CAPITALISTIC NIHILISM
The Collapse of Class: Marxist Socialism and Capitalist Nihilism
1. The neo-dialectic paradigm of narrative and textual predeconstructionist theory
"Society is part of the futility of reality," says Derrida. An abundance of de-appropriations concerning textual predeconstructionist theory exist.
The primary theme of the works of Burroughs is a mythopoetical reality. Foucault suggests the use of Marxist socialism to deconstruct sexism.
It could be said that the characteristic theme of Cameron's essay on capitalist nihilism is the common ground between sexual identity and culture. Therefore, the main theme of Hubbard's analysis of Marxist socialism is the role of the reader as artist.
The premise of textual pre-deconstructivist theory suggests that art serves to oppress minorities, but only if the modern paradigm of reality is valid; if that is not the case, Debord's model of textual predeconstructivist theory is one of "Lacanist obscurity", and hence fundamentally elitist. In Queer, Burroughs denies capitalist nihilism; in Junky Burroughs deconstructs textual libertarianism. Therefore, if Marxist socialism holds, we have to choose between capitalist nihilism and textual predeconstructivist theory.
Lyotard uses the term 'postsemiotic dialectic theory' to denote a self-sufficient paradox. The subject is contextualised into that which includes truth as a whole.
Several theories concerning not, in fact, discourse, but subdiscourse may be discovered. In a sense, Foucault suggests the use of Marxist socialism to challenge hierarchy.
The Collapse of Class: Marxist Socialism and Capitalist Nihilism
First Things
Capitalism and the Suicide of Culture
Not long before he died, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin sombrely summed up his, and our, age: "I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western History. What made it so horrific is politics or more precisely the secular religions of National Socialism (the term national socialism was coined by French intellectual Maurice Barrès. The term characterizes the rejection of pluralism(multiculturalism), individualism, materialism (in philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena, including consciousness are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance) and globalism. Globalism can have at least two different and opposing meanings. One meaning is the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations. Another is viewing the entire world as a proper sphere for one nation to project political influence. Political scientist Joseph Nye, co-founder of the international relations theory of neoliberalism, argues that globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances; while globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. Globalism may be contrasted with individualism, localism, nationalism, regionalism or internationalism) and Communism that violently sought to transfigure the bourgeois economic and political condition of modern man ((A member of the bourgeoisie is a bourgeois or capitalist (plural: bourgeois; capitalists.)
Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class that owns the means of production in a capitalist society. Marxists view the bourgeoisie as emerging from the wealthy urban classes in pre- and early capitalist societies.)). The term bourgeoisie has been widely used as an approximate equivalent of upper class under capitalism. The word also evolved to mean merchants and traders, and until the 19th century was mostly synonymous with the middle class (persons in the broad socioeconomic spectrum “between” nobility and peasants or proletarians).
Marxism defines the bourgeoisie as the social class that owns the means of production in a capitalist society. As such, the core of the modern bourgeoisie is industrial bourgeoisie, which obtains income by hiring workers to put in motion their capital, which is to say, their means of production - machines, tools, raw material, etc. Besides that, other bourgeois sectors also exist, notably the commercial bourgeoisie, which earns income from commercial activities such as the buying and selling of commodities, wares and services.
In medieval times, the bourgeois was typically a self-employed proprietor, small employer, entrepreneur, banker or merchant. In industrial capitalism, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie becomes the ruling class - which means it also owns the bulk of the means of production (land, factories, offices, capital, resources - though in some countries land ownership would still be a monopoly of a different class, landed oligarchy) and controls the means of coercion (national armed forces, police, prison systems, court systems).
Ownership of the means of production enables it to employ and exploit the work of a large mass of wage workers (the working class), who have no other means of livelihood than to sell their labour to property owners; while control over the means of coercion allows intervention during challenges from below. Marx distinguished between "functioning capitalists" actually managing enterprises, and others merely earning property rents or interest-income from financial assets or real estate (renters).
Marxism sees the proletariat (wage laborers) and bourgeoisie as directly waging an ongoing class struggle, in that capitalists exploit workers and workers try to resist exploitation. This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who own no means of production of their own, must seek employment in order to make a living. They get hired by a capitalist and work for him, producing some sort of goods or services. These goods or services then become the property of the capitalist, who sells them and gets a certain amount of money in exchange. Part of this money is used to pay workers' wages, another part is used to pay production costs, and a third part is kept by the capitalist in the form of profit (or surplus value in Marxist terms). Thus the capitalist can earn money by selling the surplus (profit) from the work of his employees without actually doing any work, or in excess of his own work. Marxists argue that new wealth is created through work; therefore, if someone gains wealth that he did not work for, then someone else works and does not receive the full wealth created by his work. In other words, that "someone else" is exploited. In this way, the capitalist might turn a large profit by exploiting workers.
In the late Middle Ages, as cities were emerging, artisans and tradesmen began to emerge as both a physical and economic force. They formed guilds, associations and received charters for companies to conduct business and promote their own interests. These were the early bourgeoisie. In the late Middle Ages (the 14th and 15th centuries), they were the highest guildsmen and artisans, as evidenced in their ability to pay the fines for breaking sumptuary laws, and by paying to be called citizens of the city in which they lived. In fact the King of France granted nobility to all of the bourgeoisie of Paris in the late fourteenth century. They eventually allied with the kings in centralizing power and uprooting feudal barriers against trade.
In the 17th and 18th century, the bourgeois supported the English revolution, American revolution and French revolution in overthrowing the laws and privileges of feudal order. These changes in property law cleared the way for the rapid expansion of commerce and the establishment of capitalist societies. With the expansion of commerce, trade, and the market economy, the bourgeoisie grew in size, influence, and power. In many countries, the aristocracy either transformed into essentially bourgeoisie rentiers, or found itself overthrown by a bourgeois revolution.
The bourgeoisie was never without critics. It was first accused of narrow-mindedness, materialism, hypocrisy, and lack of culture, among other things, by persons such as the playwright Truldière and the novelist Flaubert, who denounced its supposed banality and mercenary aspirations. The earliest recorded pejorative uses of the term "bourgeois" are associated with aristocratic contempt for the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. Successful embourgeoisement typically meant being able to retire and live on invested income.
The secular religions are now gone, (notwithstanding the information below) leaving behind only loss and ruin. Communism, as an ongoing political experiment, expired (dormant maybe but not expired) with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; (China, Korea?)National Socialism didn’t survive its crushing military defeat during World War II. As the twenty–first century dawns, it is difficult to imagine a serious ideological challenger to what communism and National Socialism wanted to destroy: prosaic bourgeois liberal democracy—what social theorist Michael Novak calls democratic capitalism.
See also :
• Anti-globalization movement
• Global warming
• Information age
• Post-industrial society
• National interest
• New World Order (conspiracy theory)
• New world order (Bahá'í)
• New world order (politics)
• The Collapse of Globalism
• United Nations
The ideology generally supports the creation of a self-sufficient corporatist economy and a single-party state. Historian Robert Tombs sees this amalgamation exemplified in General Georges Ernest Boulanger, a general and politician popular among both royalists and the urban right. Sternhell cites boulangisme as being influential on fascism, an associated ideology, although not on Nazism) and Communism that violently sought to transfigure the bourgeois economic and political condition of modern man.
Current Communist Countries
• People's Republic of China - (Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó) (since October 1, 1949)[1]
• Cuba - Republic of Cuba (República de Cuba) (since January 1, 1959) [2]
• Laos - Lao People's Democratic Republic. (Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao) (since December 2, 1975)[citation needed]
• Vietnam - Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Cộng hòa Xã hội Chủ nghĩa Việt Nam) (officially in unified Vietnam since July 2, 1976, but in the north since 1954) [3]
Current Socialist Countries
• Bangladesh - People's Republic of Bangladesh (since 16 December 1971) (Gônoprojatontri Bangladesh) (see Constitution of Bangladesh)
• ROC - Republic of China (since 1928) (see Constitution of the Republic of China)
• Egypt - Arab Republic of Egypt (Jumhūriyyah Miṣr al-ʿArabiyyah) (since 11 September 1971) (see Constitution of Egypt)
• Guyana - Cooperative Republic of Guyana (see Constitution of Guyana)
• India - Republic of India (see Constitution of India)
• Libya - Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Al-Jamāhīriyyah al-ʿArabiyyah al-Lībiyyah aš-Šaʿbiyyah al-Ištirākiyyah al-ʿUẓmā) (since 1 September 1969)
• North Korea - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk) (since September 9, 1948) [4] (see: Constitution of North Korea). In 1992, all references to Marxism-Leninism were removed from the constitution and Juche became the official philosophy.
• Portugal - Portuguese Republic (since 1974) (see Constitution of Portugal)
• Sri Lanka Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (since 7 September 1978) (see
Constitution of Sri Lanka)
• Syria - Syrian Arab Republic (Al-Jumhūriyyah al-ʿArabiyyah as-Sūriyyah) (since 1973)
(see Constitution of Syria)
• Tanzania - United Republic of Tanzania (since 26 April 1964) Informal
• Bolivia - Plurinational State of Bolivia (Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia) (see Movement
for Socialism (Bolivia))
• Nicaragua - Republic of Nicaragua (República de Nicaragua) (see Sandinista)
• Venezuela - Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (República Bolivariana de Venezuela) (see Bolivarianism)
Former
• People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (Al-Jumhūrīyah al-Jazā’irīyah ad-Dīmuqrāṭīyah ash-Sha’bīyah) (15 September 1963 - 23 February 1989)
• Burkina Faso[citation needed]
• Republic of Cape Verde (República de Cabo Verde)[citation needed]
• Socialist Republic of Chile (República Socialista de Chile) (4 June - 13 September 1932)
• Republic of Ghana[citation needed]
• People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea (République populaire révolutionnaire de la
Guinée) (1958–1984)
• Bissau-Guinea[citation needed]
• Republic of Iraq (Al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʿĪrāqiyah) (14 July 1958 - 16 July 1979)
• State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael)[citation needed]
• Democratic Republic of Madagascar (Repoblika Demokratika Malagasy) (21 December
1975 - 19 August 1992)
• Republic of Mali (République du Mali) (6 December 1968 - 12 January 1992)
• Mexico (from 1929 - Dec. 1, 2000)
• Republic of Nicaragua (República de Nicaragua)
• Portuguese Republic (República Portuguesa) (1976–1989)
• Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe (República Democrática de São Tomé e
Príncipe)[citation needed]
• Republic of Senegal (République du Sénégal)[citation needed]
• Republic of Seychelles (Repiblik Sesel)[citation needed]
• Democratic Republic of Sudan (Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān ad-Dīmuqrāṭīyah) (1969–1985)
• Republic of Suriname (Republic Suriname)[citation needed]
• Tunisian Republic (Al-Jumhūriyyah at-Tūnisiyyah)[citation needed]
• Republic of Uganda
Former states
• United Arab Republic (Al-Jumhūrīyah al-‘Arabīyah al-Muttaḥidah) (1958–1961), now
Syrian Arab Republic and Egyptian Arab Republic
• People's Republic of Zanzibar (Jamhuri ya Watu wa Zanzibar) (1964), now part of
Tanzania
These are short-lived political entities that emerged during wars or revolutions (mostly in the aftermath of World War I) and declared themselves to be socialist under some interpretation of the term, but did not survive long enough to create a stable government or achieve international recognition.
