“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“It is not an accident or a limitation or a prejudice that we cannot care equally about all the suffering in the world: it is a condition of our existence and our sanity.”
Bernard Williams, 2006, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton University Press.
“Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not”.
Mao Tse Tung, 1966, On Contradiction.
“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.
“Symbolically, future generations have replaced the proletariat in the collective imaginary as the focal point of public concern”.
Pierre Rosanvallon, 2013, The Society of Equals, Harvard University Press.
“I argue both directly and implicitly that it was the confrontation with the explosion of the art world and its discourses – as well as events on the street and the barricades – that released a generation of philosophers from the ivory tower of the École Normale Supérieure and that their engagement with contemporary art played a crucial role in formulating the new postmodern mindset”.
Sarah Wilson, 2010, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, Yale University Press.
“It is no small statement to affirm that the richness of this controversy makes ostensible not the insurmountable divergence of the continental and analytic traditions, but rather the wealth and diversity of the discussions of intentionality in the twentieth century”.
Raoul Moati, 2014, Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language, Columbia University Press.
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