… but you don’t have to!
For students of modern political ideologies, William Greider offers a compendium of virtually every totalitarian lie from Hobbes to Mao in putting forth his “dream for the future” – enforced, of course, by government guided by Greider.
If you’re taking this for credit, identify the specific passages that embrace Hobbes (hint: it is his central contradiction), Rousseau (what is his alternative to the “will of all”?), Kant (it’s in Perpetual Peace), Hegel (not just the dialectic, but that’ll do for starters), Marx (Ms. of 1844 **and** the German Ideology), Lenin (read The Black Book of Communism) and, last but not least, Mao (a steel mill in every village!).
Extra credit: note his rejection of the Bible (Genesis II; 1 John 2:16; John 16:33; and passim). And Aristotle (Metaphysics I.i; and Ethics I, VI-VII). And Augustine (City of God, XIX).
The Nation, like most pools of leftist advocates, is gifted at the total critique; but its denial of metaphysics and its belief in its own superiority doom it to the basement of the Lubyanka. (Hat tip to PL)
UPDATE: Greider not only cribs from every member of totalitarianism’s Who’s Who, but also channels Hillary, who said, in her commencement speech, “Here is the grand vision I suggest Americans can pursue: the right of all citizens to larger lives. Not to get richer than the next guy or necessarily to accumulate more and more stuff but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively the elemental possibilities of human existence.” (Thanks to DL for the tip).
8:50 am on May 11, 2009
