StephenKMackSD's Blog

Philosopical Apprentice.

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Jun 29, 2025

Editor: The opening paragaraph

Shaping Ends: Reflections on Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man has been widely regarded as a celebration of the triumph of the West.footnote¹ Its message, on the accepted view, is that, with victory in the Cold War and the death of Communism, the Western way of life has emerged as the culmination of humanity’s historical evolution. As the end state towards which that evolution has been tending it represents a pattern of universal validity, a light to itself and to all non-Western societies still struggling in history. It will be argued here that this interpretation is wholly misconceived and, indeed, that it must be stood on its head to obtain the true meaning of the book. The distinctive core of what the West stands for, in Fukuyama’s view, is liberal democracy. What his book tells us is that this is itself a transitory historical form, the process of whose dissolution is already well advanced. It is a verdict inescapably grounded in the logic of the argument, in the fundamental tenets of the philosophy of history Fukuyama espouses. Thus, in the classic style of that subject, he arrives on the scene too late, when a way of life has grown old beyond hope of rejuvenation. There is a sharp irony in the fact that philosophy’s grey on grey should be taken in this case as an expression of maturity and vigour. Something is owed here to the complex perversity of the times, but something also, it must be admitted, to the strangely half-hearted, double-minded and inadequately self-conscious way in which Fukuyama has approached his task. All this constitutes, however, a reason not for abandoning the agenda he has set but for taking it onwards towards completion.

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Editor: I will selectively quote from this essay, that has not been matched by anyone I have encountered over the years!

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For Fukuyama to appropriate this body of thought he has to make a simple, strategic assumption. It is that ‘we can understand’ Kojève’s universal and homogeneous state as liberal democracy.footnote¹⁴ The crux of the matter is then easy to state: ‘Kojève’s claim that we are at the end of history . . . stands or falls on the strength of the assertion that the recognition provided by the contemporary liberal democratic state adequately satisfies the human desire for recognition.’footnote¹⁵ The incisiveness of this formulation is, unfortunately, not matched by Fukuyama’s response. Indeed, he never manages thereafter to hold the question steadily in his sights, still less to provide an unequivocal and authoritative answer. This failure is the chief source of the impression of systematic ambiguity left by his book. For the issue at stake, the satisfactoriness of liberal democratic recognition, is the best clue to the array of conflicting appearances it presents. Moreover, to survey the variety of views Fukuyama seems to endorse on it is not simply to encounter a medley of contending strains, all with much the same claim to be the true voice of their author. Instead we find on one side a line of thought that seems lifeless, blinkered, without much sense of personal involvement. On the other there is a strong thread of argument, drawn out with energy, individuality and full awareness. It confronts and seems able to rebut in its own terms the claims of the first side without meeting any answering denial or even engagement. Hence, the theme of recognition can shed light on the question raised earlier of authenticity, of which are the deep and which the shallow features of Fukuyama’s position.

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The Influence of Leo Strauss

There is, to begin with, a line of thought comprising the indications that Fukuyama accepts the essentials of Kojève’s case. That he is in some measure disposed to do so is hardly surprising since they provide the theoretical basis of his official doctrine in its first version. Thus, for much of the time he seems content to take over the substance of Kojève, giving it a liberal democratic gloss. In this frame of mind the liberal democratic state is conceived of as providing a fully satisfying recognition on Kojèvian lines. That is to say, it recognizes all human beings universally ‘by granting and protecting their rights’.footnote¹⁶ Recognition becomes reciprocal ‘when the state and the people recognize each other, that is, when the state grants its citizens rights and when citizens agree to abide by the state’s laws’.footnote¹⁷ At times Fukuyama even outdoes Kojève in propounding the merits of this arrangement, as in the claim, surely absurd on any literal reading, that ‘The liberal democratic state values us at our own sense of self-worth.’footnote¹⁸ We seem here to be firmly grounded in the brave new, and historically final, world of liberal democracy. Yet a different and deeper note soon intrudes, growing more insistent as the discussion proceeds. To appreciate it fully one has to take account of another element in the intellectual background of Fukuyama’s work. This is the presence there of Kojève’s major critic and interlocutor, Leo Strauss. Their debate was sustained for over thirty years, chiefly by means of a correspondence which has now reached the public realm in the second edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny. footnote¹⁹ The influence of Strauss on Fukuyama is much less prominently advertised than is that of Kojève, surfacing only in copious footnotes. Yet it is no less significant.footnote²⁰ Indeed, Fukuyama’s book may be read as the record of a struggle in which the latter has the better of things in the end. To read it in terms of this unacknowledged drama is to gain an otherwise unobtainable perspective on its many evasions and equivocations.

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The question of what is ‘more Marxist’ about such a vision may be set aside here, except to note the obvious distancing function of that description. What is important is that we appear to be at a strategic turning point in the argument. For Kojève’s abstract statism is surely being decisively rejected. The comments on it have every appearance of constituting a considered verdict, reached through a prolonged engagement, not to say infatuation, with its object. It crowns a spirited and committed movement of thought and the position being criticized is never rehabilitated thereafter. This is as close as we shall get to noting an authentic, principled shift in Fukuyama’s thinking. It provides both an obituary for his Kojèvianism and a clear indication of an alternative way forward. If the thesis that history ends in liberal democracy is to be sustained it is plainly not to the liberal democratic state that we should look for a consummating satisfaction. Instead we have to turn to the sphere of community life with its host of mediating institutions, to what is today generally referred to as ‘civil society’.

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Fukuyama’s thinking about these matters has another important dimension to consider. It consists in his awareness of a viable, indeed flourishing, alternative, even at the supposed end of history, to liberal democracy. Earlier he had noted that Asian societies offer a sense of community conspicuously absent from the contemporary United States.footnote⁴⁰ Their ‘community-orientedness’, it now appears, is grounded not in contracts between self-interested parties but in religion or some near-substitute such as Confucianism.footnote⁴¹ The recognition they provide is a kind of ‘group recognition’ that is vanishing from the West. What the individual works for is the recognition that the group accords him and the recognition of the group by other groups.footnote⁴² He derives his status ‘primarily not on the basis of his individual ability or worth, but insofar as he is a member of one of a series of interlocking groups’.footnote⁴³ The resulting emphasis on group harmony has, Fukuyama acknowledges, implications for political life. Even Japanese democracy looks, he observes, somewhat authoritarian by American or European standards, while elsewhere in Asia authoritarianism of a more overt variety is widespread.footnote⁴⁴ Here we witness the raising of a spectre that comes increasingly to haunt the pages of Fukuyama’s book. The manner in which his focus gradually shifts from West to East in pursuit of it is itself a major aspect, as well as a symbol, of the complex dislocations that characterize the work.

