Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube]
Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube]
Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America [mp3] [YouTube]
From Positivism to Analysis [mp3] [YouTube]
Recasting philosophy’s function [mp3] [YouTube]
Perception, concepts, and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill [mp3] [YouTube] First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science [mp3] [YouTube]
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s skeptical conclusion [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s essential argument [mp3] [YouTube]
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions [mp3] [YouTube]
Why Kant is the turning point [mp3] [YouTube]
After Kant: reality or reason but not both [mp3] [YouTube]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Dialectic and saving religion [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary of irrationalist themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
The postmodern vanguard: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Modern and postmodern [mp3] [YouTube]
Modernism and the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodernism versus the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern academic themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern cultural themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Why postmodernism? [mp3] [YouTube]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy
“The morality of the act, I dispose as follows: I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence.”[1]
In Roark’s courtroom speech in The Fountainhead, Rand delivers these individualist lines:
“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act — the process of reason — must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.”[2]
A striking parallel between two intransigent advocates of individualism and freedom.
Let us dwell upon this year’s ranking of Illinois as among the worst states for business: 48th out of 50.[1] That is unchanged from last year.
So people are leaving: “Illinois had the second-highest net domestic migration loss, sending 79,000 of its residents to other states. Illinois had ranked 49th in net domestic migration in the previous decade, with a 615,000 loss. Unlike the other biggest losers, New York and California, the Illinois rate in the single year of 2011 exceeded its annual rate of net domestic migration loss between 2000 and 2009.”[2]
And they are moving to the more business-friendly states: “Texas and Florida have the highest net migration of people to their states from 2001 to 2009. (By contrast, New York and California lost over 1.6 million and 1.5 million in net migration out of the states, respectively, over the same period.)”
A harsher business climate means fewer business start-ups. That means less employment. That means less individual income. That means net migration of people out of the state and lower living standards for those who stay. It also means less tax income for government, which means even worse budget crunches.
Speaking of which: here is a Richard Lorenc chart, based on data from the Institute for Truth in Accounting, comparing Illinois’ per capita debt with it neighbors’:
Add to that Illinois’ notoriously corrupt political class. Four recent Illinois governors have gone to prison, Rod Blagojevich only being the most recent.
So I suggest again this new motto for Illinois:
Illinois: Where governors go to jail and business can go to hell.
In Britain and America in the 1700s, the most influential philosopher of education was John Locke, with his Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In France, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his Emile.
But in the German states, it was Johann Georg Sulzer, with his 1748 An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children. Sulzer’s fundamental thesis:
“Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey.”
He elaborates: “It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”[1]
Horrifying: they will never remember afterwards that they had a will.
To which I add from Immanuel Kant’s lectures on education, first delivered in 1776/77: “Above all things, obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, especially of a school boy or girl.”[2] Much of Kant on education reads like a gloss on Sulzer, with its emphasis on obedience, duty, discipline, and punishment.
When we think of ethnic stereotypes — the English gentleman, the French romantic, the ramrod-straight Prussian — to what extent are those stereotypes grounded in explicit educational philosophies generated by a culture’s most influential philosophers?
Sources:
[1] Johann Georg Sulzer, Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder (An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children), 1748. Quoted in Alice Miller, For Your Own Good.
[2] Immanuel Kant, On Education. Translated by Annette Churton. University of Michigan Press, 1960. In Ozmon and Craver’s Philosophical Foundations of Education, 7th ed.
“He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no one man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or elsewhere, for that matter. The few whose names have lived were really impostors, expropriating the glory of the people as others expropriated its wealth.”
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology [
“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act — the process of reason — must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.”[2] 
