© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This book starts with Francis Fukuyama's claim that we are reaching (or maybe have reached) 'The End of History'. This notion was based on the collapse of Soviet-led east European communism and the rather premature conclusion that this marked the end of any clash between opposing ideological cultures - which all sounds rather passé on reflection today.
There follows a large amount of tightly-packed argument about many aspects of history, some of it quite entertaining.
But the message only really comes to life in the last 20 pages or so.
As can be seen from his Wikipedia page, Alex Callinicos is a long-term advocate of the left, in particular the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.
I have not listed a lot of highlights, and have not made any separation into chapters. Everything is included in the appropriately pink section of the highlights table.
| Page | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 37 | Francis Fukuyama: "The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of the human spirit". |
| 87 | Graeme Macdonald and Philip Pettit's 'Principle of Humanity', which should replace Davidson's 'Principle of Charity', states "that the interpreter should not so much maximize agreement whatever the cost, as minimize a certain sort of agreement which we find unintelligible. Where charity could have us recoil from the ascription of any disagreement or, as we are going to see it, error, humanity woould only have us do so when we cannot explain how such disagreement or error could have come about". |
| 112 | 'Absolutism' isn't just European - as well as Rome, there has been "Sung China, Norman Sicily and England, Ottoman Turkey and Tokugawa Japan". |
| 113 | "Forms of domination are irreducibly plural, and therefore a permanent feature of human existence. I concentrate here on three issues: 1) ideological power (AC instances Christian and Moslem multi-state structures); 2) military competition (not well understood by Marxism); and 3) scarcity and conflict. {RT: He doesn't say much about the latter - I'd have thought it was quite important.] |
| 193 | Etienne Balibar: "There are no examples of restrictions or suppressions of liberty without social inequalities, nor of inequalities without restriction or suppression of liberties, even if there are degrees, secondary tensions, phases of unstable equilibrium, compromise situations in which exploitation and domination do not distribute themselves in a homogeneous fashion among all individuals". |
| 195-6 | Habermas: "There is no cure for the wounds of the Enlightenment other than the radicalized Enlightenment itself". |
| 197 | Susan Sontag (1993): "I know that suffering is the same all over the world, but these people (in Sarajevo) are European, they belong to my culture". (This was explaining her keenness to pledge aid to this particular cause. AC regards this as 'particularism'.) |
| 198 | In much the same vein, Chief Buthelezi justified "his supporters' use of assegais and pangas in their ferocious attacks ... by saying that these were 'cultural weapons', sanctified by time-honoured Zulu tradition". |
| AC talks about 'oppression trumping' "which set in among the declining social movements of the late 1970s onwards, a procession of differentiation ad infinitum as various groups formed claiming the special, and often specifically acute, character of their oppression ...". | |
| 199 | Edward Said: "The question of identity - focusing on yourself, are we this, that or the other? - is really in the end one of the less interesting questions in the world", compared to the issue of "enlightenment and emancipation". |
| 201 | Stanley Aronowitz (referring to identity politics): "The idea of difference becomes, in effect, the new universal that cannot be overcome but must, instead, be celebrated". This, AC says, confronts the fact that class cannot, after all, be wished off the political agenda. |
| AC says "The renunciation of solidarity is a formula for the eternal recurrence of fragmentation among us [RT: who is 'us' here? The worldwide left?], and an invitation for the inheritors of the old universalisms [RT: who are they? Presumably capitalists, but totalitarian communist leaders as well?] to maintain their hold". His point is that 'we' threw out the baby of united class struggle with the bathwater of its old associations, and replaced it with particularism. So 'we' have to re-think class. | |
| 203 | Fredric Jameson: "Even a fully post-modernized First World society will not lack young people whose temperament and values are genuinely Left ones and embrace visions of radical social change repressed by a business society. The dynamics of such commitment are derived not from the reading of the 'Marxist classics', but rather from the objective experience of social reality ..." |
| AC thinks the Left may have failed up to now because only a minority of the world's population live by 'wage labour', but that's changing with more women in the workforce and large-scale industrialization of some parts of Asia and the Third World. So he's hopeful of eventual revolution, and says now is not the time to give up hope! | |
| 210 | Returning to his title, AC describes two false conceptions which, if we dispose of them, allow compatibility between theory and narrative in history. 1) is 'closed-system teleology' (we should dump this - we don't want any suggestions of 'inevitability'); 2) is regarding narratives just as a means to providing closure and "to provide the reader with a reassuring sense of her identity and integration in the social order". Instead, quoting James McPherson, AC says we should let narratives "allow us to recover the contingencies of the historical process, the junctures at which particular choices and chances tipped the balance between significantly different possible outcomes". [RT: This all sounds good.] |
This is not an area that turns me on much, and this book is not easy reading, but it has its interesting moments, especially in the conclusions.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 8th June 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .