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Preparing my teaching on Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a word caught my eye.

Marx has just finished explaining the first condition of revolution, which is that one part of society – one class or estate – must establish itself as the “general representative” of the whole of society. Only then can the liberation of this class be the liberation of the whole of society. For this revolutionary class, “its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself”.

Continue reading “The Stumbling Block: Marxism as Inverted Scapegoating?” →

Hamzah Fansuri was a 16C philosopher from Sumatra, who wrote Sufi-inspired prose and poetry in Malay. This 800 PAGE PhD thesis by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas includes a Romanised edition of Hamzah’s three prose works and English translations: https://archive.org/details/themysticismofhamzahfansuri…

A video interview with al-Attas (on Islamic thought in general, not in Hamzah Fansuri) can be found here:

Some socialists are “market” socialists, others are “planning” socialists. “Planning” usually means central planning, though not always. Robin Hahnel and others have for a while been advocating a system of democratic economic planning, though I think it would be fairest to say that this is somewhere in between a planning and a market system. The rough idea is that different social units – individuals, workers’ councils, neighbourhood “consumption councils”, federations, etc. – submit information about what they would like to consume and what work they are willing to do, then receive back a set of indicative prices based on the inputs offered and outputs demanded. In light of these prices (which they most likely won’t accept) they revise their offers – e.g. increasing the work supplied or reducing the goods demanded – and, feeding in these new offers, receive back a new set of indicative prices. The process iterates until some critical mass of units have accepted the resulting prices.

Continue reading “Shadow Socialism” →

To Whom It May Concern,

I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at Birkbeck in 2012. I had a wonderful time there, and without the opportunity Birkbeck provided me I would never have been able to end up in my current position. I would like, first of all, to express my gratitude for the institution and everything it stands for. I am also keen to help make sure that others after me have the same opportunity that I did.

Continue reading “My Letter to Birkbeck’s VCs on cuts to Philosophy” →

Liam Bright’s recent post – Why I Am Not A Liberal – was exciting, and I want to get in on the action. But others better qualified than me have replied to the philosophical points. Liam is linking some of those on the original post as he sees them. So I thought maybe I could make a historical-philosophical point. This is a rush job, and I’m shooting from the hip, so don’t hold me too hard to anything I say here.

Liam follows many contemporary liberals in tracing the roots of modern liberalism to early modern arguments for religious toleration. There’s a canon of big names that liberals are accustomed to dropping (let’s call it the Online Library of Liberty). The real big fish tend to be Protestants: John Locke and Pierre Bayle, for example. Modern liberals trace to them the notion that the state should be neutral on what Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines” and what early modern tolerationists would have called “confessions of faith”.

Continue reading “From Protestant Toleration to Capitalist Neutrality” →