• Alsace Soviet Republic (November 9–22, 1918)
• Asturian miners' strike of 1934 (de facto) (October 5–18, 1934)
• Azerbaijan People's Government (November 1945 - December 1946)
• Bavarian Soviet Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik) (April 6 - May 3, 1919)
• Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic (May - September 1919)
• Bukharan People's Soviet Republic (October 8, 1920 - February 17, 1925)
• Chinese Soviet Republic (Zhōnghuá Sūwéi'āi Gònghéguó) (November 7, 1931 -
October 1934)
• Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic (February 12 - May 1918)
• Estonian Workers' Commune (Eesti Töörahva Kommuun/Эстляндская Трудовая
Коммуна) (November 29, 1918 - June 5, 1919)
• Far Eastern Republic (Dalnevostochnaya Respublika) (April 6, 1920 - November 15, 1922)
• Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic (January 28 - April 29, 1918)
• Galician Soviet Socialist Republic (July 8 - September 21, 1920)
• German Socialist Republic (Räterepublik) (November 9, 1918 - ?)
• Hunan Soviet (1927)
• Hungarian Soviet Republic (Magyar Tanácsköztársaság) (March 21 - August 6, 1919)
• Khorazmian People's Soviet Republic (April 26, 1920 - October 20, 1923)
• Limerick Soviet (April 15–27, 1919)
• Lithuanian-Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Lietuvos-Baltarusijos Tarybinė
. Socialistinė Respublika) (February 27 - August 25, 1919)
• Republic of Mahabad (Komarî Mehabad) (January 22 - December 15, 1946)
• Mughan Soviet Republic (March - June 1919)
• Soviet Republic of Naissaar (December 1917 - February 26, 1918)
• Paris Commune (La Commune de Paris) (March 18 - May 28, 1871) (first socialist republic in history)
• Persian Socialist Soviet Republic (June 9, 1920 - September 1921)
• Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (Chính phủ Cách mạng lâm thời Cộng hoà miền Nam Việt Nam) (April 30, 1975 - June 2, 1976)
• Slovak Soviet Republic (Slovenská Republika Rád) (June 16 - July 7, 1919)
• Turkestan Socialist Federative Republic (April 30, 1918 - October 27, 1924)
• Democratic Republic of Yemen (May 21 - July 7, 1994)
Countries That House Active Communist Parties
Africa
Lesotho
Madagascar
Senegal
South Africa
Réunion
Sudan
Americas
Argentina (PCA • PCRA)
Bolivia
Brazil (PCdoB • PCB)
Canada (CPoC • MLPoC)
Chile (PCCh • PC(AP))
Colombia
Cuba
Ecuador
Mexico (PC • PPS • PPSM)
Panama (PPP • PC(ml)P)
Paraguay
Peru (PCP • PCdelP-PR)
Uruguay
United States
Venezuela
Asia[hide]
Bangladesh (CPB • WPB)
Burma
China
India (CPI • CPI (M) • CPI (Maoist) • SUCI(C))
Iran (CPIran • Tudeh Party)
Japan
Kazakhstan (CPK • CPPK)
Kyrgyzstan
North Korea
Laos
Nepal (CPN (UML) • UCPN (M))
Pakistan
Philippines
Sri Lanka
Tajikistan
Taiwan(CPRC)
Vietnam
Historical parties
Cambodia
Indonesia
Malaya
Taiwan
Thailand
Europe
Albania
Armenia
Austria (KPÖ • KI)
Azerbaijan
Belarus (KPB)
Belgium (Flanders • Wallonia)
Belgium (PvdA/PTB)
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Britain (CPB • NCPB • CPS)
Bulgaria
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark (DKP • KPiD)
Estonia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland (CPI • WPI)
Italy (PdCI • PRC)
Luxembourg
Malta
Moldova
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Russia (CPRF • RCWP-RPC)
San Marino
Serbia
Slovakia
Spain
Spain (Catalonia)
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Historical parties
Czechoslovakia
East Germany
Soviet Union
Yugoslavia
Middle East
Iraq
Israel
Jordan
Lebanon
Syria
Iran
Oceania
Australia (CPA • CPA(ML))
New Zealand (CPA • WPNZ)
Communism (history)
Marxism-Leninism
Democratic centralism
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevist s (Russian: (singular) Russian pronunciation derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903.
The Bolsheviks were the majority faction in a crucial vote, hence their name. They ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and founded the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks, founded by Vladimir Lenin, were by 1905 a mass organization consisting primarily of workers under a democratic internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism, who considered themselves the leaders of the revolutionary working class of Russia. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism. Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky commonly used the terms "Bolshevism" and "Bolshevist" after his exile from the Soviet Union to differentiate between what he saw as true Leninism and the regime within the state and the party which arose under Stalin.
History of communist states
Present communist states
Cuba
North Korea
Laos
Vietnam
Elected communist parties by country
Cyprus
Nepal
Formerly communist
Afghanistan
Albania
Angola
Benin
Bulgaria
Cambodia
Congo
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
East Germany
Ethiopia
Mongolia
Mozambique
Poland
Romania
Somalia
South Yemen
Soviet Union
Yugoslavia
Forms of government
List of government types
• Anarchy
• Aristocracy
• Communist state
• Confederation
• Corporatism
• Corporatocracy
• Consociationalism
• Demarchy
• Democracy
o Direct
o Representative
o Consensus
• Despotism
• Dictatorship
o Autocracy
o Military/Military junta
o Right-wing
o Authoritarianism
Totalitarianism
• Ethnic democracy
• Ethnocracy
• Fascism
• Federation
• Feudalism
• Gerontocracy
• Kritocracy/Kritarchy
• Logocracy
• Meritocracy
• Minarchism/Night Watchman
• Monarchy
o Absolute
o Constitutional/Limited
o Diarchy/Co-Kingship
o Elective
• Noocracy
• Ochlocracy/Mobocracy
• Oligarchy
• Panarchism
• Parliamentary
• Plutocracy
• Presidential
• Puppet state
• Republic
o Crowned
o Capitalist
o Constitutional
o Single Party
o Federal
o Parliamentary
Federal
• Socialist state
• Sociocracy
• Sultanism
• Supranational union
• Technocracy
• Thalassocracy
• Theocracy
o Islamic state
o Theo-democracy
• Timocracy
• Tribal
o Chiefdom
• Tyranny
• Unitary state
Despite the fall of the political messianisms, however, the future of democratic capitalism is by no means unclouded. Perhaps this is as it should be, since all things merely human are flawed. The hubris of the secular religions was to think that they had solved "the political problem." Properly understood, democratic capitalism makes no such claims. It has been a virtue of the richest current of liberal democratic thought, from James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville to Irving Kristol and Pierre Manent, to explore bourgeois society’s inherent limitations and failings without losing sight of its basic decency and relative justness. Three important recent books allow us to confirm the relevance of that anti–Utopian tradition and gain a better understanding of what troubles democratic capitalism today.
François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press) provides striking insights into the political tensions of democratic capitalism. While most nations have awakened to the economic merits of the free market, John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New Press) proclaims the post–Marxist era of the new global economy a human disaster. He’s mostly wrong, but enthusiasts of unleashed markets would be foolish simply to ignore the dissatisfaction's he gives voice to. And Francis Fukuyama’s ambitious The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (Free Press), which seeks to explain the social chaos that has plagued the economically advanced democracies for several decades, helps illumine—though not in a way the author intends—the biggest danger to democratic capitalism: the growing alliance between the free–market economy and a culture of moral libertinism. Politics, economics, culture: in each sphere, democratic capitalism faces deep challenges.
At the time of his death in 1997, François Furet was France’s foremost historian and the world’s preeminent authority on the French Revolution. Though once a Marxist himself, Furet broke with the Marxist view of the French Revolution—long dominant in French historiography—which saw it as an economically determined bourgeois warm–up for the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In the Marxian optic, 1789 was the inevitable result of a rising bourgeoisie overthrowing the ancien régime and the agricultural society tied to it. Furet rejected the notion of historical inevitability and gave human political actions a central explanatory role. In a Tocquevillian register of melancholic liberalism, he also claimed that the revolution released Utopian hopes for a humanity reconciled with itself and in control of its destiny that neither liberal democracy nor any other political regime, including socialism, could ever satisfactorily fulfill.
The Passing of an Illusion, which appeared in France in 1995 and quickly became a controversial best–seller across Europe, shifts the focus to the twentieth century and to the rise and decline of the Communist idea, the inheritor of those profound but—when directed into politics—destructive longings. Disabused, attentive to the complex interactions of "ideas, intentions, and circumstances" that give meaning to history, Furet’s final testament is written on the far side of the revolutionary passions of the epoch. It serves as a kind of warning about expecting too much from politics.
Communism’s seductive appeal, Furet argues, came in considerable part from coupling the inherently incompatible ideas of human volition and the science of history. The Russian Bolsheviks showed the true capacity of man’s revolutionary will, which, in the most backward nation of Europe, promised the achievement of human liberation first announced by the French Revolution. To this "cult of volition," Furet explains, "Lenin would add the certainties of science, drawn from Marx’s Capital." History has a predetermined outcome, and thanks to Marxist "science," we know exactly what it is, the revolutionaries claimed. Knowledge would transform Proletarian man into the Lord of Time, ushering in the classless society.
It was never clear how a science of historical inevitability could be reconciled with the allegedly Promethean will that forged the Russian Revolution, but no matter. Isaiah Berlin describes the emotional lure: "There is a curious human feeling that if the stars in their courses are fighting for you, so that your cause will triumph, then you should sacrifice yourself in order to shorten the process, to bring the birth pangs of the new order nearer." Will and science: "By combining these two supremely modern elixirs with their contempt for logic," Furet stringently notes, "the revolutionaries of 1917 had finally concocted a brew sufficiently potent to inebriate militants for generations to come."