The haunting power of this vision can be fully appreciated only if one notes another factor in the situation. It takes one back to the first of Fukuyama’s historical mechanisms, ‘the logic of advanced industrialization determined by modern natural science’. It is a logic which, according to a constant theme in his work, ‘creates a strong predisposition in favour of capitalism and market economics’.footnote⁴⁵ He is equally constant in holding that it has no such tendency to favour liberal democracy. Indeed, democracy is, he assures us, ‘almost never chosen for economic reasons’.footnote⁴⁶ More emphatically still, it has ‘no economic rationale’ and ‘if anything, democratic politics is a drag on economic efficiency’.footnote⁴⁷ The reasons for this are in part rather familiar ones which have been articulated by Lee Kuan Yew and, in a more sophisticated form, by Joseph Schumpeter. The basic idea is that democracy interferes with economic rationality in decision making. It does so through its tendency to indulge in policies that sacrifice growth and low inflation to requirements of redistribution and current consumption.footnote⁴⁸ In addition Fukuyama employs a more interesting and distinctive line of reasoning. It holds that ‘the individual self-interest at the heart of Western liberal economic theory may be an inferior source of motivation to certain forms of group interest’. Hence it is that ‘the highly atomistic economic liberalism of the United States or Britain’ becomes ‘economically counter-productive’ at a certain point. It does so when it begins to erode the work ethic on which capitalist prosperity ultimately depends.footnote⁴⁹ Thus, the logic of the industrialization process would seem to point neither to liberal democracy nor to socialism but to what Fukuyama calls ‘the truly winning combination’ of liberal economics and authoritarian politics; that is to a ‘market-oriented authoritarianism’.footnote⁵⁰ This projection of theory is, in his view, fully in line with the empirical evidence, for instance, the historical record of authoritarian modernizers as against their democratic counterparts.footnote⁵¹ It is borne out most strikingly by the contrast between the lack of ‘economic functionality’ shown by democracy in America in recent years and the economic success, indeed economic miracle, achieved by neo-Confucian, authoritarian capitalism in South-East Asia.footnote⁵²

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It is time to draw some threads of this discussion together. The nub of the matter, it is now clear, is that both of Fukuyama’s historical regulators lead decisively away from liberal democracy. That system is economically dysfunctional and cannot provide satisfying recognition either. In each case the root cause of failure is the same, the radical individualism that corrodes the ties of community on which, ultimately, meaningful recognition and economic success alike depend. A less triumphal message would be hard to conceive. It tells us that the contemporary Western way of life is doomed, just as communism was and for essentially the same reason, an inability to resolve the fundamental contradictions of desire which have driven human history up to now. To point this out is in a sense to reach the outer limits of a programme of showing what may with confidence be inferred on the basis of Fukuyama’s argument. It is, however, a verdict of a somewhat negative kind. Given that we in the contemporary West are not experiencing the end of history, it is natural to wonder whether anything more positive might be said about the significance of the stretch of historical time through which we are passing. The complex theoretical apparatus Fukuyama has assembled might after all be expected to have some kind of intelligible perspective to offer on the current wanderings of history’s wagon train. To raise this issue is to be brought up at once against the looming presence of the alternative form of capitalism he calls ‘market-oriented authoritarianism’. The status of, and prospects for, this system need a closer look.

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https://newleftreview.org/issues/i202/articles/joseph-mccarney-shaping-ends-reflections-on-fukuyama

Philosopical Apprentice.

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Editor: Reader if you are looking for an example of ‘The Cult Of Fukuyama’ let me offer this, via Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Rutgers University-Newark

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Within this impressive oeuvre, The End of History remains unparalleled as Fukuyama’s most theoretically ambitious work and the book that made him famous. Yet since the 1990s, The End of History has arguably acquired that status of a work whose title is repeatedly invoked, by scholars and pundits alike, but the actual content seldom seriously considered: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins readily come to mind as longstanding examples of that curious fate. Except that unlike these two other classics and highly esteemed works, Fukuyama’s book, like the essay that preceded it, has been mostly vilified by critics across the political spectrum. Leftists intemperately or condescendingly dismiss it, and fellow travelers within the bandwidth of right-wing liberalism harshly indulge in analogous dismissals, or similarly superficial invocations often caricaturizing its argument. Virtually everywhere across the scholarly political spectrum, the actual theoretical solvency and historical cogency of the work, including its actual argument, were skidded over, vulgarized, or simplified.4 Academic political theorists are not exception: within its precincts Fukuyama’s argument has been mentioned but largely unexamined. But for anyone who cares to dispassionately read the book, this is a work that belongs to a well-known genre: political theorizing qua philosophy of history. More specifically: it is best situated within a subcategory within it: philosophies of historical closure that narrate the present in terms of a historical terminus as part of a larger universal history. But not only that. The End of History constituted a genuinely original intervention in this field, one that repays serious consideration for its theoretical originality. Limitations of space preclude any comprehensive treatment of every aspect of Fukuyama’s construction of universal history. Instead, below are some observations about the basic conceptual, theoretical, and political architecture of his argument, and a brief consideration of its central claims about liberal democracy, the central theme in his narrative of universal history

August 2022

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file:///C:/Users/steph/Downloads/Vazquez-Arroyo-FukuyamasUH-Polity.pdf

Philosopical Apprentice

2025.06.14

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 27, 2025

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https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/intuition-in-kant-the-boundlessness-of-sense/

Michael Ignatieff of Jun 26, 2025. Philosophical Apprentice.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 27, 2025

Who can forget Mr. Ignatieff’s fawning interview with Isaiah Berlin? It’s hard to understand Berlin, but Ignatieff contiues as if every word was…

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3M-vX_CwxP4?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Editor: What might the reader make of this essay published by CounterPunch?

June 28, 2013

The Dishonesties of Isaiah Berlin

Tariq Ali

David Caute, author of Isaac and Isaiah: the Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, has long been a historian of ideas and a novelist. I always preferred the latter persona, in particular Comrade Jacob, a generally sympathetic account of Winstanley and the Diggers during the English Revolution (his history tutor at Oxford was Christopher Hill). Caute was alienated by fanaticism of any sort. Passions paralyzed reason. The need for certainties often meant the abandonment of truth. The logic of all this is that opinions are preferable to convictions. But opinions, even if slyly expressed, are never built on air. Some of these characteristics are on display again in his new, fascinating account of a spat between two intellectuals—conservative and marxist– in the early Sixties. The debate is an old one. A French friend who died a few years ago used to tell me that a great deal revolved on one’s attitude to ‘the masses’: what his great-grandfather called the ‘rabble’, his grandfather referred to as ‘Communards’ and his children were being taught was ‘terrorism’.

