http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item5562860/Habermas/?site_locale=…

Read Peter E. Gordon’s review in The New Repulic:

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/zero-hour-jurgen-habermas#.T7e1YaGGfdo.twitter

 

 

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6585778/?site_locale=en_US

See this review in The American Conservative, quite surprising. Thank you to Arts and Letters Daily and  Kenneth B. McIntyre.

A review in the TLS of May 18,2012 by Mark Vernon titled New Causes brought me to this book. Mr. Plokinghorne is both scientist and theologin. 

Mr. David Brooks is a propagandist of certain talent and a man given to self-serving political characterizations, indeed he expresses a positive mania for renaming. Should we consider him a Nominalist? In his essay of May 7, 2012 titled The Structural Revolution, Mr. Brooks describes a philosophical/political conflict between the Structuralists and the Cyclicalists in matters economic. Please don’t confuse his Structuralists with that Parisian intellectual coterie, and the Cyclicalists, simply call it metaphorical/rhetorical clumsiness. Recall the Nutcracker Ballet in which the Mouse King and his army fight the Gingerbread men soldiers: it has some of that flavor, but not the charm of the Petipa libretto. One might also think of a marvelous Grandville illustration, as an act of wish fulfillment. Mr. Brooks little political fable does not even meet the quality these two Fabulists. But there is a certain talent at work here, some illustrative quotations:

A Structuralist defines the problem:

“There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.”

A Structuralist defines the Cyclicalists and their problems:

“Many people on the left are having a one-sided debate about how to deal with a cyclical downturn. The main argument you hear from these cyclicalists is that the economy is operating well below capacity. To get it moving at full speed, the government should borrow and spend more. The federal government is now running deficits of about $1 trillion a year. Some of these cyclicalists believe the deficit should be about $1.4 trillion.

The cyclicalists rail against what they see as American austerity-mongers who resist new borrowing. They really rail against the European ones. They see François Hollande’s victory in France as a sign that, in Europe at least, the pendulum might finally be swinging from austerity to growth.”

The unsurprising last two sentences. The Structuralist defines the Political Future:

“Make no mistake, the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable. The cyclicalists want to preserve the status quo, but structural change is coming.”

 

American Litterateur

 

 

 

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2012/0106/bk/book_brown_dissent.html

 

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2012/may/08/text-sen-richard-lugars-two-primary-election-state/

Even if Sen. Richard Lugar represents the Eisenhower Republican in it's most compromised form, he still represented the political as the art of compromise,in the realm of civic actors who placed the preservation and well being of the Republic as the central concern of that practice of politics.The zelots that have taken over the Party since 1964 are just consolidating their position of political nihilism, as opposed to a civic patriotism based on the a priori notion of the good faith of the political 'other'. The Republic is now inert, indeed moribund, in the face of the political machinations of the New Democrats and Republicans who have surrendered to hate, fear, hubris and political subversion from within. NDAA represents the efficacy of the played out national melodrama concocted after 9/11 by the Bush Restoration and simply echoed, albeit muted in tone, by the Obama Administration. War and State Terror without compunction or even a window dressing of redress, is the stark reality of this Republic May 2012.

Publius

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/francois-hollande-becomes-french-…

 

Professor Johnson may be British but he is adept at a faithful ventriloquism of the Cold War American specialty of hysterical anti-communism. And the thoughtful reader only viewed Rep. Alan West as just another No-Nothing political opportunist in the mode of the paranoid ramblings of the bourbon soaked Senator Joe McCarthy. Rep. West of the list of 80 Democrats who are Communists, although letting his statement represent 'evidence' rather than any actual 'proof'. Rep. West and Professor Johnson are allies in the fight against the resurgent Red Menace.
Although Professor Johnson in his latest essay titled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion at his blog Ideals without Illusions at the World Affairs Journal manages to strike a tone of both respectable bourgeois intellectualism with a screeching nearly unhinged hysteria: this was no easy task but he managed to,somehow, make it work rhetorically. It is quite a feat and it is worth reading if only for an example of a specific kind of rhetorical pathology. A list of the culprits: Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou,  Michael Hardt,  Toni Negri, Gianni Vattimo, Alessandro Russo,Judith Balso, Alberto Toscano, Terry Eagleton, Bruno Bosteels , and the propaganda arm of the Communist Apologists Verso Books.
One must read it for his initial essay and his addendum in the comments section which for it's exhaustive intellectual completeness is stunning, for want of a better term. From my point of view Slavoj Zizek is the most visible of all the people that Professor Johnson names. He is both intellectually accomplished and in all ways the personification of the failed Communist Nostalgia that Professor Johnson rails against. Zizeck is polemicist, provocateur, intellectual gadfly even a stand up comic with a compelling intellectual dimension. He continually plays off the the concept of irony in all it's permutations and exploits to the fullest the practice of the dialectic.He is the most powerful in terms of public presence and he is utterly winning in his self-presentation.This makes him exceedingly dangerous as pitch man for the renewal of the political legitimacy of Communism.
Professor Johnson fails in his essay to address what might be the root cause of this destructive Communist Nostalgia that he inveighs against, which is so obviously the failure of Capital in it's unbridled Free Market iteration to deliver on it's own promised Utopia. And the Public Intellectuals that acted as apologists for that massive failure that has plunged the world, first into chaos and then to a bleak unending economic uncertainty.
Republicans, New Democrats, New Labor and the Party of Austerity are the real culprits of the political melodrama that has unfolded since the economic collapse of 2008, and the intellectuals who acted as mediators and explicators for an utterly corrupt political class, in hock to that very Capital. Read Professor Johnson's essay and meditate on the failure of Capital ,the rise of Zizek and his fellow travelers and the power of an exploitable hysteria.
Almost Marx              

  

   

The Ultramontane Catholic opinionator and Republican Conservative Ross Douthat , in his latest essay in the New York Times titled Incredible Shrinking Country, directs his attention to that once great engine of forward thinking and innovative Capital,Japan. An introduction is provided to the idea and literary practice of the dystopian novel, P.D. James' Children of Men: very descriptive of the key notion of decadence, that is the armature on which all else is built. The main protagonist in his fable is a Japan that was once represented, in America, as the ultimate in the possibilities of what Capital might become, within a neo-feudal context of the company man, at least in the stories that originated from the once fearsome, unquestionable propaganda machines of the Free Marketeers. Now that Japan is in decline, as Mr.Douthat constructs the tale, of an aging population and a declining birthrate, raises the question is it representative of decadence? Mr. Douthat finds a kindred spirit in the person of  demographer Nick Eberstadt to further his argument with apposite, and needless to say alarming, statistical data. Could it be that the Japanese have taken seriously the notion of a sustainable planet, as necessitating population control ? Mr. Douthat is addicted to the notion of growth as the sine qua non of Capitalism, and is incapable of a simple but necessary shift in intellectual perspective, from the model of growth to a model of development that might be the first step in the direction of thinking about the possibilities of the a new paradigm. Mr. Douthat is hobbled by his fealty to two ideologies that don't model creative path-breaking thought, but demand an uncritical conformity to authority.The possibility of the realization of a new paradigm remain for others to speculate and cogitate about: challenging his thinking about the need to continue an unsustainable birth rate, as indicative of Christian virtue wedded to a Capitalist imperative of an endless supply of new young workers. Is an aging population indicative of a loss of dynamism? Yes, if one is mired in the idee fixe of growth as the only measure worthy of serious consideration. Without appearing to be dogmatic, sustainable development appears to be the only rational choice at this moment.
Political Observer