However intoxicating communism’s blend of revolutionary will and pseudo–science, it inebriated as many as it did because it both grew out of and exploited a two–fold political weakness of the bourgeois regime. The first weakness: liberal democracy set loose an egalitarian spirit that it can never fully tame. The notion of the universality and equality of man, which liberal democracy claims as its foundation, easily becomes subject to egalitarian overbidding. Equality constantly finds itself undermined by the freedoms the liberal order secures. The liberty to pursue wealth, to seek to better one’s condition, to create, to strive for power or achievement—all these freedoms unceasingly generate inequality, since not all people are equally gifted, equally nurtured, equally hardworking, equally lucky. Equality works in democratic capitalist societies like an imaginary horizon, forever retreating as one approaches it.
Communism professed to fulfill the democratic promise of equality. Real liberty could only be the achievement of a more equal world, a world, that is, without the bourgeoisie. And if what the Communists derisively called the "formal" liberties of expression and political representation had to go in order to establish the true freedom of a classless society, well, so be it. Thus was set in motion, Furet ruefully observes, the "egalitarian apocalypse."
The second weakness is more complex, though its consequences are increasingly evident: liberal democracy’s moral indeterminacy. The "bourgeois city," as Furet terms it, is morally indeterminate because, basing itself on the sovereign individual, it constituted itself as a rebellion against, or at least a downplaying of, any extra human or ontological dimension that might provide moral direction to life. For all the inestimable benefits of the bourgeois city—its three–fold liberation, in Michael Novak’s formulation, from tyranny, from the oppression of conscience, and from the grinding material poverty of the premodern world—its deliverance from the past has come at a price.
As the "self" moves to the center of the bourgeois world, Furet suggests, existential questions—what is man? what is the meaning of life?—become difficult to answer. Communism, usurping the role of religion in checking the individualizing excesses of democratic modernity, falsely promised to resolve such pressing existential questions, to provide a political articulation—monstrously perverse, as it turned out—of human ends.
The two political weaknesses of the bourgeois order, Furet adds, have a psychological corollary: self–doubt and self–hatred. The bourgeois man finds himself unsettled by a guilty conscience and spiritual dissatisfaction. "Self–doubt," Furet writes, "has led to a characteristic of modern democracy probably unique in universal history, the infinite capacity to produce offspring who detest the social and political regime into which they were born—hating the very air they breathe, though they cannot survive without it and have known no other." Hatred of the bourgeoisie, on the right and the left, is a tale as old as bourgeois modernity itself, of course, but it is jarring to realize how much ire has come not from aristocratic revenants or fiery proles, but from the cerebral sons of bourgeois fathers. Historian Perry Anderson points out that most of the leading Marxist thinkers originally came from bourgeois money: Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Herbert Marcuse, even Marx himself—all had fathers who were bankers, bureaucrats, lawyers, manufacturers, or merchants.
The end of World War I—a bourgeois war motivated by bourgeois concerns and supported by the bourgeois class—left middle–class Europe exhausted. Into the breach stepped the Soviet Union, the antibourgeois society with all the answers. In the interwar years, the liberal democratic societies seemed powerless to control their fate while the Soviet Union’s "five year plans," constructing the socialist future, appeared the very model of human rationality. But as credible reports of purges, political terror, and starvation began to leak from Stalin’s totalitarian netherworld during the 1930s, doubts about the Communist system began to arise.
The chaotic aftermath of the war also spurred the rise of fascism, a second and rival critique of bourgeois modernity. Where communism embraced the universal ideals of 1789, fascism drew its revolutionary force from the nation and—with its darkest star, National Socialism—from racial ideology, making it what Furet calls the "pathology of the particular." Although professed mortal enemies, communism and fascism shared many affinities, including a loathing of the bourgeoisie, which is our concern here.
Despite the failures of communism and fascism, the political weaknesses of the bourgeois democracies—their susceptibility to egalitarian overbidding and their moral indeterminacy—are with us still. Nor are we free from hatred of the bourgeoisie; it remains virulent in both high and popular culture. The liberal democratic regime, Furet observes, by its very nature "creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flourish"—a need, his book persuasively shows, that will never be met. With the fall of communism, "The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept." "Here we are," Furet concludes, "condemned to live in the world as it is."
Is this strange antinomy of the human political condition—between the utopian impulse and prosaic reality—sustainable? Though communism and fascism have exited the stage of history, one should resist the temptation to conclude that the history of politics culminates in the bourgeois regime. New political monsters may yet arise from the unstable and ultimately dissatisfying bourgeois world. More likely, liberal democratic societies will continue their plunge into a generalized moral nihilism subversive of bourgeois order—a concern I will return to later. The task of political thought is to guard against these threats, whatever shape they might take, through what Furet terms "the sad analysis of reality."
If the political future of democratic capitalism remains uncertain, requiring both vigilance and reconciliation to this–worldly imperfections, what about its economic prospect? Though communism now rests in history’s dustbin, ant-capitalism is not without influential adherents, as evidenced by British political theorist John Gray. Gray is not of the traditional left. But having moved from Margaret Thatcher’s camp in the 1980s to become a fierce critic of Thatcher’s legacy during the 1990s, he is certainly no longer the free–market conservative he once was. His recent book False Dawn is a blistering assault on the global capitalism of competitive free markets, fast–moving entrepreneurs, and volatile stock exchanges.
Gray brusquely dismisses the assumption that global capitalism will spread wealth across the planet. Inverting Montesquieu’s dictum that "commerce . . . polishes and softens barbarian ways," Gray believes that capitalism is leading inexorably to a new late–modern barbarism. Indeed, Gray argues, the project of creating a world market is as utopian as Soviet communism—both are Enlightenment ideologies, he stresses, wedded to the cult of reason and blind to history—and threatens "to rival it in the suffering that it inflicts."
For Gray, the project for a world market is utopian because it seeks to transplant a U.S.–forged "unfettered" capitalism, characterized by flexible labour markets, low taxes, spirited competition, and relatively restrained welfare benefits, to cultures with radically different, "embedded" markets in which man’s desire to barter and trade is constrained. The transplant will never take, since unfettered markets are humanly unsatisfying; but global capitalism’s "gale of creative destruction"—Gray borrows the language, though not the sobriety, of economist Joseph Schumpeter—will erode social cohesion by destroying settled ways of life, ignite fundamentalist movements that will struggle to restore order by force, and lead rival powers to exploit natural resources ruthlessly until the earth is left cracked and barren. The world will face the "return of history," Gray solemnly warns, "with its familiar intractable conflicts, tragic choices, and ruined illusions."
Gray paints global capitalism in lurid colors. "Already it has resulted," he writes, "in over a hundred million peasants becoming migrant labourers’ in China, the exclusion from work and participation in society of tens of millions in the advanced societies, a condition of near–anarchy and rule by organized crime in parts of the post–Communist world, and further devastation of the environment." In the U.S., where the market is most free and its unyielding logic most visible, the technological innovation and cutthroat competition that creative destruction lets loose has "proletarianized" the middle classes by eliminating stable careers and suppressing income growth, undermined the family, bred resentment over fast–rising inequality, and pushed innumerable uprooted and alienated individuals into criminality. The dismal realities of the U.S. economy, he predicts, will soon consume the world. Supporting his contention, Gray interprets the crisis of Asian capitalism as a harbinger of a "fast developing crisis of global capitalism," a sign that global free markets have become ungovernable.
Gray sees no truly viable political response to global capitalism. He hopes for what I would call a "market pluralism," encouraging various ways of articulating markets within different cultural and political forms. But his hope burns dimly since he sees no world power that will put a brake on the market. The U.S., which has the power, is the global market’s chief sponsor. Socialism is dead, Gray acknowledges, and for good reason: "The legacy of socialist central planning has been ruinous." But Gray thinks that his preferred social democracy, too, has gone into "final retreat," unable to resist the capitalist storm. Global markets, obeying a "New Gresham’s Law" in which bad forms of capitalism drive out good, punish governments that borrow too much money or boost taxes to achieve full employment. A "race to the bottom" ensues, with governments stripping away social protections in order to remain economically competitive and firms relocating to the global backwater with the cheapest labour costs.
As for the neoconservative belief that markets can be tied to traditional morality, Gray is contemptuous. The free market, he says, by celebrating individual choice above all other goods, necessarily erodes traditional forms of life. Global capitalism will proceed without a humanly appealing economic and political alternative until it sets itself, and the world, aflame.
Most of False Dawn’s description of contemporary capitalism, it is easy to show, is wildly exaggerated. Gray overestimates the degree of the historical ascendancy of American–style capitalism and the destructive effects of economic globalization. Market pluralism is, in fact, a fairly accurate way of describing the global economy, and is likely to remain so. To the "unfettered" capitalism of the U.S.—itself a caricature, since the U.S. economy is regulated heavily—we can contrast Japanese capitalism, which, despite the turmoil that has roiled the Asian markets in the last year, still features long–term employment and tight relations between banks and other firms; the German social–market model, with generous welfare benefits, powerful trade unions, and high taxes; and the touted "Third Way" of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in England. One needn’t stake a claim on the merits of any particular capitalism to grasp the reality of market pluralism.
Each kind of capitalism entails unavoidable trade–offs. German worker protections, for example, come at a cost: negative job growth over the past five years and high unemployment. The U.S.’s freer market has led to booming job growth and low unemployment but greater disparities in wealth. Economic globalization, pace Gray, hasn’t made these difficult social choices irrelevant. It does, however, punish exceedingly foolish economic programs, like President François Mitterrand’s 1981 nationalization of large swaths of the French private sector, which sent $3 billion a day in capital flooding from the country until his government was forced to change course. We may be witnessing the "final retreat" of extreme forms of social democracy, though even that I doubt, since the pull of egalitarianism will always be powerful in bourgeois societies. But, contrary to Gray, more moderate versions remain viable, albeit at the cost of low job growth and high taxes. There is no wide–ranging "race to the bottom."
Only on two counts does Gray’s analysis deserve deeper scrutiny. First, there is capitalism’s tendency to erode stable careers. The U.S., where the project to establish the global market originated, is the best place, Gray feels, to measure the insecurity creative destruction brings with it. The rest of the world will soon feel it. "In their ever greater dependency on increasingly uncertain jobs," Gray contends, "the American middle classes resemble the classic proletariat of nineteenth–century Europe." Today, he holds, the prospect of a career is becoming obsolete.
That overstates the situation. Many people still have long–term, even lifetime, careers. The U.S. employment turnover rate has shifted in the direction of mobility, but more from individuals willingly changing jobs (or even careers) than from being fired or laid off. Nevertheless, beneath Gray’s inflammatory rhetoric lies a truth. For much of the post–World War II period, technological changes came relatively slowly. Industry in the developed world grew used to fixed ways of doing things. Now, as competition from an increasingly international economy liberates ever more creativity and technological innovation, the insecurity of employees will continue to grow as whole industries become redundant and are replaced with new industries, perhaps unimagined a short time before. How much call is there, in the year 2000, for vinyl record albums or typewriters? Who knows what new industries lay just beyond the horizon? The Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione puts it sharply: in the future we will have myriad "work opportunities" but fewer lifetime "jobs." Flexibility will be the key to prosperity, both nationally and individually.