Caute has expanded a cold war footnote has been expanded into an entire volume and has performed a valuable service for all students of the period. The work is essentially a portrait of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin with whom the author shared a perch at All Souls College, Oxford and where they occasionally engaged in lofty conversations. One of the less elevated talks concerned Isaac Deutscher. It troubled Caute at the time.

The liberal political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin and the Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher were both asylum seekers, given refuge and residence in Britain during the early decades of the last century. That was about all they had in common. Their intellectual trajectories pointed in opposite directions. Berlin was escaping the Russian Revolution. Deutscher was in flight from the armies of the Third Reich, poised to take Poland. Both of them were Jews, the first a Zionist, who annoyed Chaim Weizmann by refusing all his requests to shift to Tel Aviv as an adviser, the second famously defined himself as a ‘non-Jewish Jew’, and despite arguing with Ben Gurion, remained sympathetic to Israel till the 1967 war. His next-of-kin had perished in the camps. His surviving relations lived in Israel. He died later that year at 60. His last interview in the New Left Review took the form of a prescient warning to Israel, comparing its intransigence to that of old Prussia:

“To justify or condone Israel’s wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest…The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase ‘Man kann sich totseigen!’ ‘You can triumph yourself to death’.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin became an influential figure in British and American public life. To this day he is worshipped by Silvers et al at the NYRB. His packed early morning lectures on Marx that one attended at Oxford were bracing. He was a witty raconteur, intelligent and not averse to replying to hostile questions. His speaking style was confected, a parody of an upper class English voice replete with stutter and a disjointed laugh. Even his loyal biographer, Michael Ignatieff, was compelled to remark on his over-the-top Anglophilia. He was a liberal fanatic, a staunch empire loyalist, gliding effortlessly from Britain to the United States when the time came. He was at his happiest when close to power, an instinctive courtier, unless insulted or ignored. During the 1970’s he was invited to Iran, then under the iron heel of the Shah, when dissidents were being hung naked or toasted on racks by the hated secret police. He accepted. His fee was never disclosed, but the subject of his talk, ‘On the Rise of Cultural Pluralism’ irritated the Empress Farah Dibah, no doubt after she realized that Vico and Herder were not brand names of the latest nail polish from Paris. He was barely halfway through his talk when the Empress signalled a courtier to bring her torture to an end. Berlin later confided to a friend that it was as ‘if stung by several wasps.’ Why did he go in the first place?

Berlin has been much written about. Michael Ignatieff’s 1998 biography was itself the subject of a savage assault by Christopher Hitchens in the London Review of Books, probably the finest essay he ever wrote, underlining all that Ignatieff had left out. This included justifications of the 1965 massacre of over a million Communists and other leftists in Indonesia as well as the horrors of the Vietnam war, a conflict planned and carried through by the liberal technocrats of the Democratic Party who Berlin adored. Isaac Deutscher has yet to find a biographer. Deeply hostile to American imperialism, he was never uncritical of the Soviet Union and, as a consequence, was often slandered in the Stalinist press. He had a visceral dislike of ex-Marxists who supposedly saw the light and became cold war pawns, subsidized by the CIA via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Encounter was a particular bête-noire. Forced to live off free-lance earnings writing for The Economist and The Observer, Deutscher sometimes cut corners to meet a deadline, but the prose was always meticulous. His Trotsky trilogy is beautifully written, leading to comparisons with Joseph Conrad.

The everyday journalism detracted from his research. His disabled young boy needed specialist care and Deutscher had to write continuously to earn the money. That is one reason why he wanted the stability of a university post. He was offered one by the University of Sussex, but as I wrote at the time in The Black Dwarf, Berlin blackballed him. And as Caute reveals, consistently denied the accusation. His detailed excavation of the archives leaves no doubt whatsoever that Berlin lied. He was guilty as charged. When the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex consulted him on Deutscher, he let the guillotine drop without any hesitation: ‘The candidate of whom you speak is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable.’ But he wanted to be helpful: he would not object to Eric Hobsbawm or C.Wright Mills. End of story. But why? It was not just the politics. Caute suggests, plausibly, that the reason for the bile was personal. Despite the mask and self-denigration, Berlin was insecure and vain. His first book, Historical Inevitabilty, was critically reviewed by Deutscher in the Observer. The insult would never be forgiven.

Caute’s account of Berlin’s earlier vendetta against Hannah Arendt is a real eye-opener. She and Albert Einstein had in 1948, together with other prominent Jewish intellectuals, criticized Israel for its encouragement of ‘fascist’ style nationalists who had carried out massacres in Deir Yassin and elsewhere. Berlin was a loyal Zionist from afar, Arendt was anything. But that could not be the only reason. She was never impressed by his intellect and may well have made this clear at some private gathering. Consulted by Faber and Faber as to whether they should publish The Human Condition, her book on political theory, Berlin responded: ‘I could recommend no publisher to buy the UK rights of this book. There are two objections to it: it will not sell and it is no good.’ The book was never published in the UK. Later when Eichmann in Jerusalem, created a storm in US literary circles, Berlin stoked his close friend John Sparrow (the Warden of All Souls) to rubbish it in the TLS (all reviews were at that time anonymous). Arendt and Mary McCarthy did some detective work, and discovered the identity of the reviewer. McCarthy wrote later that ‘Hannah was convinced that several passages could not be the work of a gentile.’

In Caute’s words, Berlin regarded Deutscher as a ‘specious, dishonest, arrogant charlatan and an enemy of Israel.’ He should have come clean, but ‘such was his high standing that the effect of the frankness might have been no less fatal.’ Readers of the book will judge for themselves which of them was the specious, dishonest, arrogant charlatan.

Tariq Ali is the author of The Obama Syndrome (Verso).

How inconvient is History in its ability to place ‘The Great Man’ in an ulflatering light!

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Editor: where might the reader place the idea of R2P (Responsibility To Protect) as the ‘Liberal’ version of Neo-Consevatism?

The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, and the Duty of the International Community to Reinforce International Humanitarian Law and its Protective Value for Civilian Populations

from Part V – The Interaction Between R2p And Humanitarian Law Obligations To Protect Civilian Populations

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2018

Summary

INTRODUCTION: INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW AND R2P AS NECESSARY ALLIES

The responsibility to protect doctrine (R2P) was once described by Michael Ignatieff, one of its architects, as follows: ‘A tyrant who butchers his people forfeits his right to rule, or suspends his right to rule. If he won’t protect his people then someone else should’. In an open letter where he was arguing in favour of a military option to address the situation in Libya in 2011, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, stated that ‘state sovereignty is not A licence to kill. No state can abdicate the responsibility to protect its people from crimes against humanity, let alone justify perpetrating such crimes’. More recently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov evoked R2P language, as a justification for the military intervention in Crimea, stating that ‘we are talking here about protection of our citizens and compatriots, about protection of the most fundamental of the human rights’.

