What We Find Interesting: Reply to Noah Millman on Obsolete IR Realism

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 18, 2013

Responding to the blog comment that I expanded upon in the prior post, Mr. Millman asks two questions which I will append in full below. Millman asks specifically whether the Realist definition of national interest is “definitional or axiomatic,” by which terms, as his follow-up post seems to confirm, he appears to be aiming for the distinction between descriptive, or analytical, and prescriptive, or political, Realism. He also wonders whether “national interest” is something artificial, effectively a product of politics or political processes, or something “independent” and “objective,” in other words beyond politics in the narrow sense. In his second question, he specifies an assumption about “the state” – what the state is or how we should conceive of it – that we have frequently discussed at this blog, as in our recent posts on libertarianism as well as on the subject of neo-imperialism, and in intermittent discussion of Hegelian concepts of the culture-state. For present purposes, this question of the state is, I think, better answered in the context of answering the first question. In other words, the two questions can be answered together.

Under the theoretical framework I was outlining in my prior remarks, the Realist notion of finally determinative national interest would be both definitional and axiomatic within an obsolete, yet still significantly operative, nation-state concept. Continue reading →

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Re-Statement on the World State of States, in Seven Theses, in Relation to International Relations Realism

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 17, 2013

1. The traditional international relations “Realist” framework presumes that a finally determinative complex of interests congeal on the nation-state level exclusively and permanently, and that all such nation-state interests function in roughly the same way. The nation-state is, however, a contingent historical form that displaced, though did not fully extinguish, other modes of social-political organization, and is also susceptible to historical-evolutionary change.

2. As a matter of the history of the primacy of the nation-state political formation, since roughly 1945 at the very latest, realism conceived on the basis of a global state of nature intermittently ordered by national spheres of influence and by unevenly enforced traditions of international law, a global state of nature in which each nation-state acted as an ideally free pseudo-individual, has been obsolete. History’s greatest exponents of that finally unsustainable and self-contradictory worldview, the hyper-nationalist and hyper-statist nation-states of Imperial Way Japan and Third Reich Germany, were soundly defeated by the United Nations, an embodiment of the transnational possibility, or emergent global interest, that took the form of a military alliance under Anglo-American sponsorship before the name was handed off to a new institution that conforms to, but is not itself politically or administratively equivalent to, the new global state or global state system.

3. We live in the age of a concretely emerging global interest and global state under a neo-imperial framework whose concept and therefore whose main functional modes are different from those of the nation-state, but no less “real” – unless nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, orbital satellites, the mass media including the internet, exponential population growth, accelerated migration, ecosystem destruction, transnational resource and supply chains, stateless people and non-state actors, and so on, and so on, are not “real.” Continue reading →

Posted in History, International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, War | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Government by Other Means

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 16, 2013

As expected, the Professor’s reply to my analysis of his avoidant tendencies is also avoidant, taking the form of a condescending remark that indirectly manifests his  discomfort by wishing him onto a therapist’s couch, with a Scotch and Soda. Yet even though the Professor re-asserts his refusal of serious dialogue, he returns, or had already returned, to my argument, merely in a different place. Alternatively, sustaining the pscyhoanalytical mode, we could say he returned to the argument and to me by way of a second displacement. I am grateful either way for the resultant second (quasi-)reply, since it provides an opportunity to delve further into a matter of broader interest than a comment-thread spat between two internet nobodies: How and why the argument for liberty, or negative freedom, turns against itself into the facilitation of tyranny. Continue reading →

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Syria and the Neo-Imperial Interest

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 15, 2013

nicer version of US-centric map of the worldFriend of the blog Elias Isquith, in a thoughtful piece on prospective U.S. intervention in Syria posted at the League, refers to “the pivot point at which an international action to stop an atrocity becomes something much closer to regular old imperialist meddling.” The problem, for Isquith and others, is that, by political necessity, any intervention on behalf of the Syrian rebels, especially as justified on the basis of the crimes of the Assad regime, becomes objectively intervention requiring defeat of the Assad regime, just as intervention in the Balkans objectively meant the eventual fall of Milosevic and company, and intervention in Libya meant the fall of Gaddafi. Put broadly: War remains war, and any justification of intervention is finally a justification for the defeat of an enemy, in effect at all costs just as it will be truly at all costs to everyone who kills or dies, in Syria as anywhere else – or will be no true justification at all.

