J Blundell Australia February 28 2024

Genuine upskilling to satisfy the the needs, demands, exigencies and future security of young people everywhere in regions existentially threatened, in the five challenging terms idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want now echoing and reverberating in a billion helplessly confused frankly dazed political-class minds – Yes, Veronica, there is an environment and you”re living in it dear so come why not loosen your clothing a little? – Beveridge 1942^1,2,3,4 – if we recall that no-one lives, with, mentally dwells in or may ever be legitimated let alone lionised in, a so-called History of Ideas, Debates or ludicrous even experientially pointless public opinion ‘Wars,’ but (lives by) what he, she or ‘they’ do in any given society to act upon and ameliorate if not overturn the array of existential threats to its (micro, citizen, resident) members via a mature, vital operational understanding of the life of human society-in-environs expressly, practically, technically and ever-so elephant-in-the-room obviously economically in the two other domains that ideological neoliberal satanic psychopathic- and head-banging Abrahamic religious fundamentalist and genocidal ecocidal totalitarian-propaganda suppresses, oppresses and destroys, the meso scaled geographical community and macro scale tropospheric WORLD⁵.

.. being a hopefully definitive essay powerfully pitted against 1948 triumphalist (Hey, we survived⁶) post WWII Oxford Union adolescent upper middle class white-skin debating club historicist fabulists’ both-sidesist nonsense of liberalism on HOW personal, interpersonal and community level empowerment and freedom from vilification, assault, violation or killing on account of your gender, ethnicity or lifestyle would help..

What Happened to Liberalism? Becca Rothfeld speaks with Samuel Moyn about his book Liberalism Against Itself and why liberalism is in crisis.

Becca Rothfeld: The first question I wanted to ask is how to improve liberalism. Despite some misreadings of Liberalism Against Itself as illiberal, it’s very much not an anti-liberal book. It’s a book that’s disappointed with the direction that postwar liberalism has taken, but it’s also cautiously optimistic about the liberal tradition’s ability to redeem itself. Tallying up your objections to Cold War liberalism in the book, I noticed that it was possible to construct a better ideal of postwar liberalism by imagining a sort of mirror image of the failed liberalism you describe. Could you say a little bit about the positive conception of liberalism glinting in the background of the book?

Samuel Moyn: This book is a series of portraits of liberals in the middle of the twentieth century, and I take a pretty deflationary view of the politics that they wrought. I claim that they introduced a rupture in the history of liberalism. I do imply that they’ve left us, at least in part, in our current situation, intellectually and even practically. I don’t know if I would agree that I’m optimistic about liberalism: I would say that there are resources from the past to draw on before Cold War liberalism that could be used to argue for a new liberalism. But I certainly think that we need to give tough love to liberals, not just for their abuse of their own tradition, but also because they seem recurrently incapable of confronting some nagging criticisms of their platform. You’re right that I do suggest (albeit indirectly) some laudatory features of liberalism before it became transmogrified through the Cold War liberals. I’ll mention a few. The first half of the book is about what liberalism was before Cold War liberals abandoned its core motivation—human emancipation. I start out with a chapter on the Enlightenment that defines the epoch through its promotion of emancipation from the ruins of authority and tradition. But a much bigger component of Liberalism Against Itself is the contrast I draw between the self-perfectionism of the Enlightenment and the tolerationism that surged through the careers of more recent liberals like John Rawls. In the beginning, liberals were total perfectionists. They offered a novel, controversial ideal of the highest life, one premised on personal fulfillment through creativity. That’s because the early liberal thinkers were also romantics, were deeply connected to the Romantic movement in literature and philosophy. Another component of early liberalism that should be resuscitated is an ethos of progress. Liberals before the middle of the twentieth century were connected to a sense that history was a forum to achieve emancipation and to construct interesting lives. Agency doesn’t just materialize—the conditions for it must be built. To the early liberals, those conditions aren’t going to appear overnight. There were a lot of reasons in the middle of the twentieth century to give up on progress—certainly the notion of inevitable progress. What I worry about is an overcorrection: that Cold War liberals lost any sense of an uplifting, radiant future to offer through policy, both locally and globally. A truly emancipatory vision for liberalism would involve reversing some of the damage of that pessimistic thinking.

