ecology--though his health problems preclude
much of his previous activities. However, he is still on the editorial advisory boards of Anarchist Studies and Society And
Nature and Cassell has just published his new book, Reenchanting Humanity.
Basic Philosophies
Bookchin has sought to integrate a wide variety of progressive philosophies into one cohesive whole. Still staunchly
against oppression of all forms, Bookchin’s social ecology might best be generalized as left-libertarian. However, he
incorporates many other ideas into his critique of modem capitalism, such as his favor of decentralized, local structures,
and his concern with human inequity (racial, sexual, and class-based) and, of course, his ecological concerns. Bookchin’s
theories argue that the reason humans dominate nature primarily generates from the domination of human by human-such as men-over-women (patriarchy), white-over-black (racism), and rich-over-poor (classism). Bookchin wishes to
challenge all hierarchical dominant structures through his left-libertarian critique.
Bookchin also criticizes biocentric notions advanced by such deep ecologist groups as Earth First! He argues that
biocentric ideas distract us from capitalism as the primary source of problems, promote misanthropic philosophies that
are counterproductive, and wholeheartedly reject even ecologically beneficial technologies.
All these things, Bookchin argues, prevent a cohesive strategy that will defend the environment as well as
people: the strategy of social ecology. Bookchin’s dialogue with Dave Foreman in Defending The Earth helps illustrate
many of these criticisms. Bookchins fully-developed arguments against the biocentric, pantheistic eco-spiritualists can be
found in Which Way For The Ecology Movement?
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Bookchin also diverges from many radical environmentalists, like Kirkpatrick Sale and Jerry Mander, in his refusal to
wholly condemn technology. He believes that eco-technologies can and should be developed. In fact, the Institute for
social ecology has been developing eco-technology since 1974. While he admits to the risk associated with technological
advances, he notes that they can give us tools like solar collectors, efficient windmills, and ecologically designed
buildings.
like most radical populists, Bookchin believes that democratic decision making and local initiatives are key for a truly
Green politics. Unlike most, however, he has a blueprint for a green revolution. He has called for a “new politics” of
participatory democracy, or “libertarian municipalism.” Bookchins brand of politics is based on popular assemblies at
municipal, neighborhood, and town levels: a form of direct-democratic participation. He has acknowledged the danger
that small communities can become isolationist and parochialist, so to avoid the risk of this, he advocates a civic
confederalism, by which a decentralized society confederates in an alliance. The group of localities counters the
influence of the centralized nation-state and its market forces.
As an alternative to the unbridled market of capitalists, or the nationalized economy promulgated by Marxian socialists,
or to the workers’ ownership and self- management of industry advocated by syndicalists, Bookchin’s view calls for a
municipalized economy. He feels that co-operatives, though positive, are not sufficient enough to challenge the
intimidating powers of the state and the market, but a mutually supporting confederated structure could present such a
challenge. The politics of confederation stand in stark opposition to other radical and mainstream social theories.
Another place Bookchin takes a different path than many radical ecologists is in his criticism of populationist ideology.
Though he admits that a bourgeoning population can cause environmental woes, he feels that populationist dogma--that
population problems are the most pervasive, most insidious threat to the ecology--is counterproductive. He argues that
the Nazis used populationist imagery to justify their ethnic cleansing. He reminds us that United States populationists
often speak of the growing population in terms of Third World population, and alerts us to the racist overtones these
arguments have. He argues that focusing on population distracts us from the true, social causes of ecological woes--thus
blurring our critique of capitalism and preventing us from addressing problems in a social-ecological manner. He points
to history as an illustration that population warnings are often overstated, and is skeptical of the populationists antiimmigrant, neo-Malthusian character.
Despite his awareness of overwhelming social problems, Bookchin, now in his seventies, takes an optimistic view of social
transformation. He not only feels that humans can mobilize to change society, but also argues in many places that it is
inevitable. His rationale is that, since humans have an innate desire for freedom as well as revolutionary impulses, these
urges can only be suppressed with the “annihilation of man himself.” These “Eros-derived impulses” can be delayed, “but
they can never be eliminated.” He also argues that, looking historically, the statist structure should have become obsolete
long ago, and that “due to its ripeness and decay” the structure must fall.
The mechanism by which Bookchin argues the transformation will occur is this: in the face of a profound crisis, such as
the one capitalism faces right now, people will mobilize against the evils of the statist, capitalist structure. As we
confront the growing problems, Bookchin says, our desire to change will also grow, and, in fact, “[un the face of such a
crisis, efforts for change are inevitable.” The problem comes when we accept small, token gains from the statist structure
and allow dissent to me moved into the
“institutional bounds of Treasonable dissent.” Bookchin argues that reforms just mask the oppressive, hierarchical
structures that capitalism’s nature makes inevitable. He warns against co-optation, saying that
reforms are just those in power throwing a bone to those who have no power. He argues that if the ecology movement
“does not ultimately direct its main efforts toward a revolution in all areas of life” that the movement will simply
“degenerate into a safety valve for the existing order.”
Debate Application
Bookchin’s debate applications are manifold and versatile. He offers a stinging critique against any mainstream thinking-defenders of the market system, people who argue for economic ‘efficiency’, those who argue for a strong federal
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system with no regard for the local. However, he offers an equally applicable criticism of many progressive/radical
thinkers, rejecting the biocentric notions and anti-technology ideas of Earth First!, among others.
He offers helpful analysis into the pratfalls of many other radical philosophies--socialism, comniunitarianism--which
neglect the tights of the individual. Bookchin’s defense of personal liberties makes his philosophy advantageous against
these thinkers. Moreover, it is also apparent that Bookchin’s historical analysis and inevitability arguments make
responding to practicality and other arguments relatively simple. From a broader perspective, it can also be argued that
the limited focus of many debaters is bad--by focusing on one issue, be it the ecology, the economy, or individual rights-they are shortsighted, missing the comprehensive approach social ecology offers.
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Bibliography
Murray Bookchin, DEFENDING THE EARTH: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN MURRAY BOOKCHIN
AND DAVE FOREMAN, Boston: South End Press, 1991.
Murray Bookchin, THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM, Cheshire Books, 1982.
Murray Bookchin, POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, Black Rose Books, 1977.
Murray Bookchin, WHICH WAY FOR THE ECOLOGY MOVEMENT? Boston: South End Press, 1994.
Charles Crute, FREEDOM MAGAZINE, 13th June 1992
Peter Marshall, DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE, London: Harper Collins, 1992.
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CRISIS AND THE RESULTING SOCIAL SHIFT IS INEVITABLE
1. THE CRISIS AND CHANGE IS INEVITABLE: THE ONLY QUESTION IS CO-OPTATION
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute
for Social Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 76.
In the face of such a crisis, efforts for change are inevitable. Ordinary people all over the globe are becoming active in
campaigns to eliminate nuclear power plants and weapons, to preserve clean air and water, to limit the use of pesticides
and food additives, to reduce vehicular traffic in streets and on highways, to make cities more wholesome physically, to
prevent radioactive wastes from seeping into the environment, to guard and expand wilderness areas and domains for
wildlife, to defend animal species from human depredation. The single most important question before the ecology
movement today, however, is whether these efforts will be co-opted and contained within the institutional bounds of
“reasonable “ dissent and reformism or whether these efforts will mature into a powerful movement that can create
fundamental, indeed revolutionary, changes in our society and our way of looking at the world.
2. THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE CANNOT BE CONTAINED
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, 1977, page 61.
The Eros-driven impulses in man can be repressed and sublimated, but they can never be eliminated. They are renewed
with every birth of a human being and with every generation of youth. It is not surprising today that the young, more
than any economic class or stratum, articulate the life-impulses in humanity’s nature--the urgings of desire,
sensuousness, and the lure of the marvelous. Thus, the biological matrix, from which hierarchical society emerged ages
ago, reappears at a new level with the era that marks the end of hierarchy, only now this matrix is saturated with social
phenomena. Short of manipulating humanity ‘s germ plasma, the life-impulses can be annulled only with the annihilation
of man himself.
3. DESTRUCTION OF THE STATE STRUCTURE IS INEVITABLE AND OVERDUE
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, 1977, page 26.
The decay of the American institutional structure results not from any mystical “failure of nerve” or from imperialist
adventures in the Third World, but primarily from the overripeness of America’s technological potential. like the hanging
fruit whose seeds have matured fully, the structure may fall from the lightest blow. The blow may come from the Third
World, from major economic dislocations, even from premature political repression, but fall the structure must, owing to
its ripeness and decay.
4. CO-OPTATION CAN DELAY BUT NOT STOP THE CRISIS AND REVOLUTION
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, 1977, page 26.
True, a great deal of the pursuit of this discontent can be diverted into established institutional channels for a time. But
only for a time. The social crisis is too deep and world-historical for the established institutions to contain it.
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CO-OPTATION THROUGH REFORMS IS THE BIGGEST DANGER
1. ONLY REVOLUTION IS EFFECTIVE: ALL OTHER ACTIONS PRESERVE THE BAD SYSTEM
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute
for Social Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 78.
I have long argued that we delude ourselves if we believe that a life-oriented world can be developed or even partially
achieved in a profoundly death-oriented society. U.S. society, as it is constituted today, is riddled with patriarchy and
racism and sits astride the entire world, not only as a consumer of its wealth and resources, but as an obstacle to all
attempts at self-determination at home and abroad. Its inherent aims are production for the sake of production, the
preservation of hierarchy and toil on a world scale, mass control and manipulation by centralized, state institutions. This
kind of society is inexorably counterposed to a life-oriented world. If the ecology movement does not ultimately direct its
main efforts toward a revolution in all areas of life--social as well as natural, political as well as personal, economic as
well as cultural--then the movement will gradually degenerate into a safety-valve for the established order.
2. REFORMS CAN NEVER STOP THE SYSTEM’S HORRORS: THEY DELAY REAL ACTIONS
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 77.
Conventional reform efforts, at their best, can only slow down but they cannot arrest the overwhelming momentum
toward destruction within our society. At their worst, they lull people into a false sense of security. Our institutional
social order plays games with us to foster this passivity. It grants long-delayed, piecemeal, and woefully inadequate
reforms to deflect our energies and attention from larger acts of destruction. Such reform measures hide the rotten core
of the apple behind an appealing and artificially red-dyed skin.
3. IMPROVING LIFE WITHIN THE CURRENT SYSTEM LEADS TO CO-OPTATION
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 81.
To be sure, moving from today’s capitalist society--based on giant industrial and urban belts, a highly chemical
agribusiness, centralized and bureaucratic power, a staggering armaments economy, massive pollution and exploited
labor--toward the ecological society that I have only begun to describe here will require a complex and difficult transition
strategy I have no pat formulas for making such a revolution. A few things seem clear, however. A new politics must be
created that eschew the snares of co-optation within the system that is destroying social and ecological life. We need a
social movement that can effectively resist and ultimately replace the nation-state and corporate capitalism; not one
that limits its sights to “improving * the current system.
4. NO COMPROMISES ARE GOOD: MUST AVOID CO-OPTATION AT ALL COSTS
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 78-9.
It does mean, however, that the immediate goals we seek and the means we use to achieve them should orient us
toward the radical fundamental changes that are needed instead of towards co-optation and containment within the
existing, hopelessly destructive system. I am convinced that we will fail to keep our political bearings and avoid cooptation unless we develop a bold and uncompromising vision of a truly ecological future. The highest form of realism
today can only be attained by looking beyond a given state of affairs to a constructive vision of what should be. It is not
good enough to merely look at what could be within the normal institutional limits of today’s predatory societies. This
will not yield a vision that is either desirable or sufficient. We cannot afford to be content with such inherently
compromised programs.
Our solutions must be commensurate with the scope of the problems. We need to muster the courage to entertain
radical visions which will, at first glance, appear “utopian “ to our cowed and domesticated political imaginations.
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ECOLOGICAL STRATEGIES MUST BE SOCIAL AND NOT SINGLE-ISSUE
1. ONLY SOCIAL ECOLOGY COMBATS ALL HIERARCHIES
Murry Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology,
DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 97.
Women, poor folks, and people of color are tight, I think, to be very wary of a philosophy which interprets vital questions
of human solidarity, democracy and liberation as optional and secondary concerns, at best, and evidence of “antiecological “ or “anthropocentric “selfishness, at worst. Ecological philosophy, if it is to provide a solid base for alliancebuilding, must be a social ecology that critiques and challenges all forms of hierarchy and domination, not just our
civilization’s attempt to dominate and plunder the natural world. It must be set as its overarching goal, the creation of a
non-hierarchical society if we are to live in harmony with nature.
2. SOCIAL ECOLOGY IS BEST TO BUILD ALLIANCES THAT STOP HIERARCHY
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 97-8.
Social ecology provides a better foundation for alliance-building and a respectful unity-in-diversity because it
understands that the very concept of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human, indeed, of the
young by their elders, of women by men, of one ethnic or racial group by another, of society by the state, of one
economic class by another, and of colonized people by a colonial power. It thus stresses all the social issues that most
deep ecologists or reform environmentalists tend to ignore, often downplay, or badly misunderstand. From this
perspective, the fight against racism is not just a mere political item that can be added to “defending the Earth; “it is
actually a vital and essential part of establishing a truly free and ecological society. The difficult work of building alliances
across ethnic lines is thus seen, as Jim correctly says, as a moral as well as a strategic imperative for the ecology
movement.
3. SOCIAL ECOLOGY AVOIDS RACISM, SEXISM, MISANTHROPY, AND ECO-WOES
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 62.
A clear, creative, and reflective left green perspective can help us avoid this fate. It can provide a coherent philosophical
framework or context that can avoid the moral insensitivity, racism, sexism, misanthropy, authoritarianism, and social
illiteracy that has sometimes surfaced within deep ecology circles. It can also provide a coherent alternative to the
traditional left’s neglect of ecology or its more recent, purely utilitarian commitment to reformist environmentalism.
4. AS LONG AS HIERARCHIES EXIST, WE WILL BE AT THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 97.
Our present society has a definite hierarchical character. It is a propertied society that concentrates economic power in
corporate elites. It is a bureaucratic and militaristic society that concentrates political and military power in centralized
state institutions. It is a patriarchal society that allocates authority to men to varying degrees. And it is a racist society
that places a minority of whites in a self-deceptive sovereignty over a vast worldwide majority of peoples of color. While
it is theoretically possible that a hierarchical society can biologically sustain itself, at least for a time, through draconian
environmental controls, it is absolutely inconceivable that present-day hierarchical and particularly capitalist society
could establish a nondomineering and ethically symbiotic relationship between itself and the natural world. As long as
hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of domination nature
will remain a predominant ideology and inevitably lead our planet to the brink, if not into the abyss, of ecological
extinction.
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DECENTRALIZATION IS NECESSARY TO SOLVE
1. BOOKCHIN PROVES THAT DECENTRALIZATION IS BEST
David Levine, The Learning Alliance, a non-profit grassroots environmental organization, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991,
page 13.
According to Bookchin, decentralized forms of production and food cultivation tailored to the carrying capacities of
particular bioregions are not only more efficient and ecologically sustainable, they also restore humanity’s intimate
contact with the soil, plant and animal life, sun and wind. This, he believes, is the only way to fully anchor and sustain a
widespread ecological sensibility within our culture. Furthermore, he maintains that only by challenging the profitseeking, “grow or die” dynamic of the corporate capitalist economy and creating an alternative economy oriented to
ecologically sustainable production to meet vital human needs can we genuinely protect the planet from the ravages of
acid rain, global warming, and ozone destruction.
2. DECENTRALIZED SYSTEMS ARE BEST FOR ECOLOGY AND ENERGY
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, DEFENDING THE EARTH, 1991, page 61.
By decentralizing our communities, we would also be able to eliminate society’s horribly destructive addiction to fossil
fuels and nuclear energy. One of the fundamental reasons that giant urban areas and industries are unsustainable is
because of their inherent dependency on huge quantities of dangerous and nonrenewable energy resources. To maintain
a large, densely populated city requires immense quantities of coal, petroleum, or nuclear energy. It seems likely that
safe and renewable energy sources such as wind, water, and solar power can probably not fully meet the needs of giant
urban areas, even if careful energy conservation is practiced and automobile use and socially unnecessary production is
curtailed. In contrast to coal, oil, and nuclear energy, solar, wind, and other “alternative” energy sources reach us mainly
in small ‘packets,” as it were. Yet while solar devices, wind turbines, and hydroelectric resources can probably not
provide enough electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island today, such energy sources, pieced together in an organic
energy pattern developed from the potentialities of a particular region, could amply meet the vital needs of small,
decentralized cities and towns.
“DEEP” AND MYSTICAL ECOLOGISM HURTS TRUE ENVIRONMENTALISM
1. DEEP ECOLOGY AND NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY WILL BE USED BY REACTIONARIES
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, WHICH WAY FOR THE ECOLOGY MOVEMENT, 1994, page 4. Despite their indifference to social issues and their
emphasis on personal “salvation,” ecomystics usually premise their views on a biometaphysics, as contradictory as this
may seems. Ecofeminist celebrations of the alleged intuitive powers and soulful women over “male” rationality and
aggressiveness easily lend themselves to a crude sociobiogism that is more genetic than cultural. The numinous “Self’
that we must presumably develop if we are to attain “self-realization,’ to use the language of Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and
George Sessions, has very earthy implications that can lead to highly reactionary conclusions.
2. MISANTHROPIC ENVIRONMENTALISM CRUSHES ALL GOOD ECOLOGISM
Murray Bookchin, Philosopher, former Professor at many Universities, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social
Ecology, WHICH WAY FOR THE ECOLOGY MOVEMENT, 1994, page 29.
The misanthropic strain that runs through the movement in the name of biocentrism, antihumanism, Gaian
consciousness, and neo-Malthusianism threatens to make ecology, in the broad sense of the term, the best candidate we
have for a “dismal science.’ The attempt of many mystical ecologists to exculpate the present society for its role in
famines, epidemics, poverty, and hunger serves the world’s power elites as the most effective ideological defense for the
extremes of wealth on one side and poverty on the other. It is not only the great mass of people who must make hard
choices about humanity’s future in a period of growing ecological dislocation; it is the ecology movement itself that must
make hard choices about its sense of direction in a time of growing mystification
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Answering Bookchin
Introduction
Give Murray Bookchin credit: the old guy just keeps churning out writings, despite being at death's door for what seems
like a decade at least. From reading his stuff, you would think he hangs on just for the sheer pleasure of confounding
(and viciously dissing in print) his critics. And you know what? maybe he does. But no matter.
Through his voluminous writings, intriguing analysis and excellent evidentiary support for his claims, Bookchin is one of
those authors who has achieved lasting fame in debate. His work has been cited by debaters for what seems like forever.
Why, then, are there so few specific on-point refutations offered when debaters argue Bookchin’s critiques of capitalism,
the state, deep ecology, etc.? As one of my debaters, who makes his living arguing 'Uncle Murray' said to me one day:
Don't people realize that there are tons of people who FLAT-OUT HATE Bookchin? Which is true. There is no love lost
between Murray and (most of) his critics, who attack the old social ecology scholar with a virulent hatred that seems
irrational and obsessive.
That’s true of some more than others. You have your goofy deep-ecologist attacks on Bookchin, which criticize him for
being a crotchety old man more than anything else. Bob Black has compared him to Elmer Fudd, for example. David
Watson also falls into this category - and be advised, some of these sources are more reasonable and credible than
others. For a pretty good comparison between Bookchin’s ideas and the thought of a (moderately) reasonable deep
ecologist, check out DEFENDING THE EARTH, Bookchin’s dialogue with former Earth First!er Dave Foreman.
Then you have your environmental movement scholars that admire Bookchin for his contribution to the cause, but see a
few shortcomings in his philosophy that they think ought to be ironed out. A few of these people, like John Clark, are
bitter toward Bookchin and his way of thinking. Others, like Michael Albert, seem to have honest questions about
Bookchin’s visions that they would like to see addressed.
So, when deciding how to organize the four pages of cards I’m supposed to produce for this, I figured, why not produce
FOUR DIFFERENT ways of attacking Bookchin? That’s right, you get criticisms of Murray Bookchin from the perspective of
Deep Ecology, Ecocommunitarianism, Participatory Economics, and Socialism/EcoMarxism as well.
Not that these are the only four ways out there, but it shows you the kind of opposition he has engendered. That’s not to
say the opposition is overwhelming. Murray has tons of support from ecologists, labor people and anarchists as well.
And you’ll see why if you check out some of his books. Agree or disagree with him, the man has clearly put a ton of time
and energy into understanding history, philosophy and the way that various important issues intersect. This makes him
one of the most important radical thinkers of the 20th century.
Reading Bookchin
Since his first writings, Murray Bookchin’s thought has changed a lot. That’s not surprising, considering he’s seen
monumental changes in society. Bookchin got his start as a young socialist, only later evolving into the kind of social
anarchism that marks his thinking today. Although he wrote one of the first reasoned critiques of technology and its
impact on the environment -- predating even Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING - he later came to consider technology a
crucial part of social revolution. And though at one time he was wary of any dealings with any kind of state, he’s come to
reconsider that position.
This is important when you consider how to answer Bookchin’s arguments. Many of the debaters utilizing his evidence
will not be familiar with the latest changes in Bookchin’s thinking, so if you are, that can work out well for you.
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The Institute for Social Ecology, where Bookchin is a director emeritus, has a website at www.social-ecology.org where
you can access the institute’s journal, HARBINGER, at no charge. They continue to publish interviews with the director,
which will keep you up-to-date.
This isn’t to say that Bookchin changes his ideas like some people change their underwear: his viewpoint on capitalism
has been remarkably consistent over the years; so has his criticism of state power, his derision of anti-environmental
policies, and his defense of direct democracy. All of this manifests itself in a political program that Bookchin calls
Libertarian Municipalism.
To understand how to answer the philosophy, you’ve got to understand the philosophy. So let’s take some of Murray’s
major issues in order.
Bookchin's Critique Of Capitalism
This is one of his most mainstream (among the left) ideas. Bookchin believes that capitalism commodified the very
essence of life, reducing human beings and the environment to mere items for purchase.
This, he argues, counteracts sustainability. If corporations can buy anything -- drilling the pristine Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge for a few short years' supply of polluting oil seems to be a current example -- then priceless treasures become
just more fodder for the death-inspired growth machine.
This has more of an impact than just beauty: Bookchin claims that, left unchecked, capitalism will make the earth
unsuitable for complex forms of life, effectively leaving the planet for the roaches.
There are two ways to answer this type of thinking. The first is to simply take a "capitalism good" approach, which I'll
address in the next few paragraphs. I think the best strategy, though, is to attempt to critique Bookchin's solution step. If
you can win that Libertarian Municipalism is not as effective at getting away from capitalism as something else might be,
you can undercut the argument in what I think is a more effective way.
But if you debate in a more conservative district, or simply (shudder) prefer the capitalism good argument, you should
check out Martin Lewis' book GREEN DELUSIONS.
Lewis, ironically, enough, shares some assumptions with Bookchin. Both of them agree that technological solutions will
ultimately be required to solve the world's mental problems. With a world population that's growing every day, someone
has to produce enough food to feed these people and enough energy to keep them warm. But that's about the only
thing the two of them would agree on.
Lewis would say that capitalism is the only potential way to achieve this type of technological savvy. Isn't it capitalism
that brought us such bounties as nuclear power (!)? Didn't capitalism give us factory farming, where animals are swollen
to such an absurd degree that they can no longer mate naturally - but have produced the largest chicken breasts you've
ever seen?
In all seriousness, Lewis says that the profit motive encourages people to produce new technologies, which lead to
better and more successful ways to protect the environment. Now, Bookchin might respond that the profit motive has
other side effects as well - such as those technologies being used to produce, well, PROFIT - instead of sustainability.
Bookchin, though no longer a socialist, would also point out that several non-capitalist countries (the Soviet Union
among them) have produced serious technological breakthroughs as well.
At any rate, Lewis writes powerful if flawed evidence that can help you answer Bookchin's critique of capitalism. His
arguments, I should point out, are incompatible with the other arguments including in the evidence section - it's a bad
idea to say capitalism is good in one part of your speech and criticize it in another.
Bookchin's Critique Of The State
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Like all anarchists, Bookchin has a critique of the state. Unlike many anarchists, his is well-thought-out and developed
into a coherent and logical criticism.
It isn't just some abstract entity called "the state" that Bookchin is critiquing. It's any monolithic governmental entity that
exercises power controlling the citizenry. That applies especially to fascist or authoritarian regimes( the Soviet Union,
Nazi Germany) but applies as well to liberal democracies like the United States.
Bookchin criticizes the republican form of government, where individuals elect representatives to vote (allegedly) based
on the views of their constituents. This type of government, Bookchin reasons, is less and less likely to actually fairly
represent the interests of the populace. The further removed the people are from the decision-making process -- and the
places where decisions are made -- the less their views are considered, and the more undemocratic it is.
It isn't just a problem with political organization, though that is certainly an issue. It's an issue of size. Bookchin admires
some of the Greek city-state forms of government, where political space was created through directly democratic public
meetings. This was able to happen because the political entities were smaller than they are today. The United States has
270,000,000 citizens. Think it's easy to form a consensus among them? Heck, you couldn't even fit half of them into the
largest sports stadium in the land.
But if the political entities are smaller -- municipalities -- then most, if not all, of the people affected by decision-making
processes can get involved. This type of "municipalism" is desirable to Bookchin.
Additionally, he espouses, large states are more likely to be repressive. Simply the existence of a large state apparatus
makes the exercise of repressive power more likely. Repression is undesirable -- civil liberties are desirable. Thus, a
political organization that promotes "libertarianism" is better than an oppressive state.
Hence, Bookchin's idea of "Libertarian Municipalism." We'll go into more detail about what this entails a little bit later,
but for now, let's talk about how you answer his "state bad" argument.
The best way to answer the argument is to emphasize a few of the good things the state does. Might the state protect
vulnerable people against assaults of the powerful? What about social welfare programs for the homeless? Financial aid
programs for students? Laws that act against racist violence? These are all positive things to reasonable people.
Additionally, one might point out that the alternatives to the state don't look good at this time. If you don't have a state,
you don't have laws that stop corporations from polluting the environment. You don't have child labor laws. You don't
have 40-hour work week laws. Basically, any alternative to the state might just exacerbate the very capitalism that
Bookchin hates.
No less a figure than MIT professor and noted anarchist thinker Noam Chomsky has made this argument. While Chomsky
agrees that state power is in some ways fundamentally illegitimate, that power is also the only thing that constrains
corporations from exploiting people and the world's environment.
In some ways, Chomsky concludes, anarchists must actually defend and strengthen the federal government -- despite the
fact that they would ultimately like to see that government abolished. This is perhaps the best single argument against
Bookchin's critique of the state, and it can be found in Chomsky's 1997 book POWERS AND PROSPECTS.
Bookchin is also far from the only anarchist to make this claim, so if you think anyone in your region will be running this
argument, you owe it to yourself to check out Chomsky.
Finally, consider that Bookchin himself has changed his views over the years. There are some Bookchin scholars, such as
Alan Rudy and Adam Light, who interpret his most recent writings as embracing reformism as opposed to revolution. This
can be an effective argument, particularly if your opponent does not know Bookchin well. You can argue that Bookchin
used to consider total rejection of the state as the only way to get social transformation, but that he has reconsidered
that viewpoint.
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A word of warning: Bookchin's long-time companion, Janet Biehl, has written that this is a poor way to determine
Bookchin's current way of thinking. Still, it is an argument some have made.
Bookchin's Ideas About Technology
While many environmentalists are anti-technology, Bookchin isn't. Rather, he has a more subtle view of advanced
science, saying that it is shaped by the social situations in which we find ourselves.
One of his most famous works is called POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, which refers to Bookchin's theory of technology.
The only truly liberatory society, according to Murray, is a "post-scarcity" one. All the liberty in the world doesn't mean
much if people are dying from resource scarcity.
Technology, he reasons, is a necessity for the kind of revolution we need. If, after that revolution, technology can provide
the types of food and energy humans require, then we can think about getting to libertarian municipalism. One littleknown fact about Bookchin's philosophy is that he says these "post-scarcity" technologies already exist -- we just have to
get to a point where they can be used for the benefit of all.
What Are The Problems With Libertarian Municipalism?
As we've seen, there are a lot of different schools of thought that criticize Bookchin. Let's take some of these criticisms in
order, beginning with the most vehement critics of Bookchin and proceeding through the others in descending order.
Deep ecologists oppose Bookchin's notions of technology. Many of them primitivists, such as Bob Black, John Zerzan and
David Watson, these people don't see ANY role for technology in the ideal society.
There is some variance in the opinion about exactly how much technology Bookchin is in favor of. To the deep ecologists,
however, even allowing for the possibility of high-tech fixes opens the door for a technological snowball. Some of
Bookchin's remarks favoring biotechnology have been used to indicate that he endorses more tech rather than less.
To people like Black, Watson and the like, technology can never be used in a manner positive for humans or the
environment. While Bookchin would say that the social system of capitalism is responsible for many of the ills of
technology -- the profit motive causing technology to be used as a labor replacement, for example -- the deep ecologists
argue that it will always alienate humans from their natural roles in society and pollute the ecosystem.
If you make your living fishing, for example, and someone produces a machine that can catch fish quicker and more
efficiently than you can, that does two things. First, you can no longer do what you've always done, diminishing what
might be your natural role in things. Second, it allows quicker and more effective resource extraction, which contributes
to (in this case) overfishing and environmental devastation. This occurs, they say, independent of social factors like the
economic system.
Bob Black also plays the "more anarchist than thou" card, accusing Bookchin of defending statism himself. To Black, even
defending the kind of city-state politics that Bookchin does is pretty non-anarchist. Even the directly democratic public
meetings that Bookchin insists will empower the populace are, to Black, just another statist solution.
John Clark, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University, says that he was inspired by Bookchin’s thought at first. But he
broke from Bookchin to develop his own form of social ecology, one that he calls ‘ecocommunitarianism.’
According to Clark, Bookchin’s thought doesn’t approach a true ethics, but merely constitutes top-down moralizing. This
is counter to the goals that Bookchin himself claims to espouse.
Alan Rudy and Andrew Light offer a more complimentary critique, agreeing that Bookchin has made a significant
contribution to ecology and social theory. But to the two of them -- socialists -- Bookchin ignores the pivotal role of labor
in society.
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Their viewpoint, which might be considered an attempt to advance ‘ecosocialism’ as an alternative to Bookchin’s social
anarchism, claims that to commit this fallacy can do nothing but alienate the vast majority of people in society - working
people.
Michael Albert, one of the editors of Z Magazine, published a thoughtful criticism of Libertarian Municipalism on the Z
website, inviting other activists (and Bookchin and Biehl) to respond with their thoughts. You can access this forum at
www.zmag.org, which will help you see the divergent strains of argument.
Albert's criticisms are fair-minded, and intended more to assist Bookchin's critique than destroy it. Still, he raises points
that debaters can exploit. What means for dispute resolution exists in Libertarian Municipalism? A public meeting? Well,
why would have an entire public meeting to, say, resolve a dispute between neighbors? Wouldn't that be a lot of
meetings that would involve a lot of people? Would such meetings be attended? Wouldn't they just bore people?
There are other issues, issues of justice. Let's say these small municipalities that Bookchin envisions have something (or
develop something) that is of interest beyond the borders of the municipality. Let’s say there’s a municipality that
surrounds the Grand Canyon, or the University of Oregon. Do the people who happen to live in the area around these
treasures have more of a right to decide what happens to them than the rest of us? Think before you answer: this may
mean accepting a nuclear waste dump in the Grand Canyon
Conclusion
The best strategy to beat Murray Bookchin contains two steps: first, read as much of the man’s (recent) work as you can
in order to enhance your understanding of his philosophy. Second, pick the school of thought you feel most comfortable
defending of the four I’ve listed. Then, familiarize yourself with their criticisms of Bookchin. Personally, I think Clark’s
viewpoint provides the deepest and truest criticism of Bookchin - I think deep ecologists misanalyze his work, I think the
ecosocialist tradition isn’t yet well-developed, and I think Albert’s ideas are more meant to be thought-provoking than
anything. But of course, you should argue what you’re most comfortable arguing. Good luck, and good hunting.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hakim Bey, THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE, ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY, POETIC TERRORISM, Autonomedia, 1991.
Bob Black, ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM, CAL Press, Columbia, 1997.
Murray Bookchin, POST SCARCITY ANARCHISM, Wildwood House, London, 1971.
Murray Bookchin, TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY, Black Rose, Montreal, 1980.
Murray Bookchin, REMAKING SOCIETY: PATHWAYS TO A GREEN FUTURE, South End Press, Boston, MA., 1990.
Murray Bookchin, SOCIAL ANARCHISM AND LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM, AK Press, Edinburgh/San Francisco, 1995.
Murray Bookchin, THE MODERN CRISIS, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1986.
Murray Bookchin, THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: THE EMERGENCE AND DISSOLUTION OF HIERARCHY, Cheshire Books,
Palo Alto, California, 1982.
Murray Bookchin, "Communalism: The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism", DEMOCRACY AND NATURE, No. 8 (vol. 3,
no. 2), pp. 1-12.
Murray Bookchin, WHICH WAY FOR THE ECOLOGY MOVEMENT?, AK Press, Edinburgh/San Francisco, 1994.
Murray Bookchin, THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL ECOLOGY, Black Rose Books, Montreal/New York, 1990.
Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman,
Black Rose Books, Montreal/New York, 1991.
David Watson, BEYOND BOOKCHIN: PREFACE FOR A FUTURE SOCIAL ECOLOGY, Autonomedia/Black and Red/Fifth Estate,
USA, 1996.
David Watson, AGAINST THE MEGAMACHINE: ESSAYS ON EMPIRE AND ITS ENEMIES, Autonomedia/Fifth Estate, USA,
1997.
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ECOCOMMUNITARIANISM IS BETTER THAN BOOKCHIN'S IDEAS
1. ECOCOMMUNITARIAN POLITICS IS BETTER THAN BOOKCHIN'S MUNICIPALISM
John Clark, professor of philosophy at Loyola University, SOCIAL ECOLOGY AFTER BOOKCHIN, 1998,
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/municipaldreams.html, accessed May 10, 2001.
This analysis forms part of a much larger critique, in which I attempt to distinguish between social ecology as an evolving
dialectical, holistic philosophy, and the increasingly rigid, nondialectical, dogmatic version of that philosophy
promulgated by Bookchin. An authentic social ecology is inspired by a vision of human communities achieving their
fulfillment as an integral part of the larger, self realizing earth community. Ecocommunitarian politics, which I would
counterpose to Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, is the project of realizing such a vision in social practice. If social
ecology is an attempt to understand the dialectical movement of society within the context of the larger dialectic of
society and nature, ecocommunitarianism is the project of creating a way of life consonant with that understanding.
Setting out from this philosophical and practical perspective, I argue that Bookchin's politics is not only riddled with
theoretical inconsistencies, but also lacks the historical grounding that would make it a reliable guide for an ecological
and communitarian practice.
2. BOOKCHIN'S IDEAS ARE NOT TRULY ETHICAL, JUST DOGMATIC AND MORALIZING
John Clark, professor of philosophy at Loyola University, SOCIAL ECOLOGY AFTER BOOKCHIN, 1998,
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/municipaldreams.html, accessed May 10, 2001.
One of my main contentions in this critique is that because of its ideological and dogmatic aspects, Bookchin's politics
remains, to use Hegelian terms, in the sphere of morality rather than reaching the level of the ethical. That its moralism
can be compelling I would be the last to deny, since I was strongly influenced by it for a number of years. Nevertheless, it
is a form of abstract idealism, and tends to divert the energies of its adherents into an ideological sectarianism, and away
from an active and intelligent engagement with the complex, irreducible dimensions of history, culture and psyche. The
strongly voluntarist dimension of Bookchin's political thought should not be surprising. When a politics lacks historical
and cultural grounding, and the real stubbornly resists the demands of ideological dogma, the will becomes the final
resort.
3. BOOKCHIN'S VIEWS WON'T LEAD TO REAL SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
John Clark, professor of philosophy at Loyola University, SOCIAL ECOLOGY AFTER BOOKCHIN, 1998,
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/municipaldreams.html, accessed May 10, 2001.
Certain tendencies that have always impeded Bookchin's development of a truly communitarian outlook are already
evident in his conclusions on the place of "consciousness" in this process. "What consciousness must furnish above all
things is an extraordinary flexibility of tactics, a mobilization of methods and demands that make exacting use of the
opportunities at hand." In this analysis, Bookchin expresses a Bakuninism (or anarcho-Leninism) that has been a
continuing undercurrent in his thought, and which has recently come to the surface in his programmatic municipalism.
His conception of consciousness at the service of ideology stands at the opposite pole from an authentically
communitarian view of social transformation, which sees more elaborated, richly developed conceptions of social and
ecological interrelatedness (not in the sense of mere abstract "Oneness," but rather as concrete unity-in-diversity) as the
primary challenge for consciousness as reflection on social practice.
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MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S IDEAS ARE MISGUIDED AND DANGEROUS
1. BOOKCHIN’S NOTION OF ‘SOCIAL VS. LIFESTYLE’ ANARCHISM IS AWFUL, STALINIST
Bob Black, anarchist, ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM, 1997, p. 3.
SOCIAL ANARCHISM OR LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM may well be the worst book about anarchists that any of them has ever
written. According to the cover blurb, Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been ``a lifelong radical since the early 1930s.''
“Radical'' is here a euphemism for “Stalinist''; Bookchin was originally “a militant in the Young Pioneers and the Young
Communist League”. Later he became a Trotskyist.
2. BOOKCHIN’S MOVEMENT IS A PATHETIC FAILURE
Bob Black, anarchist, ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM, 1997, p. 5.
About 25 years ago, Murray Bookchin peered into the mirror and mistook it for a window of opportunity. In 1963 he
wrote, under a pseudonym, Our Synthetic Society, which anticipated (although it seems not to have influenced) the
environmentalist movement. In 1970, by which time he was pushing 50 and calling himself an anarchist, Bookchin wrote
``Listen, Marxist!'' – a moderately effective anti-authoritarian polemic against such Marxist myths as the revolutionary
vanguard organization and the proletariat as revolutionary subject. In this and in other essays collected in Post-Scarcity
Anarchism, Bookchin disdained to conceal his delight with the disarray of his Marxist comrades-turned-competitors. He
thought he saw his chance. Under his tutelage, anarchism would finally displace Marxism, and Bookchin would place the
stamp of his specialty, ``social ecology,'' on anarchism. Not only would he be betting on the winning horse, he would be
the jockey. As one of his followers has written, “if your efforts at creating your own mass movement have been pathetic
failures, find someone else's movement and try to lead it''.
3. BOOKCHIN IS AN EGOMANIACAL LEADER
Bob Black, anarchist, ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM, 1997, p. 9.
Something went awry. Although Dean Bookchin was indeed widely read by North American anarchists – one of his
acknowledged sycophants calls him “the foremost contemporary anarchist theorist'” – in fact, not many anarchists
acknowledged him as their dean. They appreciated his ecological orientation, to be sure, but some drew their own, more
far-reaching conclusions from it. The Dean came up against an unexpected obstacle. The master-plan called for
anarchists to increase in numbers and to read his books, and those parts came off tolerably well. It was okay if they also
read a few anarchist classics, Bakunin and Kropotkin for instance, vetted by the Dean, with the understanding that even
the best of them afford “mere glimpses” of the forms of a free society subsequently built upon, but transcended by, the
Dean's own epochal discovery, social ecology/social anarchism. Bookchin does not mind standing on the shoulders of
giants – he rather enjoys the feel of them under his heel – so long as he stands tallest of all.
4. BOOKCHIN USES STALINIST TACTICS
Bob Black, anarchist, ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM, 1997, p. 12.
Where Bookchin accuses rival anarchists of individualism and liberalism, Stalinists accuse all anarchists of the same. For
example, there was that Monthly Review contributor who referred to Bookchinism as “a crude kind of individualistic
anarchism”! In other words, capitalism promotes egotism, not individuality or “individualism.” ... The term “bourgeois
individualism”' an epithet widely used today against libertarian elements, reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideology
permeates the socialist project – these words being, of course, those of Bookchin the Younger. That the Dean reverts to
these Stalinist slurs in his dotage reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideology permeates his project. Fanatically
devoted to urbanism, the Dean was being complimentary, not critical, when he wrote that “the fulfillment of
individuality and intellect was the historic privilege of the urban dweller or of individuals influenced by urban life”
Individuality's not so bad after all, provided it's on his terms.
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BOOKCHIN’S NOTION OF “LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM” IS FLAWED
1. BOOKCHIN’S VIEWS OFFER NO WAY TO RESOLVE DISPUTES
Michael Albert, author and activist, ASSESSING LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM, November, 1999,
http://www.zmag.org/lmdebate.htm, ACCESSED May 10, 2001.
Why are noted anarchists proposing political institutions? Isn't that contrary to abolishing the state? Only if you accept
"the interchangeability of politics with Statecraft," replies Bookchin, and advocate throwing out the baby with the
bathwater. So libertarian municipalism instead proposes "large general meetings in which all the citizens of a given area
meet, deliberate, and make decisions on matters of common concern." And it notes that "if the political potential of the
municipality is to be fulfilled, community life must be rescaled to……a manageable size." The decision-making assemblies
must contain everyone in the municipality and "meet at regular intervals, perhaps every month at first, and later weekly,
with additional meetings as people [see] fit." Given their modest size, these assemblies "could meet in an auditorium,
theatre, courtyard, hall, park, or even a church-indeed in any local facility that was sufficiently large to hold all the
concerned citizens of the municipality." Insofar as libertarian municipalism is a vision for a new type polity, in addition to
wondering why the authors don't discuss mechanisms for adjudicating disputes (the kind of thing that now leads to law
suits) and handling difficult problems of enforcement-I also wonder why they feel that each citizen needs to be directly
involved, face-to-face, in all decisions. While the general thrust of the assembly vision seems positive, why must it be
exclusive? Why is it unwise to use other decision-making mechanisms as well, when assemblies aren't optimal? I am not
sure, for example, why libertarian municipalism feels that no means of representation can ever be designed to function
compatibly with popular assemblies, preserving democracy but functioning better in situations that transcend small
group concerns.
2. LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM CREATES A TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY
Michael Albert, author and activist, ASSESSING LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM, November, 1999,
http://www.zmag.org/lmdebate.htm, ACCESSED May 10, 2001.
Bookchin's warning seems correct to me, but I am not sure how the insight is incorporated in the libertarian municipalist
vision. Why does libertarian municipalism take for granted (a) that all decisions should be taken by a majority vote, and
(b) that the control of each institution in the society, regardless of how wide a constituency it affects, should be entirely
in the hands of the assembly for the particular municipality in which it happens to reside. Put less abstractly: Why should
a majority decide aspects of my life that affect only me? And why should a university or the Grand Canyon be totally
under the auspices of those who happen to live where it sits?
3. BY REJECTING PARTICIPATORY ECONOMICS, BOOKCHIN’S IDEAS WILL FAIL
Michael Albert, author and activist, ASSESSING LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM, November, 1999,
http://www.zmag.org/lmdebate.htm, ACCESSED May 10, 2001.
Watching markets gobble up everything in their path, Libertarian Municipalists fear that economic institutions per se are
imperial and will try to usurp political functions by their very nature, or will at the very least create a context precluding
political democracy. I think this is correct about markets, and also about central planning, for that matter, but is wrong
about participatory economics. But be that as it may, what is ironic is that as a counter to the imagined inevitable
imperial economy, Libertarian Municipalists propose an imperial polity, usurping economic functions not even just
implicitly, or as a by-product, but in principle and as a celebrated priority. And, oddly, as a result of taking on this added
function, the institutions would not only fail to do economics justly and cooperatively, but would devolve into a
centralized hierarchical economic bastardization of their intended decentralized democratic form.
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BOOKCHIN’S VIEWS IGNORE LABOR’S KEY ROLE
1. BOOKCHIN'S POLITICAL VISION IS FLAWED: IT IGNORES LABOR
Alan Rudy, Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Andrew Light, Doctorate in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz, "Sociology and
Social Labor: a consideration and critique of Murray Bookchin," MINDING NATURE, edited by David McCauley, 1996, p.
318-319.
