re: Kagan, just as I said, any serious academic would rather stick a finger down his throat than read Kagan's ludicrous expose...

The balls these people have is just incredible. Just even referring to Hobbes and Kant in such a simplistic and incoherent way is simply outrageous. I can't believe they feel rigorous themselves - which deep down they probably don't, but then again, the US 'academic' establishment wouldn't be attuned to any of it, hence they get away with it, at least in the US. As long as you can sell the PNAC agenda (which is what this is all about... nothing to do with furthering knowledge or being a serious academic).

In this context, Hobbes and Kant can't be more than a bunch of flash names in order to increase the leverage of Kagan's ludicrous ideas. Fair enough, Hobbes is a big thing in IR realist theory (which, in a sense, shows the incoherence of it). Hobbes in IR is merely 'useful', not historically rigorous nor bearing any resemblence with the truth.

Mainstream IR (ie. realism, liberalism and the neo-realist/liberalist concession) has until now not been able to bring out the normative aspect of this enquiry. Knowledge and Interest. Anything more need to be said?

Let us never forget the political aspect in pedagogy.

I love Fischer's comment at the UN the other day: "Any of you who know anything about European history should know that we're not from Venus, but we're the survivors of Mars."

This obviously implicitly saying that US=Nazis. Now that's the best comment to make vis a vis PNAC ejaculation. Not that Kagan and his crew would have recognized the implicit national socialist connotation. That's how stupid they are... as stupid as Goering and Goebbels.

It's what you get if you surround yourself with the wrong books, none of them written before the second world war.

US=positivist hell=death of historicism=death of humanity.