* Following below review of Berman's Terror and Liberalism (do read it, it's very amusing), the Boston Globe also published this piece by him last week.

"Let us fear, then. But let us also remember that, at moments like this, every possibility is still in play-the worst, but also the best: the road that leads to Yugoslavia, as well as the road to Poland. Iraq could go either way right now. So let us hope, too. Let us press for greater American involvement, a more generous budget, an all-is-forgiven attitude that welcomes and even requests support from the rest of the world-a big campaign of reconstruction and not a small one."

Anyway, read it all - it's mad. Where does this liberal hatred come from? It must be our language...



* Robin Cook wrote a commentary in the New Statesman, reprinted in today's Politics Guardian, portraying the Bush-Blair alliance as 'a strategic error'.

"To question the degree of Britain's complicity with a Bush administration is not to be anti-American. The US is not just the country of George Bush, it is also the country of Michael Moore, Martin Sheen and Woody Allen. Most Americans did not vote for Bush; indeed the majority of those Americans who did turn out to the polls voted for AI Gore. Nor will Bush be there for ever. In only a year's time, Blair's aides will be confronted with demands from the White House for signals of endorsement of a Bush re-election. I fear their basic instinct, if they expect Bush to win, will be to oblige. It is vital that they master those instincts: Britain's interest is in a Democratic victory."



* I was watching a German-produced documentary last night on different aspects of 'leftism'. The approach was historical, centering mainly around 60's and 70's protest culture and the SDS, with a good load of Frankfurt School input. A lot of people from that time were interviewed, most of them recently - 'Are you still a leftist?' - a good question, as some of the semi-militant protesters now run profitable companies. As usual then, the fall of the communist states was interpreted as a loss for the leftist cause ('Has this weakened the left?'). This seems to me the major point of madness and misunderstanding. Firstly, as Horkheimer never fails to mention, socialism seizes to be of importance as soon as the revolution has happened. The left only consists in opposition and doesn't exist per se - a leftist state is a contradiction in terms. The revolutionary dialectic steps out of gear as soon as 'greener grass' is mentioned - utopias are not for us. Secondly, as Chomsky illustrates in a 1986 article published in 'Our Generation', the relationship between authoritarian communist regimes and socialism has always been a shady one:

"Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

As for the world's second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the 'socialist' dungeon.

The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period."

Think we're going to have to invent a new language for this whole business.

Since I'm on an idealist strain, one mention re: 'Positivismusstreit' - actually stumbled across a text of the 'Empirical Methods in Social Sciences' sort that for once contains a criticism of the Popperean programme. The text was German and the critique of critical rationalism didn't point to any practical aspects of the hermeneutic/dialectic approach. It does however rather nicely describe the imperialist tendencies of the analytical method, pointing to its unreflective belonging to the totality of production and power structures, thus itself being the stabilising moment in the status quo (quoting entire clauses from Adorno and Habermas - am not quite sure the writer was reflectively aware of the full meaning of the words). Obviously, the whole critique was blown off by pointing to the unsuitability of these idealist musings - the normativity would convert science into ideology, which is apparently unacceptable.

In any case - how this insight cannot compel anyone to produce severe anti-systemic sentiments is not clear to me. These 'scientists' writes these books - they see the political twistings of critical theory, yet... fetshism has killed the activist.

Then, consider the Hegelian precursor to all this - a recent contribution from Phil:

"Positive philosophy was a conscious reaction against the critical and destructive tendencies of French and German rationalism, a reaction that was particularly bitter in Germany. Because of its critical tendencies, the Hegelian system was designated as 'negative philosophy.' Its contemporaries recognised that the principles Hegel enunciated in his philosophy led him 'to a critique of everything that was hitherto held to be the objective truth.' His philosophy 'negated'-namely, it repudiated any irrational and unreasonable reality. The reaction saw a challenge to the existing order in Hegel's attempt to measure reality according to the standards of autonomous reason. Negative philosophy, it was claimed, tries for the potentialities of things, but is incapable of knowing their reality. It stops short at their 'logical forms' and never reaches their actual content, which is not deducible from these forms. As a result, so the critique of Hegel ran, the negative philosophy can neither explain nor justify things as they are. This led to the most fundamental objection of all, that negative philosophy, because of its conceptual make-up, negates things as they are. The matters of fact that make up the given state of affairs, when viewed in the light of reason, become negative, limited, transitory - they become perishing forms within a comprehensive process that leads beyond them. The Hegelian dialectic was seen as the prototype of all destructive negations of the given, for in it every immediately given form passes into its opposite and attains its true content only by so doing. This kind of philosophy, the critics said, denies to the given the dignity of the real; it contains 'the principle of revolution' (Stahl said). Hegel's statement that the real is rational was understood to mean that only the rational is real.

Hegel had considered society and the state to be the historical work of man and interpreted them under the aspect of freedom; in contrast, positive philosophy studied the social realities after the pattern of nature and under the aspect of objective necessity. The independence of matters of fact was to be preserved, and reasoning was to be directed to an acceptance of the given. In this way positive philosophy aimed to counteract the critical process involved in the philosophical 'negating' of the given, and to restore to facts the dignity of the positive."