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]
Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc), the effect of employer-provided healthcare on self-employment rates, Salvino’s suggested general entrepreneurship-friendly public policies, and China’s success in lifting 600 million people out of poverty over the last generation.
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
I found it an exciting read, in part because I teach business ethics and philosophy of economics and I’m used to being immersed in the mainstream perspective, much of which I disagree with. So it was refreshing to find a kindred approach in Kling and Shulz’s economics that emphasizes:
* The foundational role of entrepreneurs, rather than seeing workers as performing pre-existing functions. (”Entrepreneurs are the heart of the economy, pumping innovation through the system.”)
* Consequently, starting one’s economic analysis with production, not welfarist distribution. (E.g., “although the supply of physical matter on earth is finite, the number of ways to re-arrange matter is infinite.”)
* Studying real human agents, not simplified abstractions that fit one’s models. (E.g., economists “should study economic history to give meat and sinews to the formal models that they’re studying, so that we do not become, God forbid, a branch of applied mathematics.”)
* Highlighting the importance of intangible resources and the knowledge economy, not simply the material resource economy. (E.g., “the average citizen in many advanced industrial nations has over $400,000 in intangible net worth.”)
* That plenty, not scarcity, is normal. (As the authors put it pithily: “To understand the plight of the workers a century ago, we’d read The Grapes of Wrath; to understand the plight of the workers today, we watch Supersize Me.”)
* That, consequently, win-win social relations are normal and the proper benchmark, not the usual expectation of zero-sum.
Kling and Schulz have put it together in a highly readable public intellectual book that draws upon and makes accessible the scholarly work of Douglass North, Robert Fogel, Joel Mokyr, Robert Solow, and Paul Romer.
The layout of the book is also intriguing and well done, alternating between explanatory essays on key economic themes and interviews with major economists: North, Fogel, Romer, Solow, Mokyr, along with William Easterly, Amar Bhide, William Lewis, William Baumol, and Edmund Phelps.
So get this book and learn about what the authors call Economics 2.0.
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This week in my Contemporary European Philosophy course, we are reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 at the height of World War 2.
“It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is. But nothing could be further from the truth or more misleading. The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long revolution of thought, a process in which thinkers who have had great influence far beyond the confines of Germany have taken part. Whatever one may think of the premises from which they started, it cannot be denied that the men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers who left the impress of their ideas on the whole of European thought. Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.” (p. 167)
Which thinkers and powerful writers? Hayek has named Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche as the major 19th-century influencers. But isn’t it too much to expect politicians to read philosophers? Did Hitler actually read Hegel and Nietzsche? Perhaps. (Though we know that Dr. Goebbels was well read in them and a great admirer of Marx.)
So of great importance were the transitional thinkers of the generation from 1900 to 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. In Chapter 12, “The Socialist Roots of Naziism,” Hayek devotes a few paragraphs each to Werner Sombart, Johann Plenge, Friedrich Nauman, Paul Lensch, Moeller van den Bruck, and Oswald Spengler. All of them were steeped in combinations of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and all of them were socialists; but their value-added (so to speak) was as public intellectuals and as intellectual activists who applied the abstract theories to the particular German context.
National Socialism, then, as Hayek reads it, resulted from over a century of intellectual and development: Germany’s brightest minds developed the theory and laid the cultural groundwork for the Nazi political transformation.
How free are individuals in all 50 states? Political scientists Jason Sorens and Will Ruger have crunched the numbers in over 30 areas — civil liberties, travel freedom, drug enforcement, business regulation, tax policy, and so on — as well as computing overall rankings for each state.
And the winner is … North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
My home state, Illinois, now ranks 45th, falling two spots since 2009: “Illinois is one of the least free states to live in from the perspective of regulatory policy and personal freedom, but on fiscal policy it ranks in the middle of the pack.” Gack.
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
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