Though we shouldn’t exaggerate its extent, this transformation, inseparable from global capitalism’s creative destruction, can lead to a social weakness comparable to democratic capitalism’s political weaknesses of moral indeterminacy and vulnerability before egalitarianism. Some people will have a hard time adapting to the more flexible work world. Not everyone, after all, is cut out to be one of Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe. A life of constant anxiety about one’s future is a diminished life. Gray is right about that much. Political thinkers need to think imaginatively about how to reduce such insecurity.
One option, I’m convinced, is a dead end: the agenda of the traditional social democratic left. Social democracy, at least in its extreme forms, massively swells the welfare state, makes government power omnipresent, and drains economic life of its vitality. Unfortunately, many on the left don’t see, perhaps can’t see, what neoconservative social theorist Irving Kristol calls the "spreading spiritual malaise" of the welfare state. Writing in 1840, Tocqueville imagined a society consumed with such a malaise, in which government, compassionate toward its subjects, provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. . . . It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with government as its shepherd.
Tocqueville’s nightmare of tutelary despotism, a world without risk or human excellence, is the result toward which a certain kind of social democracy tends. It solves the problem of insecurity at the cost of restricting initiative.
More promising are the recommendations of Michael Novak in his 1996 book Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life. First, Novak argues, policymakers should move to establish personal ownership of benefit packages (especially health care benefits, which companies carry only by historical accident) that can move from job to job with a worker should he be displaced by creative destruction or choose a new career path. Second, as a way of combating labour’s decline in an era of flexible economies, Novak proposes that visionary unions reconstitute themselves as independent business corporations, supplying trained workers, as needed, to other firms. Neither of these suggestions would eliminate insecurity, but they would be pragmatic, non-utopian ways of lessening the anxiety an open society causes while preserving its opportunity–creating dynamism.
A more flexible economy also will require new habits, and new ways of teaching them. Buttiglione has made this point repeatedly: "People must learn to learn, but not learn just technical knowledge, because this changes easily." Instead, Buttiglione argues, individuals must be willing and able to adapt. If once one knew how to make vinyl albums, one must learn today how to operate the machines that make compact discs; tomorrow, one will probably have to learn to do something else as technology continues to evolve. Europe’s stagnating welfare states have been, for decades now, more set on consuming wealth than creating it. Thinking primarily of them (though the lesson holds for all advanced economies), Buttiglione calls for an educational renewal that will again make work a central virtue in our democratic societies.
Responsible thought—Furet’s sad analysis of reality, not Gray’s phantasmagoria—also has, then, an essential role to play in the economic realm. It must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the plurality of market models. And it must seek to temper the disadvantages of each. The market, we need to remember, is an instrument (a point Gray does grasp) and we can always try to make it more effective in securing human flourishing. It can be viewed as an Enlightenment ideology comparable to communism—a secular religion, in effect—only if profit becomes a society’s regnant deity. I don’t think things are that bad yet, but democratic capitalism’s economics, like its politics, are imperfect, far from utopian shores.
In the economic life of democratic capitalism, too, we need vigilance and reconciliation to the flawed and often tragic nature of the human world. This is as true as it has ever been in the age of global capitalism, which promises to make us at once more prosperous and more anxious, and constantly beckons the spectre of tutelary despotism as an answer to our fears.
Gray makes another argument, an old argument that has always shadowed bourgeois society. The free market, he claims, is incompatible with traditional forms of life and leads to a culture of anomic individualism, family disintegration, and social upheaval. Agreeing with Gray, at least in part, is Francis Fukuyama, author of the justly famous The End of History and the Last Man, which argued, wrongly but well, that man’s political history had reached its terminus in bourgeois liberal democracy.
In his most recent book, The Great Disruption, Fukuyama blames the social chaos of the democratic world of the past thirty–five years—spiralling crime, rising divorce, tragically high abortion and illegitimacy rates, and worsening levels of trust and citizenship—on the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, a process that began during the 1960s. "Was it just by accident," Fukuyama rhetorically asks, "that these negative social trends, which together reflected weakening social bonds and common values holding people together in Western societies, occurred just as economies in those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era?" Fukuyama’s answer: no. The Great Disruption is the poisonous fruit of the economic trends of the past three decades.
What was it, though, about the postindustrial economy that led to such dire consequences? The first key for Fukuyama is the transformation it wrought in the nature of work. In the industrial era, most work was labour intensive. Men were more suited to it than women, simply because of their greater physical strength. But the postindustrial economy, Fukuyama explains, "substitute’s information for material product." In an information economy, instead of the muscular assembly–line auto worker getting big rewards, it’s the brainy programmer designing the car’s computer system who draws the sizable salary.
Such far–reaching change in the nature of work opened the way for women to enter the workforce in large numbers. Women leaving home to compete for jobs put unprecedented pressures on the family by, among other things, diminishing the father’s traditional role as breadwinner. The decline of the family, Fukuyama notes correlates with many of the social pathologies, including crime, that have afflicted the economically advanced Western societies since the sixties. Intensifying the strain on the family, he continues, was a technological invention of the post industrial era: the Pill. The Pill encouraged the "liberation" of women from the constraints of the hearth, Fukuyama stresses. But it also had an effect on men’s behaviour by altering their attitude toward the risks of sex. It helped turn them into cads by separating sex from obligations toward child rearing. Men’s ties to family life, already fragile since they have fewer natural bonds toward their offspring than do women, became precarious.
The post industrial economy drives the Great Disruption in a second way, Fukuyama suggests, and here his argument exactly mirrors that of Gray and sociologist Daniel Bell, who famously wrote in the 1970s of the "cultural contradictions of capitalism." The breathtaking innovation of the information economy, and the kaleidoscope of choices it allows, "spills over" into moral and social norms, corroding authority and weakening the bonds of family, neighborhood, and nation. When I can choose from one hundred different brands of breakfast cereal, Fukuyama seems to be claiming, I will want one hundred different sexual partners, too, and be angry if my priest or my mother frowns on my desire. We begin to choose our moralities, our pasts, and even our sexualities in the post industrial bazaar. Faced with such individualizing forces, small wonder that the moral order has been badly damaged.
All this makes the end of history sound very unsatisfying. Not to worry, Fukuyama reassures us, for the Great Reconstruction has begun. Man can’t live in the rubble of anarchy for long. His social nature and his self–interested reason lead him to "reform" social life, to invent new moral rules for getting along with his fellow man. Along with nature and reason, the ongoing turbulence of the post-industrial economy itself encourages the re-emergence of social norms—or "social capital," as Fukuyama calls it. "A modern, high–tech society," he writes, "cannot get along without [social norms] and will face considerable incentives to produce them." We’re already seeing the signs of the new order, Fukuyama notes: safer streets as crime drops, falling illegitimacy and divorce rates, an increase in the level of neighbourly trust. Fukuyama draws on game theory and a formidable range of recent research in the life sciences, including evolutionary biology and primatology, to make his point, but the upshot is clear: the end of history marches on, with just a thirty–five–year cultural disruption to slow it down. If Gray is Cassandra, Fukuyama is Pangloss.
What should we think of Fukuyama on democratic capitalism’s recent history? The Great Disruption contains a wealth of data that will be mined for years to come. But Fukuyama’s argument is fundamentally flawed.
His explanation of the Great Disruption, first of all, is unsatisfactory. There is a stronger cultural component to moral breakdown in the West than Fukuyama concedes. If the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy undermined moral life throughout the Western democracies, as he claims, why didn’t the same change lead to disorder in Japan and South Korea? As Fukuyama admits, nothing comparable to the divorce and illegitimacy of the Western democracies exists in these Asian societies; crime rates in Japan have actually dropped over the period of the Great Disruption. Apparently, their thicker communal and familial cultures have staved off social disorder. But this would indicate, against the thrust of Fukuyama’s argument that culture moves with a strong degree of independence from economics. Moreover, the Pill didn’t drop out of the sky one day on unsuspecting bourgeois societies, but grew out of profound cultural and moral shifts—in particular the rise of feminism—that thus far has had less resonance in Asia.
Nor does Fukuyama sufficiently stress the role of law and policy in the West’s social woes. Would divorce have increased so dramatically had Western societies not liberalized divorce laws? Would crime have so ravaged America’s cities in the absence of laws coddling criminals? Would the number of abortions have skyrocketed had liberal regimes not legalized abortion? Of course not. Yet a post-industrial economy didn’t force these changes in law and policy, which occurred in varying degrees throughout the West over the past three decades. Rather, they too grew out of profound cultural and moral shifts—in particular the triumph in elite circles of a desiccated form of liberal thought—that thus far haven’t penetrated Asian societies to the same degree. In short, culture and politics seem to be the primary explanatory factors for the Great Disruption, not capitalist economics.
Culture and politics are the principal realms of man’s liberty and reason. Fukuyama’s refusal to grant them a major place in his analysis isn’t just the product of his quasi–Marxist economics; it follows from his reductive conception of human nature, which, despite his claims, is anything but Aristotelian. The new age sciences he employs are rigidly deterministic. Fukuyama protests that he’s no determinist, but I wonder if it’s possible to embrace these life sciences uncritically, as he does, and still leave a place for freedom. Evolutionary biology, for example, with its theory of the "selfish gene," interprets a mother’s sacrifice for her child not as a free act of love but as a quest to propagate her genetic heritage. This interpretation is unttestable, a matter of belief. Yet if it’s a matter of belief, why believe it? Doing so renders our moral vocabulary vacant and makes the human world literally senseless. If his notion of freedom is thin, Fukuyama’s understanding of human reason isn’t any thicker: his is not the proud reason of Kant, let alone Aristotle, but is purely instrumental. It teaches us the most efficient way to get from a to b, and that’s about it.
Given Fukuyama’s reliance on untenable economic and scientific reductionisms and his pinched view of reason, I find his optimism about moral renewal in liberal democratic societies no more convincing than his account of its breakdown. Man’s nature limits his freedom, but within those limits experiments in living can take him far from recognizably good ways of life, where his faculties can flourish, toward ways of life that diminish his spirit and lead, in the long run, to social breakdown. Who can say how long a society can continue running—and in some ways improving—while its spiritual life declines? Furthermore, why should we expect the same post-industrial economy Fukuyama thinks led to the Great Disruption to help heal it? Simply because an economy "needs" something doesn’t mean human beings will supply it.
