Over at Aeon Magazine Robert Talisse worries that “our social lives” are being “tyrannised by democracy” because “choices about mundane matters…are all deeply tied to [our] political profile…social worlds are shaped by the travails of contemporary politics” and builds to the conclusion that “there is such a thing as too much democracy,” that “we must reserveContinue reading “Robert Talisse On ‘Too Much Democracy’ And The Public-Private Distinction”
Tag Archives: democracy
Karl Jaspers On The ‘Phantom’ Public
In Man In The Modern Age (Routledge, New York, 1959), Karl Jaspers writes: The term ‘masses’ is ambiguous….If we use the word ‘masses’ as a synonym for the ‘public,’ this denotes a group of persons mentally interlinked by their common reception of certain opinions, but a group vague in its limits and its stratification, though atContinue reading “Karl Jaspers On The ‘Phantom’ Public”
Democracy, The ‘Anti-National,’ And The Seditionist
In my essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books on the Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, currently serving a fifty-five year jail term in Federal prison for seditious conspiracy, I had written: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 remain a blot on American democracy; John Adams deeply regretted — till the dayContinue reading “Democracy, The ‘Anti-National,’ And The Seditionist”
The Incompatibiity Of Democracy And The Modern Nation-State
A few days ago, I posted the following status on my Facebook page: Sometimes, over the course of a semester’s worth of reading and discussing material with one’s students, you can feel a sort of collective convergence on some substantive theses. This semester, my Political Philosophy class and I were in agreement on this one:Continue reading “The Incompatibiity Of Democracy And The Modern Nation-State”
Political Conventions Begone
Cometh the political convention and cometh the dreary return of speculative commentary about their usefulness, their substantiveness, their relevance. Cometh too, the sight of perfectly reasonable, sensible folks tuning in to them, wasting their time in the hope of picking up meaningful political lessons. (I’ve been told that some folks tune in for the comedicContinue reading “Political Conventions Begone”
Samir Chopra 