Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Mini essay: AS in California and the nature of modern politics Posted here Wednesday, October 08, 2003 at 8:32:07 PM       Arnold in California:  the very power of the medium is to lead to the selection a different kind of person as leader. No thoughtful reasonably egoed person can survive, nor would want to.  We live in a  media and management society, not a democracy. Democracy now is a crazy popularity contest among survivors of legal challenges, sexual revelations, and any other threat you can imagine.   And people voted for AS because the situation is so bad, they wanted to vote NO and shake things up on the remote possibility that it would work. One thing about a big narcissist - he wants to be admired, and if he is also realistic, it requires real service and hard work.I hink some of the pro Bush vote in 2000 hadthe same motive.   The problem is that the democracy project, which started with kings and their ministers, then spreading out authority and self understanding to parliaments, and then to a general franchise, lost any theory of governance along the way except bureaucratic performance. This holds back the continued democratization, because realizable democracy with the current levels of citizen development, with current political theory, would lead to system collapse.  Democratization requires education for both leaders and led, representatives and their chosers. The current spread of opinion is not a fit basis for decisions. What is necessary is real participation at local, regional and national levels, in order to give people the experience of informed and responsible choices. This requires that resources be spread at different levels in the larger system, so that semi-autonomy can be experimented with at lower levels. There is no need for coherence across levels, top to bottom, but only a kind of absence of veto and an absence of projected violence and damage from parts to wholes or wholes to parts. ********

Book review - idealsim in 17th c england Posted here Wednesday, October 08, 2003 at 7:59:49 PM     To help with a broader perspective.. H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Ideas@h-net.msu.edu (October 2003) Robert Appelbaum. _Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England_. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-81082-5. Reviewed for H-Ideas by Arthur Williamson <williamsonah@csus.edu>;, Department of History, California State University, Sacramento Utopia and the Construction of Modernity Between James VI and I's accession to the English throne in 1603 and the consolidation of the Stuart Restoration in about 1670, English society witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of utopian political writing. So Robert Appelbaum maintains, and his claims go further. The period, he says, comprises "a unique epoch," one which promoted political idealism through a wide literature in ways both unprecedented and never again repeated (p. 8). For Appelbaum, this utopian literature eventually extended to speeches, political pamphlets, sermons, constitutions, systematic treatises--in addition to more imaginary works such as dramas, poetry, and "utopias" as commonly understood. ********