The two reviews at Amazon.com on Marx's polemic against Pierre Prudhon are both positive. This is the better of the two:
marx is mind expanding, June 6, 2001 | By | bastiat von mises (century city CA) - See all my reviews |
This review is from: The Poverty of Philosophy (Great Books in Philosophy) (Paperback)
Marxs book here shows you how the distribution of wealth yes why some now 060601, have 145,000,000 in net worth at top of company and a worker in company has 43,000 dollars, is a human political construction. Nothing that exists is law of physics unalterable reality. He shows how this distribution is stupid, and how a more equal distribution and democratic economy can do much better than now. He says this in angery word webs. It is a fun book that get sone thinking. You will have intellectual, fun, a rare form of fun these days.****
What more can I write? I'm blown away.
There's this to perk us up:
John Dewey, Democracy And Education
1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars This is a Good Book with lots of great ideas!, November 4, 1999
By A Customer
I am a college student majoring in education and I read Democracy and Education for a class. I found this book to be very incitful. I find it hard to believe that John Dewey one of the most important philosophers recognized problems at the beginning of the century and we still have them today. One of Deweys ideas state that we learn by doing, this is still not a norm in todays curriculum. I thought this book was excellent but in parts found it difficult to either read or understand.
And then directly below:
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars This is a Good Book with lots of great ideas!, November 4, 1999
By A Customer
I am a college student majoring in education and I read Democracy and Education for a class. I found this book to be very incitful. I find it hard to believe that John Dewey one of the most important philosophers recognized problems at the beginning of the century and we still have them today. One of Deweys ideas state that we learn by doing, this is still not a norm in todays curriculum. I thought this book was excellent but in parts found it difficult to either read or understand.
http://www.amazon.com/review
I'm a sloppy typist and a lazy proofreader, but I'm not a school teacher here. Nor do I have all the answer to them questions what perplexus us, duh. I do have my concerns for the future, the one I hope to have in luxury when the youth of the nation are paying my retirement benefits while I goof-off on the beach in the tropics. But it's looking like poorly to me. Worse is that many young people don't seem to understand that they don't understand; and worse still, many people far older than I are every bit as ignorant and arrogant as youths, if not more so. And they are often more so. Thus, one can rely on the democracy of our favorite system to pull us through, or we can improvise and use what intelligence and skill and nerve we have to save ourselves and perhaps a few others on Earth as well. That takes personal initiative and volition in the mind, as attitude. One must become a school teacher even though one knows little, perhaps only more. Someone will lead; and if we do not, others will. And now others do. See above.
4 comments:
I get uncomfortable when I see either/or - democracy/men of will - arguments. Yes we need men of will, but to do what? Understandably, we get uneasy in an age of Obama and Hilary mania and forget that democracy in America has traditionally meant the rule of realistic middle-class values. Unless we have a grip on questions of means and ends, a vision of the free society without ends, invoking the will to power can just be the road to another Nietzsche-inspired monstrosity.
If we filter our understanding of the Philosophy of Histroy through Hegelianism, yes, all world-hitoric figures will resemble Napoleon or Hitler; but if we look at history as not Will to Power but a Human challenge of free individuals fulfilling their innate Humanness, we'll see history as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, and the guy down the street who invented some wild gizmo that made up the internet. Men must do or nothing will get done but by others who haven't got a care in the world for anything but whatever.
"Man of Action" is not simply a Gnostic parody of Human reality. Not even at all. Man of Action is the guy down the street who gets things done in spite of all that would stop him, whether he builds a gas station or plumbs a building or conquers the North Pole. Yes, even he who runs against Barak Obama. Men of action bring us daily Democracy. They are policemen, soldeiers, school teachers, doctors, and bricklayers and street sweepers.
One does, others compete, and the better thing perchance wins for a while. Nothing much written in stone makes any impressionon anyone tee days, so one needn't worry that if one brings froth ten commandments the masses will complain that there should be eleven; that with ten, there might be one unfair to him and that other guy so let's abandon all hope we who foolishly entered in.
No, we do; life decides. We have goals or we have slide and decline and apathy and invasion and collapse. And that would be a good thing.