This paper is a critque of social ecology and Bookchin's form of political anarchism out of an emerging socialist ecological
tradition, something Bookchin once claimed was a contradiction. We begin with an exposition of some of Bookchin's
central ideas: his theory of the development of domination in the early evolution of human society, the importance of
the transition to capitalism for human society, and his exposition of a new future for modern society rooted in his
Kropotken-inspired evolutionary anarchism. The next section criticizes this work. Our central critique is that Bookchin
powerfully underplays the importance of labor as a mediating force within and between the social relations of humans,
and within and between humans and the nonhuman natural world. This critique is advanced in relation to some of
Bookchin's positions relative to capitalism, most notably that Bookchin fails to see the importance of the qualitative
change evidenced by the development of social labor under and through capitalism's uneven and combined
development. The primary consequences of Bookchin's neglect of labor as a category of analysis, and of social labor as a
defining characteristic of capitalism and its contradictions, are that Bookchin's natural histories are incomplete and
produce a problematic analysis of historical change. These problems derive from the theoretical rigidity of his political
project, which results in a skewed interpretation of material, global, and political problems.
2. BOOKCHIN’S THEORY AND STYLE STILL HAVE SERIOUS SHORTCOMINGS
Alan Rudy, Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Andrew Light, Doctorate in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz, "Sociology and
Social Labor: a consideration and critique of Murray Bookchin," MINDING NATURE, edited by David McCauley, 1996, p.
323.
For these reasons and more, including his support of feminism, gay rights, and struggles against racism, Bookchin's
contributions to left ecology must not be understated. However, while his work has been and remains important to the
development of left ecology, his theory (and, too often, his polemical style) have serious shortcomings, which this paper
is intended to address.
3. BOOKCHIN HAS MOVED AWAY FROM HIS VIEWS OF TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
Alan Rudy, Research Fellow, University of Alberta, Andrew Light, Doctorate in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz, "Sociology and
Social Labor: a consideration and critique of Murray Bookchin," MINDING NATURE, edited by David McCauley, 1996, p.
323-324.
While he has maintained a messianic vision of the future, Bookchin's more recent ecotopic visions have become
increasingly low-technology affairs. In the early 1980's his view of technology had evolved to the point where his
concerns were focused on "how we can contain (that is absorb) technics within an emancipatory society." In 1986, in his
introduction to the second edition of Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin wrote that, if he were to rewrite the book, he
would "temper the importance [he gave] to the technological 'preconditions' for freedom." Similarly, his perspective on
scarcity, viewed "as a drama of history that our era has evolved technologically," has changed to the point "that such an
interpretation is now unsatisfactory." Most recently, Bookchin has said that what must be overcome is not the
contradiction between the modern potential for post-scarcity and its lack of realization but rather the "gravest most
single illness of our time...disempowerment."
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Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke was a prominent literary and social critic who focused on the use of rhetoric by speakers and the way
rhetoric was used strategically to affect audiences. His doctrine is very marxist and anti-scientific in nature. He was born
in 1897and began school only to drop out in 1918 finding it too constraining. His first several books were written as
literary and social criticisms without any cohesive project in mind. They do include some interesting argumentative tools
however, such as the idea of trained incapacity, which we will be exploring.
In 1945, he began a trilogy of books on rhetorical interpretation that he called Dramatism by writing A Grammar of
Motives. This was followed in 1950 with A Rhetoric of Motives. These two were to be followed by a third called A
Symbolic of Motives, but he had lost interest in the project by then and moved on to working on The Rhetoric of Religion
which dealt more with his new interest in the power of words as ultimate terms. In the early seventies, he renewed his
attacks on the use of technology and how it appeared to be dominating humanity’s definition of its own ends. He started
to spend time reworking his older projects before dying in the early nineties.
What criteria might be necessary for finding a single word that summed up Burke’s whole project? One might suggest
‘motive’ since it appears frequently, and is found even in the title of two books he wrote and one he intended to, but I
don’t think this sums up Burke’s project for getting at motives. For that, we need a word that that can be used in place of
the grammar of motives, or the rhetoric of motives, or the symbolic of motives. The one word that best describes the
process of getting at the grammar, rhetoric, and symbol of motives is ‘Dramatism.’
Our first reason for this might be that it best gets at the concept of the motive. “The titular word for our own method is
‘dramatism,’ since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the
analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (A Grammar of Motives xxii). Burke has a
need to separate the concept of motion from that of action. In motion, physical forces alone move something. In action,
a will is involved in creating the movement. There is a motive behind the movement that is created by the will. The
confusion of these two things is referred to as the pathetic fallacy. The pathetic fallacy that occurs when motion and
action are confused has the impact of dehumanizing the actor by implying that his or her motives are physical motion
instead of purposeful action. Thus, dramatism is an important label for Burke’s project because it creates a separation
between Burke’s project and others such as science that might see motives as motion and not as action. Dramatistic
analysis leaves room for the will, while science might blot it out as just physical motion.
Our second reason for using dramatism is that it best fits with the other terms developed by Burke for analysis of human
beings. In A Grammar of Motives, Burke establishes the pentad for analysis of action. His introduction refers to the
pentad as “The Five Key Terms of Dramatism” (Grammar xv). The terms themselves (act, scene, agent, agency, and
purpose) are suggestive of watching a drama. It is clear that in using these as his key or most basic terms of analysis,
Burke intends his project to be defined in a word as the dramatistic.
Finally, we might suggest that this is the most fitting term because Burke’s dramatistic pentad was made as a grounding
for the later works. After writing about the coming works on the Rhetoric of Motives and the Symbolic of Motives, Burke
writes that “we found in the course of writing that our project needed a grounding in formal considerations logically
prior to both the rhetorical and the psychological” (Grammar xviii). It is the dramatic pentad that forms the grounding for
all of the rest of Burke’s project. Since it is the dramatic that is the basis from which we get at the motive and at people
as symbol using animals, we should think of the ‘dramatic’ as the word best fitting Burke’s whole project.
TRAINED INCAPACITY AND COMIC CORRECTIVES
Let’s assume some debater was debating policy for two years and then this debater’s partner quit. Now, our debater will
have to make a transition into LD debate. Unfortunately, after two years debating policy, our debater has picked up
some bad habits, talking too fast for example. This is what Burke calls trained incapacity. When you learn to do things a
certain way, you are simultaneously learning how to be incapable of doing them certain other ways. This is especially
useful for criticizing social theorists. For example, Burke applies this to his fellow marxists. They have learned to explain
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all social degradation in terms of the economic. The obvious problem with this is that they are incapable of conceiving
other notions of problems or other ways to fix them.
But how can someone who’s trained as a marxist break out of this trained incapacity? Since a marxist has learned to
think of things in the economic, how can the marxist possibly see his or her way out of thinking this way? The marxist
isn’t just going to assume everything he or she already believes is already wrong. Burke’s solution to this problem is a
comic corrective, the foremost of them is called perspective by incongruity. Perspective by incongruity means to make an
interpretation of something that is the complete reverse of what common sense or standard reason would tell you. Then
look for ways that the perspective by incongruity could be correct as a means of opening up new perspectives.
What Burke chiefly wants to avoid here is the danger of taking ideas to an extreme. Even perspective by incongruity can
go too far. Another common danger Burke guards against is the rebunking of an idea shortly after the debunking of that
same idea. For example, let’s look at post-modernism. Post-modernism attempts to defeat reason by critically analyzing
its presuppositions. It supposes that one cannot have any kind of a cohesive or objective truth, only subjective
interpretations. At this point, post-modernism has debunked reason. The problem comes after this at the point that
post-modernists attempt to fill the void they themselves have created by appealing to the same objective standards they
just attacked. They do this by attempting to show that there are ‘contextual’ realities that are created by a community
standard in which most everyone is involved. This is rebunking. A hypocritical abuse of argument has occurred in which
the post-modernist make him or herself the victim of the same attack that post-modernism was subjecting other ideas
to.
BURKEAN COMMUNICATION
Burke’s earlier works begin to get at the notion of a rhetor’s motive by looking first at the idea of auditor’s form. Burke
writes in Counter-Statement that “form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate
satisfying of that appetite.” (31) As an audience member watching or looking on an action, I am forever attempting to
identify with the symbols within that scene that will appeal to my form. As a rhetor, I appeal to the piety of particular
symbols as a means of courting members of my audience. Burkean persuasion occurs when identification meets
courtship. I will demonstrate this first by examining the output of the rhetor and second by examining the input of the
audience.
The output of the rhetor is designed to court the audience by appealing to piety. We should begin first with the concept
of courtship. “By the ‘principle of courtship’ in rhetoric we mean the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social
estrangement” (A Rhetoric of Motives 208). This does not necessarily mean that the ideas involved would estrange the
audience without the use of persuasion. It is entirely possible that the audience has never considered the idea and is
estranged in this way, although the other still applies. The key thing to pull from our definition of courtship is the idea of
transcendence, which means that we will suppress one idea by referring instead to another that we may value more
highly. For example, a world leader might try to raise support for his or her government by appealing to the public’s
sense of nationalism. Nationalistic pride might spur citizens to forget about the current government’s record. That is
courtship via transcendence. In order to enact this, we must have some other principle to which we can appeal. Piety is
this principle to which we may appeal to transcend another value. “Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what… a
sense of the appropriate…” (Permanence and Change 74-75). When we transcend something, we are saying ‘There is an
appropriate order to things that suggests we should value this one principle over this other.” Piety suggests a hierarchy
of principles. The transcendence of courtship is the laying out of those principles.
The input of the audience is designed to identify with those ideas that satisfy the form of the individual audience
members. As an audience member, I am looking for ideas that satisfy aspects of my form. It is this desire that spurs on
my attempt to identify with symbols. Burke writes in Attitudes Toward History that “’identification’ is hardly other than a
name for the function of sociality.” (267) Identification is a consubstantiality between me and a symbol. It is when I
define myself as the symbol (although not that symbol alone). Audience members do this to satisfy their forms.
Persuasion is the meeting of identification and courtship. The rhetor courts, or appeals to piety, which the audience
member transcends towards in an attempt to fulfill his or her form by identifying with it. It is action on two levels. The
rhetor acts in courting the audience member toward piety, while the audience member identifies with the piety to fulfill
his or her form.
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HIERARCHY, PERFECTION, AND THE NEGATIVE
Burke claims, at one point, that man is the symbol using animal that is goaded by perfection and a sense of hierarchy.
This comes from the construction of the negative that is required by symbol using such as language. Burke tells us that
the negative is found nowhere in nature, i.e. there is no such thing as nature as a non-existent something, a zero. The
idea of a non-thing is a concept constructed within the mind. The zero or the nothing is a creation used for the purpose
of symbol usage.
With the invention of the zero comes the need for hierarchy. Once human beings have begun to distinguish between the
something and the nothing, they began to distinguish between those things that came closer to being called one thing
versus those things that were not so close. Human beings are now constructing scales or values for things that are
arranged in hierarchies.
Next comes the desire for perfection. Once a hierarchy is established, it is only natural for human beings to desire to
climb it or claim those values or things that are towards the top of the hierarchy. This is found inherently within the use
of language or symbol use. Recall that Burke’s project focuses on the rhetor’s use of symbols and an attempt to get at
the motives of the rhetor. The very fact that rhetors have motives, that they have purpose in action, implies an end. The
idea of an end or a goal implies with it that there is an attempt to attain some value within the hierarchy (a goal suggests
a shift within the hierarchy).
CRITICISMS OF BURKE
Compared with Burke, who examines the rhetor, Foucault examines the broader societal use of rhetoric and Derrida
examines the narrower rhetoric itself. Foucault looks more broadly while Derrida looks more narrowly. Burke’s project
focuses on the rhetor. When Burke attempts to define man as the ‘symbol using animal’ he is attempting to discover the
origin of the symbol. He focuses on the rhetor as an origin. It is for this reason that so much of his work is concerned with
motives. In seeing the rhetor as an origin of symbols, the most obvious question for Burke to ask is why symbols
originated from the source that they did. Interpretation is itself a story (with motives behind it) that is about the possible
motives behind some other act.
Foucault’s view of rhetoric is broader. Foucault’s structuralism makes him see people as only parts of a greater whole.
The rhetoric of an individual is really only a piece of a larger discursive sphere in which communication takes place.
Individuals are just parts of the society and cultural structure that is constructed within them (they are constructed as
parts of the structural whole). This really doesn’t conflict that much with Burke. It still leaves a lot of room to deal with
motives even though it explains them as not originating from the individual rhetor. Instead, the origin comes from what
has been constructed within the rhetor by the larger social and cultural structure. Thus, the only real difference between
the two is that Foucault does not see the individual as the origin of rhetorical motive.
Derrida’s focus is narrower than Burke’s. Derrida focuses on the printed word alone. Once the author has written a word
on a page and another has read it, that word is no longer the author’s. When the reader proceeds to read the printed
word, the reader is bringing his or her own experiences and interpretations to the word. The author does not exist within
the mind of the reader to guide the interpretation. The reader is alone with the written word and nothing else. This is
significant to our reading of Burke in that Derrida’s deconstruction argues that the motive of the rhetor means nothing at
all. The reader may interpret the written word in any way the reader wishes, even if it is the direct opposite of the intent
of the rhetor.
Derrida and Foucault reveal Burke’s project to be tense. Burke insists upon an individual rhetor with motives is the key to
analyzing rhetoric. In dissent to this, Foucault says no to the individual and Derrida says no to motive.
BURKE IN LD DEBATE
Most of Burke’s work can be found as highly useful in developing the criteria debate, but not so much for values. He
doesn’t suggest many terms as concrete values, and is rather vague on the few that he does advocate for the sake of
interpretation and criticism. First, I might look at the pentad as a potential criteria. Burke examines rhetorical work in
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terms of the dramatic pentad: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He takes two parts of the pentad and examines
the relationship between the parts that he refers to as a ratio. For example, we might do an act-scene ratio. This would
compare the elements that are part of an purposive act versus the parts that are caused by the surrounding scene.
How could that possibly be useful to a LD debater? The pentadic elements help pick apart the extreme over-estimations
of parts of the dramatic act. For example, a debater might be claiming that society is largely equal right now and because
of that people should be largely responsible for themselves without the aid of others. In terms of the pentad, this act of
being responsible for the self is being viewed as in domination of the scene, the potential that society might make the
actor disadvantaged in some way. You have to argue that your opponent is discounting too much of an element of the
pentad. The discounting of an element of the pentad is due to an extreme over-estimation of the importance of one of
the elements, in this case the act.
This is especially important if you are able to argue that the favoring of your opponent’s idea could create trained
incapacities that endanger your own. The critique that you are now making of your opponent’s case position is that it’s
core ideology is monolithic in scope and will block out the sun for opposing perspectives. Consider, for example, the
implications of glossing over the definition of justice by calling it fairness or equality, etc. The cult of justice in value
debate does not do ‘justice’ to the ideal of academic or educational debate by avoiding what justice is as a value.
Glossing over such discussion is a way of avoiding meaningful debate on the issue and not of creating interpretations
that lead to better understanding.
Another possibility for a good argument is making use of the pathetic fallacy. I think that this might work best as a
critique of the idea of progress. Watch for an attempt by an opponent to elevate principles, such as the scientific, over
the humanistic or the cultural. Recall that the idea of the pathetic fallacy was one in which action was confused with
motion. An opponent’s pathetic fallacy is an act of dehumanizing the will. It reduces human motive and purpose to
physical causality. The progress of which they speak is actually a death of the human soul.
Perhaps the best choice for arguments in using Burke comes out of his idea of the creation of morality by the use of the
negative. He thinks that the creation of hierarchies is a consequence of the use of symbols, and more specifically, the use
of language. These hierarchies are both good and bad. On one hand, they do create desire and greed for those things
commonly found at the top of the hierarchy. On the other, they are also responsible for hierarchies that place the good,
the moral, and the just at the top. It is only the construction of these hierarchies that makes the moral possible.
The value debate round is a good example of this line of thinking. When your opponent establishes a case with a value
and criteria, your opponent is choosing one hierarchy over another. Some hierarchies place the idea of the common
good at the top, while others place individual rights at the top. The choice of one hierarchy over another displays motive,
and motives may be analyzed in forming a story about your opponent’s case.
The terms that come to dominate as the top of a hierarchy are referred to as ultimate terms by Burke. Ultimate terms
are terms that carry with them an almost religious worship. For example, think of the way science is sometimes thought
of as a god of the twentieth century’s design. The same way we revere science’s ability to discover truth, we worship the
justice of our democratic institutions and constitutions, we admire selflessness and self-sacrifice, is the same way we
worship may of the ultimate terms in our vocabulary. It might be said that all values are really just ultimate terms that
are worshipped for different reasons or motives.
Burke opens up the question of motive in the debate round. Who would really value this? Why would they value this
idea or this set of positions? Although I think unequal application of goods or benefits is a common argument, I don’t
often hear the premises or motives for creating the argument challenged. The value of ‘quality of life’ is a great example
of a value that is begging for Burkean interpretation. Who’s quality of life is being referred to? What is a quality life? A
debater usually responds to this with a cliché or trite answer concerning what is generally true about living well, but this
is a view of living well from the perspective of who? Why does this single person create this particular conception of
what a quality life is? Burke will always look for some sort of motive behind any piece of rhetoric, including the answers
to questions given in a debate round.
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Since there exists a hierarchy of terms, Burke claims that there also exists a never-ending attempt to get closer to the
ultimate that is at the hierarchy’s top. This is the pursuit of perfection. It is also the use of this desire that allows rhetoric
to work. Rhetoric appeals to this desire within people in order to motivate action on their part. Appealing to the higher
ideal or ultimate term allows the audience to identify with the position of the rhetor. When the rhetor is attempting to
get the audience to ignore a distasteful idea by appealing to a higher one, it is referred to by Burke as courtship.
Courtship is the base principle behind the LD debate: the transcendence of one value over another in the mind of the
audience.
ANSWERING BURKE IN THE DEBATE ROUND
This is much easier than making use of Burke because Burke is so elitist that he is difficult to make coherent arguments
out of and even more difficult to communicate to a judge. This gives the opponent of someone running Burke many
advantages. I would attempt to play off of any confusion my opponent had in the communication of Burke. Burke’s ideas
are highly abstract and not well understood as large impacts in the debate round. This brings me to my next strategy,
which would be to point out that the Burkean critique has no relevant impact to the value debate round. It might be
useful for examining the discourse of the debate, and the motives for which the values stand, but the round must
ultimately be decided on the basis of ultimate terms, and Burke offers no guidance on which are to be most carefully
examined.
Burke’s discourse suffers several problems also. He is sometimes thought to be Eurocentric, and doesn’t use bisexual
terminology when the politically correct think that he should. He is also rather elitist. This plays well for the opponent of
Burke in the debate round where the elitism of Burke can come off as snobbery, especially if it appears to be ridiculously
critiquing time tested values such as freedom and equality. The summation of my strategy would be to push my case
hard while weighing their impacts to the Burkean critique. The critique impacts are difficult to pull off, and I would doubt
that they could be clearly communicated enough to defeat pointed questions.
CONCLUSION
Kenneth Burke forms the twentieth century part of the tradition of rhetoric. I think it is imperative that debaters learn
some of his ideas and understand them as explanations for the ways arguments are made in the debate round and in the
real world. Burke claims that rhetoric is a strategy for encompassing a situation within symbols or symbolic
communication. This is the most imperative understanding that a debater can get about the idea of debating. The
debater’s goal is to most effectively court the judge by use of strategies that encompass a situation.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenneth Burke, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY (University of California Press: 1937).
Kenneth Burke, COUNTER-STATEMENT (University of California Press: 1931).
Kenneth Burke, A GRAMMAR OF MOTIVES (University of California Press: 1945).
Kenneth Burke, LANGUAGE AS SYMBOLIC ACTION (University of California Press: 1966).
Kenneth Burke, PERMANENCE AND CHANGE (University of California Press: 1935).
Kenneth Burke, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM (University of California Press: 1941).
Kenneth Burke, A RHETORIC OF MOTIVES (University of California Press: 1950).
Kenneth Burke, THE RHETORIC OF RELIGION (University of California Press: 1961).
Foss, Sonya K, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC
(Waveland Press Inc. Prospect Heights, Illinois: 1991).
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RHETORIC CREATES MORALITY OUT OF THE NEGATIVE
1. MORAL ACTION IS TIED TO LANGUAGE
Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is
Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 190
Moral action arises only as a consequence of the hortatory, judgmental uses of the negative that are possible in
language; moral action is not possible apart from language. Burke reaches this conclusion by examining the relationship
between the negative and his starting point for dramatism, action. The negative allows the establishment of commands
or admonitions that govern the actions of individuals, which Burke refers to as "thou shalt nots," or "do not do thats. "
The Ten Commandments are examples of such "thou shalt nots. " The ability to distinguish between right and wrong thus
is a consequence of the concept of the negative. Without the negative implicit in language, moral action, or action based
on conceptions of right and wrong behavior (such as law, moral and social rules, and rights), would not exist.
2. HUMAN BEINGS INEVITABLY CREATE HIERARCHIES
Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is
Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 190
The concept of the negative inherent in language necessarily leads to the establishment of hierarchies constructed on
the basis of numerous negatives and commandments and the degree to which they are followed. Hierarchy might be
called as well "bureaucracy," "the ladder," "a sense of order," or, as Rueckert describes it, "any kind of graded,
value-charged structure in terms of which things, words, people, acts, and ideas are ranked." It deals with "the relation
of higher to lower, or lower to higher, or before to after, or after to before" and concerns the "arrangement whereby
each rank is overlord to its underlings and underling to its overlords." Hierarchies may be built around any number of
elements-a division of labor, possession of different properties, differentiation by ages, status positions, stages of
learning, or levels of skill. No one hierarchy is inevitable, and hierarchies are crumbling and forming constantly. What is
important, Burke emphasizes, is the inevitability of the hierarchic principle -the human impulse to build society around
ambition or hierarchy on the basis of commandments derived from the concept of the negative.
3. THE NEGATIVE IS A CONSTRUCTION CREATED BY HUMAN MOTIVE
Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is
Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 189
Choice, which we saw earlier is essential for action, is made possible only through the concept of the negative, which
provides for distinctions among acts. Burke begins the development of his notion of the negative by examining the world
of motion or nature. In this world, he finds, no negatives exist; I everything simply is what it is and as it is. " A tree, for
example, is a tree; in no way can it be "not a tree. " The only way in which something can "not be" something in nature is
for it to "be" something else. As Burke explains, "To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were
to go out hunting for the square root of minus-one. The negative is a fiction peculiar to symbol-systems, quite as the
square root of minus-one is an implication of a certain mathematical symbol system." There is no image of nothing in
nature. The negative is a concept that has no referent in reality; it is purely a creation of language. The notion of the
negative was added to the natural world as a product of our language; with language, humans invented the negative.
The negative is the essence of language, according to Burke, and "the ultimate test of symbolicity. "
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BURKE’S METHODS MAKE THE BEST STRATEGIES FOR ANALYZING RHETORIC
1. THE PENTADIC ELEMENTS ARE BEST USED TO GET AT A RHETOR’S MOTIVES
Kenneth Burke, A GRAMMAR OF MOTIVES, 1950, p. xv.
What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the
subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the
world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. These forms of though can be
embodied profoundly or trivially, truthfully or falsely. They are equally present in systematically elaborated metaphysical
structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered
at random. We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are.- Act, Scene, Agent, Agency,
Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place,
in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred);
also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used
(agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about die purposes behind a given act, or about the character of
the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally
different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind
of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he
did it (agency), and why (purpose).
2. COMIC CORRECTIVES AVOID THE INCONSISTENCIES OF DEBUNKING
Kenneth Burke, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, 1937, p. 166
We hold that it must be employed as an essentially comic notion containing two-way attributes lacking in polemical, oneway approaches to social necessity. It is neither euphemistic nor wholly debunking-hence it provides the charitable
attitude towards people that is required for purposes of persuasion and co-operation, but at the same time maintains
our shrewdness concerning the simplicities of “cashing in.” The mystifications of the priestly euphemisms, presenting the
most materialistic of acts in transcendentally “eulogistic coverings,” provided us with instruments too blunt for
discerning the play of economic factors. The debunking vocabulary (that really flowered with its great founder, Bentham,
who developed not merely a method of debunking but a methodology of debunking, while a group of mere epigones
have been cashing in on his genius for a century, bureaucratizing his imaginative inventions in various kinds of
"muck-raking" enterprises) can disclose material interests with great precision. Too great precision in fact. For though
the doctrine of Zweck im Rech veritable Occam's razor for the simplification of human motives, teaching us the role that
special material interests play in the "impartial" manipulations of the law, showing us that law can be privately owned
like any other property, it can be too thorough; in lowering human dignity so greatly, it lowers us all. A comic frame of
motives avoids these difficulties, showing us how an act can "dialectically" contain both transcendental and material
ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiment, both "'service" and "spoils.
3. TRAINED INCAPACITY STOPS US FROM MAKING CREDIBLE INTERPRETATIONS
Sonja Foss, Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Karen Foss, and Robert Trapp is Professor of Rhetoric at
Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 189
The result of occupational psychosis and its accompanying terministic screens is "trained incapacity," the condition in
which our abilities "function as blindnesses." As we adopt measures in keeping with our past training, the very soundness
of that training may lead us to misjudge situations and adopt the wrong measures for the achievement of our goals; thus,
our training becomes an incapacity. A person trained to work in the competitive business world of the United States, for
example, may be unable to cooperate with other businesspersons because of that training, even when cooperative
action alone will prevent the failure of the business. Given different occupations, terministic screens, and the consequent
trained incapacity, some differences among members of a hierarchy are likely to be significant-as with a king and
peasant, for example, an accountant and a musician, or a Sunday painter and a renowned professional artist. In other
cases, the differences among beings are imaginary; members of different racial groups, for example, may see differences
where none exist. In either case, members lack knowledge about other beings and see different modes of living in other
classes as implying different modes of thought.
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BURKE’S PROJECT IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED
1. BURKE OVEREMPHASIZES THE INDIVIDUAL RHETOR
Carole Blair, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at University of California, Davis, KENNETH BURKE AND
CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN THOUGHT, 1995 , p. 131
A discourse thus cannot be understood by understanding its authorship, nor can a discourse “reveal” a unitary author.
Discourses constitute and are constituted by numerous forces. Certainly people speak, but they do not speak as
independent, unsituated, or unconditioned ethoi. What “accounts for” a particular discourse is other discourse and the
social sanctions that enable or constrain it. Foucault does not thematize the ethos or cogito of an author as an end or a
means of studying discourse; he subverts the relation between author and work. Thus, the humanistic themes that
continue to pervade Burke’s critical program despite his own occasional suspicions about them, are set aside in
Foucault’s project. This posthumanism, which separates Foucault from Burke, finds its source in their differential views of
language use.
2. CONSTRAINTS ON INDIVIDUAL DISCOURSE GIVE RHETORIC POWER
Carole Blair, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at University of California, Davis, KENNETH BURKE AND
CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN THOUGHT, 1995 , p. 141
It is rarity that invests the statement with power. Since not just anyone can speak, at just any time, in just any manner,
about just any topic, the rules of discursive practice function as enablers and constrainers of who can speak, when, in
what ways, and about what. As a result, what is said counts; it makes a difference, even if a small one, in the field of
discourse it enters.
3. RHETORICAL MOTIVES DO NOT EXIST
James W. Chesebro, Chair and Professor in Communications at Indiana State University, KENNETH BURKE AND
CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN THOUGHT, 1995 , p. 177
Third, writing no longer represents reality. For Derrida, all of the traditional relations among the signified (reality), signs
(language), and signifiers (human beings) have been drastically reconfigured. Signs (language) no longer represent the
signified (reality). Even more pointedly, not only have signs become a reflection of signifiers, but also the signified is not
solely and absolutely a reflection of the signifiers. As Derrida has put it, “in the last instance, the difference between
signified and signifier is nothing”. Thus, an exploration of a text becomes a study of only a human construction. As
Derrida is now famous for noting, “There is nothing outside of the text.” In context, Derrida has maintained that reading
“cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical,
historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have
taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general”.
Thus, human beings are “trapped inside language.” In Derrida’s view, writing has never and will never contain “positive
terms” for the “positive entities” in reality. He likewise maintains that speech, now conditioned and determined by the
written mode, provides only an illusion of immediacy and directness as a signifying system for dealing with reality.
Human knowledge is literally and solely contained within the texts human beings have created. Accordingly, insofar as
we understand through language, the unidimensional nature of language encourages political oppression, inhibits
explorations of reality and the search for truth, and perhaps more profoundly for a philosopher such as Derrida, no
longer allows human beings to equate being or essence with the subjective.
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BURKE’S PROJECT MAKES HARMFUL ASSUMPTIONS
1. BURKE’S DEFINITION OF MAN IS ESSENTIALIST OF WOMEN
Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np.
Burke defines Man as “the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or
moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit
of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection. This strikes me as a fairly perceptive summary
of the average Euro-American heterosexual XY. But essentialist feminism has taught us that it is not a good summation of
the majority of experiences of the other genders. For example, for most Euro-American heterosexual XX’s of the past, it
is the positivity of particular experiences (e.g. maternal love) that has formed the dominant influence on languaging.
Consequently, for such women the fact that “the negative” is a unique creaton of language does not mean that it forms
the essense of language. Similarly, as radical feminist critics of science and technology, especially critics of the new birth
technologies, have pointed out, it is men who have created the instruments that separate women from their natural
conditions and it is largely for this reason that the separation has been so oppressive.
2. BURKE’S DRAMATISM IS ETHNOCENTRIC
Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np
I suspect that at some time, in more or less perfected form, persons in all cultures engage in victimage rituals. What I am
suggesting is that victimage may not be the dominant motive structure of all cultures. What Burke’s ethnocentric version
of Dramatism threatens to blind us to is the multiplicity of different motive structures available in language. To move
post-Burke is not, then, to deny that victimage is a should look for other universally available potentials in language and
add them to the Dramatistic dictionary. Additionally, it is to hint that while victimage might show up in many cultures,
the nature of victimage might very substantially. The Burkean definition of "victimage” may need casuistric streching.
3. BURKE WOULD HAVE US LAUGH AT OUR OWN CLASS OPPRESSION
Celeste Michelle Condit, Associate Professor of Speech Communication at University of Georgia, QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF SPEECH, August 1992, p.np.
The need for revision is made urgent by the fact that another great depression is reasonably likely in the near future. We
are approaching the point in the business cycle where so much wealth is held by so few persons that consumption
becomes inadequate to support industrial production. That we have reached such a point so soon after experiencing the
Great Depression is frustrating, but a great deal of business money has been spent helping Americans to forget that
unbridled capitalism tends towards temporary collapses. However, it is not merely that the public is gullible. Even
academics never learned the lessons that those such as Burke taught the last time around. Burke would have us
transcend this tragedy by adopting a comic frame. Burke accepted Marx’s analysis of the class situation, but he rejected
Marx’s solution. At several points Burke suggests a preference for socialism, but he also indicates that a specific
economic form is not the fundamental problem. In other words, he locates the problem of wealth and poverty outside of
capitalism, at a deeper level, in language itself, where the urge to hierarchy tends to be generated (or, I would argue, at
least exacerbated). Burke’s analysis has been shown to be largely correct; we have learned that even in non-capitalist
systems, dominated by discourses of equality, hierarchies reappear; and those “on top” systematically allocate to
themselves more of the goods of social life than they allow to their “equals.”
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Judith Butler
Imagine the spectacle of a gay pride parade: flamboyant cross-dressing, same-sex displays of affection, signs and posters
advertising the legitimacy of outside the mainstream conceptions of sexuality, lesbians dressed as "butch" or "femme,"
transsexuals, male transvestite "drag queens," even gay men and lesbians who look like they could have come right out
of the corporate business world -- all in some way defy societal expectations of the correct performance of gender
through their appearance in the parade. Some people welcome the idea, others believe it to be a disgusting
abomination, and the majority finds it slightly distressing or somewhat unsettling. Why does gay pride make some
people feel "unsettled"? Judith Butler would argue that what is being "unsettled" are the norms and taken for granted
assumptions about gender that are common in our culture and society.
Martha Nussbaum, a professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, writes, “Butler's main idea, first introduced
in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what
women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social
relations of power.”15 Judith Butler is a professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California,
Berkeley. Butler's ideas of gender as something we "do" not something we "are" recasts contemporary debates over
feminism, women's political issues, and gay/lesbian studies.
WHAT IS GENDER?
Simone de Beauvior, an early feminist, said that "one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman." This observation, that
women are not biologically determined creatures, but rather, through an accumulation of social norms, practices, and
expectations, they fulfill their assigned roles in order to become women, provides a starting point for Judith Butler. For
Butler gender is not a "stable identity." Rather, gender is constituted and instituted "through a stylized repetition of
acts."
Butler derives influence from "the phenomenological theory of acts" put forth by such philosophers as Huserl, MerleauPonty, and Mead. She explains that phenomenology grounds theory in lived experience. It "seeks to explain the
mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social
sign." Butler is influenced by "post-modern" or "post-structural" philosophy that challenges the idea that behind the
signs, symbols, and words we use to describe our realities, there is an objective and perfect truth. These philosophers
argue that social reality is brought about by the ways we describe it and act it out. These actions are so daily, ordinary,
and commonplace, that we rarely question them.
For example, the woman who applies lipstick everyday without question constitutes her social reality in which women
are supposed to have colorful lips. However, there is no objective reality behind this woman's conception of femininity as
including makeup. No laws or rules are written somewhere that state that women have red lips. Further, there is no
independent "choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts)."
Hence, there is no "woman" behind the act of application of makeup who is an independent, free, unchanging, choosing
agent. Butler challenges classical philosophical idea of the stable subject, as opposed to the objects that subject acts
upon. The woman, would be traditionally considered the subject, as opposed to the object, the makeup she chooses.
Butler argues, however, that the woman is also an object. She is an object of the "constitutive acts" that create what it
means to be feminine. Butler challenges the divide between the subject and object. 16
Butler adopts a division that many feminists make between "sex" and "gender." Feminists argue that "sex" is the
biological fact of being a man or a woman, depending on the body one has when born. Gender, in contrast, is the social
and historical meaning assigned to bearers of those body parts. Butler argues that this doesn't deny "the existence and
facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body," meaning, Butler doesn't want to say that there are no such
Nussbaum, Martha. “The Professor of Parody--The hip defeatism of Judith Butler.” The New Republic. Feb 22, 1999. p.
37.
16
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory."
THEATRE JOURNAL. 1988. Volume 40. p. 519.
15
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things as breasts, penises, ovaries, etc. Her argument is rather that the way we understand the fact of these material and
natural body parts is determined by our history, society, and culture. The words we use to describe body parts
themselves would have no resonance with us if it was not for the historical norms that gives them meaning. Without the
repetition of these norms, there would be no gender at all. Butler seeks to analyze how the material and natural
dimensions of the body come to acquire meaning as gender.
Butler conceives of our understanding of the body as a set of "possibilities." A possibility is not something concrete and
certain in the objective world. It is not an "interior essence" or fixed and stable identity. Possibility conveys the sense
that a body could potentially undergo a process that would create meaning for it. She writes "the body is always an
embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a
historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical
situation." Our historical conventions place limits on the possibilities we have for understanding our embodiment, but
we reproduce those historical conventions when we adopt them in order to understand our bodies as "male" or
"female." Enacting gender is a way of "taking up" or "rendering" historical possibilities.
Butler's phenomenological understanding of acts leads her to conceive of gender as a "performance” or a "drama" using
the metaphor of the theatre. Daily performances both constitute what gender means and enact it. Butler writes, "By
dramatic, I mean only that the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities." A
person is not her or his body. A person "does" her or his body. The body is an enactment, a drama, a playing out of
scripts that are determined by history, culture, and society. Butler, however, laments the fact that the conventions of
language force her to construct sentences with an active subject, the "I" who plays out gender on an object, "my body."
She argues, "the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or antecedent to the process of
embodying itself." The possibilities that are played out are also "active subjects" in the sense that they prescribe limits on
the meaning that can be expressed, and the "I" is their object. 17
It is also important to note that this drama is repeated on a continual basis. Butler writes "the body becomes its gender
through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time." 18 She explains, "As anthropologist
Victor Turner suggests in his studies of ritual social drama, social action requires a performance which is repeated. This
repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the
mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation." 19 The drama must repeat itself continually to inscribe itself onto our
collective subconscious. It becomes a ritual. Every time it is repeated, it increases its legitimacy and status as normal and
natural.
Gender is not only a performance, it is a historical strategy. Gender is "a strategy of survival" for a culture that depends
on two genders, masculinity and femininity, to maintain its hegemony and transmit its norms. Butler writes, "Discrete
genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture." Your humanity is dependent on whether
you are properly a "man" or a "woman." Those who fail to meet the definition of one or the other, for example,
hermaphrodites, those born with both male and female sexual equipment, are considered monstrous and inhuman,
creatures that need to be surgically "fixed" to meet the definition of either "man" or "woman" for acceptance as human.
Punishment is the result of choosing not to conform to gender rules. Women considered too masculine and men
considered too feminine are regularly ridiculed and ostracized. They are not "real women" or "real men." The young boy
who wants to go to ballet class with his sister is laughed at on the playground and encouraged by his father to play
hockey instead. Examples abound. Butler writes that this ostracism is a cultural strategy: "those who fail to perform their
gender right are regularly punished." They are punished for failing to strive for a certain ideal of femininity or
masculinity. However, this ideal is not a "natural fact." Butler writes that gender is "a construction that regularly conceals
its genesis." It hides the way it came into being with the illusion of an origin in science, biology, or natural fact. Gender
purports to be natural and essential, when it is only constituted by "tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and
sustain discrete and polar genders." These actions increase the credibility of the gender system: "The authors of gender
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 521.
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 523.
19
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 526.
17
18
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become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and naturalness."
Gender is a drama and also a fiction.20
Nusbaum provides a clear articulation of Butler's conception of gender as a performance: "when we act and speak in a
gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting
it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female "natures," we co-create the social
fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there." 21
Butler describes the hegemonic order of gender as a set of scripts that have already been rehearsed and are given to
each individual. The act has been going on since before the actors "arrived on the scene" and the scripts will survive the
individuals who act them out. However, for their perpetuation, these dramas must be continually "reproduced as
reality."22
BUTLER AND A POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE
Butler argues that from a realization that gender is performance, and not emanating from a natural, fixed, stable source,
we can challenge dominant and hegemonic norms about how gender should be enacted. The result is a proliferation of
gender performances, much like the gay pride parade. Nussbaum explains Butler's idea of resistance: "by carrying out
these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little."23
Alternative gender performances open up a space to reconceptualize dominant categories and provide more freedom
for identity.
Butler notes that this type of resistance is a difficult way to establish a basis for political action. She writes, "it seems
difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a way to conceptualize the scale and systemic character of women's oppression
from a theoretical position which takes constituting acts to be its point of departure. Although individual acts do work to
maintain and reproduce systems of oppression, and, indeed, any theory of personal political responsibility presupposes
such a view, it doesn't follow that oppression is a sole consequence of such acts." The relationship between acts of
gender constitution and oppression is more difficult to describe than simple cause and effect. She writes that this
relationship is neither "unilateral nor unmediated." The only possibility for resistance is to transform "hegemonic social
conditions rather than the individual acts that are spawned by those conditions."
Despite this warning, Butler sees potential for resistance in performative acts. Deriving inspiration from the feminist
slogan, "the personal is political," Butler claims that the set of acts that constitute gender are "shared experience and
'collective action.'" These acts do not belong just to individuals, rather, they are public acts that make sense in cultural
and social contexts. Butler doesn't want to say that individuals have role, "Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways
of doing one's gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions, is
clearly not a fully individual matter." 24 Butler wants to say that gender is neither an individual choice nor is it fully
"inscribed" on an individual by society, culture, and history. She explains that "actors are always already on the stage,
within the terms of the performance."
Butler calls attention to the point at which the analogy between the theatre and gendered performances breaks down. In
the theatre, we do not believe that the performances are meant to represent reality. But in our daily lives, those
performances constitute our realities. She describes, "the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and
applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence."
This experience, in which "the act is not contrasted with the real, but constitute a reality that is in some sense new, a
modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated into the pre-existing categories that regulate gender reality"
presents an opportunity to restructure the limits of possibility for gendered performance. These experiences, which most
often leave people feeling unsettled (but isn't "she" really a "he"?) call into question whether or not a "reality" of gender
exists. More than just calling into question the reality of gender, the transvestite "challenges, at least implicitly, the
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 522.
Nussbaum. p. 37.
22
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 526.
23
Nussbaum. p. 37.
24
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 525.
20
21
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distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity."
Gender is "real only to the extent that it is performed." 25
In addition to this "critical genealogy of gender," a "politics of performative gender acts" is imperative. This politics "both
redescribes existing gender identities and offers a prescriptive view about the kind of gender reality there ought to be."
The drag queen effectively redescribes an existing feminine gender identity and challenges the association with biological
sex. She/He should be able to demonstrate the complexity of gender free from punitive consequences. 26 Butler writes,
"The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the
possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding
identity as a politically tenuous construction." By recognizing that genders are "neither true nor false" we give license to
an infinite configuration of gendered performances, not only in gay pride parades, but in everyday life. 27
BUTLER AND FEMINISM
Butler explains the applicability of her theory of gender to feminists: "From a feminist point of view, one might try to
reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure,
essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic." A vision of feminist politics that arises from Butler's theory would
be starkly different from mainstream feminist organizing in the United States today. Butler writes "There are thus acts
which are done in the name of women, and then there are acts in and of themselves, apart from any instrumental
consequence, that challenge the category of women itself." Acts done in the name of women would be the majority of
feminist political projects, for example, attempts to integrate women into previously male dominated fields, attempts to
set aside specific places for women, such as "women-only" Women's Studies courses, or women's shelters, or attempts
to restructure government and society to accommodate women's concerns, such as child-rearing, maternity leave, and
education.
Butler is critical of this sort of feminist political action. She writes, "one ought to consider the futility of a political
program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the
category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed
situation." Butler criticizes feminism for an unquestioned acceptance of the stable category of "women." The idea of
"women" as a category is dependent on social, historical, and cultural contexts. The idea of a "universal woman" who is
the subject of feminist discourse, obscures differences between women and "provides a false ontological promise of
eventual political solidarity." Ontology is a theory of being, what it means to exist. There is no objective existence as a
"woman." Every woman's experience is mediated by her race, class, age, gender, nationality, and a myriad of factors too
numerous to list. Every woman's experience does not fit the mold of oppression feminism seeks to combat. 28
The binary gender system that feminism perpetuates continues to channel people into the categories of "men" and
"women," closing down options for subversive, alternative gendered performances. A politics of gendered performances,
however, can break down conceptions of femininity that tie women to domestic work and keep men from child-rearing.
It destroy the notion that men need to be masculine and women need to be feminine in order to achieve normalcy, thus
increasing the political, social, and cultural potentials for every individual.
CRITICISMS OF BUTLER
Martha Nussbaum, a well known Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, takes Butler to task for what
she calls a “moral quietism” on the scale of “radical libertarianism.” Nussbaum writes, “For Butler, the act of subversion
is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No
bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.”
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 527.
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 530.
27
Butler, Judith. . GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY. (New York: Routledge,
1990). p. 141.
28
Butler. "Performative Acts…" p. 523.
25
26
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Nussbaum considers Butler to be too theoretical and to have too little application to practical life. Nussbaum criticizes
Butler for failing to write in a way that is clear and accessible for those unfamiliar with post-modern jargon.
Others criticize Butler's politics of gender subversion as being too decontextualized. Susan Bordo critiques Butler's theory
of subversion, "She does not locate the text in question (the body in drag) in cultural context (are we watching the
individual in a gay club or on the "Donahue" show?), does not consider the possibly different responses of various
readers (male or female, young or old, gay or straight?) or the various anxieties that might complicate their readings… 29
Although Bordo agrees with Butler "in theory," she questions the likelihood that drag performances can destabilize the
"binary frame" of gender identities.30 Bordo recommends that the subversiveness of gender performances be analyzed in
social and historical context.31 Bordo is also critical of drag performances for perpetuating "highly dualist gender
ontologies" and considers gender ambiguity a better way to destabilize the notion that there are only two impermeable
and fixed genders, male and female.32
JUDITH BUTLER AND DEBATE
Butler's theory that there is no truth to gender is vital in debates over feminism, women's issues, and gender. Butler's
theory can provide the basis for a powerful critique of calls for legal changes that fail to question gender norms. Butler's
theory can also provide reasons to reinvision status quo conventions about gender in order to open political space and
freedom for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and others. A good starting place to gain an understanding of Butler's work is
her book Gender Trouble.
29
Bordo, Susan. UNBEARABLE WEIGHT. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). p. 292-293
Bordo. p. 293.
31
Bordo. p. 294.
32
Bordo. p. 293.
30
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Bibliography
Benhabib, Seyla, et al. FEMINIST CONTENTIONS : A PHILOSOPHICAL EXCHANGE (THINKING
GENDER). New York: Routledge, 1995.
Butler, Judith. BODIES THAT MATTER: ON THE DISCURSIVE LIMITS OF "SEX." (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
Butler, Judith. (interview) “The Body You Want.” ARTFORUM. November 1992. Volume 31, Number 3,
p. 82
Butler, Judith. EXCITABLE SPEECH: A POLITICS OF THE PERFORMATIVE. (New York : Routledge,
1997).
Butler, Judith and Joan W. Scott. FEMINISTS THEORIZE THE POLITICAL. (New York: Routledge,
1992).
Butler, Judith. GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY. (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
Butler, Judith. THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF POWER: THEORIES IN SUBJECTION. (Stanford, Ca: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
Butler, Judith. SUBJECTS OF DESIRE: HEGELIAN REFLECTIONS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
FRANCE. (New York : Columbia University Press, 1987).
Cheah, Pheng and Elizabeth Grosz. “The Future Of Sexual Difference: An Interview With Judith Butler
And Drucilla Cornell.” DIACRITICS: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM, Spring 1998, Volume 28, Number 1, p. 19
Costera Meijer, Irene and Baukje Prins. “How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview With Judith Butler.”
SIGNS. Winter 1998, Volume 23, Issue 2, p. 275
Duggan, Lisa. “The Theory Wars, Or, Who's Afraid Of Judith Butler?” JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S
HISTORY, Spring 1998 Volume 10, Number 1, p. 9
Fraser, Nancy. “Heterosexism, Misrecognition And Capitalism: A Response To Judith Butler.” NEW
LEFT REVIEW, March-April 1998, Number 228, p. 140
Hood-Williams, John and Wendy Cealey Harrison. “Trouble With Gender.” THE SOCIOLOGICAL
REVIEW, February 1998, Volume 46, Number 1, p. 73.
Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy. “Fashionable Subjects: On Judith Butler And The Causal Idioms Of
Postmodern Feminist Theory.” POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY, September 1997, Volume 50, Number 3, p. 649.
Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFORMANCE. (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
Nussbaum, Martha. “The Professor of Parody--The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler.” THE NEW
REPUBLIC. Feb 22, 1999. p. 37.
Singer, Linda. EROTIC WELFARE: SEXUAL THEORY AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EPIDEMIC.
Ed. Judith Butler and Maureen MacGrogan. (New York : Routledge, 1993).
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GENDER IS PERFORMANCE
1. GENDER NORMS ARE CONSTITUTED IN REPETIVE ACTS.
Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 148
If taken as the grounds of feminist theory or politics, these "effects" of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality
are not only misdescribed as foundations, but the signifying practices that enable this metaleptic misdescription remain
outside the purview of a feminist critique of gender relations. To enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of
signification is not a choice, for the "I" that might enter is always already inside: there is no possibility of agency or reality
outside of the discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have. The task is not whether to
repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender
norms that enable the repetition itself. There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender
ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as
intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive
requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility.
2. GENDER IS NOT NATURAL.
Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 148-149
Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political
discourse as its necessary ground. The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it
establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated. This kind of critique brings into question the
foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated. The internal paradox of this
foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very "subjects" that it hopes to represent and liberate. The
task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that
already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. If identities
were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices
derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would
surely emerge from the ruins of the old. Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their
present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life,
confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness. What other local strategies for
engaging the "unnatural" might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such?
3. GENDER IS NOT FIXED; IT IS A PRACTICE.
Judith Butler, Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, GENDER TROUBLE, 1990, p. 33
Woman Itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an
ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the
most reified forms, the "congealing" is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social
means. it is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a telos that governs the process of
acculturation and construction. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political
genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its
constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police
the social appearance of gender. To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a
move which has been a part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of
showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits.of possibilities
that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies.
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BUTLER PROVIDES A BASIS FOR FEMINIST POLITICS
1. BUTLER’S PRESCRIPTIONS DESTABLIZE HEGEMONIC SEXUAL CATEGORIES
Susan Hekman, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, HYPATIA, Fall 1995, p. 151.
Butler defines her own political position in the context of a discussion of the growing literature on "radical democracy."
She rejects what she declares to be the impossible ideal of this position radical inclusivity. In a densely argued critique of
Slavoj Zizek's politics, Butler rejects his claim that politics should be grounded in the "real" that lies outside the symbolic.
Butler makes it clear that for feminist politics this means that instead of invoking "woman" as the real beyond the
symbolic, we should instead "mobilize the necessary error of identity". She argues that we can and should invoke the
category "woman," but our aim in doing so must be to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. Butler's
prescriptions for a feminist politics, then, come to something like this: feminists can deploy the categories of abjection
which, although constituted by the hegemonic law of sex, can be used to destabilize that law. Although categories such
as "queer" are not inherently destabilizing, they can and should be used as a site of resignification and refiguration of the
symbolic that produce them. In other words, it is not enough to be "queer," one must be "critically queer."
2. BUTLER’S CRITIQUE OF GENDER SPURS POLITICAL ACTION
Lisa Duggan, Professor of History, New York University, JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY. Spring, 1998, p. 9.
But Sokal and his supporters, including Rosen, Epstein, and Pollitt, aim their attacks at a very amorphous target called
"postmodernism," "deconstruction," or "cultural studies"--all very different intellectual practices, and not all guilty as
charged--or just designated as Theory, or personified as Judith Butler--whom many see as having an almost magical
power to destroy progressive activism. From another point of view, Butler's work has enabled forms of activism. Perhaps
it is this queer activism ("harmless cross-dressing") and not Theory alone that is the underlying target of some of the
attacks. Polarizing "theory" and "politics" (the "academic" and the "activist" as Rosen, Epstein, and Pollitt do) requires
some major oversights and distortions. Many of the arguments assigned to "academic/ theory" can be found in
"political/ activist" discourses too. During the 1980s, interventions into leftist and feminist politics on the grounds of race
and sexuality appeared in grassroots organizing and organizational conflicts as well as in scholarship and theory. Many
leftist feminists have only belatedly and begrudgingly accommodated these interventions. Historians and others located
in the university have some reason to assign them to a younger generation of "pomo"-influenced scholars. Sometimes,
the impulse to attack Theory and its pretensions can function as a displacement of generational tensions and political
conflict.
3. FEMINIST POLITICS MUST CONTEST THE MEANING OF THE TERM “WOMEN.”
Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard University John F. Kennedy
School of Government, American Political Science Review, December 1995, p. 1003.
Butler then turns to the political necessity within feminism to "speak as and for women." This necessity, she writes,
needs to be reconciled with the complementary necessity of continually contesting the meaning of that word. Feminists
should assume that "'women' designates an undesignatable field of differences," so that "the very term becomes a site
of permanent openness and resignifiability." She urges, on these grounds, that "the rifts among women over the content
of the term ought to be safeguarded and prized, indeed, that this constant rifting ought to be affirmed as the
ungrounded ground of feminist theory".
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BUTLER’S FEMINISM DESTROYS ANY CHANCES FOR REAL CHANGE
1. BUTLER OFFERS NO POSSIBILITIES FOR REAL CHANGE
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.
Up to this point, Butler's contentions, though relatively familiar, are plausible and even interesting, though one is already
unsettled by her narrow vision of the possibilities for change. Yet Butler adds to these plausible claims about gender two
other claims that are stronger and more contentious. The first is that there is no agent behind or prior to the social forces
that produce the self. If this means only that babies are born into a gendered world that begins to replicate males and
females almost immediately, the claim is plausible, but not surprising: experiments have for some time demonstrated
that the way babies are held and talked to, the way their emotions are described, are profoundly shaped by the sex the
adults in question believe the child to have. (The same baby will be bounced if the adults think it is a boy, cuddled if they
think it is a girl; its crying will be labeled as fear if the adults think it is a girl, as anger if they think it is a boy.) Butler
shows no interest in these empirical facts, but they do support her contention. If she means, however, that babies enter
the world completely inert, with no tendencies and no abilities that are in some sense prior to their experience in a
gendered society, this is far less plausible, and difficult to support empirically. Butler offers no such support, preferring to
remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction. (Indeed, her recent Freudian work may even repudiate this idea: it
suggests, with Freud, that there are at least some presocial impulses and tendencies, although, typically, this line is not
clearly developed.) Moreover, such an exaggerated denial of pre-cultural agency takes away some of the resources that
Chodorow and others use when they try to account for cultural change in the direction of the better.
2.BUTLER’S DENIAL OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE DENIES FEMINISM IMPORTANT TOOLS
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.
And yet it is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs
or lions, but we do not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and reshape some aspects of our bodily
existence, but it does not shape all the aspects of it. "In the man burdened by hunger and thirst," as Sextus Empiricus
observed long ago, "it is impossible to produce by argument the conviction that he is not so burdened." This is an
important fact also for feminism, since women's nutritional needs (and their special needs when pregnant or lactating)
are an important feminist topic. Even where sex difference is concerned, it is surely too simple to write it all off as
culture; nor should feminists be eager to make such a sweeping gesture. Women who run or play basketball, for
example, were right to welcome the demolition of myths about women's athletic performance that were the product of
male-dominated assumptions; but they were also right to demand the specialized research on women's bodies that has
fostered a better understanding of women's training needs and women's injuries. In short: what feminism needs, and
sometimes gets, is a subtle study of the interplay of bodily difference and cultural construction. And Butler's abstract
pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.
3. BUTLER’S CRITIQUE IS FATALISTIC
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37
In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising
their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler's ideal suggests that these
symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered
women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections
through it. Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of
real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even
perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of
realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women
deserve better.
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BUTLER’S FEMINISM IS MORAL QUIETISM
1. BUTLER’S FEMINISM IS QUIETISM AND RETREAT
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.
Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the
extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of
political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that
we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving
power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is
still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our
resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.
One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young
scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature
than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of oldstyle feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler's
work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like
quietism and retreat.
2. BUTLER’S FEMINISM CONSIGNS WOMEN TO SUBORDINATION
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.
But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any
direction. Indeed, Butler's naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every
friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender
norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of
non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one's fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist
as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have
to articulate those norms-and this Butler refuses to do.
3. BUTLER ESCHEWS LEGAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE; CONSIGNING WOMEN TO SUBORDINATION
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, THE NEW REPUBLIC, February 22, 1999, p. 37.
Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and
subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the
institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the
possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to
some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have
changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist
before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were
changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad,
should, and would, yield before justice. Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She
finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave
who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we
all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems
to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change.
Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation
of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.
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Antonio Caso
(1883-1946)
INTRODUCTION
Jose Vasconcelos, at the funeral oration for Antonio Caso, stated that he was, “the most eloquent voice of Mexican
philosophy, that voice which kindled in human minds the love for truth and beauty…. You were a despiser of everything
vile and wicked; you were disdainful of money, and you turned your back on power…. With your great gifts you might
have gained materially comfortable positions of influence. Many times Fortune knocked at your door, but you refused to
open because you had decided to remain loyal to your vocation as a thinker…. Meanwhile, your conscience stayed wide
awake, sensitive to noble actions and sublime ideas…. Those who follow your leadership recognized in your balanced
mind the marks of the classicist; in your sensitivity, those of the romanticist; in the integrity of your conduct, those of the
gentleman. Maestro complete: wherever there is a school, there is your fatherland. Mexicano universal: through you
our nation occupies a distinguished place in contemporary thought.” (Reinhardt, “A Mexican Personalist,” 1946, p. 20).
Caso wrote extensively in several areas of philosophy, including theory of knowledge (Problemas Filosoficos), ethics (the
Existencia and other works), social philosophy (La Persona Humana y el Estado Totalitario), philosophy of history (El
Concepto de la Historia Universal y la Filosofia de los Valores), history of philosophy, and aesthetics, which is contained
chiefly in his Principios de Estetica and in his Existencia como Economia, como Desinteres y como Caridad.
LIFE AND TIMES
Antonio Caso was born in Mexico City to the liberal, positivist, engineer, Antonio Caso Moreli and to Doña Maria
Andrade, who was a Catholic and instilled in Caso an admiration for Christ. In 1897, he entered the Preparatory National
School, where he was taught by Ezequiel Chávez and Justo, who influenced him toward positivism (although Caso would
fight against it later). He received his bachelor's degree in law from the National School of Jurisprudence, which he
attended from 1902-1906.
He devoted his life to teaching philosophy, logic, ethics, aesthetics, literature, philosophy of history and sociology in the
Preparatory School, the School of Jurisprudence and Superior Studies (now the School of Philosophy and Literature of
the UNAM). He was the director of the National Preparatory School in 1909; secretary of the National University in 1910;
rector of the National University from 1920-192); and director of the School of Philosophy and Literature from 19301932. He taught without imposing a philosophic system. He was the first to teach the philosophic intuitionism of
Bergson, the thesis of Spengler, phenomenology of Husserl, neotomism of Maritain, existentialism and historicism of
Dilthey. He taught philosophy and sociology as useful tools to learn the truth.
Antonio Caso’s philosophical contentions were based in his intellectual rebellion against positivism and the tyrannical
rule of President Diaz (from 1876 to 1911, except for one four-year period). The ideals of the Cientificos (the party of the
scientists) were political order and economic progress, with positivism as the intellectual tool and President Porfirio Diaz
as the political force to operate it. Some historians argue that traditionally, when positivism is applied to politics, an
extreme form of democracy arises, proclaiming the absolute rule of the people (Radical Academy). Freedom is
understood as the full liberty of the individual, so long as it doesn’t threaten the rights of others. This laissez-faire
doctrine in economics leads to Manchesterism, a theory based on a liberal principle of economic freedom, which allows
the employer to pay the lowest possible wage without any moral responsibility toward the worker. This was exemplified
through the rule of Diaz. During his rule, foreign capital dominated the economic life of Mexico, with foreign ownership
of most of the land, industries, and natural resources.
Caso founded, together with Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henriquez Ureña, Jose Vasconcelos and Carlos Gonzalez Peña, the
magazine Savia Moderna, under the direction of Alfonso Cravioto and Luis Castillo Ledon. Upon the dissolution of the
magazine, the group became the Ateneo de la Juventud (1909-1910), which was propelled against positivism by
skepticism of the Don Justo Mountain range. They openly lectured and wrote against positivism and sought to renew the
cultural atmosphere in Mexico through freedom of expression, anti-intellectualism, spiritualism, and patriotism. Caso
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was a member of the first governing body of the UNAM in 1945, a member of the Mexican Academy of Language, and a
founding member of El Colegio Nacional in 1943. In 1920, he traveled as plenipotentiary ambassador of Mexico to Peru,
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The universities of Havana, Lima, Guatemala, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro
granted him the title of Honorary Doctor.
IDEALISM (ANTI-POSITIVISM)
The National Preparatory School that Antonio Caso attended was strongly under the positivist influence of Auguste
Comte. Positivism is a narrow philosophy of science that denies any validity exists at all to “knowledge” that is not
derived through accepted methods of science. So, in opposition to Aristotle, science cannot be the knowledge of things
through their ultimate causes, since material and formal causes are unknowable. Theoretical speculation as a means of
obtaining knowledge is rejected for verifiable experience in all affairs, including the physical, social, and economic world.
Positivism holds three primary contentions: First, that the sciences emerged in strict order, beginning with mathematics
and astronomy, followed by physics, chemistry, and biology in that order, and finishing in the newest science of
sociology. Second, that all thought follows the “law of the three stages,” passing progressively from superstition to
science by first being religious, then abstract or metaphysical, and finally by being positive or scientific. Third, that “sense
experience is the only object of human knowledge as well as its sole and supreme criterion. Hence abstract notions or
general ideas are nothing more than collective notions; judgments are mere empirical colligations of facts” (Sauvage
1911).
Caso went along with positivism in his youth, but changed his thinking after graduating from the School of Jurisprudence.
Along with Jose Vasconcelos, Pedro Henriquez Urena, and Alfonso Reyes, he helped form the Ateneo de la Juventud,
consisting of about fifty members. They sought the destruction of Porfirism, the removal of foreign economic controls in
Mexico, and the lessening of the influences of positivism on the cultural and educational life of Mexico (Flower 1949).
Caso critiqued positivism for creating a generation of Mexicans greedy for material wealth and willing to support a
dictator for thirty years (Haddox 1971). Caso claimed that the positivists tried to kill the essence of soulful Mexico, but
that the Ateneo de la Juventud sought to discover the proper character of Mexico and to develop a Mexican philosophy
(Haddox 1971). It was difficult for a philosophical revolution to occur, because of the colonial mentality that resulted in
dependency on Spain for its ideas, institutions, customs, and traditions (Haddox 1971). Caso also critiqued positivism for
its arbitrary emphasis on specific limited aspects of human experience (Caso, Positivismo, Neopositivism 1941).
Caso is labeled an idealist. He argued that rational knowledge must be based in intuition and feeling instead of purely on
verifiable experience, like positivism (Caso, Problemas Filosoficos, 1915). The goal of knowledge should be to teach
people how to live. Intuition is linked to a concept that leads to action (Haddox 1971). In his later works, he moves
beyond his social pragmatism and argues that pure theoretical knowledge can never satisfy human goals, but that the
goal of activity becomes a life of love and sacrifice for others (Caso, La Filosofia de la Cultura, 1936). He argued that
philosophy should be based on all aspects of human experience, including the poetic, historical, political, scientific, and
religious spheres (Caso, La Existencia como Economia, 1916; Caso, Filosofos y Doctrinas Morales, 1915).
EXISTENCE
Caso sought to explain existence and assign it value. This is an important search, since how existence is defined is a
fundamental aspect of society and determines how culture is transmitted and renewed (Leon 1998).
He believed that a being can obtain the ultimate happiness in love and contemplation of God; and that hope for this also
gives joy (Haddox 1971). Caso was critical of any philosophical systematization of existence, which he felt always
reduced reality down to a positivist view of it as rational, empirical, or practical (Haddox 1971). Instead, he sought a
synthesis of the diverse aspects of existence to provide an integrated picture of the whole world (Haddox 1971).
Caso sought to establish a synthesis between six different points of view regarding existence (Caso, La Existencia com
Economia, 1943): First is the metaphysical point of view which explains existence by means of “eternal truths,” which is
opposed to the historical point of view, which views reality based on its changing character. Third is the criterion of
utility, which seeks the most personal gain with the least amount of effort, which is opposed to the ethical, Christian
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point of view that seeks charity and unselfish love. Finally is the logical view, which is based on purely formal relations
among abstract ideas, versus the aesthetic view which is that of intuitions of beauty free of any practical interest.
Caso argues that the three levels of being; thing, individual, and person, follow an ascending path starting with inanimate
objects and ending in God (Caso, La Persona Humana y el Estado Totalitario, 1941). A thing is a physical, inanimate
object that can be divided up with no essential change in nature. Individuals are living, organic beings composed of
heterogeneous parts that cannot be divided up without killing the being. There are three forms of individuals: plants,
brute animals, and humans. Finally, a person is a human who conceives of general ideas, creates values, has a spiritual
dimension, and creates culture.
PERSONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
As a personalist, Caso argued that a sociopolitical order based in biological-individualism over the spiritual-personal side
of human nature leads to individualistic, laissez-faire capitalism or communism (Haddox 1971). He argues that both
systems view humans purely in egoistic, economic terms. The individualistic capitalist wants more through his/her own
economic activities; whereas, the communistic egoist wants more through the economic activities of the community
(Haddox 1971). He saw communism as a dogmatic religion, but without a god (Caso, La Persona Humana y el Estado
Totalitario, 1941). He argued that instead of the nationalism he supported, communism results in a form of nationalism
with the state as the idol (Caso, El Peligro del Hombre, 1942).
“Egoism fosters the extremes of laissez-faire individualistic capitalism or totalitarian communism; personalism leads to a
just society in which the rights and duties of both the individual and the community are not opposed but justly
coordinated” (Haddox 1971, p.38). Caso argued that society exists for the realization of human nature and the
perfection of personality; that society is a means and never an end (Haddox 1971). Humans were born for society, not
the other way around, as many moralists argue. He argued that neither the individual nor the community was worth
more, but a society based on justice was paramount. “This is a moral union of men [sic], respecting their value. The
community that tyrannizes man [sic] forgets that persons are ‘persons,’ spiritual centers of cultural action, not mere
‘biological unities.’ The individual who is opposed to the community…forgets that above the egoistic individual is human
culture, which is always a synthesis of values.” (Caso, La Persona Humana y el Estado Totalitario, 1941, p. 191-2). Only a
society based on moral union enables a person to realize her/his spirituality (Haddox 1971).
Caso argued with his personalistic humanism that freedom is a means for developing the human person (Haddox 1971).
He sought freedom for the human person, political and civil freedom, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of
thought and expression, and freedom to have private property. However, even though his rhetoric about freedom
sounds anarchistic in its orientation (except for his support of private property), he argues that these freedoms can only
be preserved and fostered under a system of laws that require authority for their enforcement. He argued that without
liberty, law, and authority, a just civil society is impossible (Krause 1961). He actually went as far as to argue that
unrestricted freedom would foster anarchy, which results in tyranny and threatens barbarism (Krause 1961).
However, he did not believe in unfettered state control and argued that the state must never be made absolute and
unlimited in its power and value, but should be recognized as limited in its social construction (Haddox 1971). He
believed that the main purpose of the state is to protect the rights of the individual, as to enable self-development.
However, he argued that the only political system that allows for this is representative democracy, which he believed
was like Christianity in that both were keys to personal dignity, political equality, and the transcendent value of all
humans. (Caso, La Persona Humana y el Estado Totalitarion, 1941). He argued that only a representative democracy
could foster a society based on the supreme values of goodness, justice, love, and holiness (Haddox 1971).
Caso called for a renewed Mexican patriotism and nationalism. He argued that, “We Mexicans must never forget that
the native country comes before the race, just as the race comes before humanity. That is to say, the best way to serve
the race is to be a good patriot and the best way to serve humanity is to work for the race. La patria is a reality like the
individual, like the family: the race is an ideal like humanity.” (Caso, El Problema de Mexico y la Ideologia Nacional, 1924,
p.78) He believed that such a form of nationalism was necessary to break the colonial mentality that kept Mexicans
dependent on Spain and apathetic toward the creation of a new system. He called for a firm and constant desire to
obtain something better (Caso, El Problema de Mexico y la Ideologia Nacional, 1924).
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ETHICS
The two ideals that Caso sought for Mexico were freedom and love. He argued that the human moral conscience has
become “drugged.” “He [sic] is saturated with avarice for material possessions, for more and more outer goods with less
and less concern for his [sic] inner, spiritual perfection. Man [sic] seems to be running away from himself [sic] with no
knowledge of where he is going.” (Caso, Principios de Estetica, 1925, p. 207). In turn, he argued that this causes violence,
tyranny, injustice, and warfare. He believed that creative freedom was necessary to achieve the desired political and
intellectual self-determination of Mexico and that humans were inherently capable of heroic, self-sacrificing love; but
that this was only possible through freedom (Haddox 1971). The ability to give and not just take was what Caso believed
was uniquely human (Haddox 1971). He believed that moral progress is the movement toward self-perfection, through
self-sacrifice (Haddox 1971). The person, in contrast to the economic-individualist, seeks to be more of a humanist,
through her/his ethical and social activities (Haddox 1971).
He imbued his sense of humanism with a faith in the innate goodness of humans and the Christian ideal of charity
(Haddox 1971). He believed that Christianity is critical to opposing this moral downturn and the real hope for humanity.
He believed that individuals and nations should imitate Jesus (Caso, El Problema de Mexico y la Ideologia Nacional, 1955,
p. 96). He believed that faith compensates for the failure of reason in knowing that God is real (Caso, “Desarticulando
paralogismos,” 1936). Although Caso was a Christian, he opposed dogmatic Catholicism and institutional religion (Caso,
La Cronica, 1921).
EDUCATION
As a teacher, Caso sought to not just create good philosophers, but good people and good citizens (Haddox 1971). He
believed that it is the role of the teacher to awaken in her/his students human personality (Haddox 1971). For Caso,
education was a perpetual search for truth (Haddox 1971). The purpose of education is to inform, not deform; to
discuss, not persuade; and to liberate, not dictate (Krause 1961).
AESTHETICS
Caso argues that art is a product of social tradition and creative genius. It is representative of the insatiable endeavor to
symbolize what cannot be expressed. Utilizing the writings of Alfonso Caso, he argues that there are four classes
representing the arts: First, a being that has moved, i.e. architecture and ornamentation; second, a being that is moving,
i.e. sculpture and painting; third, a movement of being, i.e. poetry and music; and fourth, a being and its movement, i.e.
dance and drama. (Berndston 1951)
Caso argues that there are five conditions of art or aesthetic experience: First is the general state of “demansia vital” or
vital exuberance. Living beings have a special impetus to push inert matter into partnerships of creation. He argues that
the universe as a whole is made of energies which are based on the principle that a “quantitative increase in causes
results in a qualitative differentiation in effects” (Berndston 1951, p. 324). Caso does not make very clear how art
illustrates the theory of vitality. However, he does state that, “beauty affords a rich concentration of ideas; he cites
Schiller on the contrast between work, which indicates lack, and play, which implies fullness; and undoubtedly he
assumes the general relevance in aesthetic production of the external factor of leisure and the internal factor of novel
creation.” (Berndston 1951, p. 324)
The second condition of art is disinterestedness, which implies a kind of contemplation. Things are viewed as an end
rather than in relation to our desires. “It does not imply the negation of desire or of pleasure; on the contrary, it means
that the object contemplated is so satisfying that there is no transitive movement of conation” (Berndston 1951, p. 324).
Caso based his theory on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Bergson, with Nietzsche and Santayana in disagreement. Caso argues
that catharsis and the disinterestedness of art guarantees its morality, because only interested acts can be immoral
(Caso, Principios de Estetica, 1944). He uses the theory of disinterestedness to argue that art should be dissociated from
play (Caso, Principios de Estetica, 1944). Therefore, play must be classified with work (Berndston 1951).
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The third condition of art is based on intuition, which is an awareness of reality in its full individuality (Berndston 1951).
The basic element of intuition is based on Kant, and involves seeing things as they are without the conceptual artifices of
experience. This is done through seeing things with disinterest and to view things as instruments (Berndston 1951). The
second element is the belief that there is no logic to the nature of art. “…His theory of value claims to strip the evaluator
of arbitrary decision by noting the ineluctable contributions of the object, of society, and even of God” (Berndston 1951,
p. 325).
The fourth condition of art is empathy; which Caso defines as “an effusion of the soul upon the things of the world…”
(Berndston 1951, p. 326). Empathy is part of intuition, in that the subject is the object; we endow the subject with the
attributes of our own selves. This happens in three circumstances: The first is in construction of religious myths in which
nature is invested with the hopes and fears of the subject (Berndston 1951). The second is in dealing with aesthetics,
which is the projection of pure feeling and a minor form of mysticism. It includes any perception of emotional or mental
processes or behavior directed toward action or change as attributes of objects (Berndston 1951). The third type is
logical, which states that every object is a coherent and synthetic diversity of attributes or qualities. That which
synthesizes is subjective even though it is the condition of all objects (Caso, Principios de Estetica, 1944).
The final condition of art is creative intuition or expression (Berndston 1951). Since it is not possible to embody our
emotional states in objects and these objects do not want to remain latent, they tend toward action. Thus, our
emotional states move, in the metaphysical passage, from the indeterminate (empathy) into the determinate
(expression). He argues that expression is the end result of intuition. The way that expressive factors relate to what is
expressed is similar to the relation of body and mind (Principios de Estetica 1944; Existencia como Economia 1943).
CASO IN DEBATE
Caso never identified himself with one system of thought, but instead took from other philosophers and their modalities.
As such, Caso makes for good support of many other philosophers, but also provides criticisms and thoughts for change
on all of their philosophies. For instance, Max Scheler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer all helped inform
Caso’s ethics; Caso took methodology from the pragmatist William James and took aesthetics from Benedetto Croce. For
his theory of knowledge, he borrowed from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and for his philosophy of history, he
borrowed from Nicolas Berdyaev and Wilhelm Dilthey. Caso also had minor influence from Immanuel Kant, Martin
Heidegger, Heinrich Rickert, Maine de Biran, Max Stirner, and Emile Meyerson.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Antonio Caso, Mexican Philosopher, 1883-1946.” NEW YORK TIMES, March 8, 1946.
Bergson Henri. CREATIVE EVOLUTION. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911.
Berndston, Arthur. “Mexican Philosophy: The Aesthetics of Antonio Caso.” THE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART
CRITICISM 9 (1951): 325-327.
Berrigan, Daniel. THEY CALL US DEAD MEN. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
Caso, Antonio. EL ACTO IDEATORIO Y LA FILOSOPFIA DE HUSSERL. Mexico City: Stylo, 1946.
Caso, Antonio. EL CONCEPTO DE LA HISTORIA UNIVERSAL. Mexico City: Mexico Moderno, 1923.
Caso, Antonio. LA CRONICA of Lima, Peru, July 16, 1921.
Caso, Antonio. DISCURSOS A LA NACION MEXICANA. Mexico City: Porrua, 1922.
Caso, Antonio. ENSAYOS CRITICOS Y POLEMICOS. Mexico City: Cultura, XIV, 6, 1922.
Caso, Antonio. “Evocacion de Aristoteles.” BIBLIOTECA ENCICLOPEDICA, 128. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion
Publica, 1946.
Caso, Antonio. LA EXISTENCIA COMO ECONOMIA, COMO DESINTERES Y COMO CARIDAD. Mexico City: Mexico Moderno,
1919. 2nd ed. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, 1943.
Caso, Antonio. LA EXTENCIA COMO ECONOMIA Y COMO CARIDAD. Mexico City: Porrua, 1916.
Caso, Antonio. LA FILOSOFIA DE HUSSERL. Mexico City: Imprenta Mundial, 1934.
Caso, Antonio. LA FILOSOFIA DE LA CULTURA Y EL MATERIALISMO HISTORICO. Mexico City: Ediciones Alba, 1936.
Caso, Antonio. LA FILOSOFIA FRANCESA CONTEMPORANEA. Mexico City: Bouret, 1917.
Caso, Antonio. FILOSOFOS Y DOCTRINAS MORALES. Mexico City: Porrua, 1915.
Caso, Antonio. HISTORIA Y ANTOLOGIA DEL PENSAMIENTO FILOSOFICO. Mexico City: Secretaria de Educacion Publica y
Libreria Franco-Americana, 1926.
Caso, Antonio. MEXICO. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1943.
Caso, Antonio. MEYERSON Y LA FISICA MODERNA. Mexico City: La Casa de Espana en Mexico, 1939.
Caso, Antonio. EL PELIGRO DEL HOMBRE. Mexico City: Stylo, 1942.
Caso, Antonio. LA PERSONA HUMANA Y EL ESTADO TOTALITARIO. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional, 1941.
Caso, Antonio. POSITIVISMO, NEOPOSITIVISMO Y FENOMENOLOGIA. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Filosoficos de la
Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1941.
Caso, Antonio. EL PROBLEMA DE MEXICO Y LA IDEOLOGIA NACIONAL. Bibl. Universo I, 4. Mexico City: Cultura, 1924. 2 nd
ed. Mexico City: Libro-Mex, 1955.
Caso, Antonio. LOS PROBLEMAS FILOSOFICOS. Mexico: Porrua, 1915.
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Caso, Antonio. SOCIOLOGIA. Mexico City: Stylo, 1945.
Chesterton, G.K. THE EVERLASTING MAN. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927.
Corey, Matthew T. “The Development of Philosophy in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” TEXAS PAPERS ON LATIN AMERICA.
1997. http://www.utexas.edu/cola/llilas/centers/publications/papers/latinamerica/9702.html. accessed 4/20/03.
Crawford, William Rex. A CENTURY OF LATIN AMERICAN THOUGHT. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944.
Davis, Harold E. LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT. Washington: University Press, 1963.
Flower, Edith. “The Mexican Revolt Against Positivism.” JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 10 (1949): 115-129.
Haddox, John H. ANTONIO CASO: PHILOSOPHER OF MEXICO. Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1971.
Haddox, John H. “Philosophy of Latin America: Yesterday and Today,” in AN INTRODUCTION TO SELECTED LATIN
AMERICAN CULTURES, ed. Frank W. Hubert and Earl Jones. College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 1967.
Hershey, John H. “Antonio Caso: Mexican Personalist.” UNITY (April 1943): 30-31.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM. New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1958.
Leon, Jorge Guzman Andrade. “The Concept of Person in the Antonio Philosophy Case.” HEMEROTECA VIRTUAL ANUIES.
May/August 1998. http://www.hemerodigital.unam.mx/ANUIES/lasalle/logos/77/sec_5.htm. accessed 4/20/03.
Reinhardt, Kurt F. “Antonio Caso, Mexican Philosopher.” BOOKS ABROAD 20 (1946): 238-242.
Reinhardt, Kurt F. “A Mexican Personalist.” THE AMERICAS 3 (July 1946): 20-30.
Roig, Arturo Andres. “Consideraciones Historico-Criticas Sobre el Positivismo en Hispanoamerica y el Problema de la
Construccion Identitaria Nacional.”
http://bv2.gva.es/agenda/sm_agenda/documentos/documentos_web/Arturo%20Roig.doc. Accessed 4/20/03.
Salmeron, Fernando. “Mexican Philosophers of the Twentieth Century.” In MAJOR TRENDS IN MEXICAN PHILOSOPHY.
Translated by A. Robert Caponigri. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.
Sauvage, George M. “Positivism.” NEW ADVENT: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. Vol XII. June 1, 1911.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12312c.htm. accessed 4/30/03.
Verissimo, Erico. MEXICO. New York: Doubleday Dolphin, 1962.
Ward, Barbara. “Two Worlds.” In CHRISIANITY AND CULTURE. Ed. J.S. Murphy. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1960.
Zirion, Antonio Q. “Phenomenology in Mexico: A Historical Profile. CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY REVIEW 33 (2000) 75-92.
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POSITIVISM IS FALSE
1. A GROUP OF HUMANS ARE A COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS, THE COLLECTION WILL NOT TAKE ON A LIFE OF ITS OWN
Peter Landry, political scientist, BIOGRAPHIES: JOHN STUART MILL. June 1997.
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/Mill.htm Accessed April 30, 2003. p-np.
No one will question the laudable goals of those who subscribe to positivism, including the "social scientists" of today; it
is just that the premises on which these people proceed, are wrong. Human beings are individuals and a collection of
them is but just that, a collection of individuals; and the collection will not take on a different life of its own: society is
not an independent creature with a separate set of governing laws. It was on this basis that Sir Karl Popper formulated
his criticisms. Popper thought that both Mill and Comte were wrong in treating collections of people as if these
collections were physical or biological bodies, such that scientific methods might be employed to predict future events.
"That Mill should seriously discuss the question whether 'the phenomena of human society' revolve 'in an orbit' or
whether they move, progressively, in 'a trajectory' is in keeping with this fundamental confusion between laws and
trends, as well as with the holistic idea that society can 'move' as a whole - say, like a planet."
2. SENSE EXPERIENCES NOT THE ONLY OBJECT OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
George M. Sauvage. “Positivism.” NEW ADVENT: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. June 1, 1911.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12312c.htm. Accessed April 20, 2003. p-np.
Positivism asserts that sense experiences are the only object of human knowledge, but does not prove its assertion. It is
true that all our knowledge has its starting point in sense experience, but it is not proved that knowledge stops there.
Positivism fails to demonstrate that, above particular facts and contingent relations, there are not abstract notions,
general laws, universal and necessary principles, or that we cannot know them. Nor does it prove that material and
corporeal things constitute the whole order of existing beings, and that our knowledge is limited to them. Concrete
beings and individual relations are not only perceptible by our senses, but they have also their causes and laws of
existence and constitution; they are intelligible. These causes and laws pass beyond the particularness and contingency
of individual facts, and are elements as fundamentally real as the individual facts which they produce and control. They
cannot be perceived by our senses, but why can they not be explained by our intelligence? Again, immaterial beings
cannot be perceived by sense experience, it is true, but their existence is not contradictory to our intelligence, and, if
their existence is required as a cause and a condition of the actual existence of material things, they certainly exist. We
can infer their existence and know something of their nature. They cannot indeed be known in the same way as material
things, but this is no reason for declaring them unknowable to our intelligence (see AGNOSTICISM; ANALOGY).
3. TRUTHS ARE NOT DETERMINED MERELY BY EXPERIENCE, INSTEAD THEY ARE THE RESULT OF A SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY
BASED ON EXPERIENCE
George M. Sauvage. “Positivism.” NEW ADVENT: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. June 1, 1911.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12312c.htm. Accessed April 20, 2003. p-np.
Again, Positivism, and this is the point especially developed by John Stuart Mill (following Hume), maintains that what we
call "necessary truths" (even mathematical truths, axioms, principles) are merely the result of experience, a
generalization of our experiences. We are conscious, e. g. that we cannot at the same time affirm and deny a certain
proposition, that one state of mind excludes the other; then we generalize our observation and express as a general
principle that a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time. Such a principle is simply the result of a subjective
necessity based on experience. Now, it is true that experience furnishes us with the matter out of which our judgments
are formed, and with the occasion to formulate them. But mere experience does not afford either the proof or the
confirmation of our certitude concerning their truth. If it were so, our certitude should increase with every new
experience, and such is not the case, and we could not account for the absolute character of this certitude in all men, nor
for the identical application of this certitude to the same propositions by all men. In reality we affirm the truth and
necessity of a proposition, not because we cannot subjectively deny it or conceive its contradictory, but because of its
objective evidence, which is the manifestation of the absolute, universal, and objective truth of the proposition, the
source of our certitude, and the reason of the subjective necessity in us.
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INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMUNISM RESULT IN EGOISM
1. INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIALISM DON’T NURTURE SPIRITUALITY
Antonio Caso, philosopher, LA PERSONA HUMANA Y EL ESTADO TOTALITARIO, (translated by Rene Cantu and John H.
Haddox), 1941, p. 189.
The error of individualism and the error of socialism are singularly similar, because in their extreme forms, both social
theories, both philosophical creeds, do not take cognizance of the superior nature of the human being, the level of his
spiritual being.
2. INDIVIDUALISM AND SOCIALISM DIMINISH PEOPLE’S DIGNITY
Antonio Caso, philosopher, LA PERSONA HUMANA Y EL ESTADO TOTALITARIO, (translated by Rene Cantu and John H.
Haddox), 1941, p. 189.
Individualism and communism reduce the dignity of the person. The person and the culture are concomitant. The
person implies society in his development. Society needs, in turn, the person in order to be. The spirit blossoms above
life, as does life above physical nature.
3. INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMUNISM RESULT IN THE WORST FORM OF EGOISM
Antonio Caso, philosopher, LA PERSONA HUMANA Y EL ESTADO TOTALITARIO, (translated by Rene Cantu and John H.
Haddox), 1941, p. 191.
Individualism and communism are identified as two forms of egoism. The community is egoistic, it claims its own
continuity and priority over the individual. Prior to individuals is the community. In it they were born and exist. It is the
whole, and the individuals the parts. The individual, part of a whole, has to be subordinate to the community. This is the
egoistic essence of communism. This is also the egoistic essence of individualism: the individual declares, in turn, that his
being is the only real one. He says: I conceive the state as a means for my happiness; society was established for my
felicity. I am myself. That which is of God is divine – but I am not God; what is human belongs to humanity. I am what is
real. My good is what I want to possess, not what others want to give me, and if they don’t want to give it to me, I shall
get it somehow.
4. COMMUNISM AND ANARCHY RESULT IN EGOISM
Antonio Caso, philosopher, LA PERSONA HUMANA Y EL ESTADO TOTALITARIO, (translated by Rene Cantu and John H.
Haddox), 1941, p. 192.
The only solution to conflict is axiological, ethical, and juridical. Communism and individualism oppose rights, the law.
The issue is that of two individuals, two “biological units,”” which tear at each other. Above tyrannical communities and
individuals who believe themselves absolute within an anarchy there is something else: spiritual human society
composed of persons. Just persons and just societies must prevail. Communism and anarchism are two errors that have
the same baneful root: an overvaluation of intrinsic and vital egoism.
5. INDIVIDUALISM AND RATIONALISM AREN’T MORAL. ONLY PERSONALISM IS MORAL BECAUSE IT AFFIRMS
SPIRITUALITY
Antonio Caso, philosopher, EL PELIGRO DEL HOMBRE, (translated by Dario Prieto and John H. Haddox), 1942, p. 50-51.
Individualism and rationalism are false because they represent the improper use of reason in metaphysics and ethics.
Reason, yes; rationalism, no. Personalism, yes, because it stands for spirituality and affirmation; individualism, no,
because individualism fails to recognize the moral law, the necessity for each person to realize his place in the midst of a
society that is, inescapably, the spiritual heir of all the centuries, the work of generations that precede us, and in the
present, a spiritual union, a solidarity, of efforts to form our own personality by relations with other persons. Tradition is
love for what used to be; solidarity is love for the present. The human person is realized, in terms of tradition and
solidarity, both through self-respect and through love for others.
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PERSONALISM IS A BAD MORAL OBJECTIVE
1. POLITICS CONTROLLED BY PERSONALISM EMPIRICALLY HURTS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Jesse Souza, Professor, University of Heildelberg. BEYOND HYBRIDISM AND PERSONALISM: A NEW INTERPRETATION OF
THE BRAZILIAN DILEMMA. http://www.iuperj.br/professores/texto1jesse.htm. Accessed April 20, 2003. p-np.
Personalism, in the works of Buarque, is understood both as a cultural and social heritage from the pre-modern Portugal
which colonized Brazil, as well as a consequence of the rural inheritance which was implanted here. Personalism is premodern because it implies a dominance of primary sentiments and emotions over the modern calculation of interests.
For Sérgio Buarque, this cultural trace would take on peculiar institutional forms such as patrimonialism in politics, based
on the emotional choices typical of a kinship based society leading to the constitution of a universe of political and
economic privileges that impede the development of universal standards in politics and of a horizontal solidarity based
on rational class interests. The theme of patrimonialism, the most important guiding force of Brazilian social and political
criticism since that time, would be developed by various authors including Raimundo Faoro, Simon Schwartsman and
Fernado Henrique Cardoso, and would become the dominant vision, whether in the reflexive realm or in the practicalpolitical realm, among the explanations about the causes for the Brazil's relative backwardness.
It is the undisputed presence of personalism, and its more important institutional materialization in patrimonialism,
which explains Brazil's relative backwardness in relation to the United States for example, the only nation in the
Americas with a comparable territory and population, and which is used as an explicit, or more often, implicit measure of
Brazil's comparative backwardness.
2. PERSONALISM WRONG LOCATES THE ESSENCE OF BEING IN A PERSON’S MENTAL CAPACITIES, INSTEAD OF LOOKING
TO THE INHERENT MORAL WORTH OF HUMANS
James W. Walters, Ethics professor at Loma Linda University, “Is Koko a person?” DIALOGUE, 1997. p. 34.
In physicalism, the essence of a person is found in his or her biological make-up. All humans are persons, ipso facto.
Accordingly, Baby P (see sidebar) is surely a person, and so is Baby K, only she is severely handicapped. The physicalist
tries to save every human life possible: the 400 gram newborn with the remotest chance of survival and the Alzheimer’s
patient who might be kept alive an extra year. Although William E. May, the Roman Catholic theologian, distinguishes
"moral beings" from "beings of moral worth," both categories are in the physicalist camp. He argues that moral beings
are those creatures who are "capable of performing acts of understanding, of choice, and of love." These humans are
moral beings because they are "minded" entities. However, not all humans are "minded" moral beings (i.e. anencephalic
newborns). But regardless, all humans are "beings of moral worth" because all share "something rooted in their being
human beings to begin with." This "something is the principle immanent in human beings, a constituent and defining
element...that makes them to be what they and who they are...; it is a principle of immateriality or of transcendence
from the limitations of materially individuated existence." Personalism. Contrasted with physicalism, personalism sees
the essence of a person as being located in one's mental capacities and ability to use these in satisfying ways.
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POSITIVISM IS KEY TO SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
1. POSITIVISM KEY TO SOCIAL REORGANIZATION NECESSARY FOR CIVILIZATION
Auguste Comte, philosopher, THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE, translated by Harriet Martineau, 2000, p.
39.
The positive Philosophy offers the only solid basis for that Social Reorganization which must succeed the critical
condition in which the most civilized nations are now living. It cannot be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this
work that Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon opinions.
