The thing is, that doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

Poole summarises Furedi (Mr. Revolutionary Communist Party) as saying ‘the problem is that we have turned our back on the Enlightenment’. However, the quote from him actually refers to ‘the ideas of progress associated with the Enlightenment’.

Taking out the distinction, implying that the sole effect of the whole enlightenment movement/era was to produce a single thought and then saying ‘there’s no nuance’ is pure trickery, a cheat on the reader.

As I said at the beginning, it’s all a minor point, but that kind of distortion of argument bugs me.

Thanks, SW. This is what I would have written, had I not been, as soru was kind enough to point out, too thick to do so.

A good example is the word ‘WMD’.

This sometimes means ‘weapons that can destroy a city’, i.e. nuclear weapons, hypothetical biological weapons, perhaps massed chemical weapons.

Other times, it means ‘any nuclear, chemical or biological weapon’, including normal artillery shells, crappy biological weapons that don’t really work, and perhaps even smaller things.

If you spot one person switching those terms on you behind your back, good on you. That was the killer point in Robin Cook’s resignation speach. ‘WMD are really really dangerous’, and ‘Saddam probably has WMD’ (as he thought) were true only for different meanings of the word WMD.

However, spotting that two different people use those terms differently is interesting and informative, but refutes neither.

You can make a similar point with ‘democracy’, which sometimes means ‘competitive elections happen’, and sometimes ‘rich, peaceful and ok place to live’. Watch out for people playing bait and switch with those.

if someone thinks that the stakes for this discussion are low

Of course, saying ‘it is really really important to refute these arguments, otherwise people will die’ is, everyone surely agrees, not in itself a valid form of argument?

If only because it is symmetric, and it is probably even more open to abuse when ‘people’ is replaced by ‘we’.

I don’t agree with Anderson’s labels, myself, and I thought Anderson’s essay on Rawls was a hatchet job. It’s exactly what I expected of him, frankly. But you miss my point. The clear implication of your review was that Anderson considered indistinguishable the thinkers on the right whom he treats, a claim that what is actually in the book cannot sustain—as evidence, the essay on the four authors you mentioned yourself. Hayek, Strauss, Oakeshott, and Schmidt are all on the right, certainly, and all arguably radical—but Anderson does not “lump them all together.”

What he did with Rawls has nothing to do with what he did or did not do with thinkers on the right, though as far as that goes (and oddly enough, in context), in the essay on international relations he does give the thinkers of the center in the book the same consideration that he gave the authors on the right. Still, his attitude towards thinkers of both the center and the right is that of rejection, even when he’s discussing them fairly. With the thinkers on the left, though—Thompson, Hobsbawm, and the others—he clearly thinks of himself as a compatriot, and of his task as to carry their ideas forward. That’s a far cry from establishing a spectrum and then planting oneself in the middle.

Your point about having read or not read the book, though, is well-taken—that came off more snide than I intended, and I’m sorry for the remark.

If somebody thinks that nobody falls for this claptrap, and if someone thinks that the stakes for this discussion are low, consider the case of WMDs in Iraq. The idea that Saddam Hussein was feverishly plotting to unleash WMDs imminently on the US, UK and Israel and so deserved to be overthrown is a fantasy that has resulted in some rather serious consequences, to say the least. This fantasy is not compatible with another fantasy, that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with inspectors, benignly hoping for a diplomatic resolution, and the victim of an unprovoked assault by the West. Here we have two incompatible fantasies. The differing prevalences of these fantasies is causing massive global turmoil – again, to say the least. There may be aspects of each that are true, but that is not here the point. The point is that the rhetoric leading up to the Iraq war was sufficiently weighted towards the first fantasy, stoked with fear-mongering and fueled by lies, that the opposition was left waving placards in the street. This happened partly because of political speech setting up these incompatible fantasies, leading to “either/or” positions, which are common rhetorical traps forcing people – as Poole says – to choose between cartoons. To argue this is not to say that therefore Harold Pinter in his Nobel Acceptance speech or Christopher Hitchens just about anywhere is completely right or wrong; it is not to argue that there is no truth in the cartoon of Saddam Hussein as a tyrant or a mass murderer; it is not to argue that there is no truth in the description of nefarious, bumbling machinations in the White House and 10 Downing Street. Rather it is to point out that people do get caught up in these either/or fantasies, specifically constructed as incompatible – and the consequences are serious.

And so, is it “perfectly legitimate” to summarise the situation in Iraq by saying that Saddam was bent on attacking the West, or, alternatively, that Saddam was meekly complying with international demands, providing one is consistent with this claim?

That is one of the reasons authors write books, instead of a single paragraph followed by a lot of blank pages.

Of course, if they still don’t manage to convey to the reader what they mean over the course of a whole book, then at least one person involved is pretty thick.

