The Quaker Ethic and the Spirit of Banking

Of the four big banks left today (Barclays, Lloyds, HBOS, RBS), the two strongest are Barclays and Lloyds… no surprise for their Quaker founders (John Freame & Thomas Gould, and Sampson Lloyd, respectively).

 

For Rob

A little late…

 

Uncle Isiah on saying something

“I know nothing, I have written nothing, I have not said what I wish to say. I no longer remember what it was I would wish to say. Presently someone will notice how empty my activity is, the bluff will be called, the game over.” (letter to a friend, in Ignatieff, Isiah Berlin)

 

Chocolate laxative #2

Time for another chocolate laxative.

Zizek: “On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: [for example] coffee without caffeine.”

“Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous.”

 

history repeats itself

“[Analytical] criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of [Rawls]. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on [Rawls] is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the [Rawlsian] system. Their polemics against [Rawls] and against one another are confined to this – each extracts one side of the [Rawlsian] system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by others. To begin with they extracted pure, unfalsified [Rawlsian] categories such as ['Original Position'] and ['Justice'], later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as ['overlapping consensus'], ['political liberalism']“

Contemporary as it sounds, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t find this text in the latest Philosophy & Public Affairs; it is, of course, The German Ideology, with Rawls playing Hegel’s role. And how familiar it sounds (perhaps I’m being unfair; perhaps this is just what it is to be a “philosophical school”).

But I suppose the more interesting question is about political philosophers, and how they see their work and the work of others. Chris Brooke was telling us yesterday that the Young Hegelians themselves saw their relation to Hegel as a mere echo of the Greek schools’ relationship to the other great system builder, Aristotle. And how they orientated their research (for example, Marx’s doctoral thesis on “The Difference Between the Democritean and the Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” ) as a function of this self-understanding.
Then after Cohen and Ryan’s Hegel seminar today I was talking with Ben about how Hegel was the Owl of Minerva to Bonaparte’s world-historical individual, and wondering about (what else?) where Rawls stood in all this. Had we finally cracked the secret behind those cryptic remarks on America, land of the future?

We parted on the conclusion that Dworkin must have been the Owl to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s world-historical individual…

But this just opens up a whole can of worms: who was the Twentieth Century’s Kant? (Rawls, I suppose) Who is the Feuerbach, who is the Marx? Where does Nozick fit? How do we describe the late Rawls’ relation to his own earlier self, in the terms of this particular historical looking-glass? And how does one go about turning Dworkin on his head?

(Then again, maybe I’ve got all of this wrong, and Bernard Williams was on more of the right track with his ideas about Wittgensteinianism and Left-Wittgensteinianism, or even, in the same article: “These critics [Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel] stand to Rawls much as Hegel and his followers stood to Kant.”)

But if the Young Hegelians themselves thought of themselves in roughly this way, as some sort of post-Aristotelian philosophical fall-out, perhaps we need to add to the aphorism: [history repeats itself], the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, the third time as a spaghetti Western.

 

Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch, #1

Ferdinand II “the Catholic” of Aragon, born 10th March 1452 in Sos, Aragon; died 23rd January 1516 in Madrigalejo, Spain.

Our first Dead Political Theory Cameo unified most of Spain. In 1479, he inherited the kingdom of Aragon from his father, and acquired the kingdom of Castille as a result of his marriage to Isabella of Castille (and a bit of fighting with the Portuguese). Granada followed in 1492, just in time to see Columbus unhindered passage to the New World. Following some particularly zealous Inquisiting, Jew expulsion, and intervention in Italy, Ferdinand assumed the Papally-awarded sobriquet “the Catholic” in 1496, going on to invade Navarre in support of Rome in 1512.

Machiavelli has his own admiring take on the reign of “the foremost king in Christendom”, but it is Rousseau in the Social Contract (I, 9) who playfully toyed with the possibilities.

In September 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa had stood on the sea-shore of the Gulf of San Miguel and taken “possession of the South Seas and the whole of South America in the name of the crown of Castille.” A century and a half later, Rousseau interrogated the event with dripping cynicism: “was that enough to dispossess all their actual inhabitants, and to shut out from them all the princes of the world?” Clearly not, and out of history he summoned in aid a hypothesised Ferdinand: “On such a showing, these ceremonies are idly multiplied, and the Catholic King need only take possession all at once, from his apartment, of the whole universe, merely making a subsequent reservation about what was already in the possession of other princes.”

So maybe the unification of Spain wasn’t so impressive after all.

 

Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch

Continuing our adaptation from the Virtual Stoa’s venerable Dead Socialist Watch, the Code of Nature brings you the Dead Political Theory Cameo Watch, dedicated to honouring all those unsuspecting souls co-opted into the political theory canon through no act of their own, but as part of some political theorist’s though-experiment.

To qualify,

1) They must have existed

2) They must have not performed certain actions

3) The actions they have not performed must be presented as hypothetically performed by them, and used as an example in a work of political theory

Glad we’ve established that…

 

Dead Arendtian Watch, #1

Hannah Arendt, born 14th October 1906 in Hannover; died 4th December 1975 in New York.

I’ve always thought Hannah Arendt could do with a bit more virtual celebration.

The Virtual Stoa celebrates a loose canon of socialist thinkers and actors in its venerated and long-established Dead Socialist Watch… but Arendt doesn’t really fit in there. In fact, she arguably doesn’t fit in anywhere.

Till now.

On this, the 32nd anniversary of her death in New York, the Code of Nature blog honours Arendt with this inaugural installment of the Dead Arendtian Watch.

It promises to be an infrequent blog item.

 

Black Gold

If you missed the Fair Trade Coalition screening of Black Gold tonight, you can still catch “the Super-Size Me of the Fair Trade movement” on YouTube, or indeed, here (1h16):

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conservative socialists

They’ve been discussing G. A. Cohen’s conservativism over at Crooked Timber… but Pete Seeger got there first:

“I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”