See Disclaimer Below.

Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

, , , , , , ,

Plato and Natural Law Theory

In Arts & Letters, Communism, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Western Philosophy on March 27, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Natural law theory, at its essence, is not far removed, conceptually at least, from Plato’s theory of forms.  According to Plato, only the philosopher kings are equipped and trained intellectually to comprehend the true forms as opposed to the sensible forms that are readily understandable in the phenomenal world.  These philosopher kings can grasp the Form of the Good, for instance, which is the fountainhead from which flow all true forms, including knowledge, truth, and beauty.  But how are we to know who these philosopher kings are?  How are we to distinguish them from charlatans?  And why should the polis uncritically accept the supposedly sound judgments and determinations of those who cannot prove to us their purportedly superior faculties?

There is no ideal city, no Platonic Utopia, nor even a realm approaching the character of Magnesia.  Plato’s communistic fantasies have never been achieved,[1] and the disenchantment one senses in The Laws differs markedly from the tone and confidence exuded in The Republic. It is as if Plato, having aged, realized the dreaminess of his younger vision in The Republic and wished to correct the record, even though he did not go far enough.  At least in The Laws he acknowledged that the first principle of politics is to attain peace; the absence of military conflict ought to be the chief aim of the legislator; judges are another matter.

Plato seems to have continued to admire tyranny, despite his criticism of tyrants in The Laws, for elsewhere in that work he discusses how leaders ought to create an obedient disposition among the citizens.  Commonplace though that proposition may sound, it suggests that the State and its politicians should condition citizens to act for the good of the State.  The problem is that the State is made up of those who live off the citizens, so unchecked obedience to the State means that the citizens ensure their perpetual subordination to those who exploit citizen labor.  It is little wonder that the Platonic State devotes itself to educating the young, for the State must guarantee that there are future generations of uncritical followers to take advantage of.

This is not to suggest that Plato’s works are without truth, only that they are underdeveloped and often misguided.  Aristotle seems to have thought so, too.  The free polis is a multifaceted collection of networks bound together by the voluntary acts of free agents whose rules of habit and exchange exist separately from legislative fiat.

[1] Aristotle himself recognizes that Plato lacks a proper understanding of unity because Plato treats it in terms of property ownership because it is contracted by experience.  “[A]though there is a sense in which property ought to be common,” says Aristotle, “it should in general be private.  When everyone has his own separate sphere of interest, there will not be the same ground for quarrels; and they will make more effort, because each man will feel that he is applying himself to what is his own.” Aristotle, The Politics (Translated by Ernest Barker; Revised with an Introduction by R. F. Stanley). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. P. 47.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bogus on Buckley

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communism, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Libertarianism, Politics, Writing on February 9, 2012 at 8:34 am

Allen Mendenhall

It was customary practice in my family to gather at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner after church.  Loyal to our Southern traditions, we would, after eating, divide company: men into the living room, women into the kitchen or den.  My brother and I, still children, would sit silently, for the most part, while my grandfather, father and uncles bandied about the names of politicians and discussed the day’s sermon or newspaper headlines. 

I first learned of William F. Buckley Jr. during these Sunday afternoons, as he was often the topic of conversation.  I was too young to know much, but young enough to learn a lot quickly, so I began to follow this man, this Buckley, to the extent that I could, from those days until the day that he died in February 2008.  

Overcommitted to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, Buckley was not my kind of conservative.  He could be tactless and cruel, as when he violated the ancient maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Of the dead, speak no evil”) in an obituary to Murray Rothbard wherein he wrote that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle moral priorities.”  Buckley then trumpeted some unflattering anecdotes about Rothbard before likening Rothbard to David Koresh. 

Despite such tantrums and vendettas, I always liked Buckley.  Something in the way he conducted himself—his showy decorum, flaunted manners and sophisticated rhetoric—appealed to me.

Carl T. Bogus, an American law professor and author of the biography Buckley, seems to share my qualified respect for Buckley, despite disagreeing with Buckley on important political and theoretical issues.  “I should tell the reader up front,” Bogus warns, “that I am a liberal and thus critical—in some instances, highly critical—of Buckley’s ideology.”  Yet, adds Bogus, “I admire William F. Buckley Jr. enormously.”     

