A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... the structural elimination of practical problems from a depoliticized realm must become unbearable.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The amount of social wealth produced by an industrially advanced capitalism and the technical and organizational condition sunder which this wealth is produced make it ever more difficult to link status assignment in an even subjectively convincing manner to the mechanism for the evaluation of individual achievement.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

For the present, the only protest potential that gravitates toward the new conflict zone owing to identifiable interests is arising among certain groups of university, college, and high school students.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

A new conflict zone, in place of the virtualized class antagonism and apart from the disparity conflicts at the margins of the system, can only emerge where advanced capitalist society has to immunize itself, by depoliticizing the masses of the population, against the questioning of its technocratic background ideology: in the public sphere administered through the mass media.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

From the very beginning the pattern of human socio-cultural development has been determined by a growing power of technical control over the external conditions of existence on the one hand, and a more or less passive adaptation of the institutional framework to the expanded subsystems of purposive-rational action on the other.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... mass loyalty today is created only with the aid of rewards for privatized needs.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The needs with the greatest conflict potential are those on the periphery of the area of state intervention.  They are far from the central conflict being kept in a state of latency and therefore they are not seen as having priority among dangers to be warded off.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

State-regulated capitalism, which emerged from a reaction against the dangers to the system produced by open class antagonism, suspends class conflict.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... public discussions could render problematic the framework within which the tasks of government action present themselves as technical ones.  Therefore the new politics of state interventionism requires a depoliticization of the mass of the population.  To the extent that practical questions are eliminated, the public realm also loses its political function.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

UPDATES 2011-12-22 - Special Holiday Edition

• I've been conditionally/provisionally accepted to the University of Edinburgh for an MSc in Philosophy.
• In case the essays were missed as they were put online, I've written a number of papers over the last few months, all available at http://public.kyle-brady.com/papers/
• A spreadsheet I created, based on official statistics from Texas' Death Row on Executions from 2009 through 2010, is really interesting - take a look (PDF).
• The research proposal, "Measuring the Efficacy of Identity-Bias in Self-Identified Jewish or Israeli Community," for my class on political science methodology is also available online, although it's worth noting that not only is it rather boring, it's also the last time I will be doing anything even remotely like this.  My career in the field is beyond statistics.
• A project I've been working on, Properly, Politically Educating the American Public:  Examining Great Thinkers and Theorists, has been completed - five author summaries and a theory essay of my own, sized around 25k words.  Although I may ultimately self-publish it through Amazon, I'm going to first talk to some traditional academic publishers.
• Happy Holidays from our new family!
• My recent reading list, in alphabetical order:
• papers:
• Adam Barbosa's "Do you have a permit for that?: Exposing the pseudo-public space and exploring alternative means of urban occupation" (2010)
• Neil Selwyn's "We think therefore we share: reading the thoughts of the digerati 2.0" (2009)
• Robert Tally, Jr.'s "Other Spaces Are Still Possible:  Marcuse, Theory, and 'The End of Utopia' Today" (2011)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The root ideology of just exchange, which Marx unmasked in theory, collapsed in practice. ... society and the state are no longer in the relationship that Marxian theory had defined as that of base and superstructure.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

Civilizations are established on the basis of a relatively developed technology and of division of labor in the social process of production, which make possibly a surplus product...

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

Only if men could communicate without compulsion and each could recognize himself in the other, could mankind possibly recognize nature as another subject: not, as idealism would have it, as its Other, but as a subject of which mankind itself is the Other.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

In the last analysis the process of translation between science and politics is related to public opinion. ... The enlightenment of a scientifically instrumented political will according to standards of rationally binding discussion can proceed only from the horizon of communicating citizens themselves and must lead back to it.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The reason that democratic choice takes the form of acclamation rather than public discussion is that choice applies only to those who occupy positions with decision-making power and not to the guidelines of future decisions themselves.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... the exercise of power domestically and its assertion against external enemies are no longer rationalized only through the mediation of administrative activity organized through the division of labor, regulated according to differentiated responsibilities, and linked to instituted norms.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... we must promote reforms for clear and publicly discussed goals, even and especially if they have consequences that are incompatible with the mode of production of the established system.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

Herbert Marcuse: Moving Beyond the Triumvirate of Art, Language, and Politics

Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist and activist of the 1960s and 1970s, was a member of the Frankfurt school, who believed that while Karl Marx’s analysis of modern capitalist, industrial societies was correct, they needed updating for the modern age. To this end, Marcuse was rather successful, alongside his contemporary and sometime-rival Jürgen Habermas (Habermas), but his weakness came in the same form as that of Marx: thin solutions to heavy problems that seem rather naive.

more... 