Fukuyama’s good news is also more ambiguous than it first appears. "If the rate of divorce has fallen," observes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, "the rate of cohabitation has almost doubled in the past decade alone, and couples living together without benefit of marriage can separate (and do so more frequently) without benefit of divorce." If the rate of out–of–wedlock births has decreased, the ratio of such births to all births has only levelled off, and done so at a high level. If abortions are fewer, in part it is due to the new respectability of unmarried motherhood. And so on.
As Himmelfarb testily puts it, "For almost every favourable statistic, an ornery conservative can cite an unfavourable one."
The democratic capitalist societies, then, still have a cultural problem. And here’s where things get tricky, because both Gray and Fukuyama brush up against the truth. When moral nihilism dominates the culture, as it does in Western societies—especially in the U.S.—free markets can radicalize it by shouting it, so to speak, from the rooftops. Not long ago, a television commercial for MasterCard featured pallid–faced kids who looked like junkies, with nose rings, tattoos, and the whole range of alienation’s disfiguring equipment. The message was simple: if you have money (or at least credit), who cares what your attitude toward life might be? And MasterCard is not alone: there’s Nike’s famous "Just Do It" ad campaign extolling release from constraints (which Fukuyama himself mentions), Calvin Klein’s kiddie–porn, and Time–Warner’s continuing depredations (the most recent being a rap song about killing New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani). In such cases, we witness the corporate world bottom–feeding for profit, and it’s disgusting.
The greatest threat to the future of democratic capitalism, I believe, lies in this growing association of capitalist power and moral libertinism. A few years ago, Buttiglione made a pregnant observation. "Libertinism," he said, "is in a certain sense more dangerous than Marxism, because it penetrates more deeply." Instead of crushing man’s reason and his passions, as did communism, moral libertinism turns man’s passions against the truth. Marxism, as we’ve seen, was a religious atheism, a secular religion that hubristically proposed to build utopia only to open the gates of Hell. Libertinism, Buttiglione maintains, is a "negative atheism"—it "corrupts societies and is unable to offer the values needed for a society to live." Not everyone can "just do it," or else society crumbles. In the long run, Buttiglione thinks libertine capitalism "is existentially unbearable." But in the short run, and that can last a long time, it coarsens the human world and intensifies the Great Disruption.
Gray and Fukuyama are right, then, to see a link between contemporary capitalism and nihilism, but they get things backward: nihilism is first imported into the market, not exported from it. Nihilism results, Buttiglione says, from the "suicide of culture," and here he means culture in the sense of Building, not as an anthropological term as I’ve been using it. Our elite spiritual enterprises (Buttiglione mentions philosophy and theology, and I would add art and literature) have become ever more corrupt. In their main variants, they no longer even bother to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, however plural and difficult to attain these ends might be. The suicide of culture sends its tenebrous signals throughout the human world; the market receives the signals, dumbs them down or brightens them up, and then seduces whomever it can. The bourgeois regime’s moral indeterminacy weakens its capacity to resist.
The connection between nihilism and capitalism is accidental and need not last. But the struggle against it requires, not reconciliation to this–worldly realities, as with democratic capitalism’s politics and economics, but something inspired: the rebirth of culture. Here should be directed the spiritual longings that Furet worried might again find their way into politics. We will need to paint again with the grace of Tintoretto; write with the humanity of Shakespeare; philosophize with the love of truth of Aristotle and Aquinas; and educate our best in the riches of our dual heritage of faith and reason. Our religious bodies should be at the forefront of this struggle, which is both moral and aesthetic. (Fukuyama laughs at the idea of a religious revival that might heal the Great Disruption, describing it as "a Western version of Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran on a jetliner." But this merely indicates his limited grasp of human possibilities.)
Politics, too, will have a crucial role, though not as a secular religion(?). Statesmanship can help set society’s moral and aesthetic tone, and shame the powers that have bargained with nihilism. And post liberal policies, like those New York City has successfully implemented in fighting crime, can chip away at the decisions that fed the Great Disruption.
These three important books, then, help illumine the democratic capitalist prospect. Here is what it looks like at the dawn of a new millennium: in politics, it finds itself haunted by moral indeterminacy and weak before egalitarian demands; in economics, troubled by the anxieties of the rapid change that creates wealth; and in culture, suffering from the suicide of the elevated pursuits that should protect man’s highest ends. Not pretty, until you realize the alternatives—some undreamed of political monster arising from bourgeois discontents, a spirit–sapping tutelary despotism, or a radicalization of libertine capitalism.
Working a slight change on an old truism: democratic capitalism is still the worst regime, except for all the others. Perhaps, if we’re both vigilant and lucky, the twenty–first century will not rival Berlin’s twentieth as "the most terrible in Western history."
The neo-dialectic paradigm of narrative and textual predeconstructivist theory?
"Society is part of the futility of reality," says Derrida. An abundance of de-appropriations concerning textual pre-deconstructivist theory exist.
The primary theme of the works of Burroughs is a mythopoetical reality. Foucault suggests the use of Marxist socialism to deconstruct sexism.
It could be said that the characteristic theme of Cameron's essay on capitalist nihilism is the common ground between sexual identity and culture. Therefore, the main theme of Hubbard's analysis of Marxist socialism is the role of the reader as artist.
The premise of textual pre-deconstructivist theory suggests that art serves to oppress minorities, but only if the modern paradigm of reality is valid; if that is not the case, Debord's model of textual predeconstructivist theory is one of "Lacanist obscurity", and hence fundamentally elitist. In Queer, Burroughs denies capitalist nihilism; in Junky Burroughs deconstructs textual libertarianism. Therefore, if Marxist socialism holds, we have to choose between capitalist nihilism and textual predeconstructivist theory.
Lyotard uses the term 'post semiotic dialectic theory' to denote a self-sufficient paradox. The subject is contextualised into a that includes truth as a whole.
Several theories concerning not, in fact, discourse, but subdiscourse may be discovered. In a sense, Foucault suggests the use of Marxist socialism to challenge hierarchy.
Deconstructing Marx: Socialism in the works of Rushdie.
Deconstruction (or deconstructionism) is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded - supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, literary analysis, or other fields.
Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and terms deconstructive reading "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
Derrida introduces the term deconstruction to describe the manner that understanding language as “writing”.
Sources of deconstruction
Deconstruction emerged from the influence upon Derrida of several thinkers, including:
• Edmund Husserl. The greatest focus of Derrida's early work was on Husserl, from his dissertation (eventually published as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy), to his "Introduction" to Husserl's "Essay on the Origin of Geometry," to his first published paper, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" (in Writing and Difference), and lastly to his important early work, Speech and Phenomena.
• Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's thought was a crucial influence on Derrida, and he conducted numerous readings of Heidegger, including the important early essay, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time" (in Margins of Philosophy), to his study of Heidegger and Nazism entitled Of Spirit, to a series of papers entitled "Geschlecht."
• Sigmund Freud. Derrida has written extensively on Freud, beginning with the paper, "Freud and the Scene of Writing" (in Writing and Difference), and a long reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his book, The Post Card. Jacques Lacan has also been read by Derrida, although the two writers to some extent avoided commenting on each others' work.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's singular philosophical approach was an important forerunner of deconstruction, and Derrida devoted attention to his texts in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles and The Ear of the Other.
• André Leroi-Gourhan. Of Grammatology makes clear the importance of Leroi-Gourhan for the formulation of deconstruction and especially of the concept of différance, relating this to the history of the evolution of systems for coding difference, from DNA to electronic data storage.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Derrida's deconstruction in Of Grammatology of Saussure's structural linguistics was critical to his formulation of deconstruction, and his insertion of linguistic concerns into the heart of philosophy.
Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life.
For those with a more phenomenological bent the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a problematic and misleading avenue of interrogation, and the "depth" and originality of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured in order to be the genesis of something?[
In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge.( Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change.
It has five main concerns:
• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)
• to develop general theories about how and why language changes
• to describe the history of speech communities
• to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.
Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name "deconstruction," on the grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterise his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.
Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation, even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised.
Scots language
History
Early Scots
Middle Scots
Modern Scots
Dialects
Insular Scots
Northern Scots
Central Scots
Southern Scots
Ulster Scots
Origins
Speakers of Northumbrian Old English settled in south eastern Scotland in the 7th century, at which time Celtic Brythonic was spoken in the south of Scotland to a little way north of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, and Pictish was spoken further north: almost nothing is known today about the Pictish language. At the same time Gaelic speakers began to spread from the Western Coast of Scotland north of the Clyde into the east. Over the next five hundred years with the founding of Scotland and spread of Christianity across the north of Britain by the Columban Church the Gaelic language slowly moved eastwards and southwards across the lowlands. When Northumbrian la
nds were incorporated into Scotland in the 11th century Gaelic became the prestige language there and had some influence, but the south east remained largely English speaking. In the far north, Viking incursions brought Old Norse speakers into Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.
Scholars of the language generally use the following chronology[1]:
• (Northumbrian) Old English to 1100
• Pre-literary Scots to 1375
• Early Scots to 1450
• Middle Scots to 1700
• Modern Scots 1700 onwards
The nature of early forms of the language are obscure due to Viking plundering and destruction, Edward I's removal of the national records and their subsequent loss, the destruction of the monasteries in border warfare, and vandalism during the Reformation. It is difficult to assess whether Scots descends largely from the Old English of Lothian or the Anglo-Danish of Yorkshire introduced some four hundred years later, which would explain the Norse elements in Early Scots which are lacking in Northumbrian Old English.[2] Current insights into pre-literary Scots stem largely from place-names, archaeology and a few words in Latin documents.
Early Scots
Main article: Early Scots
Northumbrian Old English had been established in south-eastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the 7th century. It remained largely confined to this area until the 13th century, continuing in common use while Gaelic was the court language. English then spread further into Scotland via the burgh.
After the 12th century early northern Middle English began to spread north and eastwards. It was from this dialect that Early Scots, known to its speakers as "English" (Inglis), began to develop, which is why in the late 12th century Adam of Dryburgh described his locality as "in the land of the English in the Kingdom of the Scots and why the early 13th century author of de Situ Albanie thought that the Firth of Forth "divides the kingdoms of the Scots and of the English".
Most of the evidence suggests that English spread further into Scotland via the burgh, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. Incoming burghers were mainly English (especially from Northumbria, and the Earldom of Huntingdon), Flemish and French. Although the military aristocracy employed French and Gaelic, these small urban communities appear to have been using English as something more than a lingua franca by the end of the 13th century. As a consequence of the outcome of the Wars of Independence though, the English-speaking people of Lothian who lived under the King of Scots had to accept Scottish identity. The growth in prestige of English in the 14th century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland, made English the prestige language of most of eastern Scotland.