Isquith concludes by pointing to the contradiction or apparent contradiction, a classic contradiction, between human rights protection and anti-imperialism, both of which interests he treats as non-controversially sound, in other words consensual and universal: Continue reading →

Posted in History, Neo-Imperialism, War | Tagged , | 5 Comments

No wonder is thogh that he were astoned

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 12, 2013

Indeed, Professor, Fed 10 and the Madisonian system in general very much favor constraints on “democracy,” especially as the term was understood at the time. As you observe below, one by-product of the democratic adoption of a system partly hostile to democracy itself is terminological confusion, since we call our system “democracy” and speak unreflectively about promoting democracy or democratic values, when what we are really about is better understood as a “mixed regime,” on the model of the classical “polity” but under radically transformed material circumstances.

As for the Konczal piece, of course it produces just the kind of symptomatically intemperate remarks from ideologues that you have been kind or at least inadvertently helpful enough to produce for us. We can, as the doctors say, “appreciate” the symptomology you exhibit. You blame Konczal – or call his work “astoundingly stupid” – for taking a major libertarian thinker at his word, and for following that thinker’s premises and incidental assertions logically to their illogical or self-contradictory, self-reversing, paradoxical necessary conclusions in the absurd forms of the libertarian feudal state and of freely chosen self-enslavement. You apparently cannot accept, or even rationally consider, the to you highly improper thought that libertarianism may be just as vulnerable as democratism to voting itself out of power, but according to its own mode of operation: not as a majority vote against democracy (e.g., to vote to install the tyrant, to vote to murder the free thinker, to vote democratically to restrict the voting franchise undemocratically, to vote for oligarchy disguised as liberty, etc.), but as a free decision to surrender free decisionmaking (the substance of every contract).

These are inescapable conceptual problems, Professor. I’d urge you to look into them, but, as you frequently remind me, you cannot stand philosophy. Continue reading →

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A Last Word

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 6, 2013
tumblr_mnknj2R9cr1qz6f9yo1_500
h/t thisisnthappiness.com

As little as that last post, though written as a “last comment” or at least my last comment for a very long and contentious set of discussion threads, can be known to be a last comment at all, whether if at all it will stand as a last word, or as little as an old favorite poem under the same title has ever turned out to be what it says it is, is this post what it purports to be, unless it happens after all to be. (It’s never happened, but it has happened, though it could never have happened.) Somewhere, I am confident, someone, Dostoevsky at least implicitly, maybe Monty Python, has parodied the self-legendary man preparing delivery of his last words, then discovering to his very highly qualified disappointment that they were not his last words at all, not even close: He’s actually on the road to recovery or possibly as fit as ever (not necessarily very). Even in such an instance of utter self-embarrassment before God or no one or one’s own nothingness, both impending or always already or thus finally established, one’s not so final words still would be in the genre if not perhaps in fact. We know as well that the tradition of last words is often a false tradition: Continue reading →

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not discussing a conservative understanding of the sexual division of labor

by CK MacLeod Posted on June 6, 2013

Referring to a set of options for dealing with men undergoing a supposed “loss of unearned privilege,” Kazzy says:

It’s not clear to me which of those [options] CKM is advocating. What must be remembered is that harm is being done by the mere existence of privilege. It might be unseen or unfelt, especially to those in privilege, or so baked in that even the victims do not actively realize it’s presence, but it is there. Every day. Which is why calls for patience can be so frustrating.

Could be it’s not clear to Kazzy, and others, which of those answers to a supposed question of loss of privilege CKM is advocating because CKM does not advocate and would not advocate any of them. CKM does not accept that the questions to be answered have been properly framed or their terms properly defined either by Kazzy or by any other participants, including CKM himself, on this 619-comment (and counting) discussion thread on this at least fourth League of Ordinary Gentlemen post on a derided and belittled recent set of statements by certain lesser media-political celebrities regarding gender norms. CKM rejects the definition of privilege adopted earlier in the discussion, in particular the prejudicial attachment of the adjective “unearned” to that central term “privilege.” CKM also rejects any sharp distinction between “privilege” and “right” since it neglects both the connection between the two terms going back to the Middle Ages as well as their specifically modern, liberal, and democratic co-articulation in or as a realm of “privacy” in the law, or of “private law” or “private right”: or the rights and privileges of citizenship in a democratic republic or under the reign of the generalized particular or society of individuals. CKM remains unconvinced that a conservative or traditional point of view on the sexual division of labor – on a desirable and necessarily generalized description of the rights and responsibilities (or privileges and duties) of men, and of the rights and responsibilities of women – has been even minimally comprehended, much less taken seriously, by many of those prepared and eager to dismantle and experimentally replace it or its remnants. For a conservative, the dismissive ignorance and one-sidedness of the discussion will be distressing and symptomatic in themselves, and be taken as further evidence that functional positive ideals of manhood and womanhood, rather than being systematically suppressed on behalf of faulty and incoherent social theories, should be inculcated from an early age and reinforced at every opportunity. It tends to fall to CKM to describe this perspective not because CKM is convinced of its adequacy, but because no one else seems willing or able to do so, perhaps least of all or least effectively its self-styled defenders. Continue reading →

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Two Onto-Theo-Anthropological Hypotheses

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 29, 2013

1. The positing of two “worlds,” “natural” and “divine” or “supernatural,” is unsustainable except as an “ontotheological” or perhaps more properly “onto-theo-anthropological” mode of conceptual organization or schematization. In other words, “natural” and “divine” refer to two of three such interdependent and mutually defining, yet conceptually distinguishable moments that seem to organize any discourse of or on monotheism, including the discourses of anti-monotheism and atheism, the third moment being “the human.”

2. We can entertain as a second hypothesis or corrollary hypothesis, that the familiar Sunday School questions – e.g., “How could a truly benevolent God allow evil to exist?” – emerge from, speaking loosely, the contradiction in conceiving this tripartite structure and attempting effectively in the same movement to collapse it again: We provisionally conceive of the divine principle or essence as unlike the human and natural principles, yet ask ourselves, “What happens if we view the divine principle as a human-like natural existent?” Or: “What if God possessed intentionality in the way that we conceive of human beings possessing intentionality, and operated within nature in the way that we conceive of natural forces acting within nature?” Such questioning ought to be self-evidently absurd, but historically and we might suspect necessarily, under the onto-theo-anthropological discursive hypothesis, it is a very human and very natural questioning. So when, for instance, asking what could be meant by omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence, we humanly-naturally wonder what a human-like natural-existent omnipotence etc. would be, but the question of, say, omnipotence makes sense, whatever sense it possibly could make, only and strictly as a question of omnipotence as divine omnipotence, omnipotence in the mode of or in relationship to the divine, or power (potency) from the perspective of the divine.

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Notes on A Living Originalism

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 21, 2013

The purpose of this unusually long post is to review and expand upon comment-thread discussion under a set of posts by Tim Kowal and Burt Likko, who are both practicing attorneys with abiding interest in Constitutional Law, on doctrines of interpretation. Many of the text-links will be to the original comments by others and myself.

I can accept Likko’s description of my approach as a “hybrid” of his and Kowal’s, starting out in the area of the latter, but ending up in the vicinity of the former, though I would prefer to stress the complementarity of the two perspectives, loosely “Originalism” and “Living Constitutionalism.” The perhaps still distant objective is a framework for a “synthetic originalism” or “vital originalism” or “living originalism,” or a Unified Theory or at least Adequate Description of American Constitutionalism… Continue reading →

Posted in Legal Philosophy, The Exception, US History | Tagged , , , , , , | 17 Comments

How dare you call Hayek profound?

