I now find myself in the surprising position of rooting for Gordon Brown and hoping that he manages to survive the current attempt on his career. My dislike of Brown is quite simply outstripped by my loathing of Purnell. Is it really a surprise that of all the Blairites it was Purnell who was willing to actually thrust the knife into Brown’s back? Undoubtedly a sign of his ambition. If Brown survives and restores his authority then, one might hope, this could be the end of Purnell’s career and, having overstepped his mark, he will have no significant future in politics, ultimately doomed to retire a broken and bitter man, resigned to pursuing some private sector career which will forever fail to satisfy his burning desire for power and influence. As much as I want Brown to fall, it’s important to bear in mind that it would (a) most likely leave Blairite’s back in power (b) mean that we’re denied the public spectacle of Purnell’s career dying a slow satisfying death.
Rooting for Brown?
June 5, 2009 at 9:13 am (Politics)
Tags: Brown, James Purnell
It annoys me when I find Boris Johnson endearing
May 23, 2009 at 10:19 pm (Politics, Random)
Tags: boris johnson
May 23, 2009 at 10:08 pm (Random)
How’s this theme? I want a bit of a change to reflect the fact I’ve setup the other blog.
My Research Blog
May 22, 2009 at 4:08 pm (Sociology)
Well I’ve now setup my research blog. The idea is that it will be an online notebook to replace the countless physical ones littering my room and covered in largely unreadable notes. Hopefully it will also be part of a wider network of Critical Realist blogs.
My descent into reformism continues abashed…
May 22, 2009 at 9:40 am (Politics)
I was just reading an article on the BBC website about the parliamentary fallout from the expenses scandal. It outlined some of the reforms that are being ‘considered’ in an effort increase political engagement and revitalise parliamentary legitimacy. Obviously there’s a huge degree of public relations in this but, even so, it surprised me how desirable I found some of the reforms listed to be:
Indeed, so shaken has the political establishment been by the expenses scandal that they are suddenly contemplating all kinds of ideas they had previously rejected as unwise, unworkable or hopelessly idealistic.
These include (but are not limited to):
• Proportional representation – Ending what critics see as the inherently unfair “first-past-the-post” system of electing MPs
• Fixed term parliaments – Ending the advantage to the ruling party of choosing the polling date
• A written constitution – Setting out voters’ rights and limiting the power of government
• A fully elected second chamber – Ending the power of patronage and expelling the few remaining hereditary peers
• Curbing the power of the whips – Freeing MPs to to vote with their conscience more often rather than following the party line
• Fixed terms for MPs – So they do not become too cosy and complacent in their roles
• Boosting the power of select committees – Electing the chairmen rather than having them chosen by the whips and handing them greater investigatory powers
A parliamentary liberal democracy that’s been through these reforms is still problematic to me. However it’s much less problematic than things are as they currently stand.
Children
May 21, 2009 at 12:20 pm (Random)
Tags: children
I sometimes wonder whether my inordinate distate for children makes me a bad person. Less so at present. From my bedroom window I’m watching a Mum in tears in the alleyway behind my house, pleading with her daughter “just walk, just walk, please! I can’t carry you” while the child screams and howls. Why would anyone do this to themselves? Obviously I’m glad my parents had me and they seem glad of both their children but then they would, wouldn’t they? I don’t for a second doubt that the justification lies in the doing*, as the most profoundly and deeply-rooted project human beings can engage in comes to justify itself simply though the centrality it occupies in their life. It becomes central to who they are and what their life is about and so it ceases to be some extrinsic activity that can be justified instrumentally. It poses questions but it also answers them and forever changes the shape and meaning that life holds. I’m not saying it’s possible to engage in detached rational evaluation of such profoundly personal matters – obviously life doesn’t work like that – but if it were possible, as well as mandatory, how many people would have children? I’m sure many still would but I’m certain the dynamics of it would change significantly.
*At least among the materially comfortable in the contemporary west. In different circumstences it’s obviously likely to be a somewhat differing story.
Neoliberal coup in Hungary
May 20, 2009 at 12:40 pm (Neoliberalism, Politics)
Tags: hungary, neoliberal coup
The governments of the Czech Republic and Hungary recently fell almost simultaneously. It was late March and in both cases something happened unusual. The main opposition parties, after having succeeded in undermining the governing coalitions, paradoxically have shown no interest in calling immediate early elections which they would be very likely to win – and thus be able to form their own governments. Instead, all the major parliamentary parties rediscovered common ground for collaboration and decided to form a so-called “government of technocrats” headed and formed by unknown bureaucrats or businessmen with no visible connection to any political party.