The great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing is shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of
intellectual anarchy. While stability in fundamental maxims is the first condition of genuine social order, we are suffering
under an utter disagreement which may be called universal. Till a certain number of general ideas can be acknowledged
as a rallying point of social doctrine, the nations will remain in a revolutionary state, whatever palliatives may be devised;
and their institutions can be only provisional. But whenever the necessary agreement on first principles can be obtained,
appropriate institutions will issue from them, without shock or resistance; for the causes of disorder will have been
arrested by the mere fact of the agreement.
2. ONLY POSITIVISM INFORMS ON THE LOGICAL LAWS OF THE HUMAN MIND
Auguste Comte, philosopher, THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE, translated by Harriet Martineau, 2000, p.
35-6.
The study of the Positive Philosophy affords the only rational means of exhibiting the logical laws of the human mind,
which have hitherto been sought by unfit methods. To explain what is meant by this, we may refer to a saying of M. de
Blainville, in his work on Comparative Anatomy, that every active, and especially every living being, may be regarded
under two relations – the Statical and the Dynamical, that is, under conditions or in action. It is clear that all
considerations range themselves under the one or the other of these heads. Let us apply this classification to the
intellectual functions. If we regard these functions under their Statical aspect – that is, if we consider the conditions
under which they exist – we must determine the organic circumstances of the case, which inquiry involves it with
anatomy and physiology. If we look at the Dynamic aspect we have to study simply the exercise and results of the
intellectual powers of the human race, which is neither more nor less than the general object of the Positive Philosophy.
In short, looking at all scientific theories as so many great logical facts, it is only by the thorough observation of these
facts that we can arrive at the knowledge of logical laws. These being the only means of knowledge of intellectual
phenomena, the illusory psychology, which is the last phase of theology, is excluded. It pretends to accomplish the
discovery of the laws of the human mind by contemplating it in itself; that is, by separating it from causes and effects.
Such an attempt, made in defiance of the physiological study of our intellectual organs … cannot succeed at this time of
day.
3. POSITIVISM KEY TO RENEWING EDUCATION
Auguste Comte, philosopher, THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE, translated by Harriet Martineau, 2000, p.
37-8.
The second effect of the Positive Philosophy, an effect not less important and far more urgently wanted, will be to
regulate Education. The best minds are agreed that our European education still essentially theological, metaphysical,
and literary must be superseded by a Positive training, conformable to our time and needs. Even the governments of our
day have shared, where they have not originated, the attempts to establish positive instruction; and this is a striking
indication of the prevalent sense of what is wanted. While encouraging such endeavors to the utmost, we must not
however conceal from ourselves that everything yet done is inadequate to the object. The present exclusive specialty of
our pursuits, and the consequent isolation of the sciences, spoil our teaching. If any student desires to form an idea of
natural philosophy as a whole, he is compelled to go through each department as it is now taught, as if he were to be
only an astronomer, or only a chemist, so that, be his intellect what it may, his training must remain very imperfect. And
yet his object requires that he should obtain general positive conceptions of all the classes of natural phenomenon. It is
such an aggregate of conceptions, whether on a great or on a small scale, which must henceforth be the permanent basis
of all human combinations. It will constitute the mind of future generations.
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NOAM CHOMSKY
INTRODUCTION
Noam Chomsky is an internationally respected scholar in the fields of linguistics, politics, philosophy, cognitive science,
and psychology. He has published over seventy books and a thousand articles in these subjects, helping to make him the
most cited living person today. Though Chomsky’s primary focus is in linguistics, his scholarship in political science is
particularly relevant to debate. Noam Chomsky is a self-professed libertarian socialist, and a sympathizer of anarchosyndicalism. He has published numerous books and articles that offer searing criticisms of the United States
government, often describing it as the true source of terror. Chomsky has also provided much scholarship on the
construction of governments and the problems with the current capitalist system, thus he should be a key source of
information for any political debate.
LIFE AND WORK
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. His Father, William, had fled Russia in
1913 in an attempt to escape drafting into the Czarist army. His father initially worked in a sweatshop, but eventually
was able to put himself through John Hopkins University and earn his doctorate. He soon became a leading scholar in
medieval Hebrew language, publishing a book on the subject, and also ran a Hebrew elementary school with the
assistance of his wife. Chomsky’s father greatly influenced many of his early works in the field of linguistics. Noam
Chomsky’s Mother, Elsie Simonofsky, was born in Belarus but had emigrated to the United States at a young age. She
too influenced Chomsky greatly, as she was a left-leaning social activist who taught Chomsky the importance of
examining the political roots of social problems. Chomsky’s family was very active in the Jewish community, and they
were leaders in the revival of the Hebrew language and Zionism (a strain that Chomsky says would be considered antiZionism today).
Noam Chomsky’s education began at a very young age; when he was not yet two, he was sent to Oak Lane Country Day
School. Temple University ran this Deweyite experimental school, and Chomsky remained there until he was 12. He
later attended Central High School in Philadelphia, and upon graduation enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. In
1955, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, after conducting extensive research at Harvard
University. Upon obtaining this degree, Chomsky became a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he continues to teach today. He currently holds the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and
Linguistics.
It is important to note though that Chomsky does not believe his education came from the schools, but rather from the
beliefs he was exposed to as a child. From a very young age, Chomsky was an eager reader, reading the works of authors
ranging from Austen to Dostoevsky. His parents encouraged this intellectualism, and they were constantly debating
political issues during dinner. When Chomsky turned 14, he traveled to New York City in search of more radical political
thinkers. There he became acquainted with the socialist-anarchist Jewish community that helped to foster his
libertarian-socialist beliefs and his support of anarcho-syndicalism.
CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM
Noam Chomsky is a very vocal critique of capitalism, specifically the neoliberal initiatives popularized by President
Ronald Reagan. Chomsky argues that neoliberal policies have been implemented to benefit only the wealthiest
members of American society, and have significantly impaired the ability of millions to overcome poverty.
Neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that promote market activity with minimal governmental
interference. The policies are directed towards encouraging private enterprise and consumer choice. President Ronald
Reagan’s tax cuts are a prime example of neoliberal policies: the tax cuts were directed towards the wealthy members of
society in an attempt to encourage entrepreneurship. Chomsky refers to neoliberalism as capitalism without the gloves
on, and argues that such policies are detrimental to both democracy and social welfare.
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THE UNDEMOCRATIC NATURE OF NEOLIBERALISM
One of Chomsky’s primary arguments against neoliberalism is that is destroys democracy. He offers two warrants for
this assertion. First, he points out that neoliberalism requires the government not to interfere in the workings of the
economy. Under neoliberal doctrine, it is believed that the marketplace should determine environmental regulation,
prices, wages, and so on. Thus, following the principles of neoliberalism, a democratic government is not allowed to act
in anyway that affects the marketplace. Chomsky explains the problem with this situation when he points out that
democracies are suppose to represent the will of the people, and give them a voice over the policies that affect them.
Economic issues, though, often have the greatest impact on people, but neoliberalism does not allow for any
governmental action. Issues of resource planning or the location of business is thus left up to the whims of the business
owners, who can choose to move their factories at any time despite the unemployment that may result. Chomsky
argues that it is undemocratic to allow individuals to make decisions of such social importance without any interference
from a democratically elected government.
Ultimately, following the neoliberal doctrine, democratic governments have very little control over important issues
involving the economy. According to Noam Chomsky, this lack of control is one of the primary reasons that voting
participation is declining. He argues that when voters see the lack of control they have over important economic issues,
they lose the desire to vote. The voters know that regardless of their vote, the government will continue with its policy
of protecting private interests and refusing to interfere in the market. In fact, Chomsky believes that the US government
prefers the low level of participation so that the existing social order is not disturbed. The poor and minorities, the ones
who tend to be hurt most by neoliberal policies, are overrepresented in the non-voting population. When these groups
do not vote, it is easier for the federal government to continue with its policies that benefit primarily the wealthy.
Chomsky believes this is one reason that the two political parties have resisted electoral reforms that would encourage
more voting participation or the creation of new political parties.
Secondly, Chomsky argues that neoliberal initiatives undermine democracy by creating severe social inequality. As a key
example, Chomsky notes that the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. However, at a time of soaring
profits, poverty continues to be a persistent phenomenon in the society. Over the past fifteen years, businesses in the
United States have posted record profits. However, at the same time, incomes for the majority of workers have either
stagnated or declined, making income inequality the highest it has been in seventy years. Furthermore, the United
States has the highest level of child poverty out of any industrialized society. Chomsky argues that this economic
inequality destroys the possibility for political equality. Wealthy business owners can easily gain more political power
through campaign donations and media advertisement, neither of which are available to the average citizen. As a result,
politicians are more likely to adhere to the interests of the wealthy (the ones who finance their elections), than the
interests of the working class.
STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT POLICIES IN DEVELOPING NATIONS
Unfortunately, as Chomsky explains, the United States has not only adopted neoliberal policies, but it has thrust them
upon developing nations. Following World War II, when the United States was the dominant force in the international
economy, it sought to enact trade policies that were beneficial to its economy. Chomsky explains that the US
government, along with international financial institutions, developed structural adjustment policies based on the ideals
of neoliberalism. These structural adjustment policies were steps that developing nations had to take in order to receive
a loan from the World Bank. Referred to as the Washington Consensus, the structural adjustment policies required
countries to liberalize their trade and finance laws, not allow governmental interference in the market, end inflation, and
privatize all businesses.
Chomsky argues that these structural adjustment policies severely harmed the economies of the developing nation
because they were unable to control important economic issues. He explains that every developed nation has used
governmental interference in order to protect its businesses and benefit the people. Even the United States developed
with significant governmental protectionism of its primary crops, such as cotton. However, the structural adjustment
policies offer governments no alternative. Chomsky notes that these policies are to blame for the Asian economic crisis,
as governments were forced to cut public spending at the time when they needed it the most.
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For these reasons, Noam Chomsky believes that capitalism is an unjust system. He believes that it is essential workers
have control over their social, political, and economic lives. Thus, he offers as an alternative anarcho-syndicalism.
ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM
Noam Chomsky is a strong supporter of the anarcho-syndicalist strain of anarchism. As noted previously, he became
introduced to these ideas through the socialist-anarchist Jewish community in New York City. Following this school of
thought, Chomsky advocates in numerous scholarly works for an anarchic society based on socialist ideology. He argues
that such a society is the only true way to ensure freedom and liberty to every individual, as well as the only method to
achieve social justice.
A HIGHLY ORGANIZED SOCIETY
The society Chomsky describes is not one without rules, but rather a bottom-up form of organization. A community
based upon anarcho-syndicalism would be a highly organized society derived from natural units or communities. The
primary natural units would be the workplace and the neighborhood, and from these two units a highly integrated form
of social organization would be formed through federal arrangements. Members of the communities would make the
decisions, thus people would always have control over the relevant issues that affect their lives and their homes.
Noam Chomsky has suggested two possible ways of organizing an anarcho-syndicalist society. He first explains that a
network of worker’s councils could be developed to help organize and control the workplaces and communities. The
next level of bureaucracy would then be representation across the different factories, crafts and industries. Finally, the
top level of representation would consist of general assemblies of worker’s councils, which could act on a regional,
national, and international scale.
The second form of organization Chomsky describes would entail local assemblies that deal with local issues, regional
assemblies that control regional issues, such as trade, and finally a national or international level of assemblies. Chomsky
says he is unsure of what would be the best way to organize the society, but he believes that either of these two would
be preferable to the current form of government in the United States. The key component of both these forms is that
they grant significant autonomy and control to the workers in the society. Chomsky maintains that there should not be
any elections in such a form of government, but that all people should be expected to participate in the decision-making
at some point in their lives. And, most importantly, those who are making decisions only do so temporarily, and must
continue to work in their communities. Thus, decisions are always made by the affected parties.
VALUE OF TECHONOLOGICAL PROGRESS
Chomsky concedes that the general populace must become much more educated if they are to maintain jobs and
conduct management affairs. He explains, however, that technological advancements have made this possible. In an
interview with Peter Jay, Noam Chomsky states that currently institutions do not allow workers to have access to the
information and training to control their own affairs. However, Chomsky believes it is possible for people to control not
only the their immediate affairs but also the entire economic system. This is possible because today, “much of the
necessary work that is required to keep a decent level of social life going can be consigned to machines – at least, in
principle, - which means that humans can be free to undertake the kind of creative work which may not have been
possible, objectively, in the early stages of the industrial revolution” (Relevance). Thus, technology will be able to
complete much of the labor that now requires people, and this will produce enough excess time for people to become
acquainted to the process of controlling their affairs.
THE ANTI-CAPITALIST ASPECTS
Finally, it is important to note that a major tenet of anarcho-syndicalism is that workers are not paid for their labor.
Rather, the society provides for the needs of all of the people, and workers are allowed to choose the jobs that provide
them the most fulfillment. Chomsky argues that choosing jobs based on desire as opposed to a needed paycheck will
provide enough satisfaction that no monetary compensation would be necessary. He believes that there are few jobs
everyone would refuse to do (he maintains these jobs are bad because the current system has no reason to make them
more attractable) but if there are jobs everyone refuses to do, then the community will share them. Thus a cooperative
society will be established where everyone finds fulfillment in their work, while at the same time contributing to the
wellbeing of the society.
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Noam Chomsky feels that an anarcho-syndicalist system would be vastly preferable to the current democratic system of
the United States because of its greater ability to achieve justice. He has stated that he does believe in the founding
ideals of the United States, such as its emphasis on individuality and liberty. However, he believes that the United States
is deficient because the government has no control over the economic sector of the society. He points out that the
United States was established before there were large concentrations of private wealth, and thus there was no need to
regulate large corporations in the interest of the people. However, today there is such a need and the United States
government has no power. Currently, businesses can leave communities, leave many workers unemployed, without
seeking approval from the affected individuals. Thus, over one of the main components of a person’s life, their economic
livelihood, they truly have no control. Chomsky argues this is not democratic, and may even serve to undermine
democracy. If workers are dependent on a company for a job, they may be willing to revoke democratically approved
environmental regulations merely to maintain their financial stability. Chomsky believes that such a system is neither
democratic nor just. However, in an anarcho-syndicalist society, workers would have control over the relevant matters
of their lives, such as the businesses, and thus will be able to determine what is best for their society.
CRITICISM OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Noam Chomsky is a very vocal critic of the US government’s international policies. He has repeatedly indicted the US
government as the main source of terror, and maintains that the US invades countries and supports coups in order to
extend its economic dominance. In fact, he says that all actions of the US government are taken to ensure economic and
ideological control worldwide.
Chomsky explains that business interests control much of the US government, through routes such as campaign
donations and friendly relationships. As a result, the actions of the US government are directed towards maintaining a
US-dominated economic system. These actions are taken to fulfill both short-term economic and long-term ideological
goals. For example, Chomsky has argued that the United States involved itself in Vietnam because the socialist
aspirations of the north threatened its economic interests.
Most recently, Noam Chomsky has been one of the many critics of the war in Iraq. He argues that it is a further example
of US imperialism. In 1945, the State Department recognized the energy resources in the Gulf to be a “stupendous
source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes of world history” (609 Moral Truisms). In order to gain
control of this ‘prize’, Noam Chomsky maintains that the United States invaded Iraq to obtain control of the oil. In his
article “It’s Imperialism, Stupid”, Noam Chomsky refers to Zbigniew Brzezinski , a senior planner and analyst, who stated
that US control over the Middle East would give it political leverage over the European and Asian economies who are
dependent on oil from that region. Thus, Chomsky states, the true reason for going to war is neither the debunked
WMD theory nor democratic aspirations (since the US is not adverse to supporting non-democratic regimes), but rather
economic control.
Further, Chomsky maintains that the United States government is one of the primary perpetrators of global terror. He
argues that the United States government routinely targets civilian populations and overthrows democratically elected
governments that it disagrees with. For example, in 1962 the Kennedy administration altered the focus of the Latin
American military assistance program from ‘hemispheric defense’ to ‘internal security’ (Moral Truisms 607). This change
in policy really mean “a shift from toleration ‘of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military’ to ‘direct
complicity’ in their crimes, to US support for ‘the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.’” The United
States became highly involved Latin American state-sponsored terrorism, seeking to quash any anti-capitalist sentiment
that the US determined a threat. One notable example is in Colombia, where in 1962 the Kennedy Special Forces
instructed the paramilitary on methods of sabotage and terrorist activities against communist proponents. In fact, the
president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, has stated that the
United States military trained the Argentine, Uruguayan, and Colombian militaries to use terrorist activities in killing
“social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to
be communist extremists” (608).
Because of its targeting of innocent civilians, Noam Chomsky refers to the United States as the main wielder of power.
However, because the United States is the sole superpower and has tremendous propaganda abilities, the government is
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able to deem those who go against it as terrorists and itself as the protector of freedom. Thus, the US acts with
impunity, naming its acts of aggression as necessary defensive tactics.
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE
Noam Chomsky’s scholarship can be very useful in numerous debate rounds. His writings provide a plethora of examples
of US imperialism, and his extensive list of facts will provide you with a deep understanding of the ‘under-belly’ of US
foreign policy. In his writings, Noam Chomsky has examined most of the United State’s economics and military dealings,
and provides a good understanding of the government’s true intentions. Thus, if you are debating any resolution that
focuses on US foreign policy, militarism, or democracy promotion, Noam Chomsky would be an ideal source of
information.
Furthermore, his critique of neoliberal economic policies will be extremely useful in economic debates. Many
resolutions in the past have asked questions about the effectiveness of free trade, development processes, and
capitalism. Chomsky’s numerous books and articles on this topic will provide you with a plethora of arguments against
free market capitalism.
Finally, Chomsky’s writings on anarcho-syndicalism are also important sources of debate information. In his scholarship,
Chomsky offers an enlightening criticism of the current capitalist system and the problems of US democracy. Such
arguments would be very useful in debates about economic development, democratic governments, and globalization.
The change he offers, a socialist anarchic society, is a possible alternative you could propose in any debate about
governmental organization.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barksy, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Chomsky Info: The Noam Chomsky Website. 2006. Noam Chomsky Official Website. 26 Jul. 2006
<http://www.chomsky.info/>.
Chomsky, Noam. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
---. Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1992.
---. “Commentary: Moral Truisms, Empirical Evidence, and Foreign Policy.” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):
605-620.
---. The Culture of Terrorism. Boston: South End Press, 1988.
---. Deterring Democracy. New York: Verso, 1991.
---. Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.
---. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003.
---. Imperial Ambitions: Conversation on the Post- 9/11 World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005.
---. “It’s Imperialism, Stupid.” Chomsky Info. 4 Jul. 2005. 26 Jul 2006 <
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20050704.htm>.
---. Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1994.
---. Middle East Illusions: Including Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
---. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston: South End Press, 1989.
---. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
---. “The Relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalism.” Chomsky Info. 25 Jul. 1976. 26 Jul 2006
<http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19760725.htm>.
---. World Orders, Old and New. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Chomsky, Noam, et al. Acts of Aggression: Policing Rogue States. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War & The University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York:
New Press, 1997.
Pateman, Barry, ed. Chomsky On Anarchism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2005.
Macedo, Donaldo, ed. Chomsky on Miseducation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
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THE US GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT
1. GOVERNMENTS ARE CONTROLLED BY THE WEALTHY
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 20.
Whether accurate or not, this description serves to remind us that the governing institutions are not independent agents
but reflect the distribution of power in the larger society. That has been a truism at least since Adam Smith, who pointed
out that the “principal architects” of policy in England were “merchants and manufacturers,” who used state power to
serve their own interests, however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England. Smith’s concern was
“the wealth of nations,” but he understood that the “national interest” is largely a delusion: within the “nation” there are
sharply conflicting interests, and to understand policy and its effects we have to ask where power lies and how it is
exercised, what later came to be called class analysis.
2. THE US GOVERNMENT IS WILLING TO SACRIFICE RIGHTS FOR PROFIT
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 20-1
The United States had been the world’s major economy long before World War II, and during the war it prospered while
its rivals were severely weakened. The state-coordinated wartime economy was at last able to overcome the Great
Depression. By the war’s end, the United States had half of the world’s wealth and a position of power without historical
precedent. Naturally, the principal architects of policy intended to use this power to design a global system in their
interests. High-level documents describe the primary threat to these interests, particularly in Latin America, as “radical”
and “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living
standards of the masses” and development for domestic needs. These tendencies conflict with the demand for “a
political and economic climate conducive to private investment,” with adequate repatriation of profits and “protection of
our raw materials” – ours, even if located somewhere else. For such reasons, the influential planner George Kennan
advised that we should “cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living
standards, and democratization” and must “deal in straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about
“altruism and world-benefactions” – though such slogans are fine, in fact obligatory, in public discourse.
3. THE US OVERTHREW A DEMOCRACY IN ORDER TO CRUSH A SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 21
“Radical nationalism” is intolerable in itself, but it also poses a broader “threat to stability,” another phrase with a special
meaning. As Washington prepared to overthrow Guatemala’s first democratic government in 1954, a State Department
official warned that Guatemala had “become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its
agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a
victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the population of
Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail.” “Stability” means security for “the upper classes and large
foreign enterprises,” whose welfare must be preserved.
4. THE US GOVERNMENT EXERCISES FOREIGN POLICY TO CONTAIN DISSENT
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 22
Nationalist regimes that threaten “stability” are sometimes called “rotten apples” that might “spoil the barrel,” or
“viruses” that might “infect” others. Italy in 1948 is one example. Twenty-five years later, Henry Kissinger described
Chile as a “virus” that might send the wrong messages about possibilities for social change, infecting others as far as Italy,
still not “stable even after years of major CIA programs to subvert Italian democracy. Viruses have to be destroyed and
others protected from infection: for both tasks, violence is often the most efficient means, leaving a gruesome trail of
slaughter, terror, torture, and devastation.
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THE US GOVERNMENT IS MORALLY JUSTIFIED IN ITS ACTIONS
1. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS REQUIRED TO PURSUE THE INTERESTS OF ITS PEOPLE
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/fp1.cfm>.
Many European, Islamic, and Third World critics—as well as many American leftists—make the point that the United
States uses the comforting language of morality while operating according to the ruthless norms of power politics. To
these critics, America talks about democracy and human rights while supporting ruthless dictatorships around the world.
In the 1980s, for example, the U.S. supported Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah of Iran, Augusto Pinochet in
Chile, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Today, America is allied with unelected regimes in the Muslim world such
as Pervez Musharaff in Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the critics
charge that America’s actions abroad, such as in the Gulf War and Iraq, were not motivated by noble humanitarian ideals
but by the crass desire to guarantee American access to oil. These charges contain an element of truth. In his book
White House Years, Henry Kissinger says that America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. It is indeed
true that American foreign policy seeks to protect America’s self-interest, but what is wrong with this? All it means is that
the American people have empowered their government to act on their behalf against their adversaries. They have not
asked their government to remain neutral when their interests and, say, the interests of the Ethiopians come in conflict.
It is unreasonable to ask a nation to ignore its own interests, because that is tantamount to asking a nation to ignore the
welfare of its own people.
2. THE US MUST ALLY WITH DICTATORS TO PROTECT AGAINST GREATER EVILS
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/fp1.cfm>.
But what about the United States backing Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern dictators such as Somoza, Pinochet,
Marcos, and the Shah? It should be noted that, in each of these cases, the United States eventually turned against these
dictatorial regimes and actively aided in its ouster. In Chile and the Philippines, the outcomes were favorable: The
Pinochet and Marcos regimes were replaced by democratic governments that have so far endured. In Nicaragua and
Iran, however, one form of tyranny promptly gave way to another. Somoza was replaced by the Sandinistas, who
suspended civil liberties and established a Marxist-style dictatorship, and the Shah of Iran was replaced by a harsh
theocracy presided over by the Ayatollah Khomeini. These outcomes help to highlight a crucial principle of foreign
policy: the principle of the lesser evil. It means that one should not pursue a thing that seems good if it is likely to result
in something worse. A second implication of this doctrine is that one is usually justified in allying with a bad guy in order
to oppose a regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this was in World War II. The United States allied
with a very bad man, Josef Stalin, in order to defeat someone who posed an even greater threat at the time: Adolf Hitler.
Once the principle of the lesser evil is taken into account, many of America’s alliances with tin-pot dictators become
defensible. America allied with these regimes to win the Cold War. If one accepts what is today almost a universal
consensus—that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”—then the United States was right to attach more importance to
the fact that Marcos and Pinochet were reliably anti-Soviet than to the fact that they were autocratic thugs.
3. THE US GOVERNMENT CAN PURSUE INTERESTS AND IDEALS SIMULTANEOUSLY
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/fp1.cfm>.
Critics of U.S. foreign policy judge it by a standard applied to no one else. They denounce America for protecting its selfinterest while expecting other countries to protect theirs. Americans need not apologize for their country acting abroad
in a way that is good for them. Why should it act in any other way? Indeed, Americans can feel immensely proud about
how often their country has served them well while simultaneously promoting noble ideals and the welfare of others. So,
yes, America did fight the Gulf War partly to protect its access to oil, but also to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invasion.
American interests did not taint American ideals; just the opposite is true: The ideals dignified the interests.
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CAPITALISM IS AN UNJUST SYSTEM
1. NEOLIBERAL POLICIES DESTROYED THE BRAZILIAN ECONOMY
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 27
In the highly praised history of the Americanization of Brazil that I mentioned, Gerald Haines writes that from 1945 the
United States used Brazil as a “testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development based solidly on
capitalism.” The experiment was carried out with “the best of intentions.” Foreign investors benefited, but planners
“sincerely believed” that the people of Brazil would benefit as well. I need not describe how they benefited as Brazil
became “the Latin American darling of the international business community” under military rule, in the words of the
business press, while the World Bank reported that two-thirds of the population did not have enough food for normal
physical activity. Writing in 1989, Haines describes “America’s Brazilian policies” as “enormously successful,” “a real
American success story.” 1989 was the “golden year” in the eyes of the business world, with profits tripling over 1988,
while industrial wages, already among the lowest in the world, declined another 20 percent; the UN Report on Human
Development ranked Brazil next to Albania.
2. CAPITALISM HAS LED TO SIGNIFICANT ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE US
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 28
Changes in global order have also made it possible to apply a version of the Washington consensus at home. For most of
the U.S. population, incomes have stagnated or declined for fifteen years along with working conditions and job security,
continuing through economic recovery, an unprecedented phenomenon. Inequality has reached levels unknown for
seventy years, far beyond other industrial countries. The United States has the highest level of child poverty of any
industrial society, followed by the rest of the English-speaking world. So the record continues through the familiar list of
third world maladies. Meanwhile the business press cannot find adjectives exuberant enough to describe the “dazzling”
and “stupendous” profit growth, though admittedly the rich face problems too: a headline in Business Week announces
“The Problem Now: What to Do with All That Cash,” as “surging profits” are “overflowing the coffers of Corporate
America,” and dividends are booming. Profits remain “spectacular” through the mid-1996 figures, with “remarkable”
profit growth for the world’s largest corporations, though there is “one area where global companies are not expanding
much: payrolls,” the leading business monthly adds quietly. That exception includes companies that “had a terrific year”
with “booming profits” while they cut workforces, shifted to part-time workers with no benefits or security, and
otherwise behaved exactly as one would expect with “capital’s clear subjugation of labor for 15 years,” to borrow
another phrase form the business press.
3. GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF THE MARKET HAS BEEN KEY IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Noam Chomsky, professor, 1999.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER, p. 30
Standard economic history recognizes that state intervention has played a central role in economic growth. But its
impact is underestimated because of too narrow a focus. To mention one major omission, the industrial revolution
relied on cheap cotton, mainly from the United States. It was kept cheap and available not by market forces, but by
elimination of the indigenous population and slavery. There were of course other cotton producers. Prominent among
them was India. Its resources flowed to England, while its own advanced textile industry was destroyed by British
protectionism and force. Another case is Egypt, which took steps toward development at the same time as the United
States but was blocked by British force, on the quite explicit grounds that Britain would not tolerate independent
development in that region. New England, in contrast, was able to follow the path of the mother country, barring
cheaper British textiles by very high tariffs as Britain had done to India. Without such measures, half of the emerging
textile industry of New England would have been destroyed, economic historians estimate, with large-scale effects on
industrial growth generally.
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CAPITALISM HAS BEEN ESSENTIAL IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
1. INDIVIDUAL CHOICE ALLOWED BY CAPITALISM ENSURES PERSONAL LIBERTY
Johan Norberg, author and political activist, 2001.
IN DEFENCE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, p. 23
This development has resulted, not from socialist revolution but, on the contrary, from a move in the past few decades
towards greater individual liberty. The freedom to choose and the international exchange have grown, investments and
development assistance have transmitted ideas and resources. In this way benefit has been derived from the knowledge,
wealth and inventions of other countries. Imports of medicines and new health care systems have improved living
conditions. Modern technology and new methods of production have moved production forward and improved the food
supply. Individual citizens have become more and more free to choose their own occupations and to sell their products.
We can tell from the statistics how this enhances national prosperity and reduces poverty among the population. But the
most important thing of all is liberty itself, the independence and dignity which autonomy confers on people who have
been living under oppression.
2. CAPITALISM HAS DECREASED GLOBAL POVERTY
Johan Norberg, author and political activist, 2001.
IN DEFENCE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, p. 25
Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen’s income practically doubled, from 2,497 to 4,839 dollars, corrected
for purchasing power and in fixed money terms. This has not come about through the industrialised nations multiplying
their incomes. During this period the richest one-fifth of the world’s population increased their average income from
8,315 to 14,623 dollars, i.e. by roughly 75 percent. For the poorest one-fifth of the world’s population, the increase has
been faster still, with average income rising during the same period from 551 to 1,137 dollars, i.e. more than doubling.
World consumption today is more than twice what it was in 1960. Material developments in the past half-century have
resulted in the world having over three billion more people liberated from poverty. This is historically unique. UNDP, the
UN Development Programme, has observed that, all in all, world poverty has fallen more during the past 50 years than
during the preceding 500. In its 1997 Human development report, the UNDP notes that humanity is in the midst of “the
second great ascent”. The first began in the 19th century, with the industrialisation of the USA and Europe and the rapid
spread of prosperity. The second began during the post-war era and is now in full swing, with first Asia and then the
other developing countries noting ever-greater advances in the war against poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy.
3. CAPITALISM HAS AIDED THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRATIC REGIMES
Johan Norberg, author and political activist, 2001.
IN DEFENCE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, p. 37-38
At present there are 47 states which are violating basic human rights. Worst among them are Afghanistan, Burma,
Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan – that is, countries least
affected by globalisation and least oriented in favour of the market economy and liberalism. While deploring and
combating their oppression, suppression of opinion, government-controlled media and wire-tapping, we should still
remember that this was the normal state of affairs for most of the world’s population only a few decades ago. In 1973
only 20 countries with populations of more than a million were democratically governed.
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WARD CHURCHILL
AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES
Life and Work
Ward Churchill is an activist, author and scholar covering many issues important to progressives, but be is most
concerned with the fate of Native Americans. Churchill’s political activism, he says, started shortly after he came out of
the United States Army in 1969. After being drafted and sent to Vietnam, he became disillusioned and “irritated” about
the posture of his government. Not only did he not consider Vietnam a just war, but he began to feel that, as a Native
American, he “was sent to Southeast Asia to uphold a treaty which did not require that I be there.”
As he began to research the application of federal law to Native Americans he found that “the United States was in the
process of standing in complete violation of 371 odd treaties that were on record with my people or related peoples
right here in North America.” Given this fact, Churchill took the stance that “if we’re going to be busy enforcing treaties,
it ought to be home, not over there [in Vietnam].”
Though Churchill’s focus is certainly on Native issues, his career as an author and political voice has been characterized
by abroad-based, diverse background. He has written and edited books which deal with subjects as far-ranging as crime
policy, the FBI’s domestic covert wars, and specifically the way movements like the Black Panthers were treated by both
the United States government and law enforcement agencies.
As Churchill became politically active, he moved to Peoria Illinois where he had a roommate by the name of Mark Clark.
Clark happened to be a defense captain for the Illinois Black Panther Party. In December of 1969, less than a year after
Churchill’s discharge from the army and political awakening, Clark became the first Panther killed in an armed raid by the
FBI. The raid, which took place on an apartment on Monroe Street in Chicago, also took the life of Fred Hampton, the
chairman of the Illinois Panthers. Churchill, somewhat understatedly, says that this “caught my attention.” Since there
was clear evidence from the onset of direct FBI involvement, and since there was a clear attempt made to cover that up,
Churchill became involved in the effort to bring out the truth about the assassinations of Hampton and Clark.
From there, “one thing followed another.” After he joined the American Indian Movement, Churchill began working on
the famous Leonard Peltier case. Along the way, he began to discover through his investigations what he considered
“this pattern of FBI repression. Of covert operations directed against activists in the United States that was so pervasive
it had an effect on everything I was trying to do, and everybody I was around.” This included, naturally, the Black
Panthers and AIM.
Churchill began to write extensively about his experiences and the research he did about politics. The first book he put
out was an edited collection of essays on the applicability of Marxist theory to the circumstances of the American Indians
within the United States, Marxism And Native Americans. He established a relationship with the independent collective
publishing house South End Ness, and put out books including the Agents Of Regression focusing on FBI misdeeds,
primarily against the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, but also on the Black Panther Party. Since then, Churchill
has put out several other books, and published regularly in magazines such as Z.
Today, Churchill is professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There he is the
Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. Churchill also serves as co-director of the
American Indian Movement of Colorado, Vice Chairperson of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council, and a
National Spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
Basic Ideas And Philosophy
Churchill’s most adamant stances--and most useful philosophical viewpoints--come in such books as STRUGGLE FOR THE
LAND and INDIANS ARE US?, where he presents the case for a self-determining and self-governing Native North America.
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In these books Churchill argues that the United States has no actual legal right to occupy the territory it does. Churchill
draws on history to argue that, after the revolutionary war, the United States was an international pariah, shunned
economically by other countries. Thus, the United States needed to do two things: 1) Acquire its own economic wealth
so as to attain self-sufficiency, and 2) maintain the appearance of compliance with international law while it was doing
so, to avoid further alienating potential allies among other countries. Churchill posits that then-Chief-Justice John
Marshall “inverted” international law, custom, and convention, by finding that the Doctrine of Discovery imparted
“preeminent title” over the Americas to the European settlers.
Through a series of opinions, Churchill says, Marshall declared the new lands “effectively vacant,” though the Native
Americans were indisputably occupying those lands. Through “convoluted and falsely premised reasoning,” according to
Churchill, Marshall established the somewhat paradoxical policy that “Indian nations were entitled to keep their land,
but only so long as the intrinsically superior US agreed to their doing so.”
Churchill also documents situations where he feels that the US has violated the principles set up in international law at
Nuremberg. For instance, he discusses the case of Julius Streicher, a nazi who was condemned to death not for murder,
but for running a magazine that published inflammatory caricatures of Jews. Streicher was found to have contributed to
the dehumanization of Jewish people through his publications. Churchill juxtaposes these findings against 1) the US’s
record of genocide against Native Americans through land policies, bounty policies, etc., and 2) the caricatures of Native
Americans throughout history and contemporary culture. He places one of the nazi caricatures immediately opposite the
Cleveland Indians’ mascot, Chief Wahoo, and lets the striking similarity speak for itself.
Churchill also points out the feasibility of returning lands to their original owners. He notes that most of the land initially
taken from Native Americans is not held by private individuals, but by the government or corporations. He also claims
that 2/3 of the total land mass could still reside in the hands of non-natives. As an activist for many progressive causes,
he is careful to point out the benefits this could have for other progressive causes, such as pacifism. Efforts to stop US
hegemony and militarism, for instance, would be greatly advanced by the weakening of US military might that returning
the land would represent.
Churchill is also concerned with all manner of social issues related to the condition of Native peoples. He writes
extensively on what he calls “radioactive colonialism”; that is, the tendency of the US federal government to use
resources it finds on Native reservations while leaving the hazards of those resources for those who get no benefit from
them. He notes that one hundred percent of US uranium reserves were obtained from reservation lands, but that the
government admitted in 1991 that, since the 50s, it had been dumping wastes from these products at 2,000 times a level
deemed “safe.”
Churchill is suspicious of many other “revolutionary” agendas advanced by radical groups in the United States. He deals
with the subject at length in MARXISM AND NATIVE AMERICANS, but refers to it elsewhere in many other places. He
opines that any revolution which still allowed the continuance of
“colonialism”--non-Native occupation of traditional Native lands--would merely be a continuance of the oppression
which existed before, merely in another form. By contrast, Churchill argues that the realization of the Native land
struggle would pave the way for many liberatory agendas, such as the elimination of sexism, racism, and discrimination
against homosexuals.
Churchill, as this should show, is concerned with many of the same issues progressives axe in terms of inequalities, class
disparity, and discriminatory practices. He merely traces all these back to a common root: the colonial ideology which
has been in place since Columbus. He argues that land rights and the recognition of such are a necessary precondition for
the success of all these other transformative movements.
Application To Debate
Churchill’s application to debate comes on a few levels. On any topic where issues of self-determination are prevalent,
Churchill can be counted on to defend those values. Understandably, the value of self-determination is what he hopes
will eventually assist in the liberation of the land he so hopes for. Churchill is a staunch advocate of related values, such
as localized democracy and direct self-reliance for communities.
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Churchill also provides debaters with excellent insight to multiculturalism. Not only will he defend the Native American
worldview, and the ecological and social insights it can bring to virtually any other culture, but he will passionately argue
that lack of multicultural respect can have genocidal consequences. His savage indictments of sports mascots are only
one example. Churchill also points out how nazi ideologies were, in some respects, based on the same “Manifest
Destiny” policies that helped massacre and drive from their homes countless Native peoples in North America. This kind
of historical analysis and documented evidence is convincing in any debate on cultural issues.
Churchill is also useful against any type of “radical” philosophy which leaves the native peoples in the same position the
status quo holds for them. According to Churchill, to ignore the sufferings of the Native Americans is to commit the same
sin of oppression that the dominant paradigm does, and to gloss over the insights that Native Americans can bring to
matters ecological, spiritual, and social is a risk we take at our peril. He indicts certain socialists, anarchists, communists,
feminists, and progressive activists of all shapes and sizes on this point.
Finally, Churchill’s attack on New Age spiritualities and specifically the “Men’s Movement” led by Robert Bly is of
particular venom. Churchill’s assault comes down specifically on Bly and his ilk, but is directed more generally (and
usefully against) any philosophy which co-opts elements of native traditions while being unconcerned with the fate of
actual Native Americans. Churchill condemns these “fake shamans” and declares that such practices are sacred to Native
Americans, and must not be allowed to fall into the hands of individuals using them to make money, or who will corrupt
them in any way.
Bibliography
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, AGENTS OF REPRESSION : THE FBI’S SECRET WARS AGAINST THE BLACK PANTHER
PARTY AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988.
Ward Churchill, STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND: INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE TO GENOCIDE, ECOCIDE, AND EXPROPRIATION IN
CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICA, Common Courage Press, 1993.
Ward Churchill, INDIANS ARE US?: CULTURE AND GENOCIDE IN NATIVE NORTH AMERICA, Common Courage Press, 1994.
M. Annete Jaimes, editor, THE STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA: GENOCIDE, COLONIZATION AND RESISTANCE, Boston: South
End Press, 1992.
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UNITED STATES CLAIMS TO NATIVE LANDS ARE SUSPECT
1. EVEN MARSHALL ADMI1TED US CLAIMS TO NATIVE LANDS WERE DUBIOUS
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE
STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette mimes, 1992, p142. Such lofty-sounding (and legally correct) rhetoric
was, of course, belied by the actualities of US performance. As Chief Justice Marshall pointed out rather early on, almost
every white-held land title in the country--New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and
parts of the Carolinas--would have been clouded had the standards of international law truly been applied. More, title to
the pre-revolutionary acquisitions west of the 1763 demarcation line made by the new North American politicoeconomic elite would have been negated, along with all the thousands of grants of land in that region bestowed by
Congress upon those who had fought against the Crown. Not coincidental to Marshall’s concern in the matter was the
fact that he and his father had each received 10,000 acre grants of such land in what is now West Virginia. Obviously, a
country that had been founded largely on the basis of a lust to possess native lands was not about to relinquish its
pretensions to ownership of them, no matter what the law said. Moreover, the balance of military power between
Indians and whites east of the Mississippi River began to change rapidly in favor of the latter during the postrevolutionary period. It was becoming technically possible for the US simply to seize native lands at will.
2. US MANIPULATED COURT CASES TO SUBVERT INTERNATIONAL LAW
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE
STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 1992, p 142. Still, the requirements of international diplomacy
dictated that things seem otherwise. Marshall’s singular task, then, was to forge a juridical doctrine that preserved the
image of enlightened US furtherance of accepted international legality in its relations with Indians on the one hand,
while accommodating patterns of illegally aggressive federal expropriations of Indian land on the other. This he did in
opinions rendered in a series of cases, delineated in Table: Key Indian Laws and Cases at the front of this volume,
beginning with Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and extending through Johnson v. McIntosh (1822) to Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
(1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). By the end of this sequence of decisions, Marshall had completely inverted
international law, custom and convention, finding that the Doctrine of Discovery imparted preeminent title over North
America to Europeans--the mantle of which implicitly passed to the US when England quit-claimed its thirteen dissident
Atlantic colonies--mainly because Indian-held lands were effectively “vacant” when Europeans found them. The chief
justice was forced to coin a whole new politico-legal expression--that of domestic, dependent nations--to encompass the
unprecedented status, neither fish nor fowl, he needed native people to occupy.
3. THIS HYPOCRITICAL DOCTRINE JUSTIFIED HITLER’S POLICIES, AMONG OTHERS
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado,
STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7-8.
As “Perversions of Justice” demonstrates, the philosophical/legalistic rationalization of such circumstances is not new.
Rather, the present situation is simply the outgrowth of a juridical doctrine which has been evolving in the U.S. since
before the very earliest moments of the republic. This ideology of expansionism--popularly known as “Manifest Destiny”-has ongoing direct impacts upon the indigenous peoples of North America. The ideology also supported philosophical
developments elsewhere. A salient example is Adolf Hitler’s concept of lebensraumpolitik (“politics of living space”). The
ideology stipulated that Germans were innately entitled, by virtue of an imagined racial and cultural superiority, to land
belonging to others. This rendered Germany morally free in its own mind to take such lands through the aggressive use
of military force.
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GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS STILL OCCURS TODAY
1. THE MOTIVE FOR GENOCIDE STILL EXISTS TODAY
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado,
STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7.
The history of 500 years of warfare directed against the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas is gradually coming to
light. Even those who acknowledge the genocidal nature of European and Euroamerican policies regarding American
Indians, however, tend to see them as the extremes of a different era: the brutality of the Conquistadors or the
massacres permeating the saga of the ‘Winning of the West.” The underlying motivation prompting the genocide of
Native Americans, the lust for their territories and the resources within them, is typically hidden behind a rhetoric
extolling the “settlement” of essentially vacant and “undiscovered” lands. To admit otherwise risks revealing that the
past motive for genocide exists as much today, and in some ways more so.
2. GENOCIDAL AND ECOCIDAL POLICIES ARE WAGED AGAINST NATIVE AMERICA
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado,
STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 7.
This volume of the series on Genocide and Resistance illustrates through a sequence of case studies that the destruction
of indigenous peoples through the expropriation and/or destruction of their land bases is very much an ongoing
phenomenon in both the United States and Canada. The processes are not simply genocidal; they are increasingly
ecocidal in their implications.’ Not only the people of the land are being destroyed, but, more and more, the land itself.
The nature of native resistance to the continuing onslaught of the invading industrial culture is shaped accordingly. It is a
resistance forged in the crucible of a struggle for survival.
3. EVEN AFTER REDUCING NATIVE POPULATION BY 98%, GENOCIDE CONTINUES
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, INDIANS
ARE US?, 1994, page 76-77.
By 1900, the national project of “clearing” Native Americans from their land and replacing them with “superior” AngloAmerican settlers was complete. The indigenous population had been reduced by as much as 98 percent. Approximately
97.5% of their original territory had “passed” to the invaders. The survivors were concentrated, out of sight and out of
mind of the public, on scattered “reservations,” all of them under self-assigned ‘plenary” (full) power of the federal
government. There was, of course, no tribunal comparable to that at Nuremberg passing judgment on those who had
created such circumstances in North America. No US official or private citizen was ever imprisoned--never mind hanged-for implementing or propagandizing what had been done. Nor had the process of genocide against Indians been
completed. Instead, it merely changed form. Between the 1 880s and the 1980s, more than half of all American Indian
children were coercively transferred from their own families, communities and cultures to those of the conquering
society. This was done through compulsory attendance at remote boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from their
homes. Native children were kept for years and systematically “deculturated”: indoctrinated to think and act in the
manner of the Euroamericans rather than as Indians.