When invoked to support a military intervention in a third state, regardless of what the underlying intention is, it is apparent that R2P challenges the current international legal order, at least in its traditional form. Indeed, the legal order set forth in the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century rests on three main pillars: the state as the (main) subject of law, state sovereignty, and reciprocity. State sovereignty is currently enshrined in the first paragraph of Article 2 of the United Nations Charter; its corollary principle of non-intervention in states’ domestic affairs is also enshrined in the same Article, under paragraph. In the traditional dynamics of the international legal order, a conditional relationship between the two concepts was established: sovereignty can only be enjoyed by a state if it respects every other state’s sovereignty.

Many aspects of public international law and international relations pose challenges to state sovereignty. When peoples assert their right to selfdetermination, or when heads of states are held personally accountable for violations of the law and customs of war, the sovereignty of the state in question is somehow compromised. That being said, R2P, with its new approach to intervention on human protection grounds, changes the fundamentals of the rapport between sovereignty and non-intervention.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/beyond-responsibility-to-protect/responsibility-to-protect-doctrine-and-the-duty-of-the-international-community-to-reinforce-international-humanitarian-law-and-its-protective-value-for-civilian-populations/D40C9D3BC571036C3B4D771F60F9B33F

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Mr. Michael Ignatieff’s 943 word essay titled:

The Pathos of Power : What B2’s Cannot Achieve

Editor: Mr. Ignatieff still seems to be moored in a past, that simply echoes his master : Isaiah Berlin, and the R2P Imperative he established, that is the ‘Liberal’ equivelent of Neo-Conservatism. Not to forget his ally Samantha Power, now distant from the levers of power! This reader seems to detect, in Ignatieff’s essay, an echo of Christain Eschatology?

Philosophical Apprentice.

Old Socialist’s brief comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 26, 2025

As pelude to Sullivan’s 4313 word diatribe, this reader recalls his entusiasm for The War On Terror that faded, and his entusism for the ‘Bell Curve’ of Charles Murray. Even the New York Magazine ended Sullivan’s employment.

Reader just scan the pages of his commentary, as it metaticises as you attempt to grasp its chock-a-block arguments, or what it might mean, if taken apart to inspect its inner workings?

These ending paragyaphs of Sullivans’ featuring political charlatan Francis Fukuyama, as the one clear voice of sanity, resoliteness, commitment to freedom, ring hollow. Fukuyama is now a commited ‘Liberal’, in the Age Of Trump!

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History strongly suggests that periods of toleration of gay men and lesbians can swiftly end if the public senses an overreach. That may be where we now are. No society has ever been as free for gay men, lesbians and transgender people as the modern West today. There is no such thing as the Human Rights Campaign’s “state of emergency,” and it was absurd to say so. But for some activists, there has to be. As Francis Fukuyama put it in “The End of History and the Last Man,” “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.”

Returning to a civil rights model and abandoning the quixotic attempt to end the sex binary do not mean, as some might have it, throwing trans people under the bus. Trans people are already on the bus; they are protected from employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their existing rights should be defended and expanded to public accommodations — especially the adult right to have access to gender medicine through Medicaid, which is now being threatened. Americans should back us on that. But fighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces, and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.

This does not mean the L.G.B.T.Q.+ project should be shut down entirely. We need to defend our wins; we need to protect the interests of gays, lesbians and trans people. We need to greatly expand help and care for children with gender dysphoria, prevent bullying and increase mental health resources. Protecting them from often irreversible sex changes should not mean abandoning them. It should mean renewed concern, support and, above all, solid, evidence-based research on how best we can help.

But in America, on, this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember a critical thing: We won. We won because we defended free speech, reached out to right and left and center, left others and children alone — and trusted liberal democracy. That trust was rewarded with one of the swiftest successes in civil rights history. Let’s not throw it away.

Editor: This final paragraphs featuring this ‘and trusted liberal democracy’ ! Neo-Consevatives only trust themselves. Leo Strauss re-wrote the History of Philosphy for a reason, Andrew Sullivan and Francis Fukuyama are his benificearies!

Old Socialist.

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June 27, 2025

In Sullivan’s diatribe he quotes :

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In the Netherlands, the famous Dutch protocol for gender-affirming care was pioneered in the 1990s with far stricter safeguards in place than exist in the United States today

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One concern is specific for boys who transition to girls in early puberty. “If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty’s blocked, it’s very difficult to achieve that afterwards,” a pioneering trans surgeon, Dr. Marci Bowers, has said. Research on this is minimal, and so caution is necessary in jumping to conclusions.

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There, of a cohort of 70 adolescents referred to an Amsterdam clinic from 2000 to 2008, 62 were same-sex attracted. And it’s easy to see that one way to “cure” yourself of attraction to the same sex is to become the opposite one. At Britain’s now-shuttered Tavistock clinic, according to the investigative journalist Hannah Barnes, staff members had a dark joke that at the rate they were going, there would be “no gay people left.”

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The very fact that ‘In the Netherlands, the famous Dutch protocol for gender-affirming care’, Dr. Marci Bowers, At Britain’s now-shuttered Tavistock clinic, quoted might lead the reader to treat Mr. Sullivan’s hysterical diatribe as just what it is!

Old Socialist.

Philospical Apprentice.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 26, 2025

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n08/katrina-forrester/tocqueville-anticipated-me

Editor: The opening paragraph of this essay via George Soros, offers the reader insight into both political/philosopical actors!

In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, as well as countless other organisations that promote human rights. He has promised to give $100 million to Human Rights Watch over the next ten years. The decision of the European Court, however, brings Soros to book for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, Popper wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to unify the humanitarian left while celebrating the openness of the free market, with all its imbalances. Did he succeed?

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Editor: The final paragraphs of this essay, while recognising the value of this whole essay, and its explorations of Popper, and his evolving philosopical imperatives and his self-infatuation, a clear and present danger to all who put pen to paper!