I’ve just been reading a great analysis of recent events in Hungary where the economic crisis has produced a strikingly unified action amongst the political class. The political contest that supposedly characterises post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has magically vanished and the real structures of power and control find themselves foregrounded as the brittle neoliberalism on the periphery of the European system threatens to implode in the face of massive capital flight, shrinking tax revenues and the austerity measures resulting from acceptance of the IMF’s loan. If you transplant the chain of events into the context of British party politics they become rather bizarre. As the New Statesman article puts it,
Bajnai [the New Hungarian Prime Minister] is not a member of any political party, but a friend and former business partner of both Gyurcsány and the SZDSZ leader, János Kóka. Imagine if in Britain the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the next parliament and Nick Clegg installed an old business buddy, who was not an MP, as PM.
However it’s in this apparent absurdity that the ideological logic of neoliberalism stands revealed. The austerity measures demanded – after all, there is no alternative - are claimed to be purely technical and the government is acting post-politically as it shits all over any substantive concept of a democratic politics. In effect you have the suspension of liberal democracy and, for all intents and purposes, a coup on behalf of the economic elite of Hungary. Yet within the symbolic universe of neoliberal parliamentary democracy it’s all perfectly coherent and proper.
Setting up of the “governments of technocrats” is a way of leaving the dirty work of destroying millions of lives of working people to individuals without a direct political allegiance to any parliamentary party and without any responsibility to answer to any of their voters. In reality it is a political coup against all the workers, a method aimed at confusing and disorientating people. It is a cunning move aimed at pushing through drastic austerity programmes, according to the script of world capital and its major institution IMF, euphemistically called “reforms”. How long all this will last is another matter.
A deeply cynical and political move to preempt social transformation through the seizure and consolidation of power can be presented as a formally sound and non-political response to changing circumstances: not only revealing the investment of the entirety of the political class in the maintenance of the status quo – and thus the profoundly hollow nature of substantive democracy – but also the immensely oppressive and quasi-fascist potentialities contained with neoliberal discourses of governance. You can’t help but wonder what similar events in the UK would look like?
Critical Realism, Rorty and Truth
May 16, 2009 at 11:27 am (Critical Realism, Philosophy)
Tags: Critical Realism, rorty
Truth might be better understood as ‘practical adequacy’, that is in terms of the extent to which it generates expectations about the world and about results of our actions which are realised. Just how practically adequate different parts of our knowledge are will vary according to where and to what they are applied. The differences in success of the same beliefs in different contexts and different beliefs in the same context suggest that the world is structured and differentiated, and has some degree of stability, so that while some things are transient, some are not.
While on the one hand I find this account given by Andrew Sayer plausible, on the other it seems much less so, all the more given that the fact that it’s offered in conscious opposition to Rorty’s pragmatism i.e. what is true is what works. As Rorty once said of science “Modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope”. Obviously there’s a trivial sense in which this is obviously false: unless we accept that modern science somehow captures something that, say, Voodoo does not then the manipulative capacity it grants us becomes nonsensical. Modern science allows us to cope - an unfortunate term given that it conflates the practical-instrumental and moral-existential dimensions of our engagement with the world – in the way Rorty admits it does because while it many not ‘correspond’ (with all the centuries of philosophical baggage that term brings with it) to the world, it certainly offers us the conceptual tools and structures our engagements with the world in a way that’s possessed of a far greater degree of practical adequacy than the alternatives available to us.
Once we dispense with the representationalist metaphores that Rorty is objecting to – i.e. that the world out there corresponds to the representation of it in my mind - the difference between what Rorty’s account of truth and that which Sayer gives seems rather semantic. Perhaps it’s far more a consequence of Rorty’s intellectual pseudo-radicalism and inability to break from the confines of the analytic tradition – the sort of thing which leads him into the quagmire of claiming that there’s no privileged relation between discourse and the world - than it is of some fundamental anti-realism that’s genuinely felt? One can’t help but feel that if Rorty had simply started life in a literature department, he never would have meandered into the intellectual cul-de-sac that he did. Or indeed if he’d trained in a Sociology department, he might well have endorsed the account of truth as practical adequacy that Sayer’s proposing.