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MUST CHALLENGE STEREOTYPICAL CULTURAL IMAGES
1. RACIST SPORTS MASCOTS DEHUMANIZE JUST LIKE NAZI AND KKK IMAGES
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, INDIANS
ARE US?, 1994, page 70.
Let’s get just a little bit real here. The notion of “fun” embodied in rituals like the Tomahawk Chop must be understood
for what it is. There’s not a single non-Indian example deployed above which can be considered acceptable in even the
most marginal sense. The reasons are obvious enough. So why is it different where American Indians are concerned?
One can only conclude that, in contrast to the other groups at issue, Indians are (falsely ) perceived as being too few, and
therefore too weak, to defend themselves effectively against racist and otherwise offensive behavior. The sensibilities of
those who take pleasure in the Chop are thus akin to schoolyard bullies and those twisted individuals who like to torture
cats. At another level, their perspectives have much in common with those manifested more literally--and therefore
much more honestly--by groups like the nazis, the aryan nations, and ku klux klan. Those who suggest that this is “okay”
should be treated accordingly by anyone who opposes nazism and comparable belief systems.
2. EMPIRICS SHOW THAT REJECTING RACIST SPORTS MASCOTS ISN’T HARMFUL
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, INDIANS
ARE US?, 1994, page 70-1.
Fortunately, there are a few glimmers of hope that this may become the case. A few teams and their fans have gotten
the message and have responded appropriately. One illustration is Stanford University, which opted to drop the name
“Indians” with regard to its sports teams (and, contrary to the myth perpetrated by those who enjoy insulting Native
Americans, Stanford has experienced no resulting drop-off in attendance at its games). Meanwhile, the local newspaper
in Portland, Oregon, recently decided its long-standing editorial policy prohibiting use of racial epithets should include
derogatory sports team names. The Redskins, for instance, are now simply referred to as being “the Washington team,”
and will continue to be described in this way until the franchise adopts an inoffensive moniker (newspaper sales in
Portland have suffered no decline as a result). Such examples are to be applauded and encouraged. They stand as
figurative beacons in the night, proving beyond all doubt that it is quite possible to indulge in the pleasure of athletics
without accepting blatant racism into the bargain. The extent to which they do not represent the norm of American
attitudes and behavior is exactly the extent to which America remains afflicted by an ugly reality which is far different
from the “moral leadership” it professes to show the world. Clearly, the United States has a very long way to go before it
measures up to such an image of itself.
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LIBERATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS WILL HELP LIBERATE OTHERS
1. LIBERATING NATIVE LAND PAVES THE WAY FOR MOST EVERY PROGRESSIVE AGENDA
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE
STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 1992, p 177 When we think about it like this, the great mass of
non-Indians in North America really have much to gain, and almost nothing to lose, from native people succeeding in
struggles to reclaim the land which is rightfully ours. The tangible diminishment of US material power that is integral to
our victories in this sphere stand to pave the way for realization of most other agendas--from anti-imperialism to
environmentalism, from African-American liberation to feminism, from gay rights to the ending of class privilege-pursued by progressives on this continent. Conversely, succeeding in any or even all of these other agendas would still
represent an inherently oppressive situation if their realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of Native North
America without the consent of Indian people. Any North American revolution which failed to free indigenous territory
from non-Indian domination would simply be a continuation of colonialism in another form.
2. LIBERATION OF NATIVE AMERICA IS KEY TO POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, THE
STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 1992, p 177 Regardless of the angle from which you view the
matter, the liberation of Native North America, liberation of the land first and foremost, is the key to fundamental and
positive social changes of many other sorts. One thing, as they say, leads to another. The question has always been, of
course, which “thing” is to be first in the sequence. A preliminary formulation for those serious about achieving (rather
than merely theorizing and endlessly debating) radical change in the United States might be “first Priority to First
Americans.” Put another way, this would mean “US Out of Indian Country.” Inevitably, the logic leads to what we’ve all
been so desperately seeking: The US--at least as we’ve come to know it-out of North America altogether. From there, it
can be permanently banished from the planet. In its stead, surely we can join hands to create something new and
infinitely better. That’s our vision of “impossible realism. Isn’t it time we all went to work on attaining it?
3. MUST LIBERATE NATIVES TO DIMINISH OPPRESSIVE POWER OF THE US
Ward Churchill, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Associate Director of the
Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado,
STRUGGLE FOR THE LAND, 1993, page 422.
The principle is this: sexism, racism, and all the rest arose here as a concomitant to the emergence and consolidation of
the Eurocentric nation-state form of sociopolitical and economic organization. Everything the state does, everything it
can do, is entirely contingent upon its maintaining its internal cohesion, a cohesion signified above all by its pretended
territorial integrity, its ongoing domination of Indian Country. Given this, it seems obvious that the literal
dismemberment of the nation-state inherent to Indian land recovery correspondingly reduces the ability of the state to
sustain the imposition of objectionable relations within itself. Realization of indigenous land rights serves to undermine
or destroy the ability of the status quo to continue imposing a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, militarists order upon
non-Indians.
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Constitutional Originalism Responses
Introduction
The United States Constitution forms the basis for all other American lawmaking and is therefore rightly known as the
highest law in the land. The Constitution outlines the powers of the government and the limitations of that power. It also
sets out the processes by which government exercises that power: the rules governing executive offices, legislative
bodies and courts that rule the nation. The Constitution is remarkably short considering that its text is meant to serve
these broad and important functions. The Constitution’s concision is not without problems. Many of its passages are
vague and therefore require interpretation and application to specific instances in order to give the document meaning.
Different schools of interpretation have arisen to reconcile the complex ambiguities of the constitution. Originalism is
one such model of constitutional interpretation. This essay is devoted to exploring how a Lincoln-Douglas debater might
answer an opponent who argues that originalist Constitutional interpretation ought to be valued.
Originalists argue that constitutional interpretation “should remain faithful to the ‘original understanding’ or ‘original
meaning’ of the governing principles or political philosophy of the framers.”33 To varying degrees, such theorists argue
that the judiciary is best served by preserving the original meaning of the constitution as understood by its framers. This
feature distinguishes originalism from competing interpretive philosophies that place more importance on the
underlying values of the Constitution and their evolving meaning in a democratic society. Originalism’s prominent
proponents include Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Yale Professor of Law (and failed Supreme Court nominee)
Robert Bork.
Some Lincoln-Douglas debaters might choose to link originalism to political philosophy by using theories of consent. Such
debaters might argue that when the Constitution was written and ratified, citizens entered into a “social contract” with
the United States as a sovereign state. They, therefore, agreed to abide by the laws that were enacted under the
provisions of that charter. There were, however, limits to the powers. Some restrictions were procedural, like the
provision that both houses of Congress must approve all legislation for it to become law. Others placed absolute
boundaries on the kinds of powers exercised. For example, bills of attainder (legislative acts calling for the punishment of
particular individuals for criminal activities) are prohibited absolutely by the U.S. Constitution.
Constitutional originalists would argue that the democratic polity only consented to establish a government bound by
those particular rules. Thus, any action outside of the bounds of the Constitution as originally agreed to by the people is
illegitimate. The consent of the people, in fact, is one of the justifications for judicial review made by Chief Justice John
Marshall when he first outlined the concept in Marbury v. Madison. He argued that the original limits of the people on
the power of the government they established must be protected through judicial action:
That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall
most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis, on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of
this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it, nor ought it to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so
established, are deemed fundamental. … To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation
committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? … It is a proposition
too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may
not alter the constitution by an ordinary act. Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is
either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and
like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. 34
Thus, the principle of judicial review is predicated upon a notion of consent. If consent is intended to be tangible-something beyond the dreams of political theorists—it must be embodied. For many, the Constitution is the enactment
of the consent of the governed. But that consent can be guaranteed in perpetuity only if the Constitution is interpreted
with its original meaning in mind.
33
34
David O’Brien, Constitutional Law and Politics: Volume Two, Fourth Edition,
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176-77 (1803).
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Answering Consent
There are several difficulties with the attempt to use the Constitution to prove that governed actually consented to
becoming political subjects. The most obvious is that no one who actually agreed to the Constitution are still alive today.
It is hard to argue that the next generation should necessarily be bound by the actions of their ancestors. In addition,
entire classes of individuals who now have legal equality, such as women and African Americans, had no avenue for legal
participation in the formation of the Constitution. They were not able to vote at any stage of the ratification process. On
what grounds could it be said that these people had consented to its adoption? Even if we were to limit consideration to
those who were considered citizens at the time of the founding, to say “the people” consented to the Constitution would
be a vast overstatement. It certainly was not all of the people, as many argued and voted against the adoption of the
present Constitution. Nor did all people participate in the process on equal terms. Those who were present at the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had a greater part in the creation of the governing document than those who
only voted for a representative to a state legislature or ratifying convention. If justified government is predicated upon
an absolute interpretation of the consent of the governed, the Constitution certainly fails on those terms.
Determining "Original Intent"
The changes in the Constitution over time also problematize originalist interpretation. When the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth amendments granted African Americans citizenship, all of the rights given to citizens by the original
Constitution and Bill of Rights then applied to these new citizens on the same terms. Bluntly put, the original framers
never intended to grant these individuals rights. It can be argued that we ought not value the ideals of racists and of the
original intent of a racist document. Even if we do consider the so-called original meaning of these documents, how are
we to reconcile these different framers’ intentions? It seems inconsistent with the original intention of the constitution
to simply transplant the rights meant for the original citizens (i.e., white men) upon all citizens.
Time is also an interesting factor in the consideration of an example provided by the most recent amendment to the
Constitution, which provides that “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and
Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”35 It was first ratified in
1789 by the state of Maryland, but didn’t take effect until New Jersey became the 38th state to ratify the amendment in
1992. 36 Under an originalist interpretation of the constitution, what meaning should the Supreme Court read into the
amendment? Even supposing that each state took perfect records of their ratification proceedings, it would be
extraordinarily difficult to create a consistent interpretation of the amendment’s original intent. While the meaning of
this particular amendment relatively self-evident, the problems raises valuable questions about originalism’s viability.
Who does the originalist mean by a framer of the amendment: The literal author of the amendment, the Congress that
proposed it, the ratifying legislatures of the states, and the voters who elected each of those bodies? Each of these could
be considered “framers” in some sense.
Another problem with originalist readings of the constitution is the nature of the Constitution’s language itself. The
provisions of the Constitution, for the most part, are general rather than specific. The Eighth Amendment, for example,
prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” rather than outlining a list of punishments that are unacceptable. Originalists
might understand this as simply a question of economy, as it would be nearly impossible to list out every conceivable
type of torture meant to be banned by the amendment. They would contend that the list of impermissible punishments
ought to remain fixed by the understanding of the amendment when it was adopted. Others, however, argue that the
lack of a definite list points to an understanding of the terms “cruel” and “unusual” that must change over time, as
standards of acceptable governmental provision change. This was been recognized in a decision by then-Chief Justice Earl
Warren in 1958, “ . . . that case that the words of the Amendment are not precise, and that their scope is not static. The
Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing
society.”37 As such, it would be expected that the Eighth Amendment would continue to be interpreted more broadly
35
Amendment XXVII to the U.S. Constitution, online, accessed May 21, 2001,
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxxvii.html.
36
Full ratification information is available at http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/usconst/amend.html .
37
Trop v. Dulles, Secretary of State, et al., 356 U.S. 86 (1958).
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where the fewer punishments would be allowable as time progresses. This would make the original meaning of the term
“cruel and unusual punishment” irrelevant.
Other Constitutional provisions are meaningful precisely because their effect changes over time. The commerce clause,
whereby the federal government is given jurisdiction over the regulation of interstate commercial activities, has vastly
expanded over time. This is largely because the business is now more frequently conducted across inter-state lines. To
interpret the clause as narrowly of as it was originally intended. The great flexibility of the clause seems to be its defining
characteristic. Few would disagree with this interpretation of the commerce clause. The disputed question, however, is
to what degree that sort of reading of the commerce clause ought to be instructive for reading other Constitutional
provisions.
Individual Rights and Equality
Other Constitutional questions have specific controversies that impact the originalism debate. Among the most
controversial of all constitutional questions concerns the right to privacy. The Constitution never uses the word
“privacy,” but that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from crafting a Constitutional right based upon the concept. The
first Supreme Court case explicitly recognizing a general right to privacy (in the sense of the right to autonomous action)
was Griswold v. Connecticut.38 It ruled that although there is no right to privacy explicitly mentioned in the Constitution,
there is a right to privacy implicit in the rights explicitly catalogued by the document. As such, there is a more general
zone of individual privacy that extends beyond the specific provisions:
The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. The right to educate a child in a
school of the parents' choice -- whether public or private or parochial -- is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study
any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those
rights. … The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by
emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy.
The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. … The Fifth
Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not
force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."39
This constitutional reading conflicts with an originalist understanding of Constitutional interpretation. An originalist
would argue that had the framers intended for there to be a right to privacy, they would have put in the text of the
Constitution.
This objection to a non-textual right to privacy points to originalism’s pragmatic problem of de facto support for political
conservatism. Arguably, the Supreme Court’s wisest and most far reaching decisions were only possible when it departed
from an originalist reading of the Constitution. Decisions like Brown v. Board of Education40 (overturning racial
segregation in public schools), Roe v. Wade41 (granting the right to abortion), and Romer v. Evans42 (overturning
Colorado’s Constitutional amendment banning local sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies) were all predicated on
an expansive reading of the rights accorded by the constitution than would have been made at the time of its writing. In
Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that the scant historical documentation of the understanding of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s affect on education made it impossible to interpret the amendment from a historical perspective. He
wrote, “public school education at the time of the Amendment had advanced further in the North, but the effect of the
Amendment on Northern States was generally ignored in the congressional debates. … As a consequence, it is not
surprising that there should be so little in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment relating to its intended effect on
public education.”43 This, among other considerations, allowed the Warren Court conclude that:
38
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1968).
Griswold, at 485.
40
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
41
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
42
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).
43
Brown, at 490.
39
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In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896
when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its
present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public
schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.44
Thus, it was no longer the framers’ understanding of the amendment which controlled the meaning of the constitution,
but the modern implications of the underlying principles of the document. By looking at the document in a
contemporary light, the court was able to consider new legal understandings of the amendment. For example, it
considered sociological evidence of the detrimental effects of segregation on African American children. Under a
originalist understanding of constitutional interpretation, such evidence would be less relevant to the ultimate question.
Adopting a dynamic reading of the constitution allowed the court to “conclude that in the field of public education the
doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”45 It is questionable
whether such a conclusion would be possible a under the logic of originalism. As the Plessy decision upholding separate
but equal proves, the Court’s interpretation of the meaning of the Fourteenth amendment had not always been so
progressive. Similarly, Roe and Romer depart from an originalist reading to create a more expansive sphere for individual
rights.
Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the majority opinion in Romer. He argued that the Supreme Court, through the
unilateral use of its judicial fiat, arbitrarily made the law of the land that “opposition to homosexuality is as reprehensible
as racial or religious bias.”46 This, Scalia argued, violated the fundamental tenets of democracy:
Whether it is or not is precisely the cultural debate that gave rise to the Colorado constitutional amendment (and to the
preferential laws against which the amendment was directed). Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing
about this subject, it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions
in state constitutions. This Court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class
from which the Members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that "animosity" toward homosexuality is evil.
[Romer] has no foundation in American constitutional law, and barely pretends to. … Striking it down is an act, not of
judicial judgment, but of political will.47
Objections to the anti-democratic nature of Constitutional interpretation is one of the strongest arguments in favor of
originalist constitutional reading. It is widely noted that the judicial branch is the least democratic of the three branches,
because the federal judiciary is appointed rather than elected. This case is instructive in that regard: six unelected judges
overturned the decision of 54% Colorado voters. But majoritarianism is not the sole value of American government. Few
would argue that the Jim Crow laws—even if popularly agreed to—would be “democratic” or just insofar as they singled
out a racial group for discrimination. The function of these decisions is to circumscribe the ability of the majority to
discriminate against disliked minorities.
The ultimately contingent nature of the act of Constitutional interpretation was noted in the Court’s preface to Roe: "We
bear in mind, too, Mr. Justice Holmes' admonition in his now-vindicated dissent in Lochner v. New York (1905): "[The
Constitution] is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions
natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes
embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States."48
The court was predicting the arguments from opponents of their decision concerning the vast changes in Constitutional
interpretation over time. If we are to accept the contention that a document could have changing contextual meanings,
what could be identified to give the document any meaning? One solution to this difficulty is to point to broad values
that the Constitution upholds. In addition to be an intuitively appealing connection to Lincoln-Douglas debaters, the
value approach proved fundamental for much of the most important Constitutional jurisprudence of the twentieth
44
Brown, at 492-93.
Brown, at 494.
46
Romer, at 636.
47
Romer, at 636-53.
48
Roe, at 117. Internal citations omitted.
45
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century. Justice Louis Brandeis made one such connection in relation to the Fourth Amendment’s implicit valuation
privacy in a 1928 dissenting opinion:
The makers of our Constitution … recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect.
They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought
to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the
Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To
protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual … must be deemed
a violation of the Fourth Amendment.49
In this case, Brandies focused not upon the particular provisions of the Fourth Amendment, but on the underlying values
that it upheld. Like the Court as a whole in Brown, Roe, and Bowers, Brandies believed that the Constitution held
meaning that went far beyond the particulars of its text.
Conclusion
Lincoln-Douglas debaters faced with the prospect of arguing against originalism should force their opponents to defend
the practical political implications of adopting that understanding of the Constitution’s meaning. As these examples
show, often times the Supreme Court has used expansive readings of the constitution combined with its powers of
judicial review to formulate progressive protections for the rights of minorities. Would valuing an originalist
interpretation allow those same decisions to be made? If not, what realistic alternative is there to provide for minority
rights other than expansive judicial readings of the constitution? As Colorado’s Amendment 2 proves, often times the
majority is more than willing to suppress the rights of the minority. Obviously, it would be even more difficult to fashion
a national super-majority to protect the rights of these same minorities.50 Even if such a super-majority were fashioned,
constitutional provisions could never contemplate every conceivable contingency requiring legal protection. This may be
the strongest reason to reject the originalists’ constitutional reasoning.
There are many lines of argument with which a debater can attack constitutional originalism. Whether one prefers to use
theoretical objections or practical considerations to argue against the interpretive philosophy is largely a matter of
personal preference. In either case, there are ample arguments for Lincoln-Douglas debaters to draw upon to answer
originalism.
49
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), dissenting opinion by Justice Brandeis at 478.
Under the only amendment process that has been employed, Constitutional changes require a two-thirds vote of both
houses of Congress and the ratification of three-fourths of the state legislatures (i.e., 38 states).
50
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arthur, John. WORDS THAT BIND: JUDICIAL REVIEW AND THE GROUNDS OF MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY.
Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995.
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Burns, Walter. TAKING THE CONSTITUTION SERIOUSLY. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Dorsen, Norman, ed. THE EVOLVING CONSTITUTION: ESSAYS ON THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND THE U.S. SUPREME COURT.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT, 381 U.S. 479 (1968).
Maltz, Earl M. RETHINKING CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: ORIGINALISM, INTERVENTIONISM, AND THE POLITICS OF JUDICIAL
REVIEW. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1994.
Nichol, Gene R. Colorado Law Review. Summer 1999, p. 953.
O’Brien, David M. CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND POLITICS: VOLUME TWO, FOURTH EDITION. New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2000.
Peretti, Terri Jennings. IN DEFENSE OF A POLITICAL COURT. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Perry, Michael J. THE CONSTITUTION IN THE COURTS : LAW OR POLITICS? New York : Oxford University Press, 1994.
ROE V. WADE, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
ROMER V. EVANS, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).
Scalia, Antonin. A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION: FEDERAL COURTS AND THE LAW. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1997.
Tribe, Laurence H. and Michael C. Dorf. ON READING THE CONSTITUTION. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1991.
Whittington, Keith E. CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION: TEXTUAL MEANING, ORIGINAL INTENT, AND JUDICIAL REVIEW.
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
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THE CONSTITUTION’S TEXT REFUTES ORIGINALISM
1. “ORIGINAL INTENT” CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS LACK TEXTUAL GROUNDING
Laurence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University Law School, and Michael C. Dorf, Professor
of Law at Columbia Law School, On Reading the Constitution, 1991, p. 10-11.
Another proponent of locating the ultimate interpretive authority in the Framers' intent, Raoul Berger, has argued that
the original intent of the Framers is "as good as written into the text" of the Constitution. That viewpoint became
something of a manifesto for former Attorney General Meese, who often spoke and wrote of a "jurisprudence of original
intent. But consider the practical difficulties of applying such a theory when, for example, Berger looks at the Fourteenth
Amendment, a text proposed to the states by Congress and voted on by no fewer than thirty-seven state legislatures.
Berger purports to know that the original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was far less noble than some of us
have come to believe; the primary intended beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment, he tries to show, were racist
white Republicans. And therefore, he says, giving the Fourteenth Amendment the meaning that the Supreme Court has
given it in modern times is ahistorical and illegitimate. Let us suppose that Berger's history is correct—that one really
could make that confident an assertion about something as fleeting and elusive as collective intent. In fact, suppose that
the real purpose of those who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment was to deny equality to the freed slaves to whatever
degree would prove politically possible. That is, suppose the Fourteenth Amendment was a palliative designed to
preserve peace, but that the reason for not writing so racist a credo into the Constitution's text was a sense that some of
the Amendment's support might not withstand such candor. Even if this supposition were historically correct, and even if
you believed that original intent should control constitutional interpretation, it still does not follow that it would be
legitimate to read the Fourteenth Amendment to effect the hidden racist agenda. Why not? For one reason, because the
Fourteenth Amendment became "part of th[e] Constitution" in accord with Article V—the provision of the Constitution
that describes how amendments become law. They become law when they are ratified through a specified process by a
certain number of states. There is nothing in Article V about ratifying the secret, hidden, and unenacted intentions,
specific wishes, or concrete expectations of a group of people who may have been involved in the process of enacting a
constitutional guarantee.
2. THE CONSTITUTION’S VAGUENESS PROVES ORIGINALISM CALLS FOR INTERPRETATION
Eric J. Segall, Associate Professor of Law at Georgia State College of the Law, Constitutional Commentary, Fall 1998, 15
Const. Commentary 411, p. 424.
So, Dworkin asks, why does the "resolute text-reader, dictionary-minder, expectation scorner," change his mind when it
comes to the "most fundamental American statute of them all?" Dworkin hypothesized that a true textualist-originalist
would conclude that many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were written so generally and vaguely that the Framers
must have intended them to be interpreted over time. Had the Framers intended these provisions to have a fixed
meaning, they would have written them differently, more specifically. Of course, this generally means that judges will
have great discretion to interpret those phrases, which explains why many modern-day conservatives, like Justice Scalia,
reject semantic originalism - it affords judges too much power. But Scalia has already rejected looking at the expectations
of the Framers at the expense of the text. Scalia's textualism-originalism, therefore, is selective and inconsistent. A true
originalist, according to Dworkin, would interpret the Constitution the way the Framers intended - as embodying broad
principles that judges must apply to differing factual situations by employing independent moral judgment. This "magnet
of political morality is the strongest force in jurisprudence," and the Constitution reflects that principle in its broad
provisions protecting liberty and equality.
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ORIGINALISM DOES NOT PREVENT JUDICIAL ACTIVISM
1. ORIGINALISM DOES NOT PREVENT JUDICIAL INTERVENTION IN POLITICAL AFFAIRS
Earl M. Maltz, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law, RETHINKING CONSTITUTIONAL LAW:
ORIGINALISM, INTERVENTIONISM, AND THE POLITICS OF JUDICIAL REVIEW, 1994, p. 19.
Most discussions of the efficacy of an originalist approach to judicial review have been shaped by the premise that
originalism is synonymous with noninterventionism. As Robert W. Bennett has noted, this assumption is fatally flawed.'"
Admittedly, from an originalist perspective the Tenth Amendment does operate as an important restraint on the
freedom of action of the federal courts—a point whose significance will be explored later in greater detail. Adoption of
originalism does not, however, amount to a complete renunciation of judicial interventionism. Some of the
interventionism required by a pure originalist analysis would no doubt be applauded even by left/center constitutional
theorists. For example, even under the narrowest view of the original understanding of the First Amendment and the
Reconstruction amendments, the Court would be required to provide some protection for freedom of speech and the
rights of racial minorities, respectively. The degree of interventionism mandated by originalism on these matters would
no doubt be insufficient to satisfy the desires of left/center theorists, but the results would nonetheless be clearly
distinguishable from a stringently noninterventionist regime. Further, originalist analysis would support interventionism
in some areas where left/center theorists have typically been strong advocates of judicial deference. Among the best
examples are such provisions as the contracts clause and the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, which were plainly
understood to render substantial protection for the rights of property holders and other members of the wealthier
classes.
2. ORIGINALISM IS AS PREDICATED UPON IDEOLOGY AS ITS ALTERNATIVES
Richard A. Posner, Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at University
of Chicago Law School, Stanford Law Review, July 1990, 42 Stan. L. Rev. 1365, p. 1372.
Although Bork derides scholars who try to found constitutional doctrine on moral philosophy, it should be apparent by
now that he is himself under the sway of a moral philosopher. His name is Hobbes, and he too thought the only source of
political legitimacy was a contract among people who died long ago. This may have been a progressive idea in an era
when kings claimed to rule by divine right, but it is an incomplete theory of the legitimacy of the modern Supreme Court.
There are other reasons for obeying a judicial decision besides the Court's ability to display, like the owner of a champion
airedale, an impeccable pedigree for the decision, connecting it to its remote eighteenth-century ancestor. And Bork
knows this, for he believes that judges should give great weight to precedents, even when a precedent rests on a
mistaken interpretation of the Constitution.
3. ORIGINALISM IS CANNOT SUPPORT LEGITIMACY THROUGH TACIT CONSENT
John Arthur, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the program in Philosophy, Politics and Law at Binghamton
University, WORDS THAT BIND, 1995, p. 31-32.
Indeed, I will argue, originalism cannot successfully link tacit consent with its conception of constitutional interpretation.
There is no plausible defense of the claim that the people, today, consent to the specific, historical limits on elected
officials envisioned by the framers. To begin, it is clear that modern-day citizens are not generally aware of the actual,
historical meanings historians might tell us were in the minds of the framers at the time the Constitution was ratified.
Indeed, historians are themselves often at odds about such questions. But how, then, can citizens today be said to have
tacitly consented to those specific meanings, if they cannot and do not understand them? Suppose, for instance, that
historical research showed that the widely accepted, settled meaning given by the current generation of judges to a
constitutional provision was not the one shared by the framers. Would originalists then argue that the Constitution has
been wrongly understood because the people had consented to those original limits on their legislature instead of the
limits the Courts have settled on? That seems completely implausible.
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ORIGINALISM IS IMPRACTICAL
1. ORIGINALISM IS PLAGUED WITH DIFFICULTIES IN APPLICATION
Gene R. Nichol, Professor and Dean Emeritus at University of Colorado School of Law, Colorado Law Review, Summer
1999, 70 U. Colo. L. Rev. 953, p. 968.
The theory of original intention, like other constitutional methodologies, is plagued with difficulties. The frequent
scarcity of ratification debate records, the difficulty of attributing a single intention to so large and diverse a group, the
vagaries of constructed history, the Framers' apparent ambivalence about intention, and the abstract and aspirational
nature of many constitutional provisions cast significant doubt on the ability of original intention to accurately guide
judges.
2. THE CONSTITUTION IS TOO VAGUE TO SUPPORT AN ORIGINALIST READING
Laurence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University Law School, and Michael C. Dorf, Professor
of Law at Columbia Law School, On Reading the Constitution, 1991, p. 15.
One basic problem is that the text itself leaves so much room for the imagination. Simply consider the preamble, which
speaks of furthering such concepts as "Justice" and the "Blessings of Liberty. " It is not hard, in terms of concepts that
fluid and that plastic, to make a linguistically plausible argument in support of more than a few surely incorrect
conclusions. Perhaps a rule could be imposed that it is improper to refer to the preamble in constitutional argument on
the theory that it is only an introduction, a preface, and not part of the Constitution as enacted. But even if one were to
invent such a rule, which has no apparent grounding in the Constitution itself, it is hardly news that the remainder of the
document is filled with lively language about "liberty," "due process of law," "unreasonable searches and seizures," and
so forth—words that, although not infinitely malleable, are capable of supporting meanings at opposite ends of virtually
any legal, political, or ideological spectrum. It is therefore not surprising that readers on both the right and left of the
American political center have invoked the Constitution as authority for strikingly divergent conclusions about the
legitimacy of existing institutions and practices, and that neither wing has found it difficult to cite chapter and verse in
support of its "reading" of our fundamental law. As is true of other areas of law, the materials of constitutional law
require construction, leave room for argument over meaning, and tempt the reader to import his or her vision of the just
society into the meaning of the materials being considered.
3. ORIGINALISM IS AN INCONSISTENT ARGUMENT OF CONVENIENCE
Gene R. Nichol, Professor and Dean Emeritus at University of Colorado School of Law, Colorado Law Review, Summer
1999, 70 U. Colo. L. Rev. 953, p. 968-70.
But these drawbacks are rank pettiness compared to originalism's central difficulty: its principal advocates relentlessly
refuse to stick by it. Originalism works if they agree with the outcome dictated by history. If history does not lead them
where they want to go, they simply reject it. Judge Bork, of course, was famously guilty of such maneuvers. Bork's
originalism provided energetic critiques of much of the modern liberal agenda. But when he became a candidate for the
highest judicial office, for rather obvious political reasons, he was unwilling to cast aside staples of American
constitutional law like Brown v. Board of Education and Craig v. Boren. As a result, the articulate, strident, and
condescending jurist was reduced to ambivalent babble. In Printz, Justice Scalia faced a powerful historical claim directly
refuting his proffered rule. But rather than give in, he put his head down and pressed on - explaining at every turn why
the lessons of the founding period have nothing to offer. This, admittedly, has not been Scalia's typical pattern. Usually
when history is inconvenient, he simply ignores it. Justice Scalia's takings jurisprudence, for example, is completely
inconsistent with the original understanding that only a physical invasion presents a constitutional violation. He does not
seem to care. His wholesale revision of the jurisprudence of the Free Exercise Clause in Employment Division Department
of Human Resources v. Smith was accomplished without even a nod toward the original meaning of the provision. In
Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, Scalia fashioned a powerful new Article III doctrine to invalidate a federal grant of
statutory standing. Neither the text of the Constitution nor historical practice supported his bolstered injury
requirement. So he simply did not talk about them. The act of Congress was invalidated because he and his colleagues
thought it was a bad idea.
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PROBLEMS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE MAKE ORIGINALISM IMPOSSIBLE
1. HISTORY’S INDETERMINACY MAKES ORIGINALISM INDEFENSIBLE
Emil A. Kleinhaus, editor, Yale Law Journal, October 2000, 110 Yale L.J. 121, p. 122-24.
The originalist project, by all accounts, relies heavily on historical analysis. In order to elucidate the original meaning of
the vague terms that pervade the Constitution, Justices often either delve into primary sources or rely on historians to
explain those sources. Referring to the process of historical inquiry in constitutional law, Justice Scalia admitted, "It is, in
short, a task sometimes better suited to the historian than the lawyer." Yet originalists minimize the difficulty of gaining a
clear understanding of the Constitution and its amendments through historical research. Edwin Meese, for example,
declared that "the Constitution is not buried in the mists of time." If Meese was right, the originalist project is relatively
simple. Given the opportunity to interpret a vague constitutional provision in the appropriate case, an originalist judge
will consult the text and relevant historical sources and bring the law into line with the original understanding. The
originalist thus ascribes excessive doctrinal change to nonoriginalist adventurism and defends further short-term change
on the grounds that it will bring the Court's jurisprudence permanently back to its historical foundations. As one scholar
put it, originalism "seeks to freeze meanings against erosion by time." The postulate that originalism, because it seeks to
ground constitutional law in a particular moment, must lead to a set of "frozen" results is widely affirmed, but it is not
always accurate. Despite the best efforts of historians to reach decisive historical conclusions, the most plausible
interpretation of a historical text changes over time. Historians' understanding of the Constitution and its amendments
develops as they interpret and synthesize documentary evidence. Further, since research about particular historical
questions intensifies after Justices "declare" history, historical conclusions that are incorporated into the law can be
particularly vulnerable. To the extent that Justices rely on historians when they declare history, Justices' conception of
the document's original meaning must change along with historians'. Moreover, to the extent that Justices engage in
independent historical inquiries, their conception of the document's original meaning can change even more
dramatically as they encounter previously overlooked documents or compelling secondary interpretations of those
documents. Therefore, even if the Supreme Court's jurisprudence were to coincide exactly at a particular point in time
with the Justices' conception of the original understanding, that coincidence would not spell the end of non-amendmentbased constitutional development, unless Justices simply ignored new information after that point. Ultimately, the more
Justices use historical research as a decisive interpretative tool, the more substantial the body of law that one scholar
has called the "common law of history" becomes, and the more vulnerable the Court itself becomes to extralegal
historical criticism.
2. THE VALUES OF THE FRAMERS ARE UNKNOWABLE, FORCING JUDICIAL ACTIVISM
John Arthur, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the program in Philosophy, Politics and Law at Binghamton
University, WORDS THAT BIND: JUDICIAL REVIEW AND THE GROUNDS OF MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY, 1995, p.
34-35.
Defenders of original intent stress that judges should ignore their own values in favor of the values of the framers, so
presumably in this case we would need to ask what the framers would do, given their values, if they understood our
world as we do. But it is by no means clear that the "values" people hold can be sharply separated from their beliefs
about the "facts." The value the framers (or anybody else) place on privacy and the importance of a warrant will be
influenced by their beliefs about the dangers posed by modern technology as well as the risks posed by police intrusions
on privacy. But if (as this suggests) the framers' values would change as they learned what we know, then what is left of
the original claim that judges should rule in accord with the framers' values but not their (now outdated) understanding
of the world? How are judges to know what the framers' values were? The temptation, of course, will always be for
judges to attribute their values and beliefs to the framers, thinking that if the framers were here they would see the
world as we do. Put that way, however, it is no longer clear that we are talking about "the framers" as much as about
ourselves. Since any judge would presumably think the framers would take a reasonable position on these issues, there
will no longer be a sharp distinction between our own ideas about what the Fourth Amendment requires and what the
framers understood it to require.
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Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson
Progressive thinkers seek to promote new values. They engage in discourse about how to view the world, the harms and
advantages of various perspectives, and how action follows thought. The belief is that values guide and influence our
actions. Values serve as lenses with which to view the world. If I believe that we should value hierarchy and competition
over equality and cooperation, I am both more likely to take actions supporting elitism, and more likely to view world
events from a perspective which normatively judges existing social arrangements to be desirable.
Moreover, values form a framework of rhetoric, the way in which we seek to persuade others. The impact of values on
rhetoric is significant. We choose our words based on our values. We interpret the words of others in the same way. The
very act of naming something in terms which denote desirability or undesirability has an impact on how we engage the
world. Naming is very important. We can kill and save lives with names.
This essay concerns the attempts of two feminist activists, Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson, to re-think values, and in doing
so, to find new names and new concepts for the challenges they see. Daly and Johnson see patriarchy--a set of
metaphysical assumptions as well as material social practices--as being overarching and far-reaching in its impact on
humanity. As an alternative to patriarchy, Daly and Johnson seek to instill "feminist" values onto the world. Feminist
values reject patriarchy: specifically, feminist values reject aggression, war, capitalism, elitism, and the inequality of
hierarchy. Feminist values support cooperation, nurturing, the affirmation of life, and the community of women who
sustain such norms.
In what follows, I shall give a brief description of the lives and struggles of Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson. Then, I will
describe their conception of feminist values and how those values are designed to replace current patriarchal norms.
After discussing the implications of these projects on value debate, the essay will conclude with a synopsis of the
potential problems of feminism and possible objections to Daly and Johnson's projects.
BIOGRAPHIES: MARY DALY
Mary Daly was born October 16, 1928, in New York, to working class Irish-Catholic parents. She exhibited a love for books
at an early age, and decided she wanted to be a philosopher by the time she was in high school. However, her life would
be filled with frustration because, in the first half of the 20th century, such a profession was simply not available to most
American women.
Daly attended an all-woman's college in Albany, New York. There, she learned that women could be powerful instructors,
even though they were limited in what they were allowed to do and say. Without any money, Daly was limited in her
post-graduate options. She opted to pursue an MA in English at the Catholic University of America, and then went on to
study theology at St. Mary's college in Indiana. At the age of 25, she received her Ph.D. in religion. Denied admission to
the University of Notre Dame solely because she was a woman, Daly took a teaching position at a small catholic school in
Massachusetts.
Eventually, Mary Daly discovered she could study philosophy outside the United States. In 1959, she went to Switzerland
on an exchange scholarship to study philosophy at the University of Fribourg. She stayed in Switzerland for seven years.
Later, returning to the United States, she accepted a position as assistant professor at Boston College, where she has
been battling the administration ever since. During that time, Daly has published a plethora of feminist manifestos.
These writings are eclectic and challenging. They often play with words and change the elemental meanings of those
words, so as to show her readers how words mix with values. The title of her most important work, for example, is
GYN/ECOLOGY--a play on the medical science of gynecology and the ecology of feminism. Her life, like her work, has
been filled with attacks on patriarchy, and a defiant insistence on the power of exclusively female communities.
SONIA JOHNSON
Sonia Johnson was born in Idaho and was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints
(Mormons). She recalls that early in her life she learned that opposition to the Church was simply unthinkable, and that
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its teachings stretched into every corner of members' lives. Johnson attended Utah State University, where she met her
future husband Richard. For many years after her marriage, Sonia Johnson lived the stereotypical life of a conservative
housewife. Soon, however, after she and her family moved to Virginia, they began to read feminist literature. Although
Johnson didn't realize at first that she was being affected by this literature, things would quickly change.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the nation was immersed in a battle between proponents and opponents of the Equal
Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the U.S. constitution which was to read simply: "Equality of rights under
the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." This seemingly innocent
amendment, however, was the center of controversy for many liberals and conservatives. Conservatives took the
amendment to be an encroachment on the freedom of local communities to deal with gender issues as they saw fit. AntiERA activists contended that the amendment would force women to go into combat if they were in the military; that it
would call for unisex bathrooms; that it would regulate who could be promoted or hired by private businesses, and so
on.
In July, 1978, Sonia Johnson joined thousands of other women for a march on Washington, D.C., urging passage of the
Equal Rights Amendment. For her increasing involvement with this cause, she was excommunicated from the Mormon
Church in 1979. In 1980, Johnson and several other women chained themselves to a building in Washington to protest
the Republican Party's abandonment of ERA. In 1981, she joined seven other women in Illinois on a hunger strike. In
1984, she was the Citizens' Party's candidate for U.S. president. During and after that time, Johnson wrote several books
calling for a shift in values from patriarchy to feminism, and for the empowerment of women's communities.
FEMINISM AS A VALUE FRAMEWORK
Feminism is not merely a "doctrine," or a set of assumptions designed to produce a particular dogma. It is more accurate
to describe feminism (a rich philosophy with many sub-categories) as a "framework." Frameworks don't merely make
observations about the world. Frameworks serve as guides to interpret the observations of others. Frameworks are like
"criteria" in that they provide a filter with which to evaluate both human experience and philosophical interpretation.
HOW FEMINISM FRAMES SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Most philosophies that end with "ism" are systemic philosophies. They try to make sense of virtually all relevant data
through their particular framework. This does not mean that such philosophies attempt to explain everything, but that
they attempt to explain, and make sense of, all those phenomena that they deem to be their concern. Marxism, for
example, does not attempt to explain why electrons are negatively charged, since such a fact has nothing to do with
Marxism's concern that workers are exploited, or that the owners of capital and property tend to establish social
hegemony. Crime, on the other hand, would be a Marxist concern because it can be explained by an appeal to existing
economic and social relations.
Similarly, feminists believe that social problems, especially those concerning oppression, are within the focus of systemic
approaches to feminism. These social problems usually stem from the following manifestations of patriarchy: 1. Valuing
aggression and competition over peace and cooperation. One of patriarchy's central principles is that problems and
differences between people can best be solved by one party aggressively challenging, fighting, and beating, another
party. Because of this tenant, feminists frame problems like war, domestic violence, and capitalism as manifestations of a
culture of competition and violence created by men. 2. Acquisitiveness. Capitalism is not simply an economic system, but
a value system embraced by people who believe the earth was essentially made for the use of those humans most
ruthless in exploiting it. Another of patriarchy's major principles is that those who have enough power to acquire things
should acquire what they want, regardless of the social costs. Because of this, feminists frame problems like
environmental exploitation, poverty, and colonialism as manifestations of the male ethos of greed. 3. Power and
hierarchy. Patriarchy thrives on the notion that people are not really equal. Leadership and submission are natural
attributes of human existence. While "equality" may be possible under the law, all this really means is that there is some
vaguely "level" playing field upon which people can compete for the top spots in society. Feminists believe that
patriarchal obsession with "leadership," "credibility," politics, and force creates hierarchies which judge individuals based
on their place in some male-created "scale." This means that patriarchal society is fundamentally and foundationally undemocratic, regardless of legal guarantees of rights.
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For Daly, the "foreground" of human existence is currently patriarchy. It is a set of beliefs and practices created by men,
to justify the rule and dominance of men. Daly and Johnson both argue that, for centuries, we have known that
communities of women do not practice the kinds of ethics glorified by patriarchy. Communities of women are not, they
argue, competitive, acquisitive, or power hungry.
The problem is that these communities that promote feminist values have been kept "underground" by patriarchy.
Whenever women attempt to move these values into the "public" sphere, the realm we call "political," men do not allow
this to happen. And on the other side, men bring their patriarchal values into the private world of women, enforcing
their will through domestic abuse, rape, propaganda, dividing women from one another, and owning those things which
are necessary for human existence.
People have become so accustomed to the current system that they do not believe it can be changed. Even if they think
change is desirable, they do not believe it is possible. Those who see it as possible do not always think it is desirable. This
is due to patriarchy's control of virtually all ideological institutions. Men control religion, which reminds women that God
is Male, and that the male in society is therefore closer to God than the female. Men control the media, which means
that our daily indoctrination of news and education includes the glorification of competition and acquisitiveness. Finally,
men control property, money, and the means of production, meaning that they have the material forces to back up their
ideological notions. Images in the media, in education, and everyday life serve to reinforce the notion that nothing can
be changed.
WAR AND VIOLENCE VERSUS PEACE
For Mary Daly, violence and aggression mark patriarchy as the "foreground". That is, violence characterizes the main way
of being in the patriarchal world. This violence destroys people's potential. Daly likens the war ideology of patriarchy to a
religion where innocent people are sacrificed on the altar of war.
In place of such violence, radical feminism offers a way of being that celebrates life. There are several reasons why a
feminist ideology would be life affirming and peaceful. First, women experience a connection to life through their power
of giving life. For a woman to nurture a child in the womb for nine months, and experience the pain and ecstasy of giving
birth to that child, means that she will materially and spiritually experience the process of life itself. Second, Daly writes
of a "pure lust," which is not a sexual or pornographic lust, but is a feeling of intimate connection to the rest of the
world. Although both women and men are capable of feeling this "pure lust," most men do not, because they are more
deeply influenced by patriarchy; and many women do not experience it, because through socialization, discouragement,
and punishment, the patriarchy has driven them away from it.
It seems obvious that a world that embraced life in every form would reject war. But why would violence necessarily also
be rejected? For radical feminists, the coercion of violence is a corollary to war: It springs from an ethic, which assumes
cooperation is unnatural and coercion almost inevitable. That ethic is patriarchy. Daly argues that verbal aggression is a
prerequisite to physical aggression. She writes: This use of verbal violence to unleash and support inclinations toward
physical violence is operative also in the highest echelons of the military machine. On this level, too, male demonic
destructiveness is clearly linked to hatred and contempt for women and all that men consider to be female. (Mary Daly,
GYN/ECOLOGY, 1978, p. 359) For Daly, "enemy" territory and the bodies of women are one and the same in the eyes of
aggressive, warlike males.
INTERCONNECTEDNESS
Whereas patriarchy emphasizes our divisions, radical feminism emphasizes our connectedness: with each other, with the
earth, and with our history. The main manifestation of this for feminism is, of course, women's connections to one
another. Foss, Foss and Griffin write: To be a Radical Feminist is to become a member of a minority, to place one's trust
in other women, and to reclaim women's relationships with other women …to embrace the cognitive and affective shift
that takes place in the soul as a result, and to embark on the spiraling journey of female becoming that takes women into
the background. (Foss, Foss and Griffin, FEMINIST RHETORICAL THEORIES, 139) Realizing that interconnectivity allows
women to stop patriarchy from pitting them against one another. In the current system, white women are pitted against
Black women; rich women are told to subordinate poor women. Radical feminism offers a vision wherein each woman
has more in common with every other woman than with any man. So, at least within the confines of gender, radical
feminism wants women to be interconnected.
