The emphasis on political philosophy on this weblog arises from my realization that, in the wake of the collapse of the New Left, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the unilinear understanding of history as "progress" and "emancipation" (ie., the inevitable march of progress), the social democratic Left, and Marxism in particular, has little to offer us in terms of political theory to analyze current political realities in a postmodern world.
Marxism has all but gone. That pretty much leaves us with a social democractic left that is committed to Enlightenment rationalism and has pretty much become a form of managerial liberalism. This Left quietly capitulated to liberal cultural hegemony, accepted the Enlightenment assumption of the system's structural soundness and infinite perfectibility and the standard Enlightenment perspective of an inevitable and irreversible progress and supported the welfare state as the only possible opposition to an otherwise triumphant market capitalism. In supporting the welfare state it a supported bureaucratic-centralist model---- statism. The state is assumed tl be the only agency able to deal with and correct the dysfunctionalities of capitalism.
Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen state it well:
"No longer able to present themselves as the vanguard of progressive forces paving the way for a bright socialist future, they have now regrouped as part of an academic rear-guard entrusted with protecting "civil society" and liberal values against the market and other forces of darkness--a kind of quixotic kathekon seeking to prevent a recurrence of the fascist experience in a context where there has never been any such threat....this model ends up ascribing to "democratic forces" a defensive role: to prevent the alleged roll-back of the welfare state and to oppose other austerity policies under the Reagan and succeeding administrations."
These conservative forces are seen as retaining existing relations of privilege that stand in the way of human emancipation and are moving towards the implementation of authoritarian measures. Hence the defence of liberal institutions and fundamental freedoms from the authoritarian conservative political strategies based around "family, nation, and faith".
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 29, 2005 11:58 PM | TrackBack