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 13, 2013

To my eye, the response by Kevin Vallier at Bleeding Heart Libertarians to Corey Robin’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” embodies a tactic that we used refer to in competitive debate as “the spread” – the attempt to overwhelm an opponent with an effectively unanswerable list of minor counter-arguments. The “spreader” hopes that one or another unanswered counter-argument will be taken as decisive, and, if the resultant clash of minutiae leads everyone to forget the main argument, all the better. In addition to being lost amidst the recitation of ca. 23 listed “errors,” Robin’s argument is, I think, mis-characterized at the outset of Vallier’s post, where Vallier briefly sets a bar or set of bars for what, in his opinion, Robin would need to prove in order to justify his work, but rather than explain why Vallier’s assumptions strike me as arbitrary, another task almost as complex as fully responding to the errors would be, I will try to re-construct or summarize Robin’s thesis in relation to some of Vallier’s typical complaints, and to point to further implications that would be at least as problematic for Robin and the Left as for Hayek’s partisans wherever they may locate themselves politically. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, History, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Libertarianism as Core-Extreme Ideology of the Liberal Democratic State

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 12, 2013

What we call “liberalism” may appears to us as more a set of “priorities or predispositions” than a coherent ideology or philosophy because the ideology and its political-philosophical commitments are preceptual and effectively consensual – for us: Liberalism may not appear “ideological” because we treat its main ideological precepts as simply true or as unquestionable for “all intents and purposes,” in other words under the continuation of the social-cultural whole as well as the political-juridical-administrative “state.” We can (always idly) question the philosophical validity of our foundational concepts, but we are precluded from taking any negative conclusions truly meaningfully into the public square. The unquestioned premises tend to come forward and become identifiable as ideology, and therefore more questionable potentially (prior to self-defensive suppression or ideological hygiene), under conditions of stress or crisis, most obviously as a result of an external or seemingly external impetus, as during war with ideologically defined adversaries, another way of saying that the actual (as opposed to merely intellectual or ideal or idle) bringing forward of these premises will be definitional for a crisis of the whole state. Under “normal” conditions, they operate as ingrained presumptions and occasional subject of politically meaningless speculation. Continue reading →

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“the false notion of heroic self-made aristocracy”

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 10, 2013

…an enlightened utterance in response to which we will note, with our friend Mr. Hume: “We have… no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all.” Rousseau concurs, but Nietzsche remains more popular among “us” (not “really” more popular in the more material sense, in which Rousseau and Hume reign), because, in addition to reaching that same conclusion, and before he descended into complications and dissociations indistinguishable from “none at all,” he invited us to make up and celebrate any more pleasing reason-no-more-true-nor-false. In the social-political dimension, the problem that Nietzsche encountered and we encounter, or that we simply ignore if it it suits our needs or preferences or madness, is that the peculiar false reason of the mass liberal democratic regime form remains a true reason precisely to the extent that, like the dying fairy, it is always applauded back to life. If the people childishly choose false democracy democratically, then it is a truly-if-childishly and truly-because-childishly democratically chosen false democracy, more authentically democratic than the rejected ideally or supposedly authentic democracy, and the lonely post-Humean Nietzschean has nothing to offer against the massed innocents except the necessarily generally unheard assertion that he or she, for his or her own perfectly unaccountable reasons, prefers something else, as if we might ever have had some doubt on that score, and even though or because he or she utterly lacks the power to produce that something else except within the limits of the room set aside for him or her by his or her family or perhaps the state, if family or state so chooses on the basis of connections and assumptions, those also false notions truly believed and believed true, that family and state retain against the lonely post-Humean Nietzschean’s ridicule, whether shouted or scrawled or whispered in free stride naked back and forth across the floor, covered in his or her but to be honest typically his own filth, impotently priapic, priapically impotent, occasionally pausing to play piano also with his elbows, and calling it Continue reading →

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