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NON-HIERARCHICAL RELATIONS
Whereas patriarchy believes hierarchy to be inevitable, radical feminism rejects that inevitability. Radical feminists see
human beings as fundamentally able to be equal, and deserving to build social relationships which maximize that
equality; not in some abstract legal sense, but in real and concrete ways. Two strains of Sonia Johnson's thinking help
clarify why radical feminist values necessitate the rejection of hierarchy.
First, for Johnson, all oppression is based fundamentally upon the oppression of women. Since family and domestic
relations are, and always have been, the most primary and original relations (before we enter the "outer world" we first
have relations with our family), dominance in the intimate sphere is a prerequisite for other types of dominance.
Johnson's metaphor is familiar: at one time, long ago, men from one tribe decided to attack the tribe across the river.
Thus war was born. But Johnson says there is a story even before that story: The men in that tribe first had to dominate
and "colonize" the women and children in their tribe. Once they were able to do that, they were subsequently confident
and powerful enough to decide to conquer other people too.
Extended to everyday relations today, the metaphor becomes clearer. Women must be subordinated today for men to
fight wars. They must keep having babies to turn into faithful workers, soldiers, and other mothers. They must "keep the
home fires burning" while the men are away killing each other. If patriarchy values aggression and dominance, it feeds
upon the dominance over, and aggression towards, the essentially peaceful women who help sustain the patriarchy
through their reproductive and nurturing capacities.
Second, Johnson argues for the empowerment of "ordinary" women, not self- or other-designated spokespersons for
some elite group of feminist adjudicators. Johnson is fond of saying that she is Sonia Johnson, and no one else, and she
can only absolutely influence herself. She believes that true feminism is not the product of a few elite women theorizing
in classrooms or boardrooms, but is in fact a movement of millions of women who have realized their self-responsibility,
and even more millions upon whose everyday experience feminism must be based.
Ultimately, non-hierarchical relations require (1) self-responsibility from each person, and (2) the willingness to sacrifice
for others. This is a radical vision of democracy that says "leadership" is a sham, because it implies that different people
are differently equipped to take responsibility for their endeavors. True, we ALL need help from one another, no one
more or less than another. But the ultimate end to that help ought to be empowerment, not dependency. Patriarchy
thrives on dependency, on relationships of dominance and submission wherein the dominated party feels she NEEDS to
be dominated. Johnson's radical feminist values reject such a framework in favor of mutual trust and self-empowerment.
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE
Most value debates center around questions we have long assumed to be basic philosophical dilemmas. Some of these
include freedom versus order, justice versus mercy, and sovereignty versus law. In each of these cases, a "zero-sum" is
assumed. That is, it is assumed that some people will use their liberty to harm others. It is assumed that some leaders
will take advantage of an ordered society to coerce others. It is assumed that justice requires harm, or that mercy
requires allowing harm to go unpunished. It is assumed that sovereign nations will inevitably harm people within their
borders, or that law is always coercive.
Radical feminists claim that these assumptions only hold true under a patriarchal system where people are pitted against
one another. Thus, feminism attempts to dismantle that belief by providing an alternative where people are encouraged
to cooperate and freely associate with one another, and where individuals, communities, and nations see violence as
primarily unacceptable and certainly avoidable. A radical feminist president would have waited longer to go to war with
Iraq in 1991; or would have avoided war altogether, by offering solutions which were nurturing, understanding, and
constructive to all parties. The fact that this seems "utopian" or unrealistic is further proof that we are led to believe the
current state of affairs is the only possible reality.
Feminism provides the framework for searching for the systemic causes of problems rather than accepting their
existence and establishing ad hoc solvency procedures for them. In the evidence section to follow, Sonia Johnson writes:
Feminism...far from being a "single issue," is a perspective, a way of looking at all the issues. It provides a framework for
evaluating them. It is a world view, a complete and complex value system, the only alternative to patriarchy. Feminism is,
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in short, the most inclusive and descriptive analysis of the human situation on earth--at this time or any other, as far as
we know. (Sonia Johnson, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 237.)
In addition to offering a comprehensive philosophy with which to weigh other competing value claims, radical feminism
promotes a radical version of democracy, which challenges traditional interpretations of the concept of government.
Feminism promotes a concept of democracy, which is participatory, inclusive, and constructive. Debaters arguing from a
radical feminist standpoint must convince critics that human beings are not naturally self-serving, aggressive, or
acquisitive. The point of feminism is that we were made to be those things, and can hence be unmade from those things.
PROBLEMS WITH FEMINISM
Any systemic philosophy is answerable on the grounds that it is too absolutist. Radical feminism is no exception. Readers
of Johnson, Daly, and other radical feminists will notice an undertone of absolutism in their writings. Johnson constantly
claims that feminism is "universal" in its comprehension. The claim that all women everywhere have more in common
with one another than any woman has with any man seems unreasonable. Daly speaks of male-ness and war as if they
were one and the same. What follows is a brief list of potential objections to radical feminism.
First, it is unclear that the values put forth by these radical feminists are exclusively "feminine" in nature. The problem is
that whenever one argues that "men" can have "feminist" values, one is playing into the binary framework of
"masculine" and "feminine" which critics of feminism say is the problem. If, as a man, I think one should seek peace and
cooperation, I am not necessarily embracing a "feminine" side. I may simply be embracing an ethic that I believe to be
desirable. By claiming that everything desirable is "feminist," radical feminists are simply creating an opposition where
no such opposition may be warranted.
Second, the fixation on values such as nurturing and care as being exclusively "feminine" can harm both men and
women. For example, one offshoot of radical feminism, called "ecological feminism," claims that women are more
connected to the earth and that an embrace of feminist values is therefore, naturally, an embrace of ecological values.
Critics of the eco-feminist movement claim that by tying women to "life," "birth," blood and soil, radical feminists merely
chain women to their "natural" roles as mothers and housekeepers. But women should be empowered to do whatever
they feel is right, rather than be kept in roles that are deemed "nurturing" and "peaceful." Peace may be another name
for subservience.
Third, feminism in this radical nature seems too divisive to really succeed. It alienates both men and those women who
do not share in its vision. Readers will notice not only a systemic obsession with blaming all problems on patriarchy, but a
tendency to equate all of the evils of patriarchy with "men." The problem is that most men are not responsible for these
evils. A small group of powerful people controls the means of production and political influence in the world. Most of
those people are men, but some are women, and they appear no less inclined to exploit the weak than do their male
colleagues. Moreover, it is difficult to see how women alone can transform the world if they comprise only half of the
human race.
CONCLUSION
This essay has explained the value basis of the radical vision of feminism. Sonia Johnson and Mary Daly theorize that the
ignorance of women's voices, as well as the physical, spiritual and political oppression of women, have been responsible
for most of the social evils, and a considerable amount of private evils, in world history. Debaters arguing about feminism
should not personalize the issues so much that they are perceived as attacking all men. People arguing against feminism
should not appear so defensive as to seem they are attacking women's attacks on patriarchy. Instead, an engagement
with the fundamental, foundational structures of feminist argumentation will allow a cooperative and peaceful exchange
of ideas, something which all debaters, feminists or otherwise, should value.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cornell, Drucilla. AT THE HEART OF FREEDOM: FEMINISM, SEX AND EQUALITY, Princton, N.J. : Princeton University Press,
1998.
Daly, Mary. GYN/ECOLOGY: THE METAETHICS OF RADICAL FEMINISM, Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
Daly, Mary. PURE LUST: ELEMENTAL FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY, San Francisco: Harper, 1992.
Evans, Judith. FEMINIST THEORY TODAY: AN INTRODUCTION TO SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1995.
Foss, Karen A., Foss, Sonja K., and Griffin, Cindy L. FEMINIST RHETORICAL THEORIES, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999.
Johnson, Allan G. THE GENDER KNOT: UNRAVELING OUR PATRIARCHAL LEGACY, Philadelphia : Temple University Press,
1997.
Johnson, Sonia. FROM HOUSEWIFE TO HERETIC, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1981.
Johnson, Sonia. GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1987.
Kemp, Sandra and Judith Squires. FEMINISMS, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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FEMINISM IS A DESIRABLE VALUE
1. FEMINISM AS A VALUE ADVANCES COMPASSION, NON-VIOLENCE, AND EQUALITY
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 267-268.
Feminism is the articulation of the ancient, underground culture and philosophy based on the values that patriarchy has
labeled "womanly," but which are necessary for full humanity. Among the principles and values of feminism that are
most distinct from those of patriarchy are universal equality, non-violent problem solving, and cooperation with nature,
one another, and other species. Feminists place great value on non-hierarchical social, political, economic, and emotional
or psychic relationships. Prizing compassion and genuine hearing of others' words and feelings, we put human needs and
the quality of life at the top of our list of priorities.
2. FEMINISM IS NOT ELITIST--ITS VALUES STEM FROM THE CONDITION OF ALL WOMEN
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 238.
Feminism is not an analysis thought up by several brilliant women peering in from the outside and then trying to impose
their conclusions upon those enmeshed in the actual situation they describe. Though hundreds of women from as many
countries may write about it, may work to form the richness and abundance of it into coherent theory, the raw material
is provided by the daily epiphanies of half the human race.
FEMINISM CAN GUIDE VALUE AND CRITERIA DISCUSSIONS
1. FEMINISM IS A UNIVERSAL VALUE, NOT A TREATMENT OF INDIVIDUAL ISSUES
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 236-237.
It is discouraging enough that the public views as a "single issue" the concern of half the human race about every aspect
of our lives, public and private. It is doubly disheartening that many feminists also equate feminism and "women's
rights." While women's rights are an important aspect of feminism, they are only an aspect. Feminism is not about
"issues" at all. It is about a totally different human possibility, a non-patriarchal way of being in the world. It is about a
new universal habit, a new mind.
2. FEMINISM IS A FRAMEWORK NECESSARY FOR UNDERSTANDING ALL PROBLEMS
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 237.
Feminism, I said, far from being a "single issue," is a perspective, a way of looking at all the issues. It provides a
framework for evaluating them. It is a world view, a complete and complex value system, the only alternative to
patriarchy. Feminism is, in short, the most inclusive and descriptive analysis of the human situation on earth--at this time
or any other, as far as we know.
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SEXISM IS THE CAUSE AND CONTEXT OF GREATER HUMAN PROBLEMS
1. DOMINATION OF WOMEN LEADS TO OTHER FORMS OF VIOLENCE AND DOMINATION
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 241.
Feminism posits that men raped and exploited and enslaved women before they went across the river and invaded the
neighboring tribe. It posits that men learned the power-over paradigm in their kitchens and bedrooms, their caves and
huts, through their most intimate, most formative relationships, which were with mothers, lovers, and wives, and that
they subsequently applied it in all areas of their lives, operating within that dominant/submissive, dichotomous mindset
in all subsequent affairs. Thus did the sadomasochistic paradigm, which is patriarchy, slouch into the world.
2. SEXISM IS THE PROBLEM WHICH CONTEXTUALIZES ALL OTHER PROBLEMS
Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 243.
But women, not taken in any more, are saying, "No, you don't understand. The way you treat women is central to all
these problems: central to making peace in the Middle East and Central America, central to decreasing tension between
the Soviet Union and the U.S., central to eliminating terrorism, central to restructuring the world economy." Feminists
insist in the face of monumental disbelief and boredom that sexism is the Original Sin, "the fundamental lie that marks all
human ideas, customs, and institutions," and that all the seemingly insurmountable problems in the world are the fallout
from this most radical corruption. It is clear, therefore, that the only hope for this planet is in a global transformation in
the status of women.
3. AGGRESSION AND WAR STEM FROM THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN
Mary Daly, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, GYN/ECOLOGY: THE METAETHICS OF RADICAL FEMINISM,
1978, p. 357.
Clearly, the primary and essential object of aggression is not the "opposing" military force. The members of the opposing
team share the same values and play the same war games. The secret bond that binds the warriors together, energizing
them, is the violation of women, acted out physically and constantly re-played on the level of language and shared
fantasies. In the absence of women, defeating the enemy is envisaged as making him into a woman. Yet the warriors
always attempt to seal the ultimate victory by the actual rape, murder, and dismemberment of women.
4. WAR IS JUSTIFIED THROUGH PATRIARCHY'S SYMBOLIC PRACTICES
Mary Daly, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, GYN/ECOLOGY: THE METAETHICS OF RADICAL FEMINISM,
1978, p. 357.
In order to understand the misogynistic roots of androcratic aggression, we must comprehend that the perpetual War is
waged primarily on a psychic and spiritual plane. This is not to minimize physical invasion/occupation/destruction, but to
grasp the total horror. The most noxious forms of aggression are not reducible to the biological level alone, but involve
also the fabrication of "symbolic universes in thought, language, and behavior." These universes are all present in each
concrete violent act of aggression.
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"FEMINIST VALUES" ARE WRONG
1. LIBERATION REQUIRES REJECTING DISTINCTIONS AMONG MASCULINE AND FEMININE
Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.
In that vision, let us remind ourselves, the struggle for equal dignity, equal possibility, and equal worth was supposed to
change and to benefit men, too. Women's rights were thwarted by culture, not by nature; by cruel social arrangements,
not by timeless male troglodytism. "We do not fight with man himself," the nineteenth-century feminist Ernestine Rose
observed, "but only with bad principles." In the great feminist vision, neither men nor women were to be defined by, let
alone reduced to, their anatomy. For liberal feminism, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, sex, like caste and rank, was a "
morally irrelevant characteristic" that acquired its significance historically and not biologically--through law and custom,
which are amenable to moral and historical agency. Otherwise politics are meaningless, and women have reason only for
despair.
2. GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY ARE INVALID
Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.
There is plenty of empirical evidence to complicate and to counter these generalizations, not least our own experiences
of women and men who fit neither mold. There is a preponderance of studies that show that most psychological sex
differences are small to moderate, and exceeded by variation within each sex. In few other aspects of life, certainly,
would we regard animal behavior or the behavior of our anthropoid ancestors as inescapable blueprints for our own
actions. (Indeed, as Angier puts it in her delightful new book, Woman: An Intimate Geography, "many nonhuman female
primates gallivant about rather more than we might have predicted before primatologists began observing their
behavior in the field--more, far more, than is necessary for the sake of reproduction.")
3. THE "NATURE" OF FEMININITY IS FALLACIOUS--THERE IS NO SUCH THING
Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.
Liberal feminists and egalitarians of both sexes have usually made it a premise of their thinking that none of us can know
precisely the essence of womanhood in the absence of social conditions. "What is now called the nature of woman,"
John Stuart Mill observed, "is an eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural
stimulation in others." American women in 1999 are no longer such constricted houseplants, clipped to bend in one
direction and unable to grow in another direction, but neither do they exist in a sexless utopian zone. Surely humility on
the subject of what constitutes a whole, a real, an essential woman is in order.
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FEMINIST VALUES ARE UNNECESSARY
1. CULTURAL NORMS CAN CHANGE WITHOUT IMPOSING FEMINIST VALUES
Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.
Most importantly, it is a fundamental lesson of human history that a change in cultural norms can effect a change in
sexual behavior--so that, for instance, when women are given the social opportunity and the cultural sanction, many of
them will not feel it necessary to hide their libidos (and their thongs). For the evo- psycho school of misogyny (and it is
misogyny, whether it is delivered in liberal or conservative voices), it is enough that we have all known men and women
who resemble the evolutionary stereotypes. But in truth it is not enough. The reality of biological differences is
undeniable, but it is also not the only reality, or the most significant reality.
2. FEMINIST ESSENTIALISM IGNORES CULTURAL FACTORS AND CULTURAL CHANGE
Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.
The difference feminists could have argued that there are jerks of both sexes, and that men in general are prodded by a
variety of social clues to express their jerkiness in one way--by crushing beer cans on their heads, say, or by pummeling
people--while women in general express their jerkiness in another way--by emotional manipulation or verbal abuse; and
they could have argued that both these tendencies are subject to change as cultural expectations change, though they
will in all probability never be interchangeable. But that is not what the difference feminists wish to argue. They are not
especially struck by the infinite variety of human beings. Like the evolutionary psychologists, they prefer to believe that
men are one way and women are another way, and so it has been and so it shall be. And what point is there in social and
political reform, if the problem is biological? Genes are impervious to legislation.
3. CURRENT CONCEPTIONS OF GENDER EQUALITY ARE SUFFICIENT
Danielle Crittenden, Author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, THE
WEEKLY STANDARD, July 9, 1999, p. 31
Perhaps the best solution for women would be to accept that they have achieved equality with men in every important
way. Having had every legal, economic, political, and social impediment removed, we may have at last run up against the
impediments -- if you wish to call them that -- of our sex. To achieve any more, to be able to live the same lives as men,
we would actually have to be men -- and this, I suspect, is not an enticing goal to most women.
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ANGELA DAVIS
INTRODUCTION
Angela Davis is an internationally respected scholar and political activist. She has been embroiled in controversy
numerous times, clashing with both the government of the United States and individual critics. Due to her outspoken
political activities and the relationships she has formed, Angela Davis was targeted by the US criminal justice system in
1970. This period further led to the growth in her anti-prison sentiment, making her an important figure in the
abolitionist movement today. Angela Davis should be viewed as a primary source for information because her radical
beliefs and critiques of racism, classism, and sexism in the United States are both revealing and important issues to bear
in mind during most debates.
LIFE AND WORK
Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama on January 26, 1944. This was a period in American history when Jim
Crow Laws were still enforced, and neighborhoods were rife with racial tension. Both of her parents were educated, her
mother was an elementary school teacher and her father was first a teacher then a service station operator. Her parents
introduced her to political activism, as her mother was a campaigner for the NAACP before the state shut it down. They
managed to buy a home in an un-segregated neighborhood, where Angela spent most of her childhood. This
neighborhood was often referred to as Dynamite Hill, because homes of black families were bombed so often by the Ku
Klux Klan.
Angela Davis was unable to escape the racial tensions that were always present in her life. She was a very intelligent
young girl, but due to segregation she was forced to enter decrepit elementary and middle schools. At age 14, she was
accepted into a program run by the American Friends Service Committee, which placed black youths in integrated,
northern schools. Through this program, she was able to attend Elizabeth Irwin High School, a radical school in New York
City. She moved to New York with her mother, who wanted to obtain her MA from NYU. The school quickly introduced
her to the ideas of communism and socialism, an education that would stay with her throughout her life. While
attending this school, she also joined the Communist youth group, Advance.
When Davis graduated from high school, she attended Brandeis University on scholarship; only three African American
students attended the school. She studied French, and spent a year in Paris. While she was there, she learned of the
Birmingham Baptist Church bombing in September 1963. This event greatly affected her as she knew the four girls who
were killed. When Davis returned from Paris, she became more interested in philosophy and audited a course offered by
Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s ideas have greatly influenced Angela Davis, particularly his belief that it is the duty of the
individual to rebel against the system. After graduating from Brandeis University, she studied philosophy at Johann
Wolfgang van Goethe University in Frankfurt. However, she soon wanted to join the civil rights movements that were
arising in the United States, so she returned and studied under Marcuse at University of California at San Diego. After
earning her master’s degree, Davis returned to Germany and obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy.
After receiving her Ph.D., Angela Davis became a lecturer of philosophy at the University of California in Los Angeles. In
1967, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the following year the
American Communist party. However, when the Federal Bureau of Investigations notified her employers of her political
activities, her contract was terminated. She was later rehired though, after the community amassed popular support for
her.
On August 18, 1970, Angela Davis was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. She was charged with
conspiracy, kidnapping and homicide; the government argued that she had aided in the attempted escape from Marin
County Hall of Justice of Black Panther members. Angela Davis was on the run for several months, before finally being
captured. Though she was later acquitted of the charges, Davis spent 18 months in prison.
Today, Angela Davis continues to be a very prominent social activist. She is a professor at University of California in
Santa Cruz, and she is an outspoken proponent of the abolition of US prisons and the death penalty. Though Davis is no
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longer a member of the Communist party, she continues to maintain that capitalism is an unjust system, and democracy
would be better achieved through a socialist system.
CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM
PRISONS AS RACIST INSTITUTIONS
Angela Davis is a very vocal critique of racism in the United States, which she argues not only continues but is actually
institutionalized in the society. She points to prisons as the embodiment of this problem, and argues that the penal
system is simply an extension of slavery. Angela Davis believes that racism, classism, and sexism continue to be
significant societal problems, with the prison system being used to both isolate those affected by the problems and to
exact a profit from their free labor (a situation referred to as the prison industrial complex). Essentially, Angela Davis
believes that many of the problems facing American society today, such as crime and poverty, are intricately related to
issues of race and capitalism. This makes her an important source of information for many debates on social problems.
Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism continued to be a prevalent sentiment, even among those
who had supported the end of slavery. Very few whites were able to view blacks as intelligent beings, much less as their
equals. As a result, racism became institutionalized in governmental practices. Especially in the South, segregation
became the rule of law. In other ways too, such as voting restrictions, ruling whites sought to disenfranchise the newly
freed African Americans. Lynchings occurred throughout the South, and served as powerful reminders to blacks that
even though they were legally free, there were not equals.
Angela Davis argues that during this period, prisons emerged as a way to return freed slaves to bondage. While the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned slavery in most situations, it maintained that involuntary servitude
was legal if an individual had been convicted of a crime. Thus, with the abolition of slavery, prisons became important
sources of free labor to plantations and other businesses that had previously relied on slaves. A convict-lease system
was quickly developed, and states enacted Black Codes that criminalized many activities for African Americans, such as
being unemployed. These Codes, coupled with the prevalent racist beliefs that blacks were more prone to criminality,
led to extremely high incarceration rates for African Americans. Once in prison, Angela Davis points out that the newly
freed slaves were rented out to bosses, and sometimes forced to work on the same plantation they had worked as
slaves. Thus, prisons became a method to control black labor, as the prison populations were overwhelmingly African
American.
Unfortunately, the increased incarceration rates, according to Davis, further fueled the racist beliefs about African
American criminality. These beliefs continue to affect social justice policy today. In fact, Angela Davis points out that
“police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the
number of African-Americans and Latinos arrested – even in the absence of probable cause” (Are Prisons 31). The
continued use of racial-profiling policies, Davis argues, proves that color continues to be imputed to criminality.
And though the convict-lease system has been abolished, its use deeply affected the criminal justice system and has
shaped much of its infrastructure. Today, the policies of the convict-lease system, such as exploitation, “have reemerged
in the patterns of privatization, and, more generally, in the wide-ranging corporatization of punishment that has
produced a prison industrial complex” (Are Prisons 37). Davis explains that prisons are significant sources of profits, to
be made by the companies that supply the prisons with food, the phone call providers, the corporations who run prisons
for profit, etc. And because there is profit to be made, these corporations have a vested interest in encouraging the
growth of the prison population. And this, Davis argues, is the reason that prison populations continue to increase
despite the drop in the crime rate.
And to this day, the minorities are disproportionately overrepresented in the prison population. Angela Davis argues
that this occurs because the government uses prisons as a way to house and isolate the “undesirable” sectors of the
society, such as minorities and the poor. She states that the American population accepts the racist targeting of
minorities because they have been brainwashed by the government and media. She points out that black men are often
treated as criminals in the media and sources of entertainment. Over time, images such as the ‘criminal black man’
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effects a person’s perception, and they learn to view black men as a criminal group. These leads to the acceptance of the
racial profiling of black men.
Ultimately, Angela Davis forcefully argues that racism continues to be a significant problem in the United States. This
racism is especially obvious in the criminal justice system, where minorities are often targeted and then imprisoned for
profit. Reading her books and articles will provide you with significant analysis about the harm racism continues to cause
our society, as well as about possible alternatives to achieve a more just system.
ECONOMIC RACISM
Another mode of institutionalized racism that Angela Davis discusses is in the economic sphere. She points out that
African Americans are severely overrepresented in the poverty rates. For example, the Children’s Defense Fund has
found that black children are far more likely to be born into poverty than they were five years ago. They are also twice
as likely as Caucasian children to die in the first year of their lives, and they are three times as likely as white children to
be placed in class designed for mentally handicapped students (Women 74). Angela Davis points out that many
conservative political scientists have blamed African Americans for their poverty. These political scientists argue that the
rise in single mother homes has led to increased poverty. However, Davis claims that this analysis is both flawed and
detrimental.
Angela Davis first points out that the birthrate for single African American teenage women has actually decreased since
the 1970s, thus the conservatives claim seems not to hold true. Davis goes on to further argue that political scientists
use the African American family as a scapegoat for the ineffective policies of the federal government. The Reagan
administration vocally attacked the African American family unit as the reason for persistent poverty, which allowed him
to simultaneously advocate lower social spending. He argued that the welfare system helped perpetuate the problems
in many African American families, such as lower marriage rates, and so claimed that decreasing welfare programs would
strengthen families and decrease poverty.
Unfortunately however, this plan was not successful. Angela Davis argues that the true causes of the initial poverty were
racism, job outsourcing, and lack of social protections. Davis turns to census data to prove that increases in the
unemployment rate result in both higher poverty rates and higher rates of one-parent homes. Thus, she believes that
the welfare programs that enable families to find jobs are essential in order to eradicate poverty. However, when the
Reagan administration cut social spending, many families were left with no mechanisms of support, and so fell deeper
into the cycle of poverty.
THE GENDERED PENAL SYSTEM
In her critiques of the current justice system, Angela Davis focuses upon race and gender as important aspects in the
punishment process. She persuasively argues that women, and specifically minority women, face unique problems in the
penal system. Her analysis on the role that race and gender play illustrates a larger process that is occurring in the US.
As Davis writes, “The deeply gendered character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the gendered
structure of the larger society.” Thus, understanding Davis’s critique of the penal system can be essential to recognizing
the gendered structure of and its effects on society.
Female prisoners have historically been treated very differently than male prisoners. This differential treatment is partly
due to the smaller size of the female prison population, but also to the sexist beliefs still prevalent in US society. To
begin with, Angela Davis argues that female prisoners are viewed differently than male prisoners are. She notes that
masculine criminality has always been treated as more normal than female criminality, with a significant number of
female criminals being labeled as insane. For example, females are far more likely to be committed to mental
institutions than men, illustrating that men are viewed as criminals whereas women are treated as insane. This
continues today, with female inmates being much more likely to receive psychiatric drugs than their male counterparts.
Angela Davis points out that when prisons first became popularized as modes of rehabilitation, women were not housed
in private facilities. Rather, there were kept in large communal cells in male prisons. These women were viewed as
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“fallen” and it was not believed they could reform themselves (it was expected that men could). As a result, the women
were housed in large cells, and suffered from neglect and sexual abuse.
When separate prisons were first developed for women, they were drastically different than the institutions designed to
house men. Instead of cells, cottages and rooms were built to provide a sense of domesticity; the women in the prison
were taught homemaking courses, such as sewing and cooking, in an attempt to prepare them for their lives of
motherhood. Angela Davis argues that this system both reinforced societal norms of femininity, while also training poor
women for lives of domestic service. Many of the female prisoners, once they were released, used the skills they had
learned to become cooks, washerwomen, and maids for more affluent families. Davis further points out that this more
lenient cottage system was truly only open to the white female prisoners; black prisoners were still overwhelming forced
to serve their time in male prisons. This is an example of how issues of race have complicated gender problems,
according to Davis. The prison system sentenced white women to domesticity training, while denying the femininity of
minority women and placing them within chain gangs.
In the twentieth century, the use of reformatories for women was abolished. A new approach, referred to as ‘separate
but equal’, arose that focused on making female prisons the same as male prisons. This “separate but equal approach”
has, ironically, made conditions in female prisons more repressive in order to bring them to the same level as the male
prisons. Angela Davis argues that this policy of “separate but equal” is inherently unjust because it accepts the male
prison as the norm, thus female prisons are unable to take into account the special situations that many female prisoners
face. One example of this is that Alabama decided in 1996 to begin a female chain gang, in order to ensure equality with
the men who were already serving on them. This same logic is also employed to deny women the extra healthcare that
females often require. Thus, instead of attempting to solve for the unique problems females face, such as pregnancy and
health concerns in prisons, government officials have turned a blind eye under the mantra of “separate but equal.”
Angela Davis also identifies sexual abuse as a continuing problem in female prisons. She points out that male prison
guards often trade sex with inmates for special treatment, or demand sexual favors under the threat of physical harm.
The perpetrators of these crimes are rarely punished because the female inmates possess little recourse. Angela Davis
even argues that the sexual abuse is accepted because female criminals have been hypersexualized to a point that sexual
assault is expected. For example, the chief medical officer at a California prison argued that the female prisoners
enjoyed getting superfluous gynecological exams because they enjoyed male contact. Though later fired for this
comment, the chief medical officer voiced a belief held by many across the United States. Female criminals are
hypersexualized, thus the sexual abuse occurring within prisons is viewed as normal, even justified.
The analysis that Angela Davis offers of the conditions of women’s prisons is quite eye-opening. She describes the sexist
and racist ideologies that helped to form the current system, and the ongoing abuse that women are forced to endure.
Unfortunately, these prison practices not only affect the women sentenced for a crime, but they imprint the society as a
whole. The differential treatment women of color receive as opposed to white women, as well as the hypersexuality
attributed to female prisoners, affects societal relationships with racism and sexuality. Thus, Angela Davis identifies
prison abolition as one of the most important reforms needed in the United States.
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IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBATE
Angela Davis will be a useful source of information for numerous debate rounds. Her criticisms on the institutionalized
racism in the United States will be helpful in numerous ways. First, an understanding of the lingering effects of slavery
on our society will enable you to evaluate the actions of the United States government. In a debate round, you can listen
critically to the plan of action outlined your opponent, and seek to identify whether they would further complicate the
issues of racism. Furthermore, Davis’s analysis on the prison industrial complex can be key in teaching you to identify the
profit incentives of governmental actions. Ultimately, her critiques will challenge your beliefs on the workings and
altruism of the US government, and force you to examine in depth the true situation in the United States.
Furthermore, Davis’ analysis about economic racism and social programs will be helpful in any economic debate. Her
arguments about the necessity of welfare programs can provide fertile ground for case ideas, and her criticisms of the
capitalist system will enable you to develop unique alternatives to the current economic system.
Finally, Angela Davis’s analysis of women in prison is an important source of information on the intersections of race,
gender, and class. She points out that the prison system is both shaped by and reinforces traditional gender and racial
expectations, thus her analysis will be useful in any debate you have about race or gender. The revealing information
she provides about sexual abuse in US prisons can also be a strong argument to use whenever you are debating social
injustices or governmental failures.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
---. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974.
---. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
---. “The Black Family Under Capitalism.” Black Scholar 17.5 (1987).
---. “Black Women and the Academy.” Callaloo 17.2 (1996): 422-431.
---. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. New York: Random
House, 1998.
---. “Childcare or Workfare.” New Perspectives Quarterly 7.1 (1990).
---. “Civil Liberties and Women’s Rights: Twenty Years on.” Irish Journal of American Studies 3 (1994): 17-29.
---. “Inside/Outside: Women at the Borders of Globalization.” Architecture and Urbanism in the Americas. Spring
(1999).
---. “Public Imprisonment and Private Violence: Reflections on the Hidden Punishment of Women.” New England
Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998).
---. “Racism and Contemporary Literature on Rape.” Freedomways 16.1 (1976).
---. “Radical Perspectives on the Empowerment of Afro-American Women: Lessons for the 1980’s.” Harvard Educational
Review 58.3 (1988).
---. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York, Random House, 1989.
---. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
James, Joy, ed. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998.
Simkin, John. “Angela Davis.” Spartacus Educational. Jul. 2006. Spartacus International. 24 Jul 2006. <
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdavisAN.htm>.
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THE US SUFFERS FROM INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM
1. IGNORING ISSUES OF RACE ALLOWS THE PROBLEMS TO PERSIST
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 1998.
THE ANGELA Y. DAVIS READER, p. 62.
When the structural character of racism is ignored in discussions about crime and the rising population of incarcerated
people, the racial imbalance in jails and prisons is treated as a contingency, at best as a product of the “culture of
poverty,” and at worst as proof of an assumed black monopoly on criminality. The high proportion of black people in the
criminal justice system is thus normalized and neither the state nor the general public is required to talk about and act
on the meaning of that racial imbalance. Thus Republican and Democratic elected officials alike have successfully called
for laws mandating life sentences for three-time “criminals,” without having to answer for the racial implications of these
laws. By relying on the alleged “race-blindness” of such laws, black people are surreptitiously constructed as racial
subjects, thus manipulated, exploited, and abused, while the structural persistence of racism – albeit in changed forms –
in social and economic institutions, and in the national culture as a whole, is adamantly denied.
2. MINORITIES ARE VASTLY OVERREPRESENTED IN THE PENAL SYSTEM
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 1998.
THE ANGELA Y. DAVIS READER, p.63-4
Which is to say that there are presently over 5.1 million people either incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. Many of
those presently on probation or parole would be behind bars under the conditions of the recently passed crime bill.
According to the Sentencing Project, even before the passage of the crime bill, black people were 7.8 times more likely to
be imprisoned than whites. The Sentencing Project’s most recent report indicates that 32.2 percent of young black men
and 12.3 percent of young Latino men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are either in prison, in jail, or on
probation or parole. This is in comparison with 6.7 percent of young white men.
3. PRISON CONSTRUCTION HIDES THE PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH RACISM
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 1998.
THE ANGELA Y. DAVIS READER, p. 66-7
Because of the tendency to view is as an abstract site into which all manner of undesirables are deposited, the prison is
the perfect site for the simultaneous production and concealment of racism. The abstract character of the public
perception of prisons militates against an engagement with the real issues afflicting the communities from which
prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves
us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of late capitalism, of transnational capitalism. The
naturalization of black people as criminals thus also erects ideological barriers to an understanding of the connections
between late twentieth-century structural racism and the globalization of capital.
4. RACISM IS PREVALENT, BUT HIDDEN, IN TODAY’S SOCIETY
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 1998.
THE ANGELA Y. DAVIS READER, p. 66.
The fear of crime has attained a status that bears a sinister similarity to the fear of communism as it came to restructure
social perceptions during the fifties and sixties. The figure of the “criminal” – the racialized figure of the criminal – has
come to represent the most menacing enemy of “American society.” Virtually anything is acceptable – torture, brutality,
vast expenditures of public funds – as long as it is done in the name of public safety. Racism has always found an easy
route from its embeddedness in social structures to the psyches of collectives and individuals precisely because it
mobilizes deep fears. While explicit, old-style racism may be increasingly socially unacceptable – precisely as a result of
antiracist movements over the last forty years – this does not mean that US society has been purged of racism. In fact,
racism is more deeply embedded in socio-economic structures, and the vast populations of incarcerated people of color
is dramatic evidence of the way racism systematically structures economic relations. At the same time, this structural
racism is rarely recognized as “racism”. What we have come to recognize as open, explicit racism has in many ways
begun to be replaced by a secluded camouflaged kind of racism, whose influence on people’s daily lives is a pervasive
and systematic as the explicit forms of racism associated with the era of the struggle for civil rights.
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THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM IS NOT INFECTED WITH RACIST INTENTIONS
1. THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM DOES NOT TREAT BLACK DEFENDANTS MORE HARSHLY
Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed100900.cfm>.
Little evidence exists that black criminals face discrimination in the criminal-justice system. Black "overrepresentation" in
that system is in the number of criminals arrested. Racist cops aren't responsible for this disparity: Blacks get arrested at
the same high rates in cities like Atlanta and Washington where the political establishment is almost entirely AfricanAmerican and the police forces reflect the population's ethnic makeup. In a study on sentencing disparity commissioned
by the Center for Equal Opportunity, former University of Maryland professor Robert Lerner finds that arrested blacks
get sent to prison at a lower rate than arrested whites in just about every category that the government measures.
Lerner found that blacks were twice as likely to get off on rape charges, around 50 percent more likely to escape
punishment when charged with simple assault, and a third more likely to beat the rap on drug dealing. The difference in
favor of black offenders existed in 12 out of 14 categories of crime.
2. MINORITIES BENEFIT FROM LEGAL DISCRIMINATION
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/fp1.cfm>.
In my view, this is complete nonsense. As a nonwhite immigrant, I am grateful to the activists of the civil rights
movement for their efforts to open up doors that would otherwise have remained closed. But at the same time, I am
struck by the ease with which Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement won its victories, and by the
magnitude of white goodwill in this country. In a single decade, from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, America radically
overhauled its laws through a series of landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. Through such measures, America established equality of rights under the law. Of
course, the need to enforce nondiscrimination provisions continues, but for nearly half a century, blacks and other
minorities have enjoyed the same legal rights as whites. Actually, this is not strictly true. For a few decades now, blacks
and some minorities have enjoyed more rights and privileges than whites. The reason is that America has implemented
affirmative action policies that give legal preference to minority groups in university admissions, jobs, and government
contracts. Such policies remain controversial, but the point is that they reflect the great lengths to which this country has
gone to eradicate discrimination. It is extremely unlikely that a racist society would grant its minority citizens legal
preferences over members of the majority group. Some private discrimination continues to exist in America, but the only
form of discrimination that can be legally practiced today benefits blacks more than whites.
3. BLACK DEFENDANTS ARE NOT TARGETTED BY DRUG SENTENCES
Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed100900.cfm>.
Black murderers face shorter sentences than their white counterparts and (contrary to leftist dogma) make fewer trips to
death row. Even when it comes to the federal law punishing crack possession much more harshly than powder-cocaine
possession-a favorite topic of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton-racism doesn't enter the picture. In his 1997 book Race,
Crime and the Law, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy shows that the law passed with the enthusiastic
support of black congressmen who saw crack becoming the drug of choice in their districts. The use of
methamphetamine and heroin-predominantly by whites-has soared in the 1990s, while the penalties for this use have
remained stable. Would black Americans be better off if the situation were reversed, and crack dealing went on
uninterrupted in American inner cities while police cracked down on rural whites using methamphetamine? If this
happened, civil-rights leaders would organize protest marches in favor of stronger drug-enforcement efforts in inner
cities-and would be right to do so.
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A GENDERED RESPONSE TO THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS NECESSARY
1. FEMALE CRIMINALITY IS TREATED UNEQUALLY IN SOCIETY
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003.
ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 65-6
It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansion of prisons, both in the United States and throughout the world,
that we should examine some of the historical and ideological aspects of state punishment imposed on women. Since
the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we have seen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form of
punishment, convicted women have been represented as essentially different form their male counterparts. It is true
that men who commit the kinds of transgressions that are regarded as punishable by the state are labeled as social
deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality. There
has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviors
as significantly more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts.
2. MALE PRISONS ARE DESIGNED AS THE NORM
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003.
ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 75-6
Paradoxically, demands for parity with men’s prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health
opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women. This is not only a
consequence of deploying liberal – that is, formalistic – notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male
prisons to function as the punishment norm.
3. SEXUAL VIOLENCE IS COMMITTED AGAINST FEMALE PRISONERS
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003.
ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 77-8
As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases, and, paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison regimes
recedes, sexual abuse – which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punishment of women –
has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner sexual
abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated suggests that for
women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively
sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.
4. FEMALE PRISONS ARE HYPSEXUALIZED TO CONDONE RAPE
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003.
ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 79-80
The criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual
assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a Nightline television series
filmed in November 1999 on location at California’s Valley State Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed by
Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visited
the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer
explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for “male contact,” and that they therefore welcomed these
superfluous gynecological exams. Although this office was eventually removed form his position as a result of these
comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse.
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THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM PROMOTES JUST OUTCOMES
1. THE US GOVERNMENT HAS ATTEMPTED TO ATONE FOR ITS PAST FLAWS
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/fp1.cfm>.
So what about slavery? No one will deny that America practiced slavery, but America was hardly unique in this respect.
Indeed, slavery is a universal institution that in some form has existed in all cultures. In his study Slavery and Social
Death, the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history, in the
most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time
harbored the institution.” The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese,
the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, and American Indians had slaves
long before Columbus came to the New World. What is distinctively Western is not slavery but the movement to end
slavery. Abolition is a uniquely Western institution. The historian J. M. Roberts writes, “No civilization once dependent on
slavery has ever been able to eradicate it, except the Western.” Of course, slaves in every society don’t want to be
slaves. The history of slavery is full of incidents of runaways, slave revolts, and so on. But typically, slaves were captured
in warfare, and if they got away, they were perfectly happy to take other people as slaves.
2. PRISONS ARE NOT RUN FOR PROFITS
Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed100900.cfm>.
The contention that the quest for profits has driven America's fourfold increase in prison capacity since 1980 is equally
specious. Private-prison operators, a chief bugbear of the Left, incarcerate a measly 5 percent of America's convicts.
Prisons contract out more services than they did 15 years ago, but so do nearly all other government agencies. The
overwhelming majority of prison services remain in the hands of money-losing government bureaucracies. Unlike their
military-industrial counterparts, which produce some of America's leading exports and sell civilian goods ranging from
jetliners to computer hardware, major prison-related producers sell little outside of America's borders and almost
nothing to private citizens. While a few states, California and Tennessee most prominently, do count corrections-industry
groups among their most powerful lobbies, they remain exceptions. No sizeable cities have prison-reliant economies,
and few people outside of declining farm towns actually want to live near prisons. Indeed, the presence of a large jail
proved a major stumbling block in the effort to revitalize Chicago's South Loop.
3. CRIME IN THE US IS LESS DUE TO SENTENCING STRUCTURES
Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, <http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed100900.cfm>.
The bulk of the evidence shows that longer sentences really do work. And an honest look at the international data
presents a good case for building prisons: A 1998 study from the British Home Office, their equivalent of the Justice
Department, cited the U.S. as one of only two major Western countries to see their crime rates drop between the late
1980s and late 1990s. Canada, France, England, and Switzerland all have more crime per capita than the United States. A
study commissioned by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 1998, Englishmen were twice
as likely as Americans to have their cars stolen, about a third more likely to get mugged by an armed assailant, and nearly
ten times more likely to have their home broken into while it was occupied. The study's authors suggest an explanation:
"An offender's risk of being caught, convicted and incarcerated has been rising in the United States but falling in
England."
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SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR
FRENCH EXISTENTIALIST AND FEMINIST (1908-1987)
Simone DeBeauvoir epitomizes the excellence of the French intellectuals of the 20th Century. Articulate, refined,
somewhat humorous but gravely serious at times, DeBeauvoir was a better writer than her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre;
some even say she was a better thinker as well. Her ideas were both an affirmation of Sartre’s existentialism and a
refutation of it, for while she argued that we could not justify our values through appeals to higher authority, while she
agreed with Sartre that the universe was largely a moral void, she insisted that values must be chosen as values, and she
realized long before Sartre did that such values necessarily required deference to the needs arid situations of other
people.
Simone DeBeauvoir made the leap from radical individualist to the continuity of women--a step few intellectuals take.
With the publication of The Second Sex, DeBeauvoir would always be known as a feminist, and what an existentialist
feminist had to say would be pretty interesting. DeBeauvoir did not invent, nor did she leave behind, a comprehensive
set of ideas; she started no movements, gathered no followers. What she did was think and write, and did these things
better than any writer of her time.
Life And Work
Simone DeBeauvoir was one of three daughters born in Paris to a middle-class family; Simone was born in 1908. The
mother was a devout Catholic, while the father was a bitter, cynical atheist. The two had agreed to stay together despite
their differences, and Simone would be influenced by their opposing views of the world, and the synthesis created by
them. She learned about religious and moral guilt; about the longing for the afterlife and rewards for suffering, only to
hear from her other parent that no such things existed. That longing for transcendence, DeBeauvoir would later argue, is
much of the basis for ethics. The fact that it can never be satisfied, she would go on to say, is part of the impossibility of
the ethical task.
From an early age, the young girl was determined to be a writer. She graduated with a degree in philosophy from the
Sorbonne in 1929 (finishing just behind a short, wall-eyed but brilliant student named Jean-Paul Sartre), taught school
until 1938, published her first novel, She Came To Stay in 1943, and had no “job” but writing until her death.
Three events shaped Simone DeBeauvoir’s life (her considerable autobiographical memoirs give abundant insight into
such influences). First, her relationship with Sartre affected both the content and style of her philosophy and fiction. She
and Sartre developed existentialism as an ethical system derived from the existential analytical work of Martin Heidegger
as well as the ethical challenges of Friedrich Nietzsche. But Sartre was her emotional as well as intellectual companion,
and her love for him, as well as their mutual desire that there should be no marriage or children in the relationship,
raised important questions in her mind regarding divisions between men and women, as well as other types of social
divisions.