Divergence from Northumbrian Middle English was influenced by the Norse of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English-speaking immigrants from the North and Midlands of England during the 12th and 13th centuries, Dutch and Middle Low German through trade and immigration from the low countries, and Romance via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, Norman and later Parisian French due to the Auld Alliance. Some loan words resulting from contact with Scottish Gaelic —often for geographical features such as loch or strath, but there are others such as bog from bog (moist or damp); twig (catch on) from tuig (understand), galore (lots of) from gu leòr (plenty), boose or buss from bus (mouth) also entered the language. Eventually the royal court and barons all spoke Inglis. Further spreading of the language eventually led to Gaelic being confined mostly to the highlands and islands by the end of the Middle Ages, although some lowland areas, notably in Galloway and Carrick, retained the language until the 17th, perhaps even until the 18th, century. From the late 14th century even Latin was replaced by Inglis as the language of officialdom and literature.
Middle Scots
Main article: Middle Scots
By the early 16th century what was then called Inglis had become the language of government, and its speakers started to refer to it as Scottis and to Scottish Gaelic, which had previously been titled Scottis, as Erse (Irish). The first known instance of this was by an unknown man in 1494. In 1559 William Nudrye was granted a monopoly by the court to produce school textbooks, two of which were Ane Schort Introduction: Elementary Digestit into Sevin Breve Tables for the Commodius Expeditioun of Thame That are Desirous to Read and Write the Scottis Toung and Ane Intructioun for Bairnis to be Learnit in Scottis and Latin. In 1560 an English herald spoke to Mary of Guise and her councillors, at first they talked in the "Scottish tongue" but because he could not understand they continued in French.
By this time Scots had diverged significantly from its sister south of the border. By the standards of the time it had a 'standardised' orthography and had become the vehicle for an extensive and diverse national literature. From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster some 200,000 Scots settled in the north of Ireland taking what were to become Ulster Scots dialects with them. From the middle of the 16th century Scots began to become increasingly Anglicized. With the reformation came Bibles in English. By the late 16th century almost all writing was composed in a mixture of Scots and English spellings, the English forms slowly becoming more common so that by the end of the 17th century Scots spellings had almost disappeared completely. This process took slightly longer in unpublished vernacular literature and official records. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the Scots speaking gentry had increasing contact with English speakers and began to remodel their speech on that of their English peers. It was this remodeling that eventually led to the formation of Scottish English.
Modern Scots
Main article: Modern Scots
In the 18th century 'polite society' now considered Scots as 'provincial and unrefined' and much of the gentry endeavored to rid itself of the former national tongue. This was not universally accepted by all educated Scots of the period and a new literary Scots came into being. Unlike Middle Scots, it was usually based on contemporary colloquial speech. Its orthography was generally an adaptation of the imported standard, though some orthographic features from Middle Scots continued to be used. This modern literary Scots was exemplified by Allan Ramsay and his followers, and their successors such as Robert Burns. Many writers and publishers found it advantageous to use English forms and copious apostrophes in order to secure a larger English readership unfamiliar with Scots. The pronunciation undoubtedly remained Scots as the rhymes reveal. Early in the 19th century the publication of Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language was accompanied by a renewed interest in Scots among the middle and upper classes. In this period the absence of an official standard or socially acceptable norm led to further dialect divergence.
Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge.[1] Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Constructivists claim that the concepts of science are mental constructs proposed in order to explain our sensory experience. Constructivism believes that there is no single valid methodology and there are other methodologies for social science: qualitative research.[2] It thus is opposed to positivism, which is a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience.
Overview
Constructivism has roots in philosophy, education and social constructivism. Constructivism criticizes objectivism, which embraces the belief that a human can come to know external reality (the reality that exists beyond one's own mind). Constructivism holds the opposite view, that the only reality we can know is that which is represented by human thought (assuming a disbelief or lack of faith in a superhuman God). Reality is independent of human thought, but meaning or knowledge is always a human construction.[3]
Constructionism and constructivism are often used interchangeably. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, as well as tables, chairs and atoms are socially constructed. Kant, Garns, and Marx were among the first to suggest such an ambitious expansion of the power of ideas to inform the material realities of people's lives.
The expression "Constructivist epistemology" was first used by Jean Piaget, 1967, with plural form in the famous article from the "Encyclopédie de la Pléiade" Logique et Connaissance scientifique or "Logic and Scientific knowledge", an important text for epistemology. He refers directly to the mathematician Brouwer and his radical constructivism.
Moreover, in 1967, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality, which has initiated social constructionism.
History
Constructivism has many roots:
• The thought of Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus (Everything flows, nothing stands still), Protagoras (Man is the measure of all things). Protagoras is clearly represented by Plato and hence the tradition as a relativist. The Pyrrhonist sceptics have also been so interpreted. (Although this is more contentious.)
• After the Renaissance and the enlightenment, with the phenomenology and the event, Kant gives a decisive contradiction to Cartesians’ epistemology that has grown since Descartes despite Giambattista Vico calls in "La scienza nuova" (the new science) in 1708 reminding that "the norm of the truth is to have made it".
• The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment's universalist tendencies involved an emphasis on the separate natures of races, species, sexes and types of human[citation needed].
• Gaston Bachelard, who is known for his physics psychoanalysis and the definition of an "epistemologic obstacle" that can disturb a changing of scientific paradigm as the one that occurred between classical mechanics and Einstein’s relativism, opens the teleological way with "The meditation on the object takes the form of the project". In the following famous saying, he insists that the ways in which questions are posed determines the trajectory of scientific movement, before summarizing "nothing is given, all is constructed" : "And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed.", Gaston Bachelard (La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934). While quantum mechanics is starting to grow, Gaston Bachelard makes a call for a new science in Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (The new scientific spirit).
• Paul Valéry, French poet (20th c.) reminds us of the importance of representations and action: "We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent", "My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more".
• This link with action, which could be called a "philosophy of action", was well represented by Spanish poet Antonio Machado: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
• Ludwik Fleck establishes scientific constructivism by introducing the notions of thought collective (Denkkollektiv), and thought style (Denkstil), through which the evolution of science is much more understandable, because the research objects can be described in terms of the assumptions (thought style) that are shared for practical but also inherently social reasons, or just because any thought collective tends to preserve itself. These notions have been drawn upon by Thomas Kuhn.
• Norbert Wiener gives another defense of teleology in 1943 "Behavior, intention and teleology" and is one of the creators of cybernetics.
• Jean Piaget, after the creation in 1955 of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, first uses the expression "constructivist epistemologies" (see above). According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing" (in An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical, 1990) and "the most prolific constructivist in our century" (in Aspects of Radical Constructivism, 1996).
• Herbert Simon called « The sciences of the artificial » these new sciences (cybernetics, cognitive sciences, decision and organisation sciences) that, because of the abstraction of their object (information, communication, decision), cannot match with the classical epistemology and its experimental method and refutability.
• Gregory Bateson and his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
• George Kelly (psychologist) and his book The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955).
• Heinz von Foerster, invited by Jean Piaget, presented "Objects: tokens for (Eigen-)behaviours" in 1976 in Geneva at a Genetic Epistemology Symposium, a text that would become a reference for constructivist epistemology.
• Paul Watzlawick, who supervised in 1984 the publication of Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? (Contributions to constructivism).
• Ernst von Glasersfeld, who has promoted since the end of the 70s radical constructivism (see below).
• Edgar Morin and his book La Méthode (1977–2004, six volumes).
• Mioara Mugur-Schächter who is also a quantum mechanics specialist.
• Jean-Louis Le Moigne for his encyclopedic work on constructivist epistemology and his
General Systems theory (see "Le Moigne's Defense of Constructivism" by Ernst von Glasersfeld).
Constructivism's concepts and ideas
The common thread among all forms of constructivism is that they do not focus on an ontological reality, but instead on a constructed reality. Indeed, a basic presupposition of constructivism is that Reality-As-It-Is-In-Itself (Ontological Reality) is utterly incoherent as a concept, since there is no way to verify how one has finally reached a definitive notion of Reality. Talk of verification in this connection is beside the point. According to constructivism, one must already have Reality in mind—that is, one must already know what Reality consists of—in order to confirm when one has at last "hit bottom." Richard Rorty has said that all claims to Realism can be reduced to intuition (Consequences of Pragmatism, chs. 9, 11). The Realist/Anti-Realist debate can be reduced, in the end, to a conflict of intuitions: "It seems to us that..." vs "Well, it seems to us that..." A realist would not view the argument in this way, and would say that one of these is misled, that one group perceives correctly, and the other perceives incorrectly. Strict constructivists will attest. that there is no way to confirm one way or another, since the goal of inquiry (Reality) must be assumed to be understood at the outset. Constructivism proposes new definitions for knowledge and truth that forms a new paradigm, based on inter-subjectivity instead of the classical objectivity and viability instead of truth. The constructivist point of view is pragmatic as Vico said: "the truth is to have made it".
In this paradigm, "sciences of the artificial" (see Herbert Simon) as cybernetics, automatics or decision theory, management and engineering sciences can justify their teaching and have a space in the academy as "real sciences".
Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Constructivists claim that the concepts of science are mental constructs proposed in order to explain our sensory experience. Constructivism believes that there is no single valid methodology and there are other methodologies for social science: qualitative research.[2] It thus is opposed to positivism, which is a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience.
Constructivism has roots in philosophy, education and social constructivism. Constructivism criticizes objectivism, which embraces the belief that a human can come to know external reality (the reality that exists beyond one's own mind). Constructivism holds the opposite view, that the only reality we can know is that which is represented by human thought (assuming a disbelief or lack of faith in a superhuman God). Reality is independent of human thought, but meaning or knowledge is always a human construction.[3]
Constructionism and constructivism are often used interchangeably. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, as well as tables, chairs and atoms are socially constructed. Kant, Garns, and Marx were among the first to suggest such an ambitious expansion of the power of ideas to inform the material realities of people's lives.
The expression "Constructivist epistemology" was first used by Jean Piaget, 1967, with plural form in the famous article from the "Encyclopédie de la Pléiade" Logique et Connaissance scientifique or "Logic and Scientific knowledge", an important text for epistemology. He refers directly to the mathematician Brouwer and his radical constructivism.
Moreover, in 1967, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality, which has initiated social constructionism.
(Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: "of being" (neuter participle of εἶναι: "to be") and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences) The common thread among all forms of constructivism is that they do not focus on an ontological reality, but instead on a constructed reality. Indeed, a basic presupposition of constructivism is that Reality-As-It-Is-In-Itself (Ontological Reality) is utterly incoherent as a concept, since there is no way to verify how one has finally reached a definitive notion of Reality. Talk of verification in this connection is beside the point. According to constructivism, one must already have Reality in mind—that is, one must already know what Reality consists of—in order to confirm when one has at last "hit bottom." Richard Rorty has said that all claims to Realism can be reduced to intuition (Consequences of Pragmatism, chs. 9, 11). The Realist/Anti-Realist debate can be reduced, in the end, to a conflict of intuitions: "It seems to us that..." vs "Well, it seems to us that..." A realist would not view the argument in this way, and would say that one of these is misled, that one group perceives correctly, and the other perceives incorrectly. Strict constructivists will attest. that there is no way to confirm one way or another, since the goal of inquiry (Reality) must be assumed to be understood at the outset. Constructivism proposes new definitions for knowledge and truth that forms a new paradigm, based on inter-subjectivity instead of the classical objectivity and viability instead of truth. The constructivist point of view is pragmatic as Vico said: "the truth is to have made it".[citation needed]
In this paradigm, "sciences of the artificial" (see Herbert Simon) as cybernetics, automatics or decision theory, management and engineering sciences can justify their teaching and have a space in the academy as "real sciences".
Constructivism and sciences
Social constructivism in sociology
Main article: Social constructionism
One version of social constructivism contends that categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions. These interactions also alter the way in which scientific episteme is organized.
Social activity presupposes human beings inhabiting shared forms of life, and in the case of social construction, utilizing semiotic resources (meaning making and meaning signifying) with reference to social structures and institutions. Several traditions use the term Social Constructivism: psychology (after Lev Vygotsky), sociology (after Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, themselves influenced by Alfred Schütz), sociology of knowledge (David Bloor), sociology of mathematics (Sal Restivo), philosophy of mathematics (Paul Ernest). Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy can be seen as a foundation for Social Constructivism, with its key theoretical concepts of language games embedded in forms of life.
Constructivism and psychology
Main article: Constructivism (psychological school)
Constructivism and education
Main article: Constructivism (learning theory)
Joe L. Kincheloe has published numerous social and educational books on critical constructivism (2001, 2005, 2008), a version of constructivist epistemology that places emphasis on the exaggerated influence of political and cultural power in the construction of knowledge, consciousness, and views of reality. In the contemporary mediated electronic era, Kincheloe argues, dominant modes of power have never exerted such influence on human affairs. Coming from a critical pedagogical perspective, Kincheloe argues that understanding a critical constructivist epistemology is central to becoming an educated person and to the institution of just social change.
Kincheloe's characteristics of critical constructivism:
• Knowledge is socially constructed: World and information co-construct one another
• Consciousness is a social construction
• Political struggles: Power plays an exaggerated role in the production of knowledge and consciousness
• The necessity of understanding consciousness—even though it does not lend itself to traditional reductionistic modes of measurability
• The importance of uniting logic and emotion in the process of knowledge and producing knowledge
• The inseparability of the knower and the known
• The centrality of the perspectives of oppressed peoples—the value of the insights of those who have suffered as the result of existing social arrangements
• The existence of multiple realities: Making sense of a world far more complex that we originally imagined
• Becoming humble knowledge workers: Understanding our location in the tangled web of reality
• Standpoint epistemology: Locating ourselves in the web of reality, we are better equipped to produce our own knowledges
• Constructing practical knowledge for critical social action
• Complexity: Overcoming reductionism
• Knowledge is always entrenched in a larger process
• The centrality of interpretation: Critical hermeneutics
• The new frontier of classroom knowledge: Personal experiences intersecting with pluriversal information
• Constructing new ways of being human: Critical ontology
Constructivism and postmodernism
For some, social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural turn) to social constructionism.
From a realist's point of view, both postmodernism and constructivism can be seen as relativist theories.
Constructivist trends
Cultural constructivism
Cultural constructivism asserts that knowledge and reality are a product of their cultural context, meaning that two independent cultures will likely form different observational methodologies. For instance, Western cultures generally rely on objects for scientific descriptions; by contrast, Native American culture relies on events for descriptions. These are two distinct ways of constructing reality based on external artifacts.
Radical constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld was a prominent proponent of radical constructivism, which claims that knowledge is the self-organized cognitive process of the human brain. That is, the process of constructing knowledge regulates itself, and since knowledge is a construct rather than a compilation of empirical data, it is impossible to know the extent to which knowledge reflects an ontological reality.
See also: Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Heinz von Foerster
Critical constructivism
A series of articles published in the journal Critical Inquiry (1991) served as a manifesto for the movement of critical constructivism in various disciplines, including the natural sciences. Not only truth and reality, but also "evidence", "document", "experience", "fact", "proof", and other central categories of empirical research (in physics, biology, statistics, history, law, etc.) reveal their contingent character as a social and ideological construction. Thus, a "realist" or "rationalist" interpretation is subjected to criticism. Kincheloe's political and pedagogical notion (above) has emerged as a central articulation of the concept.
While recognizing the constructedness of reality, many representatives of this critical paradigm deny philosophy the task of the creative construction of reality. They eagerly criticize realistic judgments, but they do not move beyond analytic procedures based on subtle tautologies. They thus remain in the critical paradigm and consider it to be a standard of scientific philosophy per se.
Genetic epistemology
James Mark Baldwin invented this expression, which was later popularized by Jean Piaget. From 1955 to 1980, Piaget was Director of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva.
Quotations
• Verum esse ipsum factum, Giambattista Vico
"the norm of the truth is to have made it," or
"the true is precisely what is made"
• Verum et factum convertuntur, Giambattista Vico
"the true and the made are convertible"
• Et, quoi qu’on en dise, dans la vie scientifique, les problèmes ne se posent pas d’eux-mêmes. C’est précisément ce sens du problème qui donne la marque du véritable esprit scientifique. Pour un esprit scientifique, toute connaissance est une réponse à une question. S’il n’y a pas eu de question, il ne peut y avoir de connaissance scientifique. Rien ne va de soi. Rien n’est donné. Tout est construit, Gaston Bachelard (La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)
"And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."
• On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayer d’inventer, Paul Valéry
"We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent"
• Ma main se sent touchée aussi bien qu’elle touche ; réel veut dire cela, et rien de plus, Paul Valéry
"My hand feels touched as well as it touches; that's reality, and nothing more"
• Intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself, Jean Piaget in "La construction du réel chez l'enfant" (1937)
• "If the natives are in different worlds, how come we can shoot them?" Stephen Stich
• "I was once accused by Rene Thom of being a constructivist, which I understand was worse than being called an empiricist; I replied that I took pride in it" Sydney Brenner 2010
Criticisms
Numerous criticisms have been levelled at Constructivist epistemology. The most common one is that it either explicitly advocates or implicitly reduces to relativism. This is because it takes the concept of truth to be a socially "constructed" (and thereby socially relative) one. This leads to the charge of self-refutation: if what is to be regarded as "true" is relative to a particular social formation, then this very conception of truth must itself be only regarded as being "true" in this society. In another social formation, it may well be false.
If so, then social constructivism itself would be false in that social formation. Further, one could then say that social constructivism could be both true and false simultaneously.
Another criticism of constructivism is that it holds that the concepts of two different social formations be entirely different and incommensurate. This being the case, it is impossible to make comparative judgements about statements made according to each worldview. This is because the criteria of judgement will themselves have to be based on some worldview or other. If this is the case, then it brings into question how communication between them about the truth or falsity of any given statement could be established.
Social Constructivists[who?] often argue that constructivism is liberating because it either (1) enables oppressed groups to reconstruct "the World" in accordance with their own interests rather than according to the interests of dominant groups in society, or (2) compels people to respect the alternative worldviews of oppressed groups because there is no way of judging them to be inferior to dominant worldviews. As the Wittgensteinian philosopher Gavin Kitching[4] argues, however, constructivists usually implicitly presuppose a deterministic view of language which severely constrains the minds and use of words by members of societies: they are not just "constructed" by language on this view, but are literally "determined" by it. Kitching notes the contradiction here: somehow the advocate of constructivism is not similarly constrained. While other individuals are controlled by the dominant concepts of society, the advocate of constructivism can transcend these concepts and see though them. A similar point is made by Edward Mariyani-Squire.
even if Social Constructivism were true, there is nothing necessarily liberating about entities being socially constructed. There is not necessarily any political advantage to be gained by thinking of Nature as a social construction if, as a political agent, one is systematically trapped, marginalised and subdued by means of social construction.
Further to this general theme, when one looks at much Social Constructivist discourse (especially that informed by Michel Foucault), one finds something of a bifurcation between the theorist and the non-theorist. The theorist always plays the role of the constructor of discourses, while the non-theorist plays the role of the subject who is constructed in a quite deterministic fashion. This has a strong resonance with the point already made about solipsistic theism - here the theorist, conceptually anyway, “plays God” with his/her subject (whatever or whoever that may be). In short, while it is often assumed that Social Constructivism implies flexibility and indeterminism, there is no logical reason why one cannot treat social constructions as fatalistic.
See also
Related subjects
• Anti-racist math
• Deutsche Physik
• Collective Simulations
• Complexity
• Constructivism (learning theory)
• Constructivism in international relations
• Family therapy
• Irrealism
• Metacognition
• Personal construct psychology
• Phronetic social science
• Postmodernism
• Science and technology studies
• Social constructionism
• Systems theory
• Teleology
Proponents
• Immanuel Kant
• Gaston Bachelard
• Gregory Bateson
• Michael Dummett
• Ludwik Fleck
• Heinz von Foerster
• Ernst von Glasersfeld
• Barbara Herrnstein Smith
• George Kelly (psychologist)
• Humberto Maturana
• Jean-Louis Le Moigne
• Edgar Morin
• Jean Piaget
• Rupert Riedl
• Richard Rorty
• David Rosenhan
Proponents (further)
• Herbert Simon
• Francisco Varela
• Giambattista Vico
• Paul Watzlawick
• Alexander Wendt
Critics
• Michael Devitt
• Paul Boghossian
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. Within constructionist thought, a social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice that is the construct (or artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself. Take, for example, the concept of marriage: what this term includes and doesn't include and what it means to society does not exist "out there" in the world, but only in and through the social institutions that give it meaning within a culture. The underlying assumptions on which social constructivism is typically seen to be based are reality, knowledge, and learning.
Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however. Social constructionism is usually opposed to essentialism, which instead defines specific phenomena in terms of inherent and transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.
A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans. The social construction of reality is an ongoing, dynamic process that is (and must be) reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Because social constructs as facets of reality and objects of knowledge are not "given" by nature, they must be constantly maintained and re-affirmed in order to persist. This process also introduces the possibility of change: what "justice" is and what it means shifts from one generation to the next.
Ian Hacking noted in "The Social Construction of What?" that social construction talk is often in reference not only to worldly items, like things and facts – but also to beliefs about them.It is relevant to note that this perspective is often correctly closely connected with many contemporary theories, perhaps most notably the developmental theories of Vygotsky an d Bruner.