What is, for example, Canada? A nation with roughly 50 percent of its population immigrants, many of who have no English or French. What is this nation? A mere matrix awaiting the patrix of Islam. So it will be without men who care to withstand the remaking of the Modernity we should love so much.
Not all knowledge is Gnostic: some is Rational. And the Rational not acted upon is passivism and decline and invasion and a Muslim Canada, a Muslim Sweden, a Muslim Britain, and so on. The Rational is the Real, and whether one is tempted by Hegel or not, Man of Action moves.
Yes, I think we need to find again our Lincoln fathers, even in Canada.
I hope I'm not giving off the impression that I think all knowledge is Gnostic. Gnosticism is less a question of pragmatic or rational knowledge as of the means by which we sum up our understanding of human existence (the Gnostic making claims to have special knowledge of existential underpinnings, while ignoring much).
No doubt Canada has many looming problems today, surely enough to lead many men to bury their heads in shopping. But if we are to encourage people to do something about our problems, then we can't rely on the motivations of fear and resentment. Those only really work when you are also motivated by an understanding of what it is you are and what it is you love.
Before a man is to go the extra mile to help save something, he has to know why he and those around him are worth saving. What is it that they carry with them that must be preserved?
The problem is that we only really begin to get a firm grip on such questions by "getting involved" in the culture. And when we live with, on the one hand, all kinds of Gnostic experts telling us not to get too involved, to know our place in the system of experts, that we don't know what we are doing (as we cling to our guns and religion), that we are really motivated by evils like hatred for the other, and then, on the other hand, we have people telling us that the Gnostics are taking the world all to hell, that it's time for total war, then the double whammy can surely be paralyzing.
For a person to act, they have to have faith that in acting they are taking the first step towards a viable solution. But if the problem is posed to them in more or less apocalyptic tones - we must choose total war or death - then it's even more unlikely they will find the love and courage to do anything. They must have reason to see the good in their society, even as it exists today.
It is easy to kick Canada but there is much worth preserving and extending for those with eyes to see it. Anyway, the larger problem for those who would act is that they must overcome the nihilism and victim games shoved in their face by the institutional elites.
And ultimately to overcome the allegations that in acting you are doing evil against some other, you can't just say "to hell with them" I'm going to have nothing to do with the powers that be; most people need reason to know that their action in search of a solution is not what the fear mongering elites say it is.
And this means being able to see the scene in such a way as allowing one to find all kinds of ways to re-establish centres of shared attention that allow one to appeal to common values and interests, to solve problems by extending and not denying our need for greater reciprocity. When the snobbish elite says we are denying reciprocity to the other, we have to show them that it is they who are committing this error and that we are concerned with acting in a way that sets up new bases for reciprocity.
It's not enough to say to hell with the Gnostic elites; it is rather more a case that we need to find ways to beat them at their own game by showing we are less victimizing than they, even as we need to be more cooly realistic about human violence, and the necessity of certain wars. Ultimately we have to open doors that will allow the snobs to turn them from their dead ends, that they may lose their own addiction to seeing us as the dark knights and loser spear carriers of the apocalypse. We must be the positive force that the guy down the street wants to be.
If we are going to give the guy down the street motivation to act, we can't put him in an all or nothing situation, in a vision of a zero sum game, where he has to face and fight the final battle right now. Very very few would be ready for that. As we blog, we should think of how we might help him find more pragmatic projects that will involve productively deferring that final conflict and, by doing so, making it more likely that when the day comes, the final battle will be more of a pushover than an apocalyptic scenario.
This takes me back to the question of how we describe things like Islam. It's true that we understand a religion or politics largely in terms of its emergence and central texts. However, if humanity survives while religions and ideologies die, in future the religions will be known more by their limits (by the resentments that destroyed them) and by the possibilities people found to run away from what could no longer be held in common.
And whether this running away was total, or a form of reformation, it is this way out that ultimately defines any religion or ideology. (Consider how a typical protestant defines Catholicism, for example.) Thus to insist that Islam is one thing and one thing only, is a mistake, though perhaps that is the Hegelian in me talking.
My response is too long for the comments section here so I'll post it on the main page here and at No Dhimmitude so others can have a full look at it. I hope we raise some discussion from this. Regardless, I feel challenged as always, which I like very much, and which (I hope) I benefit from.
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