Second, in 1939, the Germans occupied much of France. This changed Sartre’s and DeBeauvoir lives considerably; both
were sympathetic to the French Resistance and DeBeauvoir lived through a dangerous and worrisome period when
Sartre was a prisoner of war in Germany. These episodes made DeBeauvoir concerned with ethics, the kind of ethics an
existentialist can willfully hold, and the need for self-sacrifice. Her novels of the period reflect such ambiguous ethical
calls; The Blood of Others begins with the hero sitting at the deathbed of his mortally wounded lover, who has been
injured in a mission against the Germans. The hero spends a great deal of time wondering about how his choices affect
others; the Germans will kill innocent people in answer to Resistance activities. It is difficult, DeBeauvoir thought, but
inevitable nonetheless, to make ethical decisions.
Finally, DeBeauvoir was affected by the 20th Century women’s movement. She knew that she was fortunate in economic
and social circumstances to be allowed’ into life both as a woman and an intellectual. She realized these privileges did
not exist for the majority of women in the world. She firmly believed, and passionately argued, that women needed
financial independence and the ability to work and prosper as human beings in order to realize their freedom. But she
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never “rejected” the “masculine world,” and in fact did not believe masculine categories of the world were themselves
subject to criticism. For her, the problem would be material, economic, social, and individual; it would never reflect the
metaphysics of masculinity in the way other feminists made the problem out to be.
Sartre died in 1980; DeBeauvoir would write that she had loved him so much she wanted to “jump into” the death his
body was experiencing, to die with him. By that time, her life was about over, too. But by the time of her death in 1987,
she had published around twenty works of fiction and philosophy, including philosophical works such as The Second Sex
and The Ethics of Ambiguity and novels like She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, The Mandarins and All Men are
Mortal. Finally, her memoirs comprise several volumes, from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter an autobiography of her
childhood, to her much more somber farewell to Saitre and to her own brilliant career.
The Impossibility And Necessity Of Ethics
Sartre once remarked that any ethics which fails to admit of its own essential impossibility contributes to ethical failure.
By this he meant that ethics are rules which humans invent, fully aware that we can never live up to them, but feeling as
if we need them anyway. Such an attitude is similar to Simone DeBeauvoir’s view that ethical choices are inevitable, even
if ethical systems themselves are not always philosophically valid.
Existentialism holds that humans make their own values, just as we make ourselves in every way through the sum total
of choices we adopt and actions and attitudes we take or assume. Within that view of the world, it is generally
acknowledged that there is no “higher source” which makes actions or ethical systems “right” or ‘wrong.” Actions and
ethics can, then, only be validated or rejected with regard to the people concerned with them. This makes individuals
(and groups) absolutely responsible for their lives.
But many people, DeBeauvoir argues, respond to this “moral void” by celebrating the darkness of the valueless life. She
points out that nihilism is dangerous because it is a glorification of the negative, rather than an attempt to fill the void
with one’s own personal meaning. Nihilists, she says, are true cowards because they escape from the necessity of making
our own values in accordance with what we consider to be a life worth living. The consequences of such nihilism are
dangerous because nihilists often give themselves over to the sheer, raw, cynical power of hatred and to the love of
power itself, and this leads to totalitarian movements such as Nazism.
Only in embracing one’s own values, wherever they are chosen or made, can an individual feel secure enough in his or
her own individuality that he or she would not think of supporting such oppressive or hateful movements like Nazism.
This is also true because, as is so often ignored by students of existentialism, my freedom does not simply exist in myself,
but is constantly contingent upon the gestures and recognition of other free people. We exist and make our values
together, even if we ultimately commit to them as individuals. Nihilism also removes the connection we have, as free
individuals, to other people, making acts of great cruelty possible.
The Woman Question
Simone DeBeauvoir, considered a “mother” of contemporary feminism, never referred to herself as a feminist. She never
advanced a philosophical system called feminism. What she did do was frame the question of being a woman in terms
accessible to most women in 20th Century Europe and the United States, whether those women considered themselves
feminists or not. She did this by initially and honestly admitting that although she didn’t know what it really meant to “be
a woman,” she knew it was the first thing she would ever say about herself when defining herself, and she figured this
was probably the case with most women.
For DeBeauvoir, the question of male oppression is historical and ethical as well as political. In The Second Sex she traces
the historical roots of women’s subordination and concludes that there may be no systematic explanation for it, at least
no explanation which can lend itself to systematic reform. What needs to happen, she argues, is for women to
consciously empower themselves, individual woman by individual woman, through economic and spiritual emancipation
from men. Although she acknowledges that men may resist such emancipation (and also points out that many women
enjoy the pedestal which patriarchy occasionally places them on), she does not see a solution which can be implemented
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quickly and comprehensively, and she does not feel that feminine emancipation requires an abandonment of the present
base and superstructure of society.
In prescribing individual economic empowerment as a solution to women’s oppression, DeBeauvoir distances herself
from two schools of thought which see the problem and solution differently. First, she rejects Marxian socialism as illequipped to deal with the problem of women, not only because Marxism is too collectivist and historicist to do justice to
the validity of individual human experience, but also because Marxism sees the problem of women’s rights in the same
eyes with which it views the antagonism between labor and capital; and, DeBeauvoir says, women’s bodies are not
factories, and women have unique problems which male workers do not have.
Second, DeBeauvoir rejects “essentialist” or radical feminist theories which call for the separation of women from men
and the cultivation of special feminist values and a women’s culture distinct from “patriarchy.” Again, DeBeauvoir does
not think that the “male” world of philosophy, business and enterprise is bad because it is “male.” It may be bad for
other reasons; it may require some revolutionary change (even, she admits, a socialist change), but it is not bad simply
because males inhabit it. And as long as that is the world before us, women would do well to become actualized and
independent in that world. Feminisms which mystify the feminine (in the form of goddess worship or the glorification of
childbearing and menstruation, etc.) simply continue oppression by separating women and glorifying the very attributes
which weaken their participation in society.
Not Enough Of A Feminist?
Such dismissal of radical feminism leads many critics to accuse DeBeauvoir of complicity in the oppression of women. It
can be pointed out that her tendency to privilege the social world (mostly dominated by males and masculine values)
over some alternative feminine world is simply her way of ignoring the uniqueness of womanhood. In other words, by
arguing that women must become more economically viable, competitive and socially adept, DeBeauvoir may simply be
saying that in order for women to stop being oppressed as women, they “just need to become more like men.” This is a
typical criticism leveled against many liberal feminists, such as Betty Friedan, and its charge against DeBeauvoir places
her squarely in the liberal camp.
Moreover, why does DeBeauvoir ignore the need for collective action? Even if many women were to follow her
prescription and try to gain economic emancipation, this would only result in a few women being happier. The laws,
social customs and economic makeup of society would still be largely in the hands of men. And the fact that these
women would need to act like men in order to become emancipated would only further strengthen patriarchy. Many
radical feminists and socialists argue that the entire structures of society must change before real change can benefit all
women.
While valid as arguments pertaining to the political philosophy espoused by DeBeauvoir, these objections may be based
on a misunderstanding of her purpose for writing The Second Sex in the first place. The book was not a political
manifesto, nor was it a philosophical principia devoted to unmasking patriarchy and offering a replacement for it. It was
one woman’s attempt, at least as that woman tells it, to understand oppression and marginalization in today’s world,
which means a world full of capitalism, competition and material considerations. Since DeBeauvoir knew most women
were not as privileged as she herself had been, she also knew that those women would not feel at all aided in their
personal lives by reading about prescribed changes in social structures or collective consciousness. What they wanted
was to hear what a well-read woman had to say about being a woman, and how one can be a woman and still be a
human being. In that, she largely succeeded. And given DeBeauvoir’s disenchantment with Stalinist Communism, it is
likely she eschewed large-scale social experiments (conducted by men) to solve the inner, subjective dilemmas of
womanhood.
Implications For Debate
Simone DeBeauvoir’s work offers two areas of value for debaters. First, her observations on values and ethics can answer
those who call for a rejection of values and ethics, and this answer can be constructed in a way that avoids the very
appeal to transcendent values that is most often the object of nihilist or relativist attacks. In other words, DeBeauvoir
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remains a “radical” in the sense that she does not call for a conservative treatment of values, but she sees importance in
them nonetheless.
Second, her treatment of feminism is a “middle ground’ between radical feminism and anti-feminism. She argues that
women must consciously choose their own liberation; this is both an ethical imperative and also an answer to those who
would impose feminism on all people as a sweeping political change.
DeBeauvoir argues that separatism (a radical form of feminism) is a setback to humanity as well as to women. This serves
as a rejoinder to advocates of a “feminist reconceptualization of values,” those who believe that certain philosophical
approaches are ‘male-centered” and others are feminist. And she notes that for women to became empowered,
economic liberation (though not necessarily of the Marxist variety, she qualifies) is a prerequisite for any meaningful
change in the lives of individual women. Again, this can be a response to those who believe that reconceptualizing values
and philosophies could liberate women: The answer is that women must be liberated in “bread and butter” issues,
economically and physically, rather than relying on the philosophers to suddenly become feminists and strive for
“nurturing” values.
What makes Simone DeBeauvoir fun and rewarding as a source for philosophical debate is her incredible voice as a
writer. She is very easy to read and even easy to read aloud. Debaters should familiarize themselves with her work, since
in a field of contemporaries (Sartre, Heidegger, etc.) who are cryptic and often difficult to understand, DeBeauvoir writes
for understanding, with her audience in mind and largely assumed to be non-philosophers. This makes her invaluable as
a debate source.
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. FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE (New York: Putnam, 1965).
. BRIGI1TE BARDOT AND THE LOLITA SYNDROME (New York: Ama Press, 1972).
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. A VERY EASY DEATH (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
. WHEN THINGS OF THE SPIRIT COME FIRST (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
Evans, Mary. SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR: A FEMINIST MANDARIN (London: Tavistock, 1985).
Ascher, Carol: SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR: A LIFE OF FREEDOM (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981).
Bieber, Konrad. SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR (Boston, G.K. Hall, 1979).
Keefe, Terry. SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR: STUDY OF HER WRITINGS (London: Harrap, 1983).
Leighton, Jean. SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR ON WOMEN (London: Associated University Presses, 1975).
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SOCIETY MUST REJECT NIHILISM
1. FAILURE TO FREELY CHOOSE ETHICS LEADS TO NIHILISM
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, 1972, p. 52. Conscious of being unable to be
anything, man then decides to be nothing. We shall call this attitude nihilistic. The nihilist is close to the spirit of
seriousness, for instead of realizing his negativity as a living movement, he conceives his annihilation in a substantial
way. He wants to be nothing, and this nothing that he dreams of is still another sort of being, the exact Hegelian
antithesis of being, a stationary datum. Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself.
2. NIHILISM MAKES FAILURE INEVITABLE
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, 1972, pp. 53-4. One can go much further in
rejection by occupying himself not in scorning but in annihilating the rejected
world and himself along with it. For example, the man who gives himself to a cause which he knows to be lost chooses to
merge the world with one of its aspects which carries within it the germ of its ruin, involving himself in this condemned
universe and condemning himself with it. Another man devotes his time and energy to an undertaking which was not
doomed to failure at the start but which he himself is bent on ruining. Still another rejects each of his projects one after
another, frittering them away in a series of caprices and thereby systematically annulling the ends which he is aiming at.
3. NIHILISM LEADS ITS ADHERENTS TO WANT TO DESTROY HUMANITY
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, 1972, p. 55.
The attitude of the nihilist can perpetuate itself as such only if it reveals itself as a positively at its very core. Rejecting his
own existence, the nihilist must also reject the existences which confirm it. If he wills himself to be nothing, all mankind
must also be annihilated; otherwise, by means of the presence of the world that the Other reveals he meets himself as a
presence in the world.
4. NIHILISM LED TO NAZISM
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, 1972, pp. 55-6. But this thirst for destruction
immediately takes the form of a desire for power. The taste of nothingness joins the original taste whereby every man is
first defined; he realizes himself as a being by making himself that by which nothingness comes into the world. Thus,
Nazism was both a will for power and a will for suicide at the same time. From a historical point of view, Nazism has
many other features besides; in particular, beside the dark romanticism which led Rauschning to entitle his work The
Revolution of Nihilism, we also find a gloomy seriousness. But it is interesting to note that its ideology did not make this
alliance impossible, for the serious often rallies to partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object in order to
hide from itself the antinomies of action.
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POLITICS OF SEPARATISM CANNOT LIBERATE WOMEN
1. WOMEN NEED NOT SEPARATE THEMSELVES FROM MEN TO BE LIBERATED
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 686.
The fact is that men are beginning to resign themselves to the new status of women; and she, not feeling condemned in
advance, has begun to feel more at ease. Today the woman who works is less neglectful of her femininity than formerly,
and she does not lose her sexual attractiveness.
2. WOMEN MUST BE AUTONOMOUS PARTICIPANTS IN SOCIETY
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 678.
Mystical fervor, like love and even narcissism, can be integrated with a life of activity and independence. But in
themselves these attempts at individual salvation are bound to meet with failure: either woman puts herself into relation
with an unreality: her double, or God; or she creates an unreal relation with a real being. In both cases she lacks any
grasp on the world; she does not escape her subjectivity; her liberty remains frustrated. There is only one way to employ
her liberty authentically, and that is to project it through positive action into human society.
3. “FEMININE” DOMAINS OR VALUES SIMPLY REINFORCE INEQUALITIES
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 65.
In truth women have never set up female values in opposition to male values; it is man who, desirous of maintaining
masculine prerogatives, has invented that divergence. Men have presumed to create a feminine domain--the kingdom of
life, of immanence--only in order to lock up women therein.
THE MYSTIFICATION OF WOMEN PERPETUATES THEIR OPPRESSION
1. HOLDING UP MYSTICAL “WOMAN’S IDEALS” ENTRENCHES MALE OPPRESSION
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 77. Condemned to play the part of the Other,
woman was also condemned to hold only uncertain power slave or idol, it was never she who chose her lot. “Men make
the gods; women worship them,” as Frazer has said; men indeed decide whether their supreme divinities shall be male
or female; woman’s place in society is always that which men assign to her; at no time has she ever imposed her own
law.
2. ASSOCIATING WOMEN WITH NATURE AND MYSTICISM CONTINUES OPPRESSION
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 75.
The devaluation of women represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value
but upon man’s weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarnated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and
man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature.
3. THE SO-CALLED MATRIARCHAL “GODDESS” PERIOD IS A MYTH
Simone DeBeauvoir, French philosopher. THE SECOND SEX, 1989, p. 70.
But in truth that Golden Age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that there did not exist
between the sexes a reciprocal relation: Earth, Mother, Goddess--she was no fellow creature in man’s eyes; it was
beyond the human realm that her power was affirmed, she was therefore outside of that realm. Society has always been
male; political power has always been in the bands of men
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Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher most commonly associated with the term “Deconstruction,” calls into question
much of what we take for granted about writing, reading, and philosophy. The ideas presented in his groundbreaking
1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” shook the
foundations of the Western philosophical tradition, caused an uproar, and spawned countless interpretations and
criticisms. Since 1966, Derrida has published more than twenty books and now lectures in France and the U.S. 51
Deconstruction has become widely influential with important ramifications for many of the ideas presented in Lincoln
Douglas debates.
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION?
The very question “What is Deconstruction” defies answer. The point of deconstruction is that it "deconstructs itself." It
is self reflexive and enigmatic. In a letter to a Japanese professor, Derrida advises a friend about translating his texts.
Derrida tells his friend what deconstruction is not. Deconstruction is not analysis nor is it critique, because “the
dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like
that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction.” 52 Deconstruction invites us to question
whether there is a simple origin or element behind language. Deconstruction isn’t about digging up the “true meaning”
of texts, philosophies, or ideas, because it questions the very idea of true meaning.
What is the relation between deconstruction and the truth? To get an idea of how the Western philosophical tradition
construes the idea of truth, it is useful to examine Plato’s philosophy, specifically, his ontology. Ontology is philosophy
that addresses questions of being, or what “is.” For example, for Plato, there are actual tables, and there is the form of
the table. The form of the table is the idea of a table that guides us in understanding which objects are tables. This form
is “table-ness:” it is what makes a table a table. For Plato, there are invisible yet underlying ideas and meanings that give
structure to all words and representations. Furthermore, these invisible yet underlying forms are superior to their
manifestations in the world. The ultimate forms are of beauty, truth, and the good. The ultimate life is the life spent in
philosophical contemplation of the forms.
Derrida turns this conception on its head. Derrida asks whether there really is “table-ness.” There is no universal idea of a
table that everyone has in mind when the word “table” is said. Some people might be thinking of their dining room table,
some people might imagine a coffee table, some people might think of a nightstand. The only way to think about the
form of the "table" is to contemplate particular tables. Derrida questions the idea that any words have fixed and certain
meanings behind them. Anagrams, which are single words that signify multiple ideas, are an example. An English
example is the word “sound” which can signify a body of water, stability, or noise.
In his book, Dissemination, Derrida gives the example of the Greek word “pharmakon.” Derrida discusses the problems
of translating pharmakon, a word that can mean " 'remedy,' 'recipe,' 'poison,' 'drug,' 'philter,' etc." 53 Derrida describes
the loss of a "malleable unity" that is inherent in translation. The word pharmakon demonstrates related yet opposing
meanings all linked to the same signifier (word). This example demonstrates that words and phrases, as “signifiers” don’t
neatly match up with transcendental “signified” ideas or objects. Translation involves the important choices of which
meanings to include and which to exclude. The situation parallels philosophy, in that philosophers must decide what to
include and exclude in the category of philosophy, for example, Plato includes logos, reason, and rationality, while
excluding myth, writing, and metaphor. This is why Derrida writes, “With this problem of translation we are dealing with
no less than the problem of the very passage into philosophy itself.” 54
51
Powell, Jim. DERRIDA FOR BEGINNERS. (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1997). p. 6
Derrida, Jacques. “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY. Ed. Atkins, G. Douglas
and Michael L. Johnson. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985). p. 3
53
Derrida, Jacques. DISSEMINATION. Trans. Barbara Johnson. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). p. 71
54
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 72
52
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Just as deconstruction is not analysis nor critique, nor is it a method. Derrida is frightened that the term “method” has
“technical and procedural” connotations. Deconstruction can’t be transformed into a set grouping of standards, rules, or
procedures. You can’t put a text into one end of the “Deconstruction Machine” and see a deconstructed version come
out the other side. Deconstruction, rather, involves a relationship between a reader and a text that is open to
spontaneity and never before seen connections. Derrida fears the label “method” will have a domesticating effect on
deconstruction. However, just as deconstruction is not a method, nor is it a singular “event.” It is not an “act or an
operation” because these terms presuppose that a reader performs operations on a text, from a standpoint above and
outside of the text.55
Derrida uses the analogies of weaving and a game to describe the relationship between a reader and a text. Derrida
writes that a text “hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.”
These laws and rules might be described as contexts or grounding. The use of the words “laws” and “rules” seems at first
to be confusing way to describe grounding, in that we generally consider laws and rules to be explicit, universally known,
and understood, for example, the U.S. Constitution or the Bible’s Ten Commandments. However, the laws and rules that
inform a text’s content, format, and structure are not laid out. Derrida writes that they “can never be booked, in the
present, into anything that could rigorously be called perception.”
These rule of a text may not be explicit, however, nor are they “secret.” Their accessibility opens the possibility for a
good deconstructive reading. Derrida uses the analogy of undoing and reconstituting a web to describe any reading. The
text is not the web and the reading external to it; rather, each reading is part of the web; it pays attention to certain
threads in the text as well as adding its own. Derrida writes that no criticism can “master the game” and “survey all the
threads at once.” Criticism is deluded when it attempts to look without touching. Derrida writes that the web will catch
fingers, even if the reading attempts not to lay a hand on the “object.” Object is placed in quotation marks to indicate
that the idea of a text as an “object” obscures the “(con)fusion” between a text and a reading.
This however, does not give license to bad readings and criticisms that are not attentive to the threads of a text. Derrida
writes that a person who adds “any old thing” to a text is undertaking just as foolish a reading as the person who thinks
she can read from an objective standpoint. This type of reading “adds nothing” because “the seam wouldn’t hold.” A
good deconstructive reading, therefore, is self-aware: willing to risk the addition of a new thread while remaining
attuned to the laws and rules of the text. This type of reading is "double" in that it pays attention both to the text and
the reader; it reads itself.56
Despite all of the above analysis, all of the above words about what deconstruction is and what it is not, we have not
captured (and cannot capture) the full force of the term (if such a thing exists). Derrida is not satisfied with the word,
"deconstruction" although it might be the least bad option. Derrida writes that deconstruction "deconstructs itself" It's
reflexivity "bears the whole enigma." At the end of his letter to a Japanese friend Derrida writes, "All sentences of the
type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X' a priori miss the point, which is to say they are at least false."57 This
is an interesting revelation, in light of the fact that Derrida spent most of his letter constructing sentences just like that.
Does his letter deconstruct itself at this point? Apparently, that is what Derrida is trying to get at. Derrida writes, "What
deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!" 58
Derrida concludes that deconstruction has meaning only in the context of a chain of significations, which Derrida says is
the case for all words. John Caputo, in the book, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, comments about the irony of trying to fit
deconstruction into a nutshell, when "the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things--texts,
institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need--do not have definable
meanings and determinable missions."59 Nutshells are just the "least bad" way to define. As far as I can tell, the
difference between a deconstructive nutshell and the traditional sort is that the deconstructors understand the trouble
with nutshells.
Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” p. 3
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 63
57
Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” p. 4
58
Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” p. 5
59
Caputo, John D. DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTSHELL. (New York, Fordham University Press, 1997). p. 31
55
56
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In her essay, “Teaching Deconstructively,” Barbara Johnson writes, "Deconstruction has sometimes been seen as a
terroristic belief in meaninglessness. It is commonly opposed to humanism, which is then an imperialistic belief in
meaningfulness. Another way to distinguish between the two is to say that deconstruction is a reading strategy that
carefully follows both the meanings and suspensions and displacements of meaning in a text, while humanism is a
strategy to stop reading when the text stops saying what it ought to have said." 60 Johnson asks the question “could we
have chosen to read literally?”61. A purely humanistic, literal reading strategy is impossible. Deconstruction pays
attention to the limitations inherent in any reading. It pays attention "to what a text is doing--how it means not just what
it means" (141). This is not nihisitic destruction of meaning and texts, rather, it is a more careful way to attend to texts
and meaning.
In response to a question at a roundtable discussion, Derrida commented that the hallmark of his work is "respect for the
great texts." Deconstruction is "an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or does not work, to find the
tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within their own corpus" 62. Deconstruction pays attention to the tension
between disruption and attentiveness to a text. However, Johnson concludes, "no matter how rigorously a deconstructor
might follow the letter of the text, the text will end up showing the reading process as a resistance to the letter." A
certain blindness, or humanism, accompanies any reading. This, however, does not deter Johnson: "it is precisely as an
apprenticeship in the repeated and inescapable oscillation between humanism and deconstruction that literature works
its most rigorous and inexhaustible seductions."63
Deconstruction is often a playful approach to texts. The philosophical tradition construes “play” as outside of philosophy,
along with myth, "magic," and emotion. In the tradition, philosophy must take itself seriously. This is also a notion
Derrida would like to call into question. His own writing is playful; it acts out. He includes plays on words, puns, creative
hyphenations to call attention to the parts of words or suggest other meanings (con-text, where the prefix "con" means
"with"), brackets and parentheses that suggest ambiguous readings (for example, "(t)here:" is this word here or there?),
and marking out words with X's to put them "under erasure" in order to question the notion of fixed concepts.
Derrida views language and texts as always in play, and not governed by rules and structures. Powell writes, "He says we
should continuously attempt to see this free play in all our language and texts--which otherwise will tend toward fixity,
institutionalization, centralization, totalitarianism. For out of anxiety we always feel a need to construct new centers, to
associate ourselves with them, and marginalize those who are different from their central values."64 The philosophical
tradition has always tried to turn free play into games with rules. This implication of this free play is that if you come
away from this explanation of deconstruction with more questions than answers you just might be on the right track.
Answers constitute mastery, understanding, and regulation that is impossible.
Another key Derridean idea/non-idea is "Différance." The term is not the same as the French word "Différence," with an
"e," although the two are pronounced in the same way. The term is meant to connote both and neither a deferring and a
differing. Like "pharmakon" it cannot be pinned down and defined. The "a" in "Différance" is meant to be disruptive,
because when we see the "a" we are understanding nothing. It shakes the division between signifiers and signifieds.
Différance is meant to resist this opposition between the "sensible," the words on the page, and the "intelligible," the
ideal forms. Derrida explains, "Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological--ontotheological-reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology--philosophy--produces its system and its
history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return."65 By this he means that différance is prior
to God and metaphysics and ontology, all the systems used answer questions about how and why we exist in the world,
because différance is what allows you to separate the categories of presence and absence in the world in the first place.
Johnson, Barbara. “Teaching Deconstructively.” WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY. Ed. Atkins, G. Douglas
and Michael L. Johnson. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985). p. 140
61
Johnson, p. 148
62
Caputo, p. 9
63
Johnson, p. 148
64
Powell, p. 29
65
Derrida, Jacques. MARGINS OF PHILOSOPHY. Trans. Alan Bass. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982).
p. 6
60
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IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEBATE ROUND
There is a dangerous tendency for Lincoln Douglas and Policy debaters who seek to use the works of Derrida in the
debate round. That tendency is to reduce Derrida's philosophies into radical subjectivist nihilism. These debaters may
argue that because Derrida demonstrates that the meanings of words are dependent on contexts that all words have no
meanings whatsoever. They may argue that all meaning depends on one's subjective viewpoint, and is hence
indecipherable. They may claim that because there is no such thing as the "Truth," the judge cannot affirm the
resolution.
The problem with this sort of argument is that, of course, if there is no truth or meaning, the judge can neither affirm nor
deny the resolution, hence, the debate cannot be decided. This sort of application of "deconstruction" to the debate
round also relies on a poor reading of Derrida's texts. Deconstruction is not nihilistic, rather, it is precisely attuned to
meanings. Recognizing that texts do not have one true meaning and interpretation does not abolish the concepts of
meaning and interpretation altogether. Deconstruction carefully traces the meanings of a text, including the what the
text literally says, as well as how the text goes about saying it, what it conspicuously leaves out, and what possible
unintended meanings can emerge when we stop worrying about what the author, or framer of the resolution intended
and examine also plays of language and context. Deconstruction also deconstructs itself. A deconstructive reading is
double: it is aware of what it itself brings to a text. Debaters should be aware of what they bring to the debate.
When I say text here, I do not mean to confine Derrida's analyses to the written word. Rather, consider a text to be a
broad term that can imply institutions, laws, cultures, and practices. Deconstruction authorizes alternative readings of
dominant institutions and practices of power. As such, it is potentially politically subversive. Deconstruction can give
license to such practices as critical race theory, critical legal studies, and feminist analysis; practices that analyze "how" a
text, a law, or a practice may marginalize racial, gendered, and sexual others, even though (or because) it doesn't
mention them.
Deconstruction can also be a way to re-examine the idea of what counts as “evidence.” Can performance, play, poetry,
and paradox constitute ways to affirm and negate resolutions just as values and criteria? Do these playful forms count as
well as the doctrines of philosophers and quotes and evidence from experts?
Deconstruction may be an original and compelling way for debaters to affirm or negate a resolution. For example, take
the resolution "The right of the individual to immigrate out be valued above the nation's right to limit immigration." A
traditional affirmation of this resolution would probably lead one towards the value of "justice" and the criteria of
political philosophers, like John Rawls, for example, whose "Difference Principle" provides the moral grounding upon
which to argue that everyone, regardless of their social status, ought be guaranteed the same opportunities, including
choice in immigration. A traditional negation might utilize the criteria of libertarians who argue that the same value,
"justice," is best guaranteed by protecting the freedom of individuals to earn money without competition from
immigrants.
Instead, how might a deconstructive negation of this resolution proceed? This negation could be based on questioning
the dichotomies that the language of the resolution is premised on, for example, the question of "immigration" itself is
based on the initial divisions between individual/nation, citizen/alien, and inside/outside. Derrida's deconstruction
provides tools for questioning the naturalness of such divisions.
In Dissemination, Derrida explores the nature of divisions and exclusions and the philosophical/interpretive tradition of
privileging what is present as opposed to what is absent, suspended, or displaced. Immigrants are an excellent example
of this practice manifested in political discourse. Derrida argues that the hegemonic role of logic is to "keep the outside
out." However, the problem arises that "this elimination, being therapeutic in nature, must call upon the very thing it is
expelling, the very surplus it is putting out. The pharmaceutical operation must therefore exclude itself from itself." 66.
Exclusions must call upon the thing that they exclude. In excluding the other, on whom they rely for self-constitution,
they remove their own possibility. For there to be such a thing as a "citizen," there must also be "non-citizens,"
immigrants, aliens, and others, or the word "citizen" would have no meaning at all, it wouldn't make sense. Derrida's
66
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 128.
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philosophy invites us to ask, how is the citizen constituted by the immigrant, and vice versa? How is the nation
constituted by the individual, and vice versa?
Derrida examines the Greek word "pharmakos" which means both "evil" and "outside." 67 The pharmakos was a
scapegoat in rituals to rid the city or the body of "what is the vilest in itself." 68 The pharmakoi were also men put to
death in an annual Athenian ritual of sexual purification. The ritual was necessary as the way the "city's body proper
reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself
within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or
aggression."69 These external threats are also internal. They have broken into the sanctity of the city. The scapegoats
were most often "degraded and useless beings" of Athens. Not only was it necessary for Athens to cleanse the city of
these threats for the city to reconstitute itself in security. It is also necessary for humanity to "keep the outside out."
Derrida explains, "By this double and complementary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and
what transcends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human in opposition on one side to the divine and
heroic, on the other to the bestial and monstrous." 70 Deconstructive readings of contemporary discourse on the
"immigrant" will find references to these people as "dirty," "bestial," "lazy," poor workers who must be kept out in order
to keep the "nation" and economy clean and free.
The sacrifice of the pharmakos is a type of tracing "played out on the boundary line between inside and outside." It is a
way for the nation to "trace and retrace" the line between inside and outside. The nation's self constitution depends on
the exclusion of these inside outsiders. These pharmakos are beneficial in the role they serve in cleansing the city, but
also harmful as evil outsiders. Derrida writes that these contradictions undo themselves in the "passage to decision or
crisis."71 In a footnote Derrida quotes Frye, who says that the pharmakos, like immigrants, are "neither innocent nor
guilty."72
Must the human community always retrace its lines by excluding others? If deconstruction's project is break through and
examine the sorts of oppositions (inside/outside) that require the sacrifice of scapegoats, what political possibilities are
opened up? Derrida's project is "in going beyond the bounds of that lexicon." A lexicon is the way we understand our
language. Derrida wants to go beyond the ways we traditionally understand language, as including and excluding. In
doing this "we are less interested in breaking through certain limits, with or without cause, than in putting in doubt the
right to posit such limits in the first place."73
If we put in doubt the rights of the affirmative to posit the difference between the citizen and the immigrant, we have
negated the resolution in an exciting and untraditional way. We have called into question the right of the affirmative to
make these distinctions, and we have located the source of oppression and inequality not in the "nation's right to limit
immigration" as the affirmative would have it, but rather, in the very terms of the resolution itself. This may be why
Derrida says that "Deconstruction is justice" and it is one of many possibilities that deconstruction has to offer LincolnDouglas debate.74
67
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 130
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 131
69
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 133
70
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 131
71
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 133
72
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 132
73
Derrida, DISSEMINATION. p. 130
74
Martin, Bill. HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). p. xi
68
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Holland, Nancy J. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF JACQUES DERRIDA. (University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
Kamuf, Peggy. A DERRIDA READER: BETWEEN THE BLINDS. (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1991).
Krupnik, Mark. DISPLACEMENT: DERRIDA AND AFTER. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press,
1983).
Lucy, Niall. Interpretations: Debating Derrida. (Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1995).
Martin, Bill. HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995).
Wolfreys, Julian. TRANSITIONS: DECONSTRUCTION, DERRIDA. (New York, St. Martin’s Press,
1998).
Wood, David. DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
Wood, David and Robert Bernasconi. DERRIDA AND DIFFéRANCE. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988).
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DECONSTRUCTION IS GOOD
1. DECONSTRUCTION IS JUSTICE
Jacques Derrida, Professor of Philosophy, quoted by Bill Martin, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. xi.
It is this deconstructable structure of law [droit], or, if you prefer to justice, as droit, that also insures the possibility of
deconstruction. justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructable. No more than
deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. I think that there is no justice without this
experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an experience of the impossible. A will, a desire, a demand
for justice whose structure wouldn't be an experience of aporia would have no chance to be what it is, namely, a call for
justice. Every time that something comes to pass or turns out well, every time that we placidly apply a good rule to a
particular case, to a correctly subsumed example, according to a determinant judgment, we can be sure that law [droit]
may find itself accounted for, but certainly not justice. Law [droitl is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it
is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate the incalculable, it requires us to calculate
with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that
is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.
2. DECONSTRUCTION OPENS SPACE FOR DIVERSE VOICES
Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. 2.
I aim to open a space for reading the writerly dimensions of western political modernity and some of its canonical texts,
as well as to open a common space for diverse voices that have recently begun to make themselves heard. The aim,
indeed, is to open the "archive" of difference as found in both the canon of western modernity-even if in the form of a
repression of the other that must be read in the margins-and in the experience of the masses. Even in the western and
especially U.S. atmosphere of historical amnesia., nothing is truly or fully forgotten. There is an archive of difference and
the strivings of people toward justice that may not be in books (or the books may not always be in the hands of the
people), that may not be in peoples minds (or in their conscious thoughts), but that exists in their hearts, their lives, their
forms of life, and the social institutions that they inhabit and have marked with their lives. This characterization of the
archive and the need to open it, and to let it open itself, is deconstructive in both the letter and the spirit of Derrida's
work. My entire text must be the argument for this last claim, and I hope that the reader will be convinced. The problem
is truly that of showing the coterminousness and compearance (co-appearance) of deconstruction and justice.
3. DECONSTRUCTION TAKES APART RACISM
Niall Lucy, nqa, INTERPRETATIONS: DEBATING DERRIDA, 1995, p. 6-7.
They have real effects, if Derrida is right, because-at the level of conditions of possibility, conceptual axioms, or
discursive statements-they are the same as those that sanction apartheid. That is why apartheid is so abhorrent-or why it
ought to be-and not because those who suffer under a state-sanctioned racism (which in a sense is everyone) suffer to a
'greater' extent than others. It isn't the effects of apartheid that constitute it, as a special case, as the ultimate racism. It
isn't the effects but rather the logic of apartheid that is offensive. And it is this logic that Derrida mourns in 'Racism's Last
Word', precisely because it is not a 'special' logic; to this extent apartheid is not a special case, even while being also-and
necessarily-a 'unique appellation'. The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power and sets separation
itself apart: 'apartionality,' something like that. By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word
corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation. At every point, like all racisms, it tends to pass segregation off as
natural-and as the very law of the origin. Such is the monstrosity of this political idiom. Surely, an idiom should never
incline toward racism. It often does, however, and this is not altogether fortuitous: there's no racism without a language.
The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. Even though it offers
the excuse of blood, color, birth-or, rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse-racism
always betrays the perversion of man, the 'talking animal.'
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DECONSTRUCTION OPENS NEW WAYS OF THINKING
1. DERRIDA CHALLENGES THE NOTION OF "RESOLUTION"
David Wood, Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, DERRIDA: A
CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 1-2
What once seemed to be a philosophical reflex - marking out a critical distance from the philosopher or the position one
is dealing with - is triply problematized in the case of Derrida. Derrida does not, typically, take up philosophical positions,
traditional or otherwise. Nor does he ever unequivocally endorse the particular discourse he happens to be employing or
engaged with. Finally, the kind of relationships that Derrida establishes with the texts he reads do not resolve themselves
within, and indeed fundamentally problematize the idea of, a homogenous space in which critical distances can be
measured and marked out.
2. DERRIDA EXPANDS THE SPACE OF READING
David Wood, Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, DERRIDA: A
CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 3
None of Derrida's readers is required to take on board the various dimensions of his writing that we have singled out. But
not to notice the specificity of the relations he establishes to other texts, not to recognize that Derrida is elaborating a
new space of reading, is surely to fail to address the real challenge (and seduction) of his work. The differences between,
say, Gaschd's articulation of Derrida's work as a theory of infrastructures (in The Tain of the Mirror), Llewelyn's drawing
out of an ethics of responsibility, Nancy's evocation of the passion of the text and Sallis's account of Derrida's mimetic
mechanisms are real enough. What unites them with the other contributors-Michel Haar, Geoffrey Bennington, Robert
Bernasconi, Christopher Norris, and Richard Rorty, and what Manfred Frank so clearly resists-is an engagement with the
expanded space of reading that Derrida's writing exemplifies without fully determining (a structure which takes us close
to Irene Harvey's concerns). This space involves both the kind of features on which Gasch6 has
concentrated-supplementarity, infrastructures and so on-which would suggest the possibility of something like a
deconstructive logic, and the ethical space, the space of responsibility, which Llewelyn deals with here, and which
Derrida. is increasingly concerned to emphasize himself. We can begin to think the relation between the two by coming
to think of deconstructive readings not as undermining a finished text, but as a responsiveness that re-engages with the
conditions of a text's production, with the desire that philosophy (and perhaps all theory) articulates even when it is lost
sight of. It might almost be worth the metaphysical overdraft required to say that Derrida is engaged in a theatrical
re-animation of the textual space of philosophy's passion.
DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT NIHILISM
1. DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT NIHILISM
Niall Lucy, nqa, INTERPRETATIONS: DEBATING DERRIDA, 1995, p. 1
The modest aim of this book is to encourage people to read the work of Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques
Derrida. Before it is 'political', I take reading to be a first principle of my profession. As a professional humanities
academic, my own teaching and research practices do not otherwise make any sense to me or hold any value unless they
begin from this principle, regardless of what might follow. In a word, I think it is unprofessional of anyone involved in
humanities scholarship to hold an opinion on Derrida's work or what 'Derrida' stands for without having read him. My
point is that too much of what currently passes for a knowledge of Derrida's work-in academic journals and in the
popular press, in lectures and at conferences, and in university corridors-is inadequate, ill informed, and very often
wrong. The reason for this is that many of those who have written Derrida off haven't actually read very much of what he
has written, if anything at all. Whatever else it may be, that's not a good model of critical practice.
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DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT PROPERLY POLITICAL
1. DECONSTRUCTIVE "PLAY" IS SILLINESS THAT DESTROYS ITS POLITICAL POTENTIAL
Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. xii-xiii.
In asking whether deconstruction might be the possibility of justice, Derrida is asking whether there might be another
conception of politics, another thinking of the polis. This book aims to sharpen the sense of the alternative conception,
theoretically and practically, and to show why it is necessary to political thinking and praxis. In pursuing this aim I
connect especially with central themes in the Marxist tradition (or traditions). However, I am greatly concerned here
with the fate of deconstruction. I worry that it may not be able to do all of the work that it could do, because of its
tendency-the tendency, at any rate, of "what is now called deconstruction, in its manifestations most recognized as
such"-to get bogged down in etymological play. This tendency gives way, with some proponents of deconstruction, and
sometimes with Derrida's work as well, to a kind of silliness lacking any political edge whatsoever. This silliness seems to
me a preoccupation that a tired and even cynical Eurocentrism might indulge in. There are better possibilities in
deconstruction, especially when Marxist and Kantian themes are engaged. In some respects this text is a workbook for
such an engagement.
2. DERRIDA IS NOT AMMUNITION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 236.
The quarrel about whether Derrida has arguments thus gets linked to a quarrel about whether he is a private
writer-writing for the delight of us insiders who share his background, who find the same rather esoteric things as funny
or beautiful or moving as he does-or rather a writer with a public mission, someone who gives us weapons with which to
subvert 'institutionalized knowledge', and thus social institutions. I have urged that Derrida be treated as the first sort of
writer, whereas most of his American admirers have treated him as, at least in part, the second. Lumping both quarrels
together, one can say that there is a quarrel between those of us who read Derrida on Plato, Hegel and Heidegger in the
same way as we read Bloom or Cavell on Emerson or Freud-in order to see these authors transfigured, beaten into
fascinating new shapes-and those who read Derrida to get ammunition, and a strategy, for the struggle to bring about
social change. Norris thinks that Derrida should be read as a transcendental philosopher in the Kantian
tradition-somebody who digs out hitherto unsuspected presuppositions. 'Derrida', he says, 'is broaching something like a
Kantian transcendental deduction, an argument to demonstrate ("perversely" enough) that a priori notions of logical
truth are a priori ruled out of court by rigorous reflection on the powers and limits of textual critique.'9 By contrast, my
view of Derrida is that he nudges us into a world in which 'rigorous reflection on the power and limits . has as little place
as do 'a priori notions of logical truth'. This world has as little room for transcendental deductions, or for rigour, as for
self-authenticating moments of immediate presence to consciousness.
3. DERRIDA HAS NO GROUND FROM WHICH TO ASSAULT LOGOCENTRISM
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 237.
On my view, the only thing that can displace an intellectual world is another intellectual world-a new alternative, rather
than an argument against an old alternative. The idea that there is some neutral ground on which to mount an argument
against something as big as 'logocentrism' strikes me as one more logocentric hallucination. I do not think that
demonstrations of 'internal incoherence' or of 'presuppositional relationships' ever do much to disabuse us of bad old
ideas or institutions. Disabusing gets done, instead, by offering us sparkling new ideas, or utopian visions of glorious new
institutions. The result of genuinely original thought, on my view, is not so much to refute or subvert our previous beliefs
as to help us forget them by giving us a substitute for them. I take refutation to be a mark of unoriginality, and I value
Derrida's originality too much to praise him in those terms. So I find little use, in reading or discussing him, for the notion
of 'rigorous argumentation'.
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DECONSTRUCTION IS ELITIST
1. DECONSTRUCTION IS CLASSIST
Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. 9.
A debt of gratitude is owed to the Yale School. It was the pathway through which Jacques Derrida's work came to be
disseminated in North America. I do not wish to engage in crude or reductive analysis. However, launched as it was as a
North American movement, deconstruction bears the marks of its elite class origins. There is the need, then, to extend
deconstruction beyond the halls of the Ivy League academies and far beyond the academy in general. There is a further
need for a kind of "recovery" (another word that seems funny in this context) of deconstruction, a return to Derrida's
texts and to their position in relation to the canons of western philosophy and literature. I need not ignore or disparage
the work of the Yale critics in order to move this agenda. Finally, there is the need to deepen the project of
deconstruction, which again means taking deconstruction beyond the academy, particularly beyond the academy's
superficiality with regard to the most significant questions facing humanity. Here the class character of much
deconstruction as practiced in the academy, and the class character of the academy, as stamped upon much of the
practice of deconstruction, stands as a major obstacle in the way of a deconstruction that really works, on every level, to
let the other speak.
DECONSTRUCTION IS BASED ON A FLAWED VIEW OF LANGUAGE
1. IT NOT DEMONSTRATE CONTRADICTIONS INHERENT IN LANGUAGE
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 241.
Nominalists like myself-those for whom language is a tool rather than a medium, and for whom a concept is just the
regular use of a mark or noisecannot make sense of Hegel's claim that a concept like 'Being' breaks apart, sunders itself,
turns into its opposite, etc., nor of Gasch's Derridean claim that 'concepts and discursive totalities are already cracked
and fissured by necessary contradictions and heterogeneities'. The best we nominalists can do with such claims is to
construe them as saying that one can always make an old language-game look bad by thinking up a better one-replace an
old tool with a new one by using an old word in a new way (for example, as the 'privileged' rather than the 'derivative'
term of a contrast), or by replacing it with a new word. But this need for replacement is ours, not the concept's. It does
not go to pieces; rather, we set it aside and replace it with something else.
2. LANGUAGE SHOULD NOT BE THOUGHT OF AS A MEDIUM
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 242.
Gasché is quite right in saying that to follow Wittgenstein and Tugendhat in this nominalism will reduce what he wants to
call 'philosophical reflection' to 'a fluidization or liquefaction (Verflussigung) of all oppositions and particularities by
means of objective irony'.19 Such liquefaction is what I am calling Aufhebung and praising Derrida for having done
spectacularly well. We nominalists think that all that philosophers of the world-disclosing (as opposed to the
problem-solving) sort can do is to fluidize old vocabularies. We cannot make sense of the notion of discovering a
'condition of the possibility of language'-nor, indeed, of the notion of 'language' as something homogeneous enough to
have 'conditions'. If, with Wittgenstein, Tugendhat, Quine and Davidson, one ceases to see language as a medium, one
will reject a fortiori Gasché’s claim that '[language] must, in philosophical terms, be thought of as a totalizing medium’.