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One of the most interesting exchanges from this period is a series of letters between Popper and the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. (It’s clear that Popper, too, thought they were interesting, since he sent Hayek a copy of his responses to Carnap’s questions.) In 1946, after reading an attack by Popper on Marx and historicism, Carnap wrote to ask ‘whether or to what extent you still regard yourself as a socialist’. Popper replied that he rejected the term ‘socialism’, but claimed that he shared much with the socialists: a belief in the ‘greater equalisation of incomes’, in ‘experimentation in the political and economical sphere’, and even in the partial ‘socialisation of means of production’. The public ownership of industries and services could work well, he suggested, and it was certainly important that the state have the power to break up monopolies. But he attached two provisos, which, he thought, brought out the differences between the socialist position and his own. He argued that socialisation would be possible only if ‘the considerable and serious dangers raised by such experiments are frankly faced, and means are adopted to meet these dangers’, and if ‘the mystical and naive belief is given up that socialisation is a kind of cure-all’. Freedom could not be ‘saved’ without ‘improving distributive justice, i.e. without increasing economic equality’. More important, it could be achieved only if its defenders were willing to use trial and error, to accept that socialisation sometimes would promote freedom, and sometimes would not. Popper believed that income disparities might be even greater in a socialised, centralised economy. It was also more likely, he believed, that in such an economy powerful people would have too much control over individuals’ thoughts and actions. As Carnap pointed out in response, Popper differed from socialists in other ways, too – notably in his lack of concern for issues of economic power and exploitation, and in his emphasis on distribution rather than production.

When did Popper leave all this behind? In a 1956 letter to the American journalist Henry Hazlitt, a neoliberal and one of the founding members of the Mont Pélerin Society, Popper retracted the ideas he’d outlined in The Open Society that now seemed to him too statist and too Keynesian, in particular the concern with full employment. He still thought it important to reduce poverty and support public education, but no longer had the goal of increasing equality. From this point on, he starts to look more like a Cold Warrior. His attacks on totalitarianism in general became attacks on communism in particular, and what he perceived as the choice between the open and the closed society became ever starker. Where once he had tried to unify the individualist left, he now became a critic of it. By the early 1970s he had declared himself in ‘diametrical opposition’ not only to Marxists, but also to the New Left. Radical students saw him as a representative of the conservative establishment; he saw them as representing the decline of Western civilisation. He objected to what he called the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ – namely, the idea that the capitalist system is evil or morally base. Yes, the open society was in ‘urgent need of reform’, but it was still the case that people had never had it so good. During the postwar decades, he withdrew from public life, spent less time at the LSE and became more and more intellectually isolated. Though he never described it in quite these terms, he came to see the biggest problem in the capitalist West as that of moral decline. Indeed, it sometimes seems that, for Popper, all that was morally objectionable in society could be blamed on individual failures of moral and intellectual responsibility. When he listed what was wrong with the world, alcohol, drugs and crime were high on the list. These were not just symptoms, he believed, but were themselves the problems. In democracies, it was not the structures of society that were at fault, but the citizens: when things go wrong, they have only themselves to blame. By 1981, Popper was so angry at outright opponents of capitalism that he claimed he didn’t care about social inequality any more. What did it matter if the rich got richer?

Despite Popper’s continual assertions that he remained a critic of modern politics, the West appeared to get off scot-free. All he cared about was whether or not a government could be removed without bloodshed. If it could, it was a democracy. Many political theorists of Popper’s generation had been sceptical about idealistic visions according to which democracy expresses the ‘general will’. They argued that such visions obscured the reality that democracies are competitive systems in which voters elect leaders – so-called ‘elite democracies’. Popper certainly shared this view. But whereas his fellow Austrian Joseph Schumpeter had argued that real-life competitive democracies tended to be less competitive – and less open – than free markets, Popper didn’t spill much ink on the flaws in his model of the open society. He may have wanted it to be open to critical discussion, but he was surprisingly uninterested in the question of how to ensure that such discussion would be open to everyone and conducted on equal terms. Though he advocated a continual ‘fight against bureaucracy’, he didn’t see the need for an equivalent fight against private corporate interests.

While it isn’t so surprising that Popper gave up on equality (it was always an instrumental good for him, a necessary step on the path to liberty), it is striking that he gave up on – or at least toyed with giving up on – aspects of individual freedom. In his later writings, population growth is a constant concern. In 1972, after the publication of The Limits to Growth thesis, with its Malthusian predictions of economic and social collapse, he wrote that in order to preserve life on earth, we must find ways to address the problem, and to do so without coercion. How? Education, he argued, was the only way out, the only way to slow population growth without constraining freedom. How to avoid giving up on freedom in the face of this danger is a recurrent theme in After ‘The Open Society’. He is less obviously troubled by threats to freedom of speech. In 1989, he declined an invitation to sign the Society of Authors’ letter declaring support for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was declared. By this time he seems to have become open to arguments for censorship. The last essay in this volume argued that the power of television must be controlled and violent images restricted. Only then could a democratic society remain ‘civilised’. Popper’s suggestion here was that the primary function of ‘civilisation’ was to reduce violence – censorship was the cost of keeping a society open.

This picture of Popper in old age is not a flattering one, but a picture of the younger Popper might not be very flattering either. Though he listed modesty and a readiness for critical debate as the highest intellectual virtues, he was famously dogmatic – and the dogmatism shines through in these writings. For a man who declared (in a technical context, it’s true) that there is ‘no such thing as justification’, he seems to have spent a lot of time justifying himself. Many of the early essays are directed at the (many) critics of The Open Society who saw it as polemical, emotional, even hysterical. His defence – that although it aimed at peace, it was also his ‘war effort’ – was reasonable, but his tone was sometimes less so. He wrote letters to friends that included third-person defences of his work so they could pass them off as their own. And he could appear remarkably self-important: in a lecture on Tocqueville, he noted how impressive it was that in some of his views on the paradoxes of freedom and equality, ‘Tocqueville anticipated me.’

These quirky and revealing writings show that Popper was not as consistent as he would have liked to think. But the editors sometimes seem too close to him to notice. Jeremy Shearmur was Popper’s assistant for many years, and gives the impression that he wants the reader to feel as he did on first reading some of these essays – when one unpublished fragment tails off, he tells us that ‘alas no more material follows.’ Popper’s own inconsistencies – particularly his celebration of individual freedom and unwillingness to face up to its consequences – are reflected in the editors’ decisions. And terminology that reminds us of Popper’s historical context has been removed, thanks to a somewhat squeamish political correctness: as the editors make clear in the introduction, they have ‘changed the use of Mohammedans for the followers of Islam, as it is now recognised as offensive’. But the updating – or whitewashing, take your pick – of Popper’s terminology doesn’t extend to eliminating the term ‘Negro’, which he apparently continued to use as late as 1988. By then, he was out of touch. The idea of The Open Society may have had a long and illustrious afterlife, but as the title of this volume inadvertently suggests, the political writings that followed are perhaps best understood as a long and not so illustrious footnote to the ‘war effort’ of Popper’s middle years.

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Editor: Also read the reply of Jeremy Shearmur.

