I've been reading this book of essays by Immanuel Wallerstein called "After Liberalism." (props to Jennifer Whitney for recommending him, though not this particular book). I've been interested for a while in the word "liberal" - what it means, why it's used as a perjorative in both right-wing and "radical" circles, and what its history is. In this book Wallerstein, an esteemed sociologist, goes into the birth of liberalism as an ideology, along with 2 other ideologies, socialism and conservatism, as a result of the French Revolution. His thesis is basically that that was the beginning of ideology itself, and those 3 were really just 3 flavors of the same thing, which developed and influenced each other but were basically after the same thing: "maintaining order" in a world where constant political change, for the first time, was normalized. Pretty fascinating stuff.
Additionally he asserts that with the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989 not only is communism over but liberalism is too. He writes a lot about colonialism and the "rights of peoples" as opposed to "human rights." Here is an excellent passage at the end of an essay called "The Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism":
What is the argument put forward in Great Britain, Germany,
France, the United States? That we (the North) cannot assume
the burdens (that is, the economic burdens) of the whole world,
Well, why not? Merely a century ago, the same North was assuming
the "White man's burden" of a "civilizing mission" among the
barbarians. Now the barbarians, the dangerous classes, are saying
Thank you very much. Forget about civilizing us; just let us have
some human rights, like, say, the right to move about freely and
take jobs where we can find them.The self-contradiction of liberal ideology is total. If all humans
have equal rights, and all peoples have equal rights, we can't
maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world-
economy has always been and always will be. But if this is openly
admitted, then the capitalist world-economy will have no legiti-
mation in the eyes of the dangerous (that is, the dispossessed)
classes. And if a system has no legitimation, it will not survive.The crisis is total; the dilemma is total. We shall live out its con-
sequences in the next half-century. However we collectively resolve
this crisis, whatever kind of new historical system we build and
whether it is better or it is worse, whether we have more or
fewer human rights and rights of peoples, one thing is sure: It will
not be a system based on liberal ideology as we have known that
ideology for two centuries now.
He's basically saying throughout the book that liberalism is this big 200 year old lie that finally pepole are starting to not believe in any more, and so some big changes are around the corner. I can see that some would disagree with the above passage on this key point: IS capitalism really an inherently inegalitarian system, as he says?
Really interesting, no?
I'd also like to mention that I recently got some new OCR software that I just used to scan that in, and I can say OCR software is pretty damn accurate and painless to use now. It's nice to see not just brand new whiz-bang uses for computers that we never thought of before but also things like OCR and video software, stuff I've been WANTING to do with computers for many years but that never really worked that well, cheaply, till recently. Hurray for the commodity computer economy! heh.
Posted by steev at Enero 4, 2005 11:04 AM