That is only how a certain antinominalistic philosophical tradition-'the philosophy of reflection'-must think of it.
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RENE DESCARTES
PHILOSOPHER 1596 - 1650
Biographical Background
Regarded as the founder of modem philosophy, Rene Descartes is among the most highly regarded European
philosophers who ever lived. His scholarship in the fields of science, mathematics and philosophy has ranked him among
the most brilliant men in modem history.
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye-Descartes, France, to parents who were fairly well-to-do. Originally,
the town was only named La Haye, but Descartes was added in his honor. He never married, although he apparently
lived with a Dutch woman far many years who bore him a daughter who died in childhood
Because his parents had some wealth, Descartes received a quality education at the Jesuit academy of La Flèche in
France and later received a law degree from the University of Poitiers. As a young man he was able to travel throughout
Europe, mostly as a volunteer in national military units, like the Dutch and Bavarian armies. It was during these travels
that Descartes began to develop his concepts in philosophy and mathematics. Among some of the men who influenced
Descartes were the Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman and Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle, a leading figure in the Roman Catholic
Renaissance in France.
Philosophical and Methodological Summary
Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Anyone who has studied philosophy is familiar with this phrase.
It is paradoxically a simple yet, highly complex philosophical notion. And it is the root of Descartes’s
beliefs.
Several different terms have been used to describe the type of philosophy Descartes developed, among them are
rationalism, objectivism, and epistemology. Rationalism is generally considered the kind of philosophical belief that
knowledge stems from reason, not experience. The term objectivism has been attached to Cartesian philosophy because
it is rooted in the notion that knowledge should be free of subjective elements that are attributed to the person
expressing the knowledge. In other words, there must be a source for knowledge outside of experience. Finally,
epistemology is the central area of philosophy that is concerned with the nature and justification of knowledge claims.
Rationalism, objectivism, and epistemology all represented theories that were contradictory to the prevailing
philosophical tenants of Descartes’s day. Essentially, most European teaching of that time was based on skepticism, that
is, humans can not be certain of very much. Therefore, Descartes was unique among his contemporaries because he held
that there was an alternative philosophical position. He rejected skepticism and instead felt that one must suspend belief
of any perceptions that are based on sensory data. In other words, just because something is perceived by sight or
sound, for example, does not necessarily mean that is real or true.
According to scholar C.G. Prado, Descartes best represents the view that human reason is capable of determining
objective truth, and therefore of gaining “timeless and certain knowledge.” Prado writes, ‘Descartes’ view was that truth
is objective, that it is timeless and autonomous in the sense of being wholly independent of human interests, and that it
is accessible to human reason.” Thus, Prado claims that for Descartes, the only proper aim for inquiry was to seek
absolute knowledge.1
Descartes believed that information obtained through the senses could never be conclusive and even deceptive.
Therefore, in order to construct a new basis for discerning what was true and to be believed he began with what he
knew to be a fact not based on the senses: I think, therefore I am. This one sentence was not based on anything be had
touched, smelled, saw, or tasted, it was a fact.
1
C.G. Prado, Descartes and Foucault. (Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 1992), p. 6.
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While Descartes’s search for truth seems to be based on a simple premise, over the centuries it has generated enormous
amounts of research, study, and debate. It is perhaps the most widely studied philosophical theory in Western thought
several experts have tried to synthesize and explain Cartesian philosophy. One of the these experts is C.G. Prado, who
wrote that the Cartesian method ‘analyze[s] the complex into its simple components, and to test those components by
comparing them to an indubitable sample of truth. Only when the various components have been found to be
individually true can the aggregate, the original complex notion, be accepted as true.” 2
Divinity of God
Because Descartes did not devote his research to only one area of scholarship, it is difficult to summarize his philosophy
regarding all topics. However, it is possible to develop a cursory summary of some of his better known topics, such as
God and science, and to synthesize the process that is called die Cartesian method of philosophy.
Descartes held a firm belief in a higher being, namely the Christian God. It was this belief in God that allowed Descartes
to create many of his theories. He had no doubt that a benevolent God existed and guaranteed that some beliefs can be
relied upon as universally and absolutely true. His reliance on the existence of God has been termed the Divine
guarantee of knowledge. For some of Descartes’s critics this absolute belief in God is a contradiction in philosophy
because Descartes had no factual basis on which to base this belief. Descartes himself pondered this apparent
contradiction. Descartes resolved this dilemma by developing what he believed was a logical conclusion—based mostly
on faith.
In Descartes’s opinion, God was the embodiment of perfection. Further, God implanted the notion of imperfection in
humans, since humans could not possibly know perfection based on experience. Therefore, it was only logical to
Descartes that God was the perfect being who created people and who is the measure by which all other comparisons to
perfection must be made.3
Contributions to Science
Descartes used a similarly strong belief in his scientific views. Basically, he felt that it was possible to describe the
attributes of the physical world entirely by mathematical physics in a single set of numerical laws. This theory was
opposite of the Aristotelian theories that were taught up until the seventeenth-century in Europe. Such scientific theory
held that independent sets of natural laws governed the behavior of objects. However, Descartes rejected such
explanations for science because they assumed that humans could know for what purpose God had designed and
created the world.
Descartes applied his radical view of science to a variety of scientific and mathematical topics including analytic
geometry, physics, astronomy, meteorology, optics, and physiology. It is probably in the area of physiology that
Descartes made some of his most important contributions to science.
He laid the foundation for the conception of the human body as a machine whose structure and behavior were to be
understood entirely on mechanical principles. 4 His greatest treatise on the topic of body and mind can be found in The
Passions of the Soul, a book which highlighted his views on physiology.
Summary of Writings and Publications
Descartes was a prolific writer on a variety of topics. The following summaries are offered to provide brief descriptions of
some of his more well known works. The English translation of the original title is listed first, with the title in its
publication language—either French or Latin—offered in parentheses.
Discourse on Method (Diccours de la mthode)
Published anonymously in 1637 as three essays, it is widely regarded as one of the classics of French literature. This
volume contains an autobiography, sketches of Descartes’s method and metaphysics, examinations of scientific
2
lbid., Descartes and Foucault p. 40.
Georges Dicker, Descartes An Analytical and Historical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 88.
4
lbid., p. 37.
3
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questions (including an account of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes was among the
first to appreciate and to publicize), and a discussion of the conditions and prospects of further progress in the sciences.
The World (U Monde)
This book presented parts of Descartes’s system of physics and the results of his research in physiology and in
embryology. This was an impactful and controversial book that was not published until after his death. Descartes
stopped its publication because he feared the repercussions it might have created. He wrote it at the time Galileo was
being condemned by the Catholic Church for espousing the Copernican theory of the solar system. Descartes also relied
on Copernicus for some of the foundations in this book, and thus he did not want to endure the same fate as Galileo.
Meditations Concerning Primary Philosophy (Mediationes de prima philosophia)
Many scholars believe this was Descartes most important work. Published in 1641, it established the framework of
concepts and the basic assumptions that he believed the progress of science required. It is this book that is frequently
analyzed and used to demonstrate Descartes’s philosophy.
Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae)
This full account of Descartes’s philosophical and scientific views was published in Latin in 1644.
However, it did not receive the positive reaction he had hoped for among the religious authorities—both
Catholic and Protestant It was a disappointment to Descartes that eventually many of his books were later
placed on the Catholic Church’s list of banned materials.
Treatise on the Passions (Us passions de 1 me)
This was Descartes’s last book which was written in 1649. Considered by many scientists to be a groundbreaking volume,
it dealt mainly with psychology, ethics and the relationship between mind and body.
Criticism and Conclusion
Empiricists provided some of the harshest criticism of Descartes, especially John Locke, George Berkely and David Hume.
These men argued that experience is the sole source of knowledge and reason is only the means for productive
manipulation of experiential knowledge.
Among contemporary philosophers, the group labeled ‘Post-modernists” offer theories that contradict
Descartes. As was stated above, Descartes was an objectivist. Conversely, some Post-modernists like
Foucault are constructivists. Foucault believed that the Cartesian explanation of knowledge deriving from a
divine source was absurd. While Descartes sought to investigate an objective and independent reality,
Foucault believed experience contributed much more to reality and knowledge than Descartes did. 5
The criticism of empiricists and post-modernists not withstanding, the influence of Descartes on modern philosophy
cannot be understated. As Cottinghain, Stoothoff and Murdocb wrote in their introduction to a translation of Descartes’s
writings, “it is to the writings of Descartes, above all others, that we must turn if we wish to understand the great
seventeenth-century revolution in which the old scholastic world view slowly lost its grip, and the foundations of modern
philosophical and scientific thinking were laid.”6 Descartes conceived fresh programs for philosophy and science during a
time when the European intellectual environment still focused on teachings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
5
lbid., Descartes and Foucault p. 97.
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Descartes Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Press
Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1988), p. vii.
6
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boney, Willis. Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967.
Butler, Ronald Joseph. Cartesian Studies. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1972.
Cottingham, John, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Cristaudo, Wayne. The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel. Brookfield, Vermont:
Gower, 1981.
Curley, Edwin M. Descartes Against the Skeptics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Descartes, Rene. Descartes Dictionary. Translated by John M. Morris. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971.
Descartes, Rene. Descartes His Moral Philosophy and Psychology. Translated by John J. Blom. New York:
New York University Press, 1978.
Descartes, Rene. Descartes: Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Norman Kemp. London:
Macmillan, 1952.
Descartes, Rene. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated by John Cottinghanr, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Grene, Marjorie Glicksman. Descartes. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985.
Kenny, Anthony John Patrick. Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1968.
Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: the Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi 1655-1715. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Mahaffy, John Pentland, Sir. Descartes. Edinburgh; London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1902.
Mellone, Sydney Herbert. The Dawn of Modern Thought: Descartes. Spinoza. Leibniz. London: Oxford University Press,
1930.
Pearl, Leon. Boston, Descartes. Twayne Publishers, 1977.
Scbouls, Peter A. The Imposition of Method: A Study of Descartes and Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Sorell, Tom. Descartes. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Watson, Richard A. The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press
International, 1987.
Watson, Richard A. The Downfall of Cartesianism 1673-1712. A Study of Epistemological Issues in Late 17th Century
Cartesianism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986.
Wilson, Margaret Dauler. Descartes. London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Wolf Devine, Celia. Descartes on Seeing: Epistemology and Visual Perception. Carbondale: Published for the Journal of
the History of Philosophy, Inc.; Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
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DOUBTFUL EVIDENCE MUST BE REJECTED
1. REASON CREATES DOUBT ABOUT ALL BELIEFS
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 76.
Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent for opinions which are not completely
certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my
opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt And to do this I will not need to run
through them all individually, which would be an endless task.
2. ALL DOUBTFUL OPINIONS MUST BE REJECTED TO DETERMINE TRUTH
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 160.
Since we began life as infants, and made various judgments concerning the things that can be perceived by the senses
before we had the full use of our reason, there are may preconceived opinions that keep us from knowledge of the truth.
It seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these opinions is to make the effort, once in the course of our life,
to doubt which we find to contain even the smallest suspicion of uncertainty.
3. ALL BELIEFS MUST BE REJECTED BASED ON DOUBT
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 123.
In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have
begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They
then attempt to separate the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to
reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false.
OBJECTIVE REALITY IS USED TO JUDGED IDEAS
1. THERE ARE DIVERSE DEGREES OF REALITY
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DESCARTES, 1968, p. 56.
There are diverse degrees of reality or (the quality of being an) entity, for substance has more reality than accident or
mode; and infinite substance has more than finite substance. Hence there is more objective reality in the idea of
substance than in that of accident; more in the idea of an infinite than in that of a finite substance.
2. IDEAS CONTAIN LESS REALITY THAN SUBSTANCE
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DESCARTES, 1968, p. 157. There is no doubt that those
which represent to me substances of something more, and contain so to speak more objective reality within them, that
those that simply represent modes or accidents; and that idea gain by which I understand a supreme God, eternal,
infinite, omnipotent, the Creator of all reality in itself than those by which finite substances are represented.
3. IDEAS ARE SUBJECT TO OBJECTIVE REALITY
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DESCARTES, 1968, p. 161. Now the reality attaching to an
idea is distinguished as two-fold by you. Its formal reality cannot indeed be anything other than the fine substance which
has issued out of me, and has been received into the understanding and has been fashioned into an idea. (But if you will
not allow that the semblance proceeding from an object is a substantial effluence, adopt whatever theory you will, you
decrease the image’s reality.)
But its objective reality can only be the representation or likeness to me which the ideas carries, or indeed only that
proportion in the disposition of its parts in virtue of which they recall me. Whichever way you take it, there seems to be
nothing really there; since all that exists is the mere relation of the parts of the idea to each other and to me, i.e. a mode
of its formal existence in respect of which it is constructed in this particular way. But this is no matter, call it, if you like,
the objective reality of an idea.
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EVIDENCE BASED ON PERCEPTIONS CANNOT BE TRUSTED
1. PERCEPTIONS DERIVED FROM SENSES CANNOT BE BELIEVED
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 76. Whatever I have up till now
accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from tune to time I have found
that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.
2. EVIDENCE OBTAINED FROM SENSES CANNOT BE TRUSTED
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 160-1. Given then, that our
efforts are directed solely to the search for truth, our initial doubts will be about the existence of the objects of senseperception and imagination. The first reason for such doubts is that from time to time we have caught out the senses
when they were in error, and it is prudent never to place too much trust in those who have deceived us even once. The
second reason is that in our sleep we regularly seem to have sensory perception of, or to imagine, countless things which
do not exist anywhere; and if our doubts are on the scale just outlined, there seem to be no marks by means of which we
can with certainty distinguish being asleep from being awake.
3. INTELLECT NOT SENSES PROVIDE ABILITY TO REASON
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 124. But the sense alone does
not suffice to correct the visual error in addition we need to have some degree of reason which tells us that in this case
we should believe the judgment based on touch rather than that elicited by vision. And since we did not have this power
of reasoning in our infancy, it must be attributed
not to the senses but to the intellect. Thus even in the very example my critics produce, it is the intellect alone which
corrects the error of the senses; and it is not possible to produce any case in which error results from our trusting the
operation of the mind more than the senses.
4. WHAT IS PERCEIVED BY THE SENSES MUST NOT BE JUDGED AS REAL
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 184. In order to distinguish what
is clear in this connection from what is obscure, we must be very careful to note that pain and colour and so on are
clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded as merely sensations or thoughts. But when they are judged to
be real things existing outside our mind, there is no way of understanding what sort of things they are. If someone says
he sees colour in a body or feels pain in a limb, this amounts to saying that he sees or feels something there of which he
is wholly ignorant, or, in other words, that be does not know what he is seeing or feeling.
5. JUDGEMENTS BASED ON SENSES CAN VARY WIDELY
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 185. But the way in which we
make our judgment can vary very widely. As long as we merely judge that there is in the objects (that is, in the things,
whatever they may turn out to be, which are the source of our sensations) something whose nature we do not know,
then we avoid error; indeed, we are actually guarding against error, since the recognition that we are ignorant of
something makes us less liable to make any rash judgment about it.
6. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO TRULY UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR SENSES PERCEIVE
Rene Descartes, Philosopher, DESCARTES SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, 1988, p. 185. Of course, we do not really
know what it is that we are calling a colour; and we cannot find any intelligible resemblance between the colour which
we suppose to be in objects and that which we experience in our sensations. But this is something we do not take
account of, and, what is more, we clearly perceive to be actually or at least possibly present in objects in a way exactly
corresponding to our sensory perception or understanding. Ad so we easily fall into the error of judging that what is
called colour in objects is something exactly like the colour of which we have sensory awareness; and we make the
mistake of thinking that we clearly perceive what we do not perceive at all.
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JOHN DEWEY
"Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power
external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing."
—John Dewey
INTRODUCTION
This essay will explore the life and thought of John Dewey, a distinctively American pragmatist philosopher. Dewey has
influenced famous contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Donald Davidson in the area of philosophy, as well
as countless teachers and educational theorists. What makes Dewey uniquely American is his pragmatism. Dewey held
that transcendent “truths” were not as important as the collective experience of ordinary human beings. For Dewey, the
ultimate test of a theory or idea was whether it “worked” for ordinary people applying the theory or idea.
After examining Dewey’s interesting life, I will attempt to explain both the philosophy of pragmatism and Dewey’s
educational philosophy. Both of these philosophies stem from particular assumptions such as the vitality of experience
and usefulness, the primacy of collective and community activity over individual reflection, and the belief that humans
can progress and improve themselves over time. A brief synopsis of some general objections of Dewey follows, along
with some ideas about how Dewey can be used in value debate.
Life and Work
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859, the son of a grocer. Dewey's father owned a general
store in the small Vermont community, and Dewey grew up listening to local customers at the store discuss politics and
culture. From a very early age, John Dewey witnessed the kind of community participation that would inspire his views
on society, politics and education. Burlington possessed paradoxical traits (and in many ways, still does): It was both a
local intellectual center and a community of simple farming and trade. If, as some critics have charged, Dewey possessed
an unreasonable utopian trust in communities, it may very well have been his youth in Burlington that inspired that trust.
At the same time, Dewey would come to reject the small town provincialism of Burlington in favor of the changing and
growing national community that characterized the second half of the 19th century.
Dewey stayed in Burlington after graduating from the public schools, and enrolled at the University of Vermont. He
graduated in 1879, at the age of twenty, and taught high school for three years. These early teaching experiences no
doubt forced Dewey to realize that something was not quite right with the education system in America. Students were
herded in and out of classrooms, taught to memorize proofs and facts and histories, and expected to regurgitate them
faithfully. There seemed to be different "tracks" for different students, from base "vocational" education to higher forms
of learning, and these divisions were often based on students' economic circumstances rather than any useful
distinctions. Not surprisingly, Dewey left public school teaching in favor of exploring the alternatives that might be
available.
In the fall of 1882, Dewey enrolled in the philosophy graduate program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland. Two years later, he received his PhD. in philosophy, and received an appointment from the University of
Michigan to teach philosophy and psychology. By now, the young scholar had experienced a wide range of educational
models, from the naive provincialism of small town public schools to the progressive possibilities of advanced study in
philosophy. He was beginning to realize that what separated these extremes was not so much the "natural talent" of
students as the philosophical commitments of the instructors and administrators. He would come to understand that if
teachers and administrators believed in students, saw students as valuable in and of themselves, rather than seeing
them as defects to be corrected or workers to be trained, most students would take advantage of the opportunities
afforded them, and grow accordingly.
In 1894, Dewey was appointed professor of philosophy and chair of the department of philosophy, psychology and
pedagogy at the University of Chicago. It was at Chicago where Dewey would begin experimenting with his progressive
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theories of education, and these experiments, along with his prolific and rigorous essays in philosophy and psychology,
brought national fame to the young man from Burlington. However, the experiments and the progressive thinking also
brought Dewey directly into conflict with University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper, who by all accounts
represented exactly the kind of "old school" traditionalism Dewey opposed. In 1904, Dewey left the University of Chicago
to become a professor of philosophy at Columbia University in New York City.
John Dewey would stay at Columbia for the next 47 years. His writings and experiments enjoyed free reign and
institutional encouragement, and he would produce a body of work nearly unmatched in the history of American
philosophy. He wrote essays and books about epistemology, politics, ethics, and education. He influenced teachers and
educational theorists all over the world. To them, he offered a notion that was both politically radical and educationally
sound: Education must occur through real, genuine experience, engaged to the child by teachers who visibly value the
child, and allow the child to participate in his or her own education. (http://inst.augie.edu/~mafjerke/dewey.htm)
Perhaps one of the most significant, and least known, of Dewey's achievements came in 1937 when he chaired the
"Dewey Commission," an effort to clear Soviet revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky of Josef Stalin's charges that Trotsky
was a counterrevolutionary sabuteur. A collection of anti-Stalinist left activists and anti-capitalist figures asked Dewey to
chair the commission because, although Dewey was no socialist, he was viewed by leftists as fair, impartial, and
concerned with social justice. Dewey's commission cleared Trotsky of all of Stalin's charges, which did not stop Stalin's
agents from assassinating Trotsky in Mexico a short time later (wsws.org/history/1997/may1997/dewey.shtml).
Dewey's role in vindicating Trotsky is important because it shows how his concern for justice and solidarity overrode his
differences with the communists. At a gathering of Trotsky's defenders, Dewey and Trotsky shared a laugh when Trotsky
reportedly said "If more liberals were like you, I might be a liberal," and Dewey replied "If more socialists were like you, I
might be a socialist." This exchange speaks volumes about Dewey's philosophy and politics. He believed that shared
experiences were always more important than ideological doctrines. The fact that he could share such honest and
sincere humor with one of the most dogmatic ideologues of the 20th century underscores Dewey's commitment to
pluralism.
John Dewey died on June 1, 1952. No other 20th century American philosopher has enjoyed a greater impact on the dayto-day workings of the system, and despite this impact, few philosophers are more misunderstood.
Dewey’s Philosophy of Pragmatism
Dewey's metaphysical assumptions naturally lead to an embrace of the kind of pragmatism advocated in the 19th
century by William James (1842-1910) and Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914). James and Peirce believed that
theoretical soundness was not a matter of adherence to some kind of transcendent logic, removed from everyday
experience. "Truth" for pragmatists is not determined in reference to absolute metaphysical principles, but rather in
reference to what "works," and what coheres with the genuine experience of living subjects. This explains why,
concerning the philosophy of religion, William James was more concerned about people's personal religious experiences
than with the various logical "proofs" for God's existence, or appeals to the truth of scripture.
Similarly, Dewey sees humans as part of nature, and sees nature as constantly changing. "A thing is its history" for
Dewey, and that history is lived experience (Gordon L. Ziniewicz, www.fred.net/tzaka/deweynew.html). Humans, as part
of nature, also have a history of change, both as a race and as individuals. Like existentialists, Dewey believes that what
constitutes "human nature" is a history of experience. But unlike existentialists, Dewey believes that history and
experience are collective as well as individual. This will become important later, when we see how strongly Dewey
believes in cooperation instead of competition.
Pragmatism holds that there is no such thing as "absolute certainty," in theory or practice. Humans may, through
experience and reflection (in fact, Dewey sees mental reflection as part of the sum of human experience), reach nearcertainty about theories or ideas. This near-certainty results not from an abstract examination of a theory or idea, but
through a contemplation of the consequences of behaving as if the theory or idea were true.
For example, I may have the idea that procrastination is an undesirable character trait, that I should adhere to my
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schedule and not put things off until the last minute. I may have this idea because my parents kept pounding it into my
head, because my teachers warn me about it, and so on. But unless the "procrastination is bad" idea is validated by my
lived experience, I could never consider it "true." In fact, my experience may contradict the advice of my parents and
teachers. I may work well under the pressure of the last minute. I may be talented enough to pull off last-minute
miracles. My lived experience tells me that it is okay to procrastinate.
At least, until the inevitable time that my last-minute miracle doesn't happen. My assignment is poorly written; my
teacher tells me it's obvious I wrote it the night before. I fail. At that point, I reconsider the original idea, and begin to
think that procrastination might be bad after all.
This example illustrates two important aspects of Dewey's pragmatism. First, as already stated, my lived experience is
more important than logic or metaphysics in determining the truth or falsity of a claim. Second, however, the example
shows that theories and ideas change. I hold something true as long as my experience verifies it. When my experience no
longer verifies it, I no longer have sound reason to hold it true.
For Dewey, experience can be active or passive, and includes reflection as well as interaction. Thus, experience is not (as
it was for the empiricists), the simple reception and contemplation of external data. It includes long-term, rigorous
meditation on ideas and things. It may even include mystical, emotional, or religious experience. As long as those things
add to my understanding of the way the world works (and remember, I am part of the world), then they are valuable
parts of the way I know things. (Ziniewicz, IBID)
Many scholars refer to these pragmatic ideas as John Dewey’s “instrumentalism.” In sum, instrumentalism holds that
humans encounter problems and exercise mental inquiry to solve those problems. They experiment, test, propose and
oppose, and through trial and error reach a higher stage of understanding. The journey to higher levels of understanding
has no end, as there is no absolute certainty:
Dewey's 'instrumentalism' defined inquiry as the transformation of a puzzling, indeterminate situation into one that is
sufficiently unified to enable warranted assertion or coherent action; and the knowledge that is the object of inquiry is,
Dewey insisted, just as available in matters of morals and politics as in matters of physics and chemistry. What is
required in all cases is the application of intelligent inquiry, the self-correcting method of experimentally testing
hypotheses created and refined from our previous experience. What counts as 'testing' may vary with the 'felt difficulty'
in need of resolution-testing may occur in a chemistry laboratory, in imaginative rehearsal of conflicting habits of action,
in legislation that changes some functions of a government - but in all cases there is a social context, mediating both the
terms of the initial problem and its solution, and being in turn transformed by the inquiry.
(http://www.xrefer.com/entry/551811)
Finally, Dewey is a strong proponent of collectivism and cooperation. There are many reasons for this beyond mere
progressive political sentiment. Rather, his collectivism stems directly from his belief in the universality of experience as
the arbiter of knowledge. I do not learn things merely by self-reflection. My experiences include the stories and
experiences of other people. Moreover, "community ideals" are those ideas and principles that a community develops
over time, as a result of collective experience. This explains Dewey's strong support of schools and progressive
education, which we'll examine in the next section. Finally, Dewey supports community ideals because, pragmatically
speaking, we achieve more cooperating with others than we achieve on our own.
In summary, Dewey's philosophy is an affirmation of humans as part of an ever-changing natural world. Abstract
principles are only valuable insofar as they cohere to our experiences of and in this ever-changing natural world. Part of
this experience is our membership in a community, where we learn from and with other people. The best political world
is one that maximizes the strength of communities, to the maximum benefit of all participants.
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Dewey’s Views on Education
“Education is not a preparation for life; Education is life itself.”
—John Dewey
As might be suggested by his pragmatism, John Dewey believed education must be informed by genuine experience,
constant interaction, and community values. Although he did not reject the notion that some individuals may be more
motivated than others to learn, he nevertheless believed that one's environment was a huge determining factor in one's
educational development. In many ways, then, Dewey's theory of education was a direct result of his pragmatist
philosophical perspective. (www.infed.org/thinkers/et-dewey.htm)
One of the most significant differences between traditional educational approaches and Dewey's "progressive" views of
education was his perspective on the role of teachers. Dewey did not view instructors as absolute authorities imposing
ideas and practices on students. Rather, he saw teachers as facilitators, guiding students through the learning process,
and he believed this ought to be done as democratically as possible. Contrary to the picture some critics have painted of
Dewey, he did not believe in some kind of simplistic (and utopian) democracy where students have as much authority as
teachers. He simply believed that much more democracy was possible in the classroom; that students could be taught
the virtues of democracy by learning to participate, in feasible ways, in their own educational experiences.
Dewey rejected the "checklist" rigor of individual assignments and isolated studies in favor of group learning, discussion,
and genuine experiences. If students are learning about agriculture, Dewey would rather students visit a farm and share
in some of the farm work than just read about farms in a book. If the subject was politics and government, Dewey would
prefer that students form their own governments and raise issues and solicit votes than merely listen to a lecture on how
governments function in a democracy.
Objections to Dewey
Critics of John Dewey’s philosophy include both philosophers opposed to pragmatism, and political activists opposed to
the soft, utopian “liberalism” of Dewey’s political positions. Objections to pragmatism usually come in the form of
metaphysical assertions that the truth of a claim is not dependent upon the experiential validation of that claim. To cite
the example I used in the section on pragmatism, those opposed to Dewey would argue that the statement “You should
not procrastinate” has a truth-value independent of my verification of that statement with my own experience.
However, more strongly worded objections come from the political side. Primarily, Dewey is charged with having utopian
aspirations regarding cooperation and progressivism, but at the same time ignoring real-world barriers to his utopia.
Conservatives, for example, charge that Dewey believes all citizens (and particularly students, in regards to his
educational philosophy) have the same basic abilities, or the same potential for genius; that Dewey seems to believe that
all differences come from the environment. Conservatives believe that people have different abilities, and that perceived
“inequalities” in society are really just the result of the cold, hard fact that some people are more talented and
industrious than others.
More criticism comes from those to the political left of Dewey, such as Marxists. For them, Dewey is a “liberal” in the
negative sense of the term. He believes everyone can “get along,” even though Marxists believe that there can be no
reconciliation between the ruling class and the working class. Thus, Dewey offers a vision of universal enlightenment and
progressive, community virtues, but offers no material means of getting to such a world. The desire that we all get along
and progress together is not enough.
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Implications for Debate
Dewey’s educational philosophy is in a class by itself, and any value debate topic dealing with education should inspire a
great deal of research on Dewey’s ideas. But in this section I will concern myself only with his general philosophy. The
following main points suggest ways in which debaters can incorporate the ideas of John Dewey:
Democracy: Obviously, Dewey is a strong proponent of democracy, for unique reasons. Dewey believes that we learn,
both individually and collectively, through experimentation and the consideration of all ideas and possibilities. For
Dewey, the clash of ideas and approaches found in a healthy democracy is the paradigm example of a progressive
society.
Necessity of Experience rather than Idealism: Dewey provides a solid answer to philosophers such as Plato, Hegel, Ayn
Rand, Leo Strauss, and other thinkers who believe that the “Truth” is a transcendent set of principles simply waiting to
be discovered. Rather, Dewey believes, we “make the truth,” not in some relativistic sense, but through genuine human
experience. Moreover, Dewey would accuse these idealist and objectivist philosophers of being foundationally antidemocratic. A natural conclusion to Dewey’s philosophy is that our collective notions of truth ought to be decided
democratically. The idea that “Truth” emanates from on high is contrary to the notions of progressive, participatory
democracy.
Cooperation versus Conflict: Obviously, Dewey believes that we learn more together than we do apart, and that we
achieve more when we unite around common goals than when we compete with one another. He rejected the notion of
competition in academics and embraced the idea that we can learn cooperatively, helping each other out, learning from
common struggles.
CONCLUSION
John Dewey represents something very important about American philosophy. Instead of being concerned about what is
ideally true, metaphysically true, logically true or mathematically true, Dewey was concerned about the truth of what
works for people in their everyday lives. This is radically democratizing, and wholly appropriate to a people who, at least
in principle, rejected the divine right of kings and the assumptions of aristocracy. It is appropriate to an experiment in
democracy amidst pluralism and uncertainty.
Debaters wishing to incorporate Dewey's ideas ought to research both the foundations of his pragmatism, and the
implications of his pragmatism on his educational theories. Although these two aspects of his philosophy are intimately
related, the literature is divided rather distinctively. Debaters might also contemplate the fact that, as they search the
library for Dewey's works, they might well be using the Dewey Decimal System, devised by John Dewey to catalogue
books in libraries.
In many ways, Dewey would be a strong advocate of academic debate. Like the participatory models of education he
advocated, debate is an exercise in empowering, involved activity. It is student-centered and relies on the students
experimenting, succeeding and failing, and learning from each exchange. In fact, understanding why debate is
educational for you can help you understand exactly the kind of education that Dewey wanted for students.
At the same time, debaters should be aware that objections to pragmatism are important. Dewey and his followers talk
about the importance of democracy and participation, but they seem unable to suggest ways to dismantle the very real
power structures that block these possibilities. Perhaps creative debaters can synthesize Deweyan pragmatism with
effective political strategies for actually opening up the real, material possibility of change in a world where, despite
Dewey's efforts, elitism still remains.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Melvin C. FOUNDATIONS OF JOHN DEWEY’S EDUCATIONAL THEORY (New York: Atherton Press, 1966).
Campbell, James. UNDERSTANDING JOHN DEWEY: NATURE AND COOPERATIVE INTELLIGENCE (Chicago: Open Court,
1995).
Dewey, John and James Hayden Tufts. ETHICS (New York: H. Holt, 1936).
Dewey, John. A COMMON FAITH (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).
Dewey, John. ART AS EXPERIENCE (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934).
Dewey, John. ESSAYS IN EXPERIMENTAL LOGIC (New York: Dover Publications, 1953)
Dewey, John. EXPERIENCE AND NATURE (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1958).
Dewey, John. FREEDOM AND CULTURE (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939).
Dewey, John. HOW WE THINK (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1910).
Dewey, John. INDIVIDUALISM OLD AND NEW (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1930).
Dewey, John. LECTURES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899).
Dewey, John. LECTURES ON ETHICS, 1900-1901 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
Dewey, John. LIBERALISM AND SOCIAL ACTION (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963).
Dewey, John. THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM, AND SCHOOL AND SOCIETY (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1956).
Dewey, John. THEORY OF THE MORAL LIFE (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1980).
Dewey, John. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION (New York: The
Macmillan company, 1916).
Gavin, W. J. CONTEXT OVER FOUNDATION: DEWEY AND MARX (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).
Haskins, Casey, and Seiple, David I.. DEWEY RECONFIGURED: ESSAYS ON DEWEYAN PRAGMATISM (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1999).
Nissen, Lowell. JOHN DEWEY’S THEORY OF INQUIRY AND TRUTH (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).
Popp, Jerome A. NATURALIZING PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION: JOHN DEWEY IN THE POSTANALYTIC PERIOD (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
Schilpp, Paul Arthur. THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951).
Soneson, Jerome Paul. PRAGMATISM AND PLURALISM: JOHN DEWEY’S SIGNIFICANCE FOR THEOLOGY (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1993).
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TRUTH IS PROGRESSIVE AND EVOLVING
1. ADAPTING TO SOCIAL CONDITIONS DETERMINES OUR ABILITY TO THINK WELL
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 296.
Thinking, however, is the most difficult occupation in which man engages. If the other arts have to be acquired through
ordered apprenticeship, the power to think requires even more conscious and consecutive attention. No more than any
other art is it developed internally. It requires favorable objective conditions, just as the art of painting requires paint,
brushes, and canvas. The most important problem in freedom of thinking is whether social conditions obstruct the
development of judgment and insight or effectively promote it. We take for granted the necessity of special opportunity
and prolonged education to secure ability to think in a special calling, like mathematics. But we appear to assume that
ability to think effectively in social, political and moral matters is a gift of God, and that the gift operates by a kind of
spontaneous combustion. Few would perhaps defend this doctrine thus boldly stated, but upon the whole we act as if
that were true.
2. SOCIAL CONDITIONS INTERACT WITH INDIVIDUALS, PRODUCING CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF MORALITY
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 298.
Constant and uniform relations in change and a knowledge of them in “laws,” are not a hindrance to freedom, but a
necessary factor in coming to be effectively that which we have the capacity to grow into. Social conditions interact with
the preferences of an individual (that are his individuality) in a way favorable to actualizing freedom only when they
develop intelligence, not abstract knowledge and abstract thought, but power of vision and reflection. For these take
effect in making preference, desire and purpose more flexible, alert, and resolute. Freedom has too long been thought of
as an indeterminate power operating in a closed and ended world. In its reality, freedom is a resolute will operating in a
world in some respects indeterminate, because open and moving toward a new future.
3. FREEDOM CONSISTS IN RECOGNIZING AND ADAPTING TO CHANGE
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, LECTURES ON ETHICS, 1991, p. 89.
Judgment or responsibility depends upon the balance between the subject and the predicate, between the natural self
and the ideal self. In obligation, the element of tension or resistance between the two is perhaps the more emphasized,
the explicit thing. But the necessary unity between the two is involved. In the idea of responsibility that unity of the
natural and the ideal self (that it is the business of the natural self to become the ideal self and of the ideal self to be
realized in the natural self) is the prominent thing. The point of simple tension between the two has been passed, and
the emphasis is on the other side of the identity between the two. In other words, the possible self does not represent a
remote, abstract possibility but is the possibility of the actual self. The actual self is not complete as long as it is stated
simply as given. It is complete only in its possibilities. That is the basis of responsibility. Carry that identity farther. Make
it not merely an identity in conception but in action, and you have freedom. Freedom is the equivalent of the reality of
growth.
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THERE ARE NO TRANSCENDENT MORAL TRUTHS
1. VALUES ARE DEPENDENT UPON REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES AND CIRCUMSTANCES
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, pp. 48-49.
For ordinary purposes, that is for practical purposes, the truth and the realness of things are synonymous. We are all
children who saw “really and truly.” A reality which is taken in organic response so as to lead to subsequent reactions
that are off the track and aside from the mark, while it is, existentially speaking, perfectly real, is not good reality. It lacks
the hallmark of value. Since it is a certain kind of object which we want, one which will be as favorable as possible to a
consistent and liberal or growing functioning, it is this kind, the true kind, which for us monopolizes the title of reality.
Pragmatically, teleologically, this identification of truth and “reality” is sound and reasonable: rationalistically, it leads to
the notion of the duplicate versions of reality, one absolute and static because exhausted; the other phenomenal and
kept continually on the jump because otherwise its own inherent nothingness would lead to its total annihilation. Since it
is only genuine and sincere things, things which are good for what they lay claim to in the way of consequences, which
we want or are after, morally they alone are “real.”
2. MORAL AND LEGAL RULES ARE NOT FIXED AND TRANSCENDENT, BUT CHANGE IN RESPONSE TO HISTORICAL
CIRCUMSTANCES
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 139.
Failure to recognize that general legal rules and principles are working hypotheses, needing to be constantly tested by
the way in which they work out in application to concrete situations, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that the
slogans of the liberalism of one period often become the bulwarks of reaction in a subsequent era. There was a time in
the eighteenth century when the great social need was emancipation of industry and trade from a multitude of
restrictions which held over from the feudal estate of Europe. Adapted well enough to the localized and fixed conditions
of that earlier age, they became hindrances and annoyances as the effects of new methods, use of coal and steam,
emerged. The movement of emancipation expressed itself in principles of liberty in use of property, and freedom of
contract, which were embodied in a mass of legal decisions. But the absolutistic logic of rigid syllogistic forms infected
these ideas.
FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY REQUIRE MATERIAL EQUALITY
1. ABSTRACT FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH: WE NEED THE MATERIAL AND ECONOMIC MEANS TO BE FREE
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, p. 281.
The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to all—irrespective of
differences in education, in command of capital, and the control of the social environment which is furnished by the
institution of property—is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated. Since actual, that is, effective, rights and
demands are products of interactions, and are not found in the original and isolated constitution of human nature,
whether moral or psychological, mere elimination of obstructions is not enough. The latter merely liberates force and
ability as that happens to be distributed by past accidents of history.
2. FREEDOM REQUIRES THE OBJECTIVE, MATERIAL MEANS TO ATTAIN CHOICE
John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher, PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION, 1968, pp. 297-98.
I sum up by saying that the possibility of freedom is deeply grounded in our very beings. It is one with our individuality,
our being uniquely what we are and not imitators and parasites of others. But like all other possibilities, this possibility
has to be actualized; and, like all others, it can only be actualized through interaction with objective conditions. The
question of political and economic freedom is not an addendum or afterthought, much less a deviation or excrescence, in
the problem of personal freedom. For the conditions that form political and economic liberty are required in order to
realize the potentiality of freedom each of us carries with him in his very structure.
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DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY IS GENERALLY REMOVED FROM REALITY
1. DEWEY’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY HAS NO OBJECTIVE BASIS
George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 251.
Dewey’s theory of ethics suffers from the same faults as his theory of knowledge. Just as ideas have no validity before all
the returns are in but must be tested afresh in each instance, so moral judgments have no verifiable value or weight in
advance of their results in action. Instrumentalist morality goes from case to case and from one step to the next without
reaching any general standards of right or wrong and what makes them so. The most it can offer is a reasonable
assumption or hopeful expectation that this way may be better than that, without examining the requisite objective
grounds for the hypothetical belief.
2. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN DISPROVEN BY 20 TH CENTURY HISTORY
George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 256.
Any philosophy which had not lost contact with the realities of social life should have been able to foresee, at least in
broad outline, the growth and outbreak of these upheavals; to have interpreted their meaning; to have prepared and
equipped people to cope with them; and thereby to have helped influence the course of events in a progressive
direction. Certainly a philosophy like instrumentalism, which claims to be so realistic and practical, should have done no
less. However, the record shows that at every critical turn of American history in the twentieth century, Deweyism has
been caught off guard and overwhelmed by the sweep of events. Instead of playing a directing role, its adherents have
been towed along in the wake of the more aggressive and dominant forces of plutocratic reaction. Their perplexity and
powerlessness was first exhibited in the First World War; it has been duplicated in every serious crisis convulsing the
United States since that time.
DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION IS FLAWED
1. DEWEY FAILS SYNTHESIZE THE TEACHER’S ROLES AS PARTICIPANT AND AUTHORITY
R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, p.
114.
Dewey’s view of the teacher, who is society’s agent for the transmission and development of its cultural heritage, is also
unsatisfactory, for it slurs over the dualism between the teacher’s position as an authority and the legitimate demand for
“participation.” A teacher is not just a leader in a game, like a football captain. In a game most of the participants know
how to play; but pupils come to a teacher because they are ignorant, and he or she is meant to be, to some extent, an
authority on some aspect of the culture. This disparity between teacher and taught—especially in the primary school—
makes talk of “democracy in education” problematic, unless “democracy” is watered down to mean just multiplying
shared experiences and openness of communication, as by Dewey. If “democracy” is to include, as it usually does, some
suggestion of participation in decision-making, we are then confronted with current tensions underlying the question of
how much “participation” is compatible with the freedom and authority of the teacher.
2. DEWEY’S EDUCATIONAL THEORIES IGNORED SOCIAL CONDITIONS
R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, p.
115.
Dewey’s treatment of the psychological principle was equally unsatisfactory; for it combined a conception of the child,
which was almost as idealistic as his conception of democracy, with a too limited view of what he called “the social
medium.” This led him to oversimplify the dualism between what he called “internal conditions” and what is the result of
social influences. Dewey was impressed, as I have reiterated, by the informal learning that went on in the home and in
the local community and wanted to forge a link between this sort of learning and learning at school. But he did not ask
the questions “which home?” and “which local community?”, for sociologists have catalogued the vast disparities that
exist between homes in this respect.
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DEWEY’S JUSTIFICATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY ARE FLAWED
1. DEWEY’S PHILOSOPHY OF DEMOCRACY IS MYSTICAL AND IMPRACTICAL
R.S. Peters, professor of the philosophy of education at the University of London, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977,
pp. 114-115.
Dewey himself never paid much attention to institutional issues. This was not just because he lived before the days when
“participation” became an issue. It was also because his attitude towards the democratic way of life was semi-mystical.
“When the emotional force, the mystical force, one might say, of the miracles of the shared life and shared experience is
spontaneously felt, the hardness and concreteness of contemporary life will be bathed in a light that never was on land
or sea.” I wonder if he always felt like this about sitting on committees!
2. DEWEY’S BELIEF IN DEMOCRACY IS BASED ON MYSTICAL, RELIGIOUS NOTIONS
George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, p. 291.
Dewey derived his basic stance toward democracy not, as he contended, from a scientific investigation of the history of
society and a realistic analysis of American conditions, but rather from a tradition that was rooted in the mystical
equality promised by the Christians. He accused the dualistic idealist philosophers of Greek and modern times of
“operating with ideal fancies” instead of dealing with the given facts. Yet he committed the same error of metaphysical
abstraction in the pivotal question of his whole philosophy: the origin, meaning, and application of democracy. He
approached democracy not in its concrete manifestations throughout class society, but as an abstraction to be stuffed
with the content he preferred to give it. Democracy to him was less a historical phenomenon than a secular religion.
DEWEY’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IGNORES HUMAN NATURE AND HISTORY
1. DEWEY IGNORES NATURAL DIFFERENCES AND INEQUALITIES
Anthony Flew, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977,
p. 87.
But even if we do concede that this opposite tendency really is implicit in the original insistence upon maximum
“interplay with other forms of association,” there is no getting away from the truth of Bantock’s contention that “there
are strong pressures of equality of outcome in the work of John Dewey;” for if associations are good and democratic in
so far as their members share numerous and varied interests, and if education for democracy is to be a matter of
concentrating on the development of various but always shared interests, then the variety of those shared interests, and
the scope for independent individual development, necessarily must be limited correspondingly. It must, that is to say,
be limited by and to whatever happens to be the maximum attainable either by the least richly talented or by the modal
majority. Maybe Dewey himself would have been unhappy about the full force of these implications. But he never comes
to terms in this context with the truth that people vary enormously in all natural endowments.
2. DEWEY IGNORES CLASS CONFLICT
George Novack, Ma