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 11 · 7 June 2012

Katrina Forrester reads Popper as if he was a proponent of market liberalism, or ‘neoliberalism’ (LRB, 26 April). But this isn’t the case. Popper certainly valued liberty and markets; but within the broad commitments of the ‘open society’ he was willing to accept considerably more government involvement than neoliberals – or any conservative, for that matter – would. Any account of Popper’s views is complicated by the fact that he found admirers on the left as well as on the right. But today there is no reason to think that support for liberty and (well-regulated) markets alone entails any particular position on the liberal spectrum. Part of the interest of After ‘The Open Society’, the collection of Popper’s writings that Forrester reviews, which I co-edited, is that it shows the extent to which Popper never fully joined with Hayek and other neoliberals. For example, late in his career he proposed that the state take a 51 per cent share in all public companies (but not an active role in management). His attention to the problem of overpopulation and his (curmudgeonly) worry about the effects of mass market television, also tell against a neoliberal interpretation of his views, especially when a more consistent social democratic interpretation is available. Popper was explicitly critical of ‘free market ideology’. But the main contribution of his political philosophy was towards the defence of the widely shared liberal commitments of the ‘open society’, within which more specific policy prescriptions may be worked out through trial and error.

Jeremy Shearmur
Australian National University

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Editor: See Chapter 9 Plato, Socrates, Classical Athens , and the West in Haim Hacohen’s Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945 for insights into Popper’s view of Plato!

Cambridge University Press

Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 23, 2000

Philospical Apprentice.

Political Observer.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 25, 2025

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June 26, 2025:

In the face of the continuing Gaza Genocide, The Toxic Myth of Jewish Victimhood repeated ad nauseam, now rules as if a truism beyond doubt, or even evidence! Read @NYT Zionist Trio: Friedman, Brooks, Stephens!

Literary Observer re-aquaints himself with Ganesh as *flâneur?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 25, 2025

Headline: How Los Angeles made the modern world

Sub-headline: The troubled city has done more than most to shape how people now live

https://www.ft.com/content/7f416e2b-a89b-4083-b3c2-77461d3986c4

It’s been sometime since I’ve read Mr Ganesh:

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*flâneur

someone who walks around not doing anything in particular but watching people and society:

She wanders around with her camera, a flâneur with a keen eye.

Lisbon is a city built for the ultra-relaxed, aimless flaneur.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/flaneur

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StephenKMackSD’s Newsletter

janan.ganesh@ft.com Denounces the American Hegemon & The Atlanticist Tories!

Political Observer comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

May 29, 2024

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The Reader confronts the latest of Mr. Ganesh’s essays, with his ability to view the 14 years of Tory rule, that has been shortsighted, across a range of issues. To express it in the blandest terms: which just might be the raison d’etre of this Ganesh intervention? The trivialization serves as the backdrop, for an apologetic that simply muddies the waters, of what an actual critical evaluation of those 14 years might be argued!

Boris Johnson, 2017: “We hear that we’re first in line to do a great trade deal with the US.” Liz Truss, 2019: “My main priority now will be agreeing a free trade deal with the US.” Dominic Raab, a cabinet eminence at around the same time: “President Trump has made clear again that he wants an ambitious trade agreement with the UK.”

Then Rishi Sunak on the same subject last summer. “For a while now, that has not been a priority for either the US or UK.” Oh.

This government’s single greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US.

Mr. Ganesh’s political myopia eventuates, realizes itself , into an expression of a self-serving political refraction, that might capture the The Reader’s attention, in the moment. But on reflection is judged as disingenuous? And or leads The Reader to treat this as propaganda?

Editor: Brexit in the next paragraph becomes the ‘Paradise Lost’ in this narrative. A a huge bet on the economic openness of America is then argued as Derrida might have argued it, as an aporia ?

Brexit was, from the start, a huge bet on the economic openness of America. A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with America, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries.

Editor: I’ll select some quotes from the remainder of the essay.

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In essence, the nation staked its future on trade at the exact historical moment that it fell out of favour as an idea. It is the geostrategic equivalent of investing one’s life savings in a DVD manufacturer circa 2009.

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Anyone with a passing knowledge of Washington could have warned them not to confuse the place for a free-market bastion.

In 1992, the trade sceptic Ross Perot won 19 per cent of the national vote as an independent presidential candidate.

Editor: Potted American History:

Look at the dates here. This was the high summer of “neoliberalism”. Imagine how much stronger the protectionist impulse was in normal times. Or rather than imagine, check the record. It shows the tariff walls of the 1800s. It shows the statism of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t an interwar aberration.

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But protectionist sentiment is a force in American life to an extent that it can’t be in a mid-sized, resource-poor archipelago. It is then transformed into policy via sectoral lobby groups of a scale and sophistication that must be seen up close to be believed.

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If I lived in a continental-scale market with superabundant resources, I’d need a lot of persuading from David Ricardo and The Economist that I am still better off trading. But that is the point. The Tories think the crucial fact about America is that it is made up of Britain’s “cousins”. (It isn’t, unless we are consulting the census of 1810.)

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After that, the next most important fact is its status. America is defending a position as the world’s number one power.

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Editor: Mr. Ganesh must realize that the Hegemon does as it pleases. The very history of Britain is defined by that practice, that claim!

One needn’t admire this about the US. One can suspect it of hysteria, in fact. But the job of a British government is to fathom these things before betting the nation’s entire future on a hunch that America will forever uphold world trade.

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Editor: the final paragraphs of this churlish meandering philippic come to an end!

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This mistake came from “Atlanticist” Tories, remember — the ones who read Andrew Roberts and track the exact co-ordinates of the Churchill bust in the White House. (Barack Obama was hated for moving it.) Well, after giving it all that, these people failed on their own terms. They failed to understand US politics. Britain will foot the bill of their error for decades.

“Trade”: even the moral connotation of the word is distinct in each nation. It has had a high-minded ring to it in Britain ever since the abolition of the Corn Laws helped to feed the working poor. In America, where the cotton-exporting Confederates were free-traders, history isn’t quite so clear-cut. It is almost as if these are different countries.

https://www.ft.com/content/8f229e15-9842-46ce-a828-19647a48f6d6

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Political Observer

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Editor:

Paragraph 1.

Editor: Mr. Ganesh in this latest feuilleton is heavely embroidered with Players in the first unweildy paragraph:

Mr. Ganesh in this latest feuilleton that is heavely embroidered with The Players in the first unweildy paragraph:-a bilingual city with a Spanish name- English as the ruling language on Earth-the British empire-French when the Versailles treaty was drafted in Woodrow Wilson’s native tongue, not just Georges Clemenceau’s-Thank Hollywood for ending the contest. Thank Disney for not having to master le subjonctif.

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Editor: Ganesh resorts to free imaginative variation as his argumentative toll of ghoice !