Social constructionism vs. social constructivism
Although both social constructionism and social constructivism deal with ways in which social phenomena develop, they are distinct. Social constructionism refers to the development of phenomena relative to social contexts while social constructivism refers to an individual's making meaning of knowledge within a social context (Vygotsky 1978). For this reason, social constructionism is typically described as a sociological concept whereas social constructivism is typically described as a psychological concept. However, while distinct, they are also complementary aspects of a single process through which humans in society create their worlds and, thereby, themselves.
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.
Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. When people interact, they do so with the understanding that their respective perceptions of reality are related, and as they act upon this understanding their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation.
For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. It is in this sense that it can be said that reality is socially constructed. The specific mechanisms underlying Berger and Luckmann's notion of social construction are discussed further in social construction. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz. Schutz was Berger's PhD adviser.
During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This had a particular impact on the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar, and others used social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction, with the goal of showing that human subjectivity imposes itself on those facts we take to be objective, not solely the other way around.
A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. At the same time, Social Constructionism shaped studies of technology - the Sofield, especially on the Social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.
Social constructionism and postmodernism
Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural turn) to social constructionism. Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the on-going mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallised by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalised by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.
Degrees of social construction
Though social constructionism contains a diverse array of theories and beliefs, it can generally be divided into two camps: Weak social constructionism and strong social constructionism. The two differ mainly in degree, where weak social constructionists tend to see some underlying objective factual elements to reality, and strong social constructionists see everything as, in some way, a social construction. This is not to say that strong social constructionists see the world as ontologically unreal. Rather, they propose that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention.
Weak Social Consructionism
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker[ writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."
In a similar vein, Stanley Fish has suggested that baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions. Both Fish and Pinker agree that the sorts of objects indicated here can be described as part of what John Searle calls "social reality". In particular, they are, in Searle's terms, ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective. "Social facts" are temporally, ontologically, and logically dependent on "brute facts." For example, "money" in the form of its raw materials (rag, pulp, ink) as constituted socially for barter (for example by a banking system) is a social fact of "money" by virtue of
(i) collectively willing and intending,
(ii) to impose some particular function (purpose for which),
(iii) by constitutive rules atop the "brute facts." "Social facts have the remarkable feature of having no analogue among physical [brute] facts". The existence of language is itself constitutive of the social fact which natural or brute facts do not require. Natural or "brute" facts exist independently of language; thus a "mountain" is a mountain in every language and in no language; it simply is what it is.
Searle illustrates the evolution of social facts from brute facts by the constitutive rule: X counts as Y in C. "The Y terms has to assign a new status that the object does not already have just in virtue of satisfying the Y term; and there has to be collective agreement, or at least acceptance, both in the imposition of that status on the stuff referred to by the X term and about the function that goes with that status. Furthermore, because the physical features [brute facts] specified by the X term are insufficient by themselves to guarantee the fulfillment of the assigned function specified by the Y term, the new status and its attendant functions have to be the sort of things that can be constituted by collective agreement or acceptance."
Finally, against the strong theory and for the weak theory, Searle insists, "it could not be the case, as some have maintained, that all facts are institutional [i.e., social] facts, that there are no brute facts, because the structure of institutional facts reveals that they are logically dependent on brute facts. To suppose that all facts are institutional [i.e., social] would produce an infinite regress or circularity in the account of institutional facts. In order that some facts be institutional, there must be other facts that are brute [i.e., physical, biological, natural]. This is the consequence of the logical structure of institutional facts."
Ian Hacking, Canadian philosopher of science, insists, "the notion that everything is socially constructed has been going the rounds. John Searle [1995] argues vehemently (and in my opinion cogently) against universal constructionism" "Universal social constructionism is descended from the doctrine that I once named linguistic idealism and attributed, only half in jest, to Richard Nixon [Hacking, 1975, p. 182]. Linguistic idealism is the doctrine that only what is talked about exists, nothing has reality until it is spoken of, or written about. This extravagant notion is descended from Berkeley's idea-ism, which we call idealism: the doctrine that all that exists is mental" They are a part of what John Searle [1995] calls social reality. His book is titled the Construction of Social Reality, and as I explained elsewhere [Hacking, 1996], that is not a social construction book at all"
Hacking observes, "the label 'social constructionism' is more code than description" of every Leftist, Marxist, Freudian, and Feminist PostModernist to call into question every moral, sex, gender, power, and deviant claim as just another essentialist claim—including the claim that members of the male and female sex are inherently different, rather than historically and socially constructed. Hacking observes that his 1995 simplistic dismissal of the concept actually revealed to many readers the outrageous implications of the theorists: Is child abuse a real evil, or a social construct, asked Hacking? His dismissive attitude, "gave some readers a way to see that there need be no clash between construction and reality" inasmuch as "the metaphor of social construction once had excellent shock value, but now it has become tired"
Informally, they require human practices to sustain their existence, but they have an effect that is (basically) universally agreed upon. The disagreement lies in whether this category should be called "socially constructed". Ian Hacking argues that it should not. Furthermore, it is not clear that authors who write "social construction" analyses ever mean "social construction" in Pinker's sense.[citation needed] If they never do, then Pinker (probably among others) has misunderstood the point of a social constructionist argument.
Strong social constructionism
Strong social constructionists oppose the existence of "brute" facts. That a mountain is a mountain (as opposed to just another undifferentiated clump of earth) is socially engendered, and not a brute fact. That the concept of mountain is universally admitted in all human languages reflects near-universal human consensus, but does not make it an objective reality. Similarly for all apparently real objects and events: trees, cars, snow, collisions.
The anatomy of a social constructionist analysis.
"Social construction" may mean many things to many people. Ian Hacking, having examined a wide range of books and articles with titles of the form "The social construction of X" or "Constructing X", argues that when something is said to be "socially constructed", this is shorthand for at least the following two claims:
(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.
(1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.
Hacking adds that the following claims are also often, though not always, implied by the use of the phrase "social construction":
(2) X is quite bad as it is.
(3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.
Thus a claim that gender is socially constructed probably means that gender, as currently understood, is not an inevitable result of biology, but highly contingent on social and historical processes. In addition, depending on who is making the claim, it may mean that our current understanding of gender is harmful, and should be modified or eliminated, to the extent possible.
According to Hacking, "social construction" claims are not always clear about exactly what isn't "inevitable", or exactly what "should be done away with." Consider a hypothetical claim that quarks are "socially constructed". On one reading, this means that quarks themselves are not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things." On another reading, this means that our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks is not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things".
Hacking is much more sympathetic to the second reading than the first.Furthermore, he argues that, if the second reading is taken, there need not always be a conflict between saying that quarks are "socially constructed" and saying that they are "real".[28] In our gender example, this means that while a legitimate biological basis for gender may exist, some of society's perceptions of gender may be socially constructed.
The stronger first position, however, is more-or-less an inevitable corollary of Willard Van Orman Quine's concept of ontological relativity, and particularly of the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, according to Quine and like-minded thinkers (who are not usually characterized as social constructionists) there is no single privileged explanatory framework that is closest to "the things themselves"—every theory has merit only in proportion to its explanatory power.
As we step from the phrase to the world of human beings, "social construction" analyses can become more complex. Hacking briefly examines Helène Moussa’s analysis of the social construction of "women refugees". According to him, Moussa's argument has several pieces, some of which may be implicit:
1. Canadian citizens' idea of "the woman refugee" is not inevitable, but historically contingent. (Thus the idea or category "the woman refugee" can be said to be "socially constructed".)
2. Women coming to Canada to seek asylum are profoundly affected by the category of "the woman refugee". Among other things, if a woman does not "count" as a "woman refugee" according to the law, she may be deported, and forced to return to very difficult conditions in her homeland.
3. Such women may modify their behaviour, and perhaps even their attitudes towards themselves, in order to gain the benefits of being classified as a "woman refugee".
Hacking suggests that this third part of the analysis, the "interaction" between a socially constructed category and the individuals that are actually or potentially included in that category, is present in many "social construction" analyses involving types of human beings.
Environmental Leftist social constructionism
The Postmodern social construction of nature is a theory of postmodernist continental philosophy that poses an alternative critique of previous mainstream, promethean dialogue about environmental sustainability and ecopolitics. Whereas traditional criticisms of environmentalism come from the more conservative "right" of politics, leftist critiques of nature pioneered by postmodernist constructionism highlight the need to recognise "the other". The implicit assumption made by theorists like Wapner [30][31] is that a new "response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world."
This is because postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But mastery is exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain. That in turn implies postmodern cultural criticism can deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world. "What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature?" [32]. Thus, the issue becomes an existentialist query about whether nature can exist in a humanist critique, and whether we can discern the "other's" views in relation to our actions on their behalf. This theorem has come to be known as "The Wapner Paradigm."
• Consensus reality
• Constructivism in international relations
• Constructivist epistemology
• Ethnomethodology
• Phenomenology
• Phronetic social science
• Parametric determinism
• Science and technology studies
• Social epistemology
• Symbolic interactionism
• Talcott Parsons
• Imagined Communities
1. Discourses of economy
If one examines socialism, one is faced with a choice: either reject deconstructivist discourse or conclude that government is fundamentally impossible, but only if material rationalism is invalid. If posttextual narrative holds, we have to choose between sub dialectic feminism and socialism. Thus, Baudrillard uses the term 'material rationalism' to denote not, in fact, semanticism, but neosemanticism.
Therefore, Werther implies that we have to choose between posttextual narrative and the conceptualist paradigm of narrative. Several theories concerning the common ground between class and narrativity exist. In a sense, the primary theme of the works of Rushdie is a capitalist totality.
However, in Satanic Verses, Rushdie affirms socialism; in Satanic Verses Rushdie analyses material rationalism. Sontag promotes the use of posttextual narrative to attack society.
2. Rushdie and socialism
"Society is part of the paradigm of sexuality," says Bataille. But several discourses concerning the role of the reader as writer exist.
"Class is fundamentally meaningless," says Foucault. The subject is contextualised into a that includes truth as a whole. Sartre uses the term 'posttextual narrative' to denote the difference between sexual identity and culture.
Thus, if material rationalism holds, we have to choose between socialism and posttextual dialectic theory. The premise of posttextual narrative implies that consensus comes from the collective unconscious. Finnis suggests that the works of Rushdie are not postmodern.
It could be said that the characteristic theme of McElwaine's critique of posttextual narrative is a self-supporting reality. An abundance of deappropriations concerning socialism may be discovered.
Thus, Derrida promotes the use of material rationalism to analyse and read class. In a sense, Foucault's essay on semiotic sublimation suggests that narrativity is used to marginalize minorities, given that socialism is valid.
Marx uses the term 'material rationalism' to denote the genre, and therefore the dialectic, of subcultural society. The subject is interpolated into a that includes consciousness as a whole.
Deconstructing Marx: Socialism in the works of Rushdie-Brian C. Ansderson