Source: Boston Review

The Cold War and the Canon of Liberalism

the perspective of these lectures is left Hegelian. It’s not specifically about the welfare state, which I don’t see as—and I don’t think left Hegelians should think of as—the end of history. That being said, you’re right that American liberals are nostalgic for the New Deal or the welfare state that they understand that they didn’t get, and then idealise Denmark or Sweden. There’s no nostalgia for that in these lectures, except insofar as it shows that there were alternative liberalisms. And there’s absolutely no suggestion that we just surgically extract liberalism before the Cold War came and graft it on to our present. But we should rehabilitate some of its impulses and return to some of its thinkers as ways of extricating ourselves from the Cold War syndrome. The significance of the left Hegelian tradition is about a kind of emancipatory statism through the institutionalisation of a free community of equals who are creative agents. That’s what I think liberalism ought to be trying to bring about, which is not at all bureaucratic or technocratic. There’s a very interesting distinction that some have used, like Svetlana Boym, about different forms of nostalgia. The point is not to luxuriate about what came before, but instead to treat the past as a critical resource for getting what we’ve never had. That’s the kind of spirit of these lectures, and I really want to avoid any complacent nostalgia, where the idea is just to go back. The welfare state was eugenic in Sweden and some other countries, and deeply exclusionary everywhere, especially along lines of gender, but also (where it mattered) race. And so, the New Deal was an incredibly compromised project all the way down. It is not a credible starting point, but we do have to have a theory of emancipation through the state and history. The nineteenth century is a better resource for that approach than our politics, call it liberal or socialist or liberal-socialist, than anything we’ve seen in the last few decades.

Source: Center for Intellectual History Oxford

Does Law and Political Economy Need Theory..

Oh my giddy aunt – DERACINATED ACADEMIC CHATTER & PhD word, glyph & number castles in the sky may only compound upon themselves and degenerate into drivel and sloganising – definitional postmodernism AND post-structuralism are on display here in one 7 word schpiel, a Brain Teaser of the Australians Waleed Aly & Scott Thompson’s arcane esoteric and frankly nonsensical parlour conversation genre this – my auntie Grace’s 1890’s indeed..

So i did have a great aunt by education and upper middle class socialisation straight out of the Suffragist Movement, the Bloomsbury Set haute couture & haute bourgeois ambience or say La Belle Époque 1871-1914 corresponding with the ending of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the beginning of World War I (1914) who made one of Australia’s if not Australia’s first ‘co-educational’ (an epistemologically whiffy and phenomenologically crackers good old Dame Enid Lyons, Dame Edna Everage, Macca the Quacker on Sundaze ‘n John Winston Howard euphemism for inclusive of young women and young men, Young People!) secondary school principals, GA Sanders, Unley HS, Adelaide, birthline unknown to me and of no interest either.

As more people know now, Mr Blundell does history not ancestry.

..those vanity-project numptie-dumpties in their headbanger BELLE-EPOQUE neoclassical academic Noah’s fu..ing Ark mentally-structured Eroica Symphony Neverland have destroyed everything we ever knew, valued or cherished.

What a fine mess (they) got us into (that) time.

John Blundell

Energy Health Public Health New Quantum Mathematics Neurolinguistic Neuroscience Economic Reform Philosophy of Science Australia

¹ https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/10/beveridge-five-evils-welfare-state

² https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/01/beveridge-report-published-a-british-revolution-1942

³ https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/giants-a-new-beveridge-report/BB34AED06B557F02FA40BE10A6F62209

⁴ https://youtu.be/F8a0TWSWBKA?si=92v0C2QTCz2gSPPH

⁵ NOW, all economic theorists will note the C1 (micro-scale) well functioning adult, the C5 (meso-scale) geocommunity notionaly over10 square kilometres of largely fertile land and the C10 (macro and Σ (sum of all things: there are none else in the real economy) troposphere as per ‘Concentric Circles Economics,’ scholar John Blundell, fruitgrower, wholesaler, food manufacturer and retailer whose businesses Blundell Orchards and Organically Grown were smashed by the neofascist Friedmanite state of South Australia, October 1995 (all documents, business documents and other contents of my office and home in the Adelaide Hills were stolen so no record so ask me a couple of pertinent questions as I am sure you all will now that your own lives depend on learning how ‘stuff’ really works in this broken chemically dissolving Ayn Rand Edward Bernays Joseph Stalin Alan Greenspan world (C9 is terrrestrial and oceanic, OK) of theirs

⁶ António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres 26/2/2024