Paragraph 2.

My favourite American city is in trouble- Donald Trump-the National Guard there this month-No one ever confused LA’s public spaces with those of Zurich- High-profile deserters include Joe Rogan, now of Texas. Brian Wilson made the ultimate departure last week: his death all the more poignant because he fixed LA in the world’s mind as the cloudless Shangri-La it isn’t.

Paragraph 3.

Editor : Ganesh resortes to the jejune:

The city can turn things around. San Francisco to the north is getting better under a mayor who has brought such whimsical innovations as enforcing the criminal law.

Paragraph 4.

Editor: The unhappy marriage of Porn and Hollywood!

Count the ways. The “other” film sector, porn, whose base of operations is the San Fernando Valley — because which of us wouldn’t look better in that light? — has had even more effect on this century than Hollywood.

Paragraph 5.

Editor: Ganesh explores Architecture and West Hollywood: He is no Ada Louise Huxtable or Aline Bernstein Saarinen!

Paragraph 6.

Editor: Ganesh explores the Politics of LA with wide latitude:

Even in politics, LA has had bizarre influence for what is not even a state capital. The radicalisation of the American right in the past century, whose spillover effects are global, has origins in Orange County, among other sunbelt suburbs. Nixon and Reagan were southern Californians by upbringing or choice. It is unthinkable but true that LA was once seen as a Wasp haven from the “ethnic” east. Cold war hardliners weren’t out of place in a region whose wealth has always rested as much on Northrop Grumman as on Paramount Pictures. I wonder how much of Trump’s animus comes in part from a sense that LA is lost conservative ground.

Paragraph 7.

Editor: The Appearance of Francis Fukuyama, the Hegalian Pretender who became a ‘Liberal’, appears as the uttery dubious counterpoint to Ganesh L.A. Crush!

And for all the intellectual condescension towards LA, the most cited, if not understood, idea of recent decades came from a former analyst at Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation called Francis Fukuyama. (Though he was also a Washington hand. Perhaps no argument, let alone “The End of History?”, can take full shape when a beach is two blocks away.)

…

Editor: The final paragraphs molded by Ganesh seven paragraphs, when the place name fails to beguile The Reader, he tosses in Werner Herzog. The repeating of those romantic place names fail to evoke in this Reader, what Ganesh finds of such moment. I long to drive up Alameda Street to Los Angeles, following the Railroad Tracks and seeing and smelling the air, and not seeing CityHall, now lost from view!

You will object that a lot of these impacts on the world aren’t for the better. But negative influence is still influence. If our present civilisation falls, and is dug up in some future renaissance, the proper excavation site will be LA. New York, London and Paris are “better” cities but how much has each done to change the human experience in the past half-century? Their role has become to contain things — almost literally all things — rather than originate them. This is what Werner Herzog was getting at when he cited LA’s “substance” as his reason for living there.

That substance might be running out. Hollywood seems creatively spent. The serious end of tech has never made the dash from northern to southern California that is forever in the offing. But the half-life of the influence that LA has exerted until now will run on for decades. The fundamental change that we are living through, from a culture in which the written word is central to one where the image is central, traces back to Hollywood. Perhaps another city is limbering up to take over as the moulder of the world. Until then, we all live in LA.

(*https://www.oed.com/dictionary/feuilleton_n?tl=true)

Old Socialist opines: The Political Class of America and the EU are mired in their own self-serving mendacity!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 16, 2025

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/syUDlqinDrI?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Peter Oborne, associate editor of Middle East Eye, argues that by threatening the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, David Cameron has disgraced himself and Britain. In trying to protect Israeli leaders from war crimes charges, Obrone says, Cameron resorted to menace and intimidation. He told ICC prosecutor Karim Khan that issuing a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu would be “like dropping a hydrogen bomb”. Oborne says this places Britain among gangster nations and rogue states for whom might is right. He compares Cameron’s actions to those of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and calls it an attempt to pervert the course of justice. He notes that the Rome Statute that established the ICC does not just prosecute those who commit war crimes, it also criminalises those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted. Cameron’s threat to “defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute” falls squarely within ICC jurisdiction, Oborne argues. Oborne concludes that although Karim Khan stood up to Cameron’s threats, the inescapable fact remains that a British foreign secretary tried to subvert the course of justice. Cameron needs to break his silence and to explain himself. Meanwhile, Starmer would be well-advised to order an urgent enquiry into the shocking revelation that Cameron sought to intimidate the chief prosecutor of the ICC.

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Old Socialist!

Political Observer : Chaos is the crulest of masters: The Iliad offers what?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 16, 2025

On Sunday, June 15, night fell on Tehran. The city of 14 million people had become a ghost town, deserted except for long lines of cars stretching out in front of gas stations. Throughout the day, streets and highways leading out of the capital were overrun by residents determined to seek safety away from the capital, far from Israeli bombardments.

That morning, the Israeli military urged the Iranian population, in a brief statement posted on its Persian-language accounts, to “immediately and very soon leave the surroundings of weapons factories and the institutions that support them,” warning this was necessary to avoid risking their lives. “Where can we go?” “How do we know if we’re close to these places?” “Which areas, which city?” worried Iranian users commented under the Israeli military’s post.

Editor: a sample of the Le Monde propaganda, posing as first hand reportage: yes or no! What of the fog of war and political posturing!

…

The night of June 12 to 13, heralding the start of a summer weekend, had seemed calm and peaceful.

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From the balcony on the sixth floor, now ablaze, residents called for help. “Our eyes and throats burned from the white smoke,” Samira recalled.

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Signs of nervousness among the authorities, who feared large gatherings of people where the situation could get out of control, were clear: Tehran’s metro stations, which were supposed to serve as shelters, ultimately remained closed on the night of June 15 to 16, as there was no neighborhood left untouched by the bombings

…

The bombardment has intensified, plunging the country into uncertainty and the beginnings of chaos. The attacks targeted sites of major strategic value, including the Ministry of Defense in Tehran, military bases and missile production facilities, especially those in Parchin and Khojir, located near the capital.

…

The burning tanks at the Shahr-e Ray refinery, south of Tehran, were releasing thick black smoke on Sunday. Iranian crude oil contains high concentrations of sulfur and heavy metals, making it particularly dangerous to inhale.

…

Social media is flooded with reports of civilian deaths, accompanied by photos and videos recounting fragments of their lives. Among them is Saleh Bayrami, a well-known graphic designer who worked for many Iranian newspapers and magazines; he was killed on June 15 while crossing Tajrish Square in Tehran.

From Israel, in a message posted on X on the morning of Monday, June 16, Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to target the Iranian population indiscriminately: “The arrogant dictator from Tehran has become a cowardly murderer, targeting civilian areas in Israel in order to deter the IDF from continuing its attack, which is crippling his capabilities. The residents of Tehran will pay the price, and soon.”

