carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (06/17/85)
I'm going to post (in several articles) a list of books that most net.politics.theorizers will find of interest. Anyone who reads and understands a few of these will also understand the difference between intelligent thought about politics and society on the one hand and the twaddle-mongering and cliche-barfing that provide most of the entertainment in our political newsgroups on the other. No, I haven't read every page of these books, but in lieu of reviews I will post brief extracts from some of them by way of recommending them. The political classics are self-recommending. To mention a few: John Locke, *Second Essay on Civil Government*. Basic for understanding American politics. A. de Tocqueville, *Democracy in America*. Ditto. There is an abridged edition in paper. J. S. Mill, *On Liberty*. The New Testament of classical liberalism. Ayn Rand described this book as "pernicious," which should be a sufficient recommendation for anyone. Some more recent books: William Ryan, *Equality*. Demolishes the ideology of free-market individualism (i.e. of equality of opportunity or "fair play"). The following is what I consider to be a brief extract from the book: _________ [Karl] Mannheim's definition of ideology thus has four components: it is (1) a set of ideas or beliefs (2) that have an "unconscious" basis, (3) that are distorted by the interests of a particular group, and (4) that serve the interests of that group in maintaining the status quo.... ...we can readily infer the dominant themes that make up the basic Fair Play ideology. The first is the extreme emphasis on the primacy of the individual.... ....The Fair Player views human life as -- almost exclusively -- the behavior of discrete individuals seeking their own individual ends and believes that ideally, a good society leaves the individual as unfettered as possible in this search. Collectivities, racial or ethnic or any other kinds of groupings, are seen as being, in a sense, less "real" than the individual and as having less legitimate a place in discourse about human affairs.... A second principle that emerges quite vividly is that individuals differ significantly from one another, that some are better than or superior to others and can be identified as such.... It can be seen, then, that to Fair Players it ranks as an obvious truth that what life "really is," is the working out of these individual differences; they furthermore take for granted that the individuals who demonstrate superior competence will occupy the preeminent positions in society and receive the most rewards.... The third [principle] has to do with the SOURCE of these differences....The emphasis falls on differences in qualities of mind, motivation, character, and the like -- differences that may be thought of as being somehow "inside" the person and that, even if acquired rather than innate, have been internalized so that the individual, so to speak, carries them around with him.... These three assumptions constitute the core of the Fair Play belief system. When he turns his mind to matters of human behavior, the Fair Player focuses on the nature and the working out of INTERNAL, INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES.... We have three dimensions that provide at least a partial framework for identifying an ideological position or belief system: -- individual versus collective -- different versus similar -- internal versus external ...The ideas that some persons are worth more than others because they can perform certain tasks and functions better than others can and that there should be as little interference as possible with the individual's seeking and attaining various forms of property form the bases of the two key explanations of, and moral justifications for, our present system of inequality. These ideas would be neither rational nor ethical if they did not rest on the three basic assumptions I have been discussing.... This completes the Fair Play ideology. Rewards are based on INDIVIDUAL merit; individuals DIFFER in merit; merit is a complex of worthy INTERNAL characteristics. Justice is served, according to this paradigm, when these internal individual differences correspond to the individual rewards received....Only the morally and socially valued internal characteristics by which we differentiate individuals justify the ultimate inequalities of condition that those individuals experience.... This...is the basis of [the Fair Player's] moral and pragmatic objections to the vision of Fair Shares....I will try to show how these objections are, in fact, based on assumptions of internal individual differences and how, furthermore, the real world shows those assumptions to be false and the consequent objections to Fair Shares to be groundless. [In a later chapter:] Our schools, then, are not the great equalizers they are made out to be....They are, in fact, major social institutions that serve at once to sustain and cement inequality and to prepare a relatively docile work force for various levels in the hierarchy of labor....Above all, schools are ideological instruments, institutions for teaching by endless example and repetition that individual human beings are all different and, in particular, that the major difference is that some are superior and others inferior, as a consequence of their different internal qualities. Schools are places where competition by individuals striving to defeat one another is exalted, where cooperation by groups to help one another is condemned, and where reading and writing and arithmetic are merely the tools of the moment by which we can be taught to play out the great American game of survival of the fittest. __________ I'll list some more books later when I get around to it. Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes