Twitter pundit Haque's Starting Point? The Political Thought of Etienne de la Boetie The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie By Murray N. Rothbard [Introduction to The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de la Boétie, written 1552-53. Translated by Harry Kurz for the edition that carried Rothbard’s introduction, New York: Free Life Editions, 1975. Étienne de La Boétie[1] has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history’s most notable friendships. Étienne de la Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Perigord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family. La Boétie’s great contribution to political thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orleans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed there. The first striking thing about the Discourse is the form: La Boétie’s method was speculative, abstract, deductive. And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear:
When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal | George Monbiot Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there's nothing they can do. So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys' attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces).
With New Constitution, Post-Collapse Iceland Inches Toward Direct Democracy Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament, at the Open Government Camp 2011. In a conversation with Truthout she insisted she doesn't want "the new constitution to be plagued with (bureaucrats') language, but the language of the people." (Photo: Florian Apel-Soetebeer / Government 2.0 Netzwerk Deutschland)When the global financial system crumbled over four years ago, Iceland played host to one of the most dramatic economic collapses in modern history. Its three largest banks were unable to refinance debt roughly ten times the size of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), causing one of the world's wealthiest nations to limp with hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The island became a symbol for capitalism's systemic failure. Most recently, on October 20, a remarkable constitution - written by an elected council with help from the public - took a step closer toward ratification after it was approved in a referendum by a 2-1 margin.
Democracy's Arc The troubling news about methane releases from the Arctic ocean that was the focus of last week’s post on The Archdruid Report belongs, as I mentioned then, to the wider trajectory of industrial society’s decline and fall, not to the more specific theme I’ve been developing here in recent months. The end of America’s global empire takes place against the background of that wider trajectory, to be sure, and core elements of the predicament of industrial civilization bid fair to play a crucial role as the United States backs itself into a corner defined by its own history. Still, important as the limits to growth are just now, there’s much more at work in the endgame of American empire. Thus this week’s post will plunge without further ado from the austere heights of atmospheric chemistry to the steaming, swampy, snake-infested realities of American politics. The worst example, and the one I propose to explore this week, is democracy. Here’s an example. End of the World of the Week #20
The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin - The Garrett Hardin Society - Articles Updated 13 March, 2005 The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, 1968 Published in Science, December 13, 1968 For copyright permission, click here. The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are ... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. What Shall We Maximize? Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. Pollution
Restoring the Commons The hard work of rebuilding a post-imperial America, as I suggested in last week’s post, is going to require the recovery or reinvention of many of the things this nation chucked into the dumpster with whoops of glee as it took off running in pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The basic skills of democratic process are among the things on that list; so, as I suggested last month, are the even more basic skills of learning and thinking that undergird the practice of democracy. All that remains crucial. Still, it so happens that a remarkably large number of the other things that will need to be put back in place are all variations of a common theme. What’s more, it’s a straightforward theme—or, more precisely, would be straightforward if so many people these days weren’t busy trying to pretend that the concept at its center either doesn’t exist or doesn’t present the specific challenges that have made it so problematic in recent years. In point of fact, she did no such thing.
Governing the Web (and everything else) Representatives of more than 190 governments begin a profoundly important 12-day closed-door meeting in Dubai on Monday to hammer out how the Internet should be run and who should pay for its operation. The International Telecommunication Union, a low-profile United Nations agency that’s sponsoring the meeting, sets out the technical standards for the world’s communication technologies, and the last time the group met was in 1988, when the information superhighway was geek talk and the World Wide Web didn’t exist. The Internet’s subsequent explosive growth occurred not so much because of the ITU but despite it. Private and state-owned telecommunications companies spent billions of dollars in response to user demand, and most governments took a hands-off approach. In less than two decades, two billion people were able to go online. Defenders of an open Internet are concerned about a dark agenda at the Dubai meeting. The governance of the Internet ain’t broken, so don’t fix it.
SimPol - Simultaneous Politics Eight Perspectives On Integral Trans-Partisan Politics Beams and Struts employs commenting guidelines that we expect all readers to bear in mind when commenting at the site. Please take a moment to read them before posting - if you already have one. Comment Link Monday, 26 November 2012 18:32 posted by Lincoln Merchant This is awesome!!! @Kaine: You said "The solution, he seems to imply, is a structural change not only within the two-party system (which he seems to equate with democracy in this video) but into changing the legislature into more of a parliamentary system. This was confusing to me, as the current system is technically capable of supporting more than two parties without changing the actual structure of the legislature Have you seen these short videos explaining how the winner-take-all rules of our elections systemically leads to a two-party system. This one explains a better system of voting for representative democracy: @ Kerstin: This is beautiful: Some quotes: Win! @ T.
Inverted totalitarianism Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin analysed the United States as increasingly turning into a managed democracy (a concept which has similarities to illiberal democracy). Wolin uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to draw attention to the totalitarian aspects of the United States governmental system while emphasizing differences between it and proper totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy[edit] Wolin argues that the United States has increasingly adopted totalitarian tendencies as a result of transformations undergone during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers in the 1940s, and the subsequent campaign to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and more recently, after 9/11, the war on terror campaign.[2] Inverted totalitarianism reverses things.
How Egypt Killed Political Islam A supporter of ousted President Mohammed Morsi prays near the Rabaah al-Adawiya mosque in the Nasr City neighborhood in Cairo, July 12, 2013. (Photo: Narciso Contreras / The New York Times)The rebirth of the Egyptian revolution ushered in the death of the first Muslim Brotherhood government. But some near-sighted analysts limit the events of Egypt to a military coup. In reality the Egyptian people had already destroyed the Morsi regime (for example government buildings had already been occupied or shut down by the people), which is why the generals intervened — the same reason they intervened against Mubarak: better to try to lead than be led by the people. Political legitimacy — especially in times of revolution — must be earned, not assumed. The brief, uninspiring reign of the first Muslim Brotherhood government will alter the course of Middle East history, whose modern chapter was formed, in part, by the rise of the Brotherhood.