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Editor: what of today 6/16/2025 11:51 AM California Time? Judge Napolitano. and Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi offer an alternative to the Le Monde and EU propaganda!

[SPECIAL] Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi :The View From Tehran!

Judge Napolitano – Judging Freedom

576K subscribers

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1GUN3Kukb9Q?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Political Observer .

Political Observer on ‘Mathias Döpfner is chair and CEO of Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company’: Think of Mathias Döpfner as the In House Anne Applebaum, or Jeffrey Goldberg of Politico !

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 16, 2025

Editor: Britannica provides a vauable history of the paid apologists for hire, in an American context, and the pioneering work of Walter Lippman, and the evolution of his Experts/Technocrats as the a check on Too Much Democratcy!

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The number of American newspaper titles more than doubled between 1880 and 1900, from 850 to nearly 2,000. In addition to the weekly newspaper serving the smaller community, every major city had its own daily newspaper, and the metropolis had become the site of circulation battles between several titles. In New York City the newspaper business was shaken up by the arrival of Joseph Pulitzer, who is often credited with changing the course of American journalism. An immigrant from Hungary, Pulitzer had proved his ability in St. Louis, Missouri, where he had bought and merged two local papers, the Post and the Dispatch. In New York City Pulitzer bought the failing New York World and in three years raised its circulation from 15,000 to 250,000, at that time the highest figure achieved by any newspaper in the world. With a series of stunts and campaigns, Pulitzer revitalized the established formulas of sensationalism and idealism, taking one step further the qualities of editorial independence and exciting journalism that had been introduced to an earlier generation of New Yorkers by Bennett’s Herald and Greeley’s Tribune (see above).

Whereas Pulitzer was never afraid to unearth public wrongdoing and to crusade against it, the next press baron to influence New York City newspapers, William Randolph Hearst, was prepared to go to much further extremes in creating a headline story. Like Pulitzer, Hearst had learned about newspaper proprietorship in the brash, tough frontier West. His San Francisco Examiner (from 1880) had gained a reputation for exposing and cleaning up political corruption. By the time he came to New York City in 1895, however, Hearst was interested in circulation-building sensation at any price, even if it meant dressing up complete fabrications as news. This approach was revealed all too clearly in 1898, when Hearst’s Morning Journal was challenging Pulitzer’s World in the New York circulation battle. The Journal published exaggerated stories and editorials about the political tensions between the United States and Spain that stirred the country to a pitch of hysteria. Eventually, war—over Cuba—was triggered by the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbour, but Hearst nevertheless claimed credit for the war in a banner headline: “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?” Hearst is reported to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, demanding pictures of atrocities for the Journal. The illustrator found no atrocities to illustrate and informed Hearst, who replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Alarmist headlines and attention-grabbing campaigns were only one of the tactics introduced by Hearst. Equally important in the sensationalist yellow journalism of the era were vivid pictorial designs—photographs, cartoons, graphic illustrations—and the new Sunday supplements, which focused on human-interest stories and comic strips.

It was inevitable that some newspapers, and especially those that refrained from irresponsible tactics, would suffer circulation losses. One of these was The New York Times, which only recovered after it was acquired in 1896 by newspaper investor Adolph S. Ochs, who promoted responsible journalism and reestablished The New York Times as the city’s leading serious journal. The paper’s slogans, “All the news that’s fit to print” and “It will not soil the breakfast cloth,” indicated Ochs’s commitment to fair-minded news reporting.

By 1900 there were half a dozen well-known newspaper barons in the United States. Hearst, whose collections at one time ran to 42 papers, was the most acquisitive of the early owners. Another early chain-builder was Edward Scripps, who began purchasing newspapers in 1878. Scripps bought small, financially insecure newspapers and set them on their feet by installing capable young editors, who were given a share of the profits as an incentive to improve circulation. The editors were always urged “to serve that class of people and only that class of people from whom you cannot even hope to derive any other income than the one cent a day that they pay for your newspaper.” Scripps wanted his papers to be of genuine service to the public, and though he succeeded in making money from them his motive was never exclusively profit. But the commercial advantage of owning newspaper chains soon became obvious, as it allowed newsprint to be bought on favourable terms and syndicated articles to be used to the fullest. Scripps’s methods were adopted by his rivals and by newspaper proprietors in other countries as the idea of chain ownership spread. Inevitably, the profitable newspapers attracted outside investors whose motives were commercial, not journalistic. This new type of proprietor was exemplified by Frank A. Munsey, who bought and merged many newspapers between 1916 and 1924, including the Sun and the Herald in New York City. In describing Munsey and others like him, the American author and editor William Allen White wrote that he possessed “the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker.”

Commercial consolidation into larger publishing groups continued immediately after World War I, when the struggle for circulation intensified. First published in 1919, the New York Daily News was written to a ruthless recipe of sex and sensationalism by Joseph Medill Patterson, and it sparked off a war with Hearst’s Daily Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic, both launched in 1924. The Graphic closed in 1932, and the Mirror ceased publication in 1963, selling many of its feature columns and comics to the Daily News, which underwent several ownership changes before being bought by Mortimer B. Zuckerman in 1993. Takeovers often led to title mergers or the complete disappearance of titles. In 1931 the New York Morning, Evening, and Sunday World titles were bought by the Scripps-Howard chain; the morning and Sunday editions were dropped, and the Evening World was merged with the New York Evening Telegram, an action that suited Americans’ preference for afternoon papers at that time. Newspapers with extensive circulations could command the attention of the larger advertisers, and this reinforced the disappearance of smaller titles in favour of a few high-circulation papers.

One outcome of the new ownership pattern was the gradual disappearance of the old press baron, who, as editor-proprietor, had tended to combine the roles of professional editor and management executive. Even the editor was to suffer a loss of personal impact as fame was increasingly won by columnists—men and women who were given regular columns to express forceful points of view or divulge society secrets. Among the most important political columnists of the 1920s were David Lawrence of the United States News, Frank Kent of the Baltimore Sun, Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald-Tribune, and Walter Lippmann of the New York World. Such writers could gain considerable national followings when their columns or articles were syndicated by major chains.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/Era-of-the-popular-press

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Political Observer

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Chapter 15 – British and American Newspaper Journalism in the Nineteenth Century

from Part III – The ‘Globalisation’ of the Nineteenth-Century Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2017

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/journalism-and-the-periodical-press-in-nineteenthcentury-britain/british-and-american-newspaper-journalism-in-the-nineteenth-century/EEF5B1329EE6F0C0FDBD75A26C006E7F#access-block