Bite Size Theory: Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy

“At the source of democracy can be found the rejection of a number of things: power detached from the social ensemble, law that governs an immutable order, and a spiritual authority possessing knowledge of the ultimate ends of human conduct and of the community. However, it is not enough to say at the source of democracy: this rejection has been democracy’s permanent driving energy. A force of negativity inhabits it.”

Claude Lefort, 1999, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy. New York, Columbia University Press

Bite Size Theory: The Sources of Social Power (Volume 4)

“Neoliberals, like socialists, must compromise with power realities to achieve any of their goals. So within what is often called the neoliberal movement I distinguish four tendencies: principled neoliberalism elevating markets and individualism, the interests of capitalists, the interests of political elites, and a conservatism that uses the state to enforce morality, law and order, nationalism, and militarism. Though there is overlap among all of these, it is useful analytically to separate them.”

Michael Mann, 2013, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011, Cambridge University Press.

Bite Size Theory: Turning Operations

“Politics is an irreducibly strategic concern and a domain of strategic action.”

Mary Dietz, 2002, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics, Routledge.

Bite Size Theory: Between Facts and Norms

“Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and of justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed.”

Jürgen Habermas, 1996, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Polity Press.

Bite Size Theory: The Laws of Hostility

“The Enlightenment, confronted by the evil of politics, goes down in a display of true religious pageantry, showing that morality cannot be conceived without the guarantee of some sort of transcendence.”

Pierre Saint-Armand, 1996, The Laws of Hostility, University of Minnesota Press.

Bite Size Theory: What Should the Left Propose?

“The history of modern social ideas has misled us into associating piecemeal change with disbelief in institutional reconstruction, and a commitment to such reconstruction with faith in sudden and systematic change.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 2005, What Should the Left Propose?,Verso.

Bite Size Theory: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

“The author sees the development of a democracy as a long and certainly incomplete struggle to do three closely related things: 1) to check arbitrary rulers, 2) to replace arbitrary rules with just and rational ones, and 3) to obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules. The beheading of kings has been the most dramatic and by no means the least important aspect of the first feature. Efforts to establish the rule of law, the power of the legislature, and later to use the state as an engine for social welfare are familiar and famous aspects of the other two.”

Barrington Moore, Jr, 1966, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Allen Lane.

Media practices and urban politics

IMG_2858If you’re interested, here is a link to a paper called Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the urban-media nexus, by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and myself, which is forthcoming soonish in Society and Space. This is the last of a series of things we have written and convened together since 2007, emerging from Scott’s time at the OU on an ESRC Postdoc fellowship and stretching beyond that (remember those?). This includes a symposium on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’ and an earlier Debate section of the same journal, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, on ‘Media, Politics and Cities‘.

Here is the abstract for the latest piece:

“The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban nexus points to the always-already present conditions of possibility for a trans-local, relational urban politics. Current conceptualizations of the politics of urbanized media however tend to fall into one of two registers: conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; or the silent politics media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, over-estimating the powers of ‘media’ within urban living. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media- in-practices provides a basis for more nuanced conceptualizations of the powers of the media- urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. An expanded view of media practices is required, one which emphasizes the coordination between organized fields of communication and everyday urbanized media practices.”

Bite Size Theory: Reason, Faith and Revolution

“One need not capitulate to a view of the world as a host of incommensurable rationalities to recognize that the criteria of what counts as correctness or well-foundedness in, say, anthropology are not the same as in art history.”

Terry Eagleton, 2009, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debates, Yale University Press.

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.