Find this full paper, and more, in my Bibliography.

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

Even if we remain conscious of the inevitable simplification involved in using ideal types, the image of the liberated generation is unsatisfying. ... The protest potential seems to emerge most prominently in subcultures in which privatized creeds (and thus the general form in which tradition asserts itself in bourgeois society) have been most permanently shaken.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The gentle social control exercised by the mass media makes use of the spectacles of an undermined private sphere in order to make political processes unrecognizable as such.  The depoliticized public realm is dominated by the imposed privatism of mass culture.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

Social welfare expenditures (such as education, health, transportation, housing, leisure, etc.) are neglected because, in relation to the sphere of private economic activity, the public-service sector in the institutional framework of advanced capitalism is not expanded to the extent necessary today.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... all signs point to the fact that the industrially developed societies - in the sphere of bureaucratized state socialism, no less than in that of organized capitalism - are unable to generate motivations adequate to providing effective aid for economic development oriented o the interests of the recipient [donor] nations.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... the bourgeois educational process, which has directed the young to individualization by means of the solitary reading of the printed word, is retiring into the background.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

Today motives of action are increasingly linked to generalized means for attaining random goals, and are exhausted in abstract endeavors to acquire income, leisure time, prestige, influence, etc. - and all this beneath the crust of a specific boredom.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

What is in question is not the system's productivity and efficiency but rather the way in which the system's achievements have taken on their own life and become independent of the needs of the people who live in it.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... the life of the individual is still determined by the ethic of competition, the pressure of status-seeking, and the values of possessive individualism and socially dispensed substitute-gratifications. ... the mode of life of an economy of poverty is preserved under conditions of a possibly economy of abundance.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

The educational process of the university of scholars was reserved for the few and was predominantly oriented to the requirements of research.  The university was supposed to educate and cultivate, but it did not train masses or experts.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... in the United States universities are among the most vulnerable institutions.  They can be put out of commission relatively easily through provocationism.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

There is no doubt that the high dropout rate and the extended duration of study are the result not of bad work attitudes or a poor selection of students, but primarily of catastrophic study conditions and an inadequate organization of university instruction.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

In countries which revolutionary nationalist groups, usually army officers, have come to power, students exercise a permanent political pressure.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

Governance and Public Duty - Balancing Pragmatism and Benevolence

Political leaders, both modern and of eras past, must, by necessity, take great care in which fashion they govern their people, whether they be President, King, or Elder. This is of great concern to such individuals due to the very nature of their position: entrusted, implicitly or explicitly, with the responsibility of managing the existential, security, and welfare concerns of their political entity, the state. Failing to properly satisfy the requirements of the position could lead to their removal from power. Therefore, the important question of how to properly weigh the leader’s impulses, interests, and intricacies inevitably arises. Over time, it seems a general consensus has developed, visible in the contrasting characteristics of regimes successful and not, that seeks to balance the leaders’ senses of public duty and selflessness with their personal agenda and selfishness. This consensus produced the maxim that pragmatic action is far better a course than ceaselessly pursuing naive, idealistic ideologies.

more... 

Find this full paper, and more, in my Bibliography.

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

In a democracy that is not firmly established, we must expect masked states of emergency that are not interpreted and recognized by the authorities as violations of legality.  Often in such cases the only thing that works is the mechanism of self-defense, based on solidarity, undertaken by the whole institution under attack.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas, Ctd.

... discussion is fundamentally governed by the same rules of rationality within which scientific reflection takes place.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)

A Word from Juergen Habermas

... we do not need to accept the existence of an opposition between a university aiming at professional specialization and one aiming at external politicization.  ... we must not be satisfied with a depoliticized university.

from Jürgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (1968, 1969)