Unlike bobble-headed television personalities and think tank sycophants, Bogus does justice to his subject, treating Buckley’s ideas evenhandedly on the grounds that he (Bogus) is “disheartened by the present state of partisan animosity,” one solution to which, he says, “is to take opposing ideas seriously.”  Bogus not only takes Buckley’s ideas seriously, but credits them for changing America’s political realities.    Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Book Review: Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature and the Economics of Liberty

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Communism, Conservatism, Economics, Essays, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on January 23, 2012 at 4:53 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following book review originally appeared here in the Fall 2010 issue of The Independent Review.

Humans are not automated and predictable, but beautifully complex and spontaneous. History is not linear. Progress is not inevitable. Our world is strangely intertextual and multivocal. It is irreducible to trite summaries and easy answers, despite what our semiliterate politicians would have us believe. Thinking in terms of free-market economics allows us to appreciate the complicated dynamics of human behavior while making sense of the ambiguities leading to and following from that behavior. With these realities in mind, I applaud Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox for compiling the timely collection Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which places imaginative literature in conversation with Austrian economic theory.

Cantor and Cox celebrate the manifold intricacies of the market, which, contrary to popular opinion, is neither perfect nor evil, but a proven catalyst for social happiness and well-being. They do not recycle tired attacks on Marxist approaches to literature: they reject the “return to aesthetics” slogans of critics such as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John M. Ellis, and they adopt the principles, insights, and paradigms of the Austrian school of economics. Nor do Cantor and Cox merely invert the privilege of the terms Marxist and capitalist (please excuse my resort to Derridean vocabulary), although they do suggest that one might easily turn “the tables on Marxism” by applying “its technique of ideology critique to socialist authors, questioning whether they have dubious motives for attacking capitalism.” Cantor and Cox are surprisingly the first critics to look to Austrian economics for literary purposes, and their groundbreaking efforts are sure to ruffle a few feathers—but also to reach audiences who otherwise might not have heard of Austrian economics.

Cantor and Cox submit that the Austrian school offers “the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically informed.” They acknowledge that this school is heterodox and wide ranging, which, they say, are good things. By turning to economics in general, the various contributors to this book—five in all—suggest that literature is not created in a vacuum but rather informs and is informed by the so-called real world. By turning to Austrian economics in particular, the contributors seek to secure a place for freedom and liberty in the understanding of culture. The trouble with contemporary literary theory, for them, lies not with economic approaches, but with bad economic approaches. An economic methodology of literary theory is useful and incisive so long as it pivots on sound philosophies and not on obsolete or destructive ideologies. Austrian economics appreciates the complexity and nuance of human behavior. It avoids classifying individuals as cookiecutter caricatures. It champions a humane-economy counter to mechanistic massproduction, central planning, and collectivism. Marxism, in contrast, is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive–in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an age in which, quite frankly, we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely products of culture or otherwise culturally underwritten. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices, for better or worse, affect lives, circumstances, and communities. (“Ideas have consequences,” as Richard Weaver famously remarked.) And communities themselves consist of multiplicities that defy simple labels. It is not insignificant, in light of these principles, that Michel Foucault late in his career instructed his students to read the collected works of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wallace Stevens and Imagination

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Communism, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Imagination, John William Corrington, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Western Civilization, Writing on May 4, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Allen Mendenhall

This post first appeared here at themendenhall.

____________________________________________________________

It would seem at first blush that American modernism is incompatible with American conservatism.  But this impression pivots on a too-narrow conception of both “modernism” and “conservatism.”  The aesthetes who animated modern American poetry were, many of them, social and political conservatives.  This fact has been lost on those intellectuals who do not admit or acknowledge alternative and complicating visions of the world in general and of modernism in particular.  In the wake of the radical 1960s, many intellectuals simply ignored the contributions of the conservative imagination to literature, preferring to will away such unpalatable phenomena by pretending they do not exist.  However well-meaning, these intellectuals either assume without much hesitation or qualification that all modernist theories and practices were progressive, or they brush under the rug any conservative tendencies among writers they admire.  American modernism was progressive in its adaptation of forms, but it does not follow that avant-garde aesthetics necessarily entails progressive political programs.  Nevertheless, under Frankfurt School and Marxist auspices, among other things, the literati and others in the academy have rewritten the history and thought of modernist American poetry to purge it of all conservative influence.  George Santayana, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore—these individuals, according to progressive mantras, were intellectually challenging and therefore, the argument goes, politically leftist.  Such revisionism will not do. Read the rest of this entry »