“Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.”
Charles Darwin, 2002, Autobiographies, Penguin.
Category Archives: Bite Size Theory
Bite Size Theory: Citizens to Lords
“The constitutive principles of Western liberal democracy, its ideas of limited and accountable government, have more to do with medieval lordship and its claims to autonomous power than with rule by the demos as conceived in ancient Athens.”
Ellen Meiskins Wood, 2008, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Verso.
Bite Size Theory: Sophistical Practice
“Philosophy counts two, speaking of and speaking to, but regardless of what happens in the bosom of the one, they always come back under the regulation of the truth that governs speaking of. […] Austin’s invention consists in counting three.”
Barbara Cassin, 2014, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism, Fordham University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Behemoth
“Though a debunking doctrine may be a useful tool in scientific analysis, it cannot provide the basis for political action.”
Franz Neumann, 1944, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, Oxford University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future
“If we are all democrats today, it is not a very cheerful fate to share. Today, in politics, democracy is the name for what we cannot have – yet cannot cease to want.”
John Dunn, 1979, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, Cambridge University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Define and Rule
“The indirect rule state was not a weak state. Unlike the preceding era of direct rule, its ambitions were vast: to shape the subjectivities of the colonized population and not simply of their elites.”
Mahmood Mamdami, 2013, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Wits University Press.
Bite Size Theory: The Democracy Project
“All societies are communistic at base, and capitalism is best viewed as a bad way of organizing communism.”
David Graeber, 2013, The Democracy Project, Penguin.
Bite Size Theory: Goldilocks’ Dilemma
“Can we find units of government that are “just right” – small enough to facilitate participation and yet large enough to exercise authority so significant as to make participation worthwhile?”
Robert Dahl, 1970, After the Revolution, Yale University Press.
Bite Size Theory: On Contradiction
“Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not”.
Mao Tse Tung, 1966, On Contradiction.
Bite Size Theory: Ontological Relativity
“Ontology is indeed doubly relative. Specifying the universe of a theory makes sense only relative to some background theory, and only relative to some choice of a manual of translation of one theory into the other”.
W.V. Quine, 1969, Ontological Relativity and other essays, Columbia University Press.
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