And how is this different from simply saying that the term “the Enlightenment” means whatever the person using it wants it to mean?

My claim is that distilling two general theses so that they end up using the same word in an apparently contradictory way is not a valid technique of argument.

Otherwise you could argue, only slightly more obviously, that Russia cannot be a capitalist country:

The USSR was undeniably communist, or at least not capitalist. Capitalism definitely gives capital a different status from Soviet communism.

However, Moscow is still the main city, meaning there has been no change in the status of the capital since the days of the USSR.

QED: claiming that contemporary Russia is capitalist is a contradiction.

It is perfectly legitimate for one work to refer to the idea of ‘Enlightenment’ as in a way that can be summarised as ‘the time the traditions changed’, and another to use it in a sense close to ‘the traditions after they were changed’.

What is bad is to have the same work mix definitions, but the authors never claimed to collaborate.

Were you really fooled by the trick? I honestly thought people here were smarter than that.

I’m a huge fan of CT in geenral, but not of the fondeness several contributors have for scoring debating points instead of making real arguments.

See the post a couple up from this one, where Henry’s response to a Economist article saying that Europenas need to suffer before they’ll support “reform” is to say that it resembles something cliche-marxists are supposed to have said. Does Henry think liberalziing European economies is a good idea, why or why not? Who knows—but he’s scored his zinger!

What you say makes sense.

If I understand correctly you are saying that SCOTUS held that one has a right to abortion and sodomy because its good for business.

You may be right,but I’d put it more 60-40 that people like Judge Kennedy who, while wealthy in income terms, have insignificant property holdings, are more about what represents their meritocratic-lawyering class values than about property.

To give another example, take the increase in federal taxation over the 20th century in the USA.

It went from next to nothing to a big chunk. Again there is a good case that this is all good for business stability, workers to exploit etc.

But would you really argue that the taxation structure is designed to optimize the return to private property?

Maybe, but I’m arguing for a more holistic human capital recognizing dominant ethos.

This is the major beef with Bush. Its not that he’s giving everything to the property interests, its that his irrationalism questions the value of meritocracy.

I mean look at the General going off on Rumsfeld.
They are bascially saying “Look at how his is mishandling our human capital. He is not an Expert.”

Its the very fact that we notice that Bush is somehow odd – even possibly a crackpot – that shows that there is more to capitalism than just the property.

I actually meant it as a puzzling question rather than a proof by contradiction.

In other words, if the dominant ethos is capitalism, and it might be reasonably expected that indoctrination of children is a component of ethos perpetuation, why is it so common for education to be provided by employees of the state?

Why are privatization schemes and voucher plans so politically difficult?

Furthermore, if you measure the hours spent per day of the population of a typical rich country, including the USA, the number of hours spen working in a truly capitalistic enterprise is a well-represented ethos but not a Dominant ethos.

Whether is be government employees or not-for-profit employees or non-workers or even for-profit workers in sectors where capital other than human and organizational capital is a minor influence ( say trial lawyers for example) there is a large and growing segment of the economy that is not “capitalist” in the old sense of the term.

If one is using capitalist as a proxy for “the money economy” then I’d say that ethos is more dominant than “capitalism” in its historical sense.

Let’s take US Presidents for example and let’s take Nixon and Clinton as paradigmatic cases of the politico-lawyering classes that didn’t come from money. And the question is did they rule in their own class interests or the interests of capital, I am inclined to put the odds (60-40) that their dominant ethos was more about what’s good for us meritocratic upstarts than it was about how can I best serve capital to claw my way to the top. But admittedly its a tough call.

To tie back to Fifi’s comment, I am inclined to agree that the enlightenment is a Sacred Relic that has been antiquated by our thorough-going moneygrubbery, but I disagree about about moneygrubbery being primarily capitalistic.

We are more about “institutional and social access capital” than just old-school capital.

Furthermore, I would argue that its the identity economics that drives the identity politics.

The action in claiming the enlightenment is that one one is trying to claim “ownership” of rich economies. Its not about religion versus atheism. Its about a chian of reasoning that goes “the enlightenment led to political and economic power, therefore those that own the enlightenment own the political and economic power.

Its a way to get ahead of the argument that the welfare state programs led to wealth therefore those that own the welfare state own the politcal and economic power.

However, so far no takers on this theory.

Our dominant ethos is capitalism because our social order preserves the right to property. It weighs that right more heavily than quaint notions of compassion and conscience and the idea pre-rich people should be treated as ends rather than the means to increased wealth.

Yeah I can see why some people might think the SCOTUS wrestles daily with the categorical imperative. And the ubiquitous ticker tape that scrolls across our TV screens? Let me guess, it calculates in real time the greatest good for the greatest number. Come on. Kant’s Enlightenment project died a long time ago.