We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see how much we shared with strangers of our own age and situation. If we could forget for a moment what was singular about our lives and concentrate instead on what we experienced with everyone else, would it be possible to see ourselves in a new light, less self-dramatizing but possibly more truthful?
Tag: society
Epistemological Panic,
or Thinking for Yourself
Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment. The key ideals of liberal democracy—moral independence and intellectual autonomy—depend on it, and my students will not have much experience of either if they end up living in a culture where all of their political and cultural opinions must express tribal allegiance to one of two partisan alternatives; where they live in communities so segregated by education, class, and race that they never encounter a challenge to their tribe’s received ideas, or in a society where the wells of information are so polluted that pretty well everything they read is “fake news”.
Rethinking Open Society
Upholding open society means accepting the “strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.” An open society is very demanding. It asks us to respect the dignity of others, especially of those with whom we may disagree and to make choices for ourselves and our community.
On Civil Society: Why Eastern Europe’s Revolutions Could Succeed
In Western Europe, civil society took centuries to emerge from the bottom up. But these societies need it immediately. Without a robustly independent society, it is hard to see how they can withstand political demagoguery and the shocks of economic transition. On the other hand, the experience of the East European dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s shows how quickly an embryonic civil society can emerge in the interstices of communism if there are enough courageous individuals who understand what it is they want and have the political cunning and tenacity to seek it.
The Myth of Citizenship
Citizenship is a myth in both the noble and the ironical sense. On the one hand, the Western political imagination remains haunted by the ideal of citizenship enunciated in Aristotle’s Politics. On the other hand, to the modern western political tradition, citizenship has seemed a fanciful conception of man and his political nature.
Needs and justice in the ‘Wealth of Nations’: an introductory essay
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable […]” — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations