« April 2020 | Main | June 2020 »
Hear ye, hear ye! I am antifa!
Given the Trump administration’s decision to declare “antifa” a terrorist group (claiming ‘it’ is responsible for the looting and violence in recent protests across the U.S. prompted by the police killing of George Floyd), it is time for all of us to publicly declare our allegiance to anti-fascism. If you are a committed “anti-fascist” (antifaschistisch), you are antifa. I am antifa! (Please share.)
By way of modulating my anger over the police killing of yet another Black person, George Floyd (in Minneapolis on Memorial Day), I put this together should you be interested. Most of these titles are found in my larger compilation on “punishment and prisons,” and some are from my blog posts on prosecutorial misconduct in this country.
I have taken some material from a previous post (in 2014) on this topic.
I am reading an enjoyable, indeed enchanting autobiographical essay by Gary Snyder, “The Path to Matsuyama,” from his book, Back on the Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), which he penned upon receiving the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize” from the Ehime Cultural Foundation in Matsuyama City, Japan, November 7, 2004. When he learned of the honor Snyder protested, “I am not a haiku poet! Please be sure you understand that.” Only a few pages into the essay, I thought of the few books of haiku poetry I have, and one in particular leapt to mind mainly because my heart longs for the return of the baseball season (watching old games on ESPN doesn’t work for me, save for a few highlights from Dodger games!): Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryū,* edited (with translations by) Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).
Haiku is a combination of two words: haikai (literally, ‘comic,’ ‘unorthodox’) and hokku, the latter a three line stanza and the former meaning “sportive” or “playful.” Bashō, a haikai master, sought to exemplify in his poetry both comic playfulness and spiritual depth, an uncommon blend of the vita contemplativa, which he practiced on his own terms, with the vita activa, evidenced in his willingness to take seriously “the ordinary, everyday lives of commoners,” portraying such figures as the beggar, the traveler and the farmer. On the origins of haiku, see “A Note on Haikai, Hokku, and Haiku,” appended to Robert Hass, ed., The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (The Ecco Press, 1994).
* Senryū (川柳, literally ‘river willow’) “is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku in construction: three lines with 17 morae (or ‘on’ often translated as syllables, but see the article on onji for distinctions). Senryū tend to be about human foibles while haiku tend to be about nature, and senryū are often cynical or darkly humorous while haiku are more serious. Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word. Senryū is named after Edo period haikai poet Karai Senryū (柄井川柳, 1718–1790), whose collection Haifūyanagidaru (誹風柳多留) launched the genre into the public consciousness.”
* * *
From the Introduction I was delighted to discover two historical facts that shine brightly:
(i) “The story of baseball haiku begins with Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who was to become the fourth pillar in Japan’s pantheon of great haiku masters (joining Bashō, Busson, and Issa), and (ii) “The first American baseball haiku was written by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), more than a half century after Shiki’s pioneering poems.”
Several baseball haiku from Masaoka Shiki:
spring breeze
the grassy field makes me
want to play catch
dandelions
the baseball rolled
through them
beyond the hedge
they are playing ball
in a withered field
One of the editors of the aforementioned volume on baseball haiku, Cor van den Heuvel, “discovered haiku in San Francisco in 1958 when he heard Gary Snyder talking about short poems at a Sunday gathering of the Robert Duncan/Jack Spicer poetry group in North Beach.” He “was known as ‘Dutchy’ when he played catcher in the late 1940s for the Comets, a sandlot team in Dover, New Hampshire.” Here are several haiku by van den Heuvel:
summer afternoon
the long fly ball to center field
takes its time
changing pitchers
the runner on first looks up
at a passing cloud
after the grand slam
the umpire busy
with his whisk broom
Two baseball haiku from Kerouac:
How cold!—late
September baseball—
the crickets
Empty baseball field
—A robin,
Hops along the bench
And three samples from Ed Markowski (b. 1954):
rising into thunderclouds
the umpire’s
right arm
late innings
the shortstop backpedals
into fireflies
night game in durango
all the stars
above the diamond
From his brief biography in the book: “Ed Markowski, the son of a steel-worker father and a kindergarten-teaching Italian mother, was born April 14, 1954, in a hospital in Detroit about a mile from Tiger Stadium. He first learned about haiku in 1967 when his older sister brought a book home called The Four Seasons (1958). Published by the Peter Pauper Press, it was a small book of Japanese haiku in seventeen-syllable English translations by Peter Beilenson. Markowski, impressed by haiku’s ‘eloquent simplicity,’ treasured the book. He still has it. He didn’t try writing haiku until 1989, when he wrote fifty-five of them ‘still under the illusion of the seventeen-syllable rule.’ After discovering William J. Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook (1985) a short time later, he began to write with a freer and more knowledgeable hand. [….]
He pitched for the St. Sylvester Darts in 1967 and 1968: ‘In ’68 I went 13 & 2. From 1985 to ’87 I played right field for, and managed, a slow-pitch team of drunks and misfits called The Cuban Heels. I throw right, and switch hit.’” [….]
Our last baseball haiku is from George Swede (b. 1940), ‘[o]ne of the world’s most accomplished haiku and senryu poets.” Swede was born in Riga, Latvia … and from the age of seven grew up in British Columbia, Canada: first in Oyama, Okanagan Valley, and then from age ten in Vancouver. He played sandlot ball during his teen years and liked to play first base. He throws and bats right-handed. Swede attended the University of British Columbia (BA in psychology), Dalhousie University (MA), and studied at Indiana University. He’s lived in Toronto since 1967, where he has had a long career at Ryerson Polytechnic University. He is currently Chair of the Department of Psychology and the School of Justice Studies.
[….] George was a [Toronto] Blue Jays season ticket-holder for about five years during the time the team won its two World Series, 1992 and 1993. He first learned about haiku in 1968 during a creative writing class at the Three Schools of Art in Toronto and even wrote a few, but he didn’t become seriously interested in writing haiku until 1976 when he was asked to review Makoto Ueda’s Modern Japanese Haiku: An Anthology [University of Toronto Press, 1976]. He published his first haiku in Bonsai in 1977. The same year, with Eric Amann and Betty Drevniok, he co-founded the Haiku Society of Canada. He has published many books of haiku and other poetry. His latest haiku book is Almost Unseen [2000] from Brooks Books.
empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone
People are always asking ‘what’s the use of poetry?’ The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the mind of compassion are roughly one and the same, and through poetry perhaps they can keep guiding the world toward occasional moments of peace, gratitude, and delight. One hesitates to ask for more.
A gassho to the great poets of the land, especially Masaoka Shiki. I would ask the mountains and rivers to overlook my brashness for having the nerve to say hello: and as it goes in Sanskrit, Sarvamangalam, ‘May good fortune come to All Beings.’ — Gary Snyder
Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known by his Muslim name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
* This of course was written before the “velvet” and “self-limiting” revolutions in East-Central Europe (and later ‘Orange’ and ‘Rose’ revolutions in two former republics of the Soviet Union).
See too, Malcolm X—a reading guide.
(Although a day late here, this was first posted on my FB page yesterday.)
“Rabindranath Tagore FRAS [Fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland] (born Robindronath Thakur) [also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur (Bhonita), and also known by his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi] was a polymath, poet, musician, artist and ayurveda-researcher from the Indian subcontinent. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the ‘profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse’ of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his ‘elegant prose and magical poetry’ remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as ‘the Bard of Bengal.’”
* * *
The following are selected snippets from Amartya Sen’s discussion of Tagore’s life and works in his book, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Sen tells us that much of his own childhood was “spent in my grandparents’ home at Santiniketan, where I studied at the school that Rabindranath Tagore had established and where my grandfather, Kshiti Mohan Sen, taught.”
Tagore, who was proud of the fact that his family background reflected ‘a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammaden [this locution, once commonplace among non-Muslims, is misleading, indeed, inaccurate, and is no longer used to describe the religious worldview of Islam] and British,’ emphasized the need to be vigilant in defence of this open-minded tradition and to help it flower more fully.
Like Akbar’s championing of rahi aql1 (the ’path of reason’), Tagore emphasized the role of deliberation and reasoning as the foundation of a good society:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls; …
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary
desert sand of dead habit; …
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
From the Gitanjali (lit. ‘song offering’)2
* * *
Sen reminds us that Tagore “was keen to preserve the obvious distinction between mythological tales and historical truths: ‘the story of the Rāmāyaṇa’ is not to be interpreted as ‘a matter of historical fact’ but ‘in the plane of ideas,’ as ‘a marvelous parable of reconciliation.’ In today’s India, Hindutva ideology (Bharatiya Janata Party/BJP) and Hindu nationalists generally3 view this text as an “historical document which cannot be questioned.” In brief, there cannot be, in several senses of the title of a book edited by Paula Richman, “many Rāmāyaṇas.”4 This nefarious religious nationalism has even been granted legal sanction, as it gave “actively destructive Hindu politicians a license to tear down a place of worship of other people (the Babri mosque, in this case, demolished in December 1992) to build a temple to Rama, in celebration of his alleged birth exactly there.”
* * *
“Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of 80, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature in Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout Bangladesh.
In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937 Graham Greene was able to say: ‘As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.’
The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the world is perhaps less interesting in the distinction between the view of Tagore as a deeply-relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and remote spiritualist. Graham Greene had, in fact, gone on to explain that he associated Tagore ‘with what Chesterton calls “the bright pebble eyes” of the Theosophists.’ Certainly, an air of mysticism played some part in the ‘selling’ of Rabindranath Tagore to the West by Yeats, Pound and his other early champions. Even Anna Ahkmatova, one of Tagore’s few later admirers (who translated his poems into Russian in the mid-1960s), talks of ‘that might flow of poetry which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath Tagore.’ [….]
… Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Rabindranath tries to produce—or had an interest in producing—a ‘synthesis’ of the different religions (as the great Moghal emperor Akbar tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently nonsectarian, and his writings—some two hundred books—show the influence of different parts of the Indian cultural background as well as that of the rest of the world. Most of his work was written at Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the small town that grew around the school he founded in Bengal in 1901. He not only founded there an imaginative and innovative system of education … but, through his writings and his influence on students and teachers, he was able to use the school as a base from which he could take a major part in India’s social, political, and cultural movements.
The profoundly original writer whose elegant prose and magical poetry Bengali readers know well is not the sermonizing spiritual guru admired—and then rejected—in London. Tagore was not only an immensely versatile poet; he was also a great short-story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist and composer of songs, as well as a talented painter whose pictures, with their whimsical mixture of representation and abstraction, are only now beginning to receive the acclaim that they have long deserved. His essays, moreover, ranged over literature, politics, culture, social change, religious beliefs, philosophical analysis, international relations, and much else.” [….]
* * *
“Tagore greatly admired Gandhi but he had many disagreements with him on a variety of subjects, including nationalism, patriotism, the importance of cultural exchange, the role of rationality and science, and the nature of economic and social development. These differences … have a clear and consistent pattern, with Tagore pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.
Rabindranath knew that he could not have given India the political leadership that Gandhi provided, and he was never stingy in his praise for what Gandhi did for the nation (it was in fact Tagore who popularized the term ‘Mahatma’—great soul—as a description of Gandhi). And yet each remained deeply critical of many things that the other stood for. That Mahatma Gandhi has received incomparably more attention outside India and also within much of India itself makes it important to understand ‘Tagore’s side’ of the Gandhi-Tagore debates.” [….]
* * *
“For Tagore it was of the highest importance that people be able to live, and reason, in freedom. His attitudes towards politics and culture, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernity, can all be seen in the light of this belief. [....] Rabindranath’s qualified support for nationalist movements—and his opposition to the unfreedom of alien rule—came from this commitment. So did his reservations about patriotism, which, he argued, can limit both the freedom to engage ideas from outside ‘narrow domestic walls’ and the freedom also to support the causes of people in other countries. Rabindranath’s passion for freedom underlies his firm opposition to unreasoned traditionalism, which makes one a prisoner of the past (lost, as he put it, in ‘the dreary desert sand of dead habit’).”
* * *
“Gandhi and Tagore severely clashed over their totally different attitudes towards science. In January 1934 Bihar was struck by a devastating earthquake which killed thousands of people. Gandhi, who was then deeply involved in the fight against untouchability (the barbaric system inherited from India’s divisive past, in which ‘lowly people’ were kept at a physical distance), extracted a positive lesson from the tragic even. ‘A man like me,’ Gandhi argued, ‘cannot but believe this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins’—in particular the sins of untouchability [one cannot but help notice how this resembles the religious rhetoric of right-wing Christian evangelicals in the U.S., although the nature of the ‘sins’ implicated differ rather markedly]. ‘For me there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign.’
Tagore, who equally abhorred untouchability and had joined Gandhi in the movements against it, protested against this interpretation of an event that had caused suffering and death to so many people, including children and babies. He also hated the [theological?] epistemology in seeing the earthquake as caused by ethical failure. ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of [natural] phenomena is too readily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.’
The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes towards science. However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to understanding physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were interestingly heterodox. He did not take the simple ‘realist’ position often associated with modern science [such ‘realism’ is often not only epistemic, but metaphysical as well]. The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in the New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting through observation and reflective concepts. To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive its truth, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable. [….]
Tagore’s epistemology, which he never pursued systematically, would seem to be searching for a line of reasoning that would later be elegantly developed by Hilary Putnam, who has argued, ‘Truth depends on conceptual schemes, and it is nonetheless ‘real truth’ [for a contemporary and, by my lights, persuasive defense of this view of truth, see the work of Michael P. Lynch5].”
Notes
“[T]here are many references to the importance of reason in the Qur’ān, and Islam seems to take pride, at least in its early years, in presenting itself as highly rational. What this implied is that people approaching Islam should use analytical reason in assessing the religion, in the sense that they should consider whether what the religion regarded as evidence for its truth is in fact evidence. We need to remember that Islam had to persuade members of other religions, and of none, to accept its validity, and what grounds could there be for such acceptance except reason? Force, after all, is ruled out, and Islam is not very enthusiastic about miracles, except for the miracle of its own form and matter. [….] The original Islamic sciences—the study of the Qur’ān, traditions [ahādīth], grammar, jurisprudence [fiqh], and theology [kalām]—are highly rational in structure—hence the early and bitter debate between the enthusiasts of the new thinking—philosophy—and the advocates of the Islamic sciences. This is not, it is important to grasp, a debate between philosophy and religion, but rather a debate between one way of reasoning and another way of reasoning. From Leaman’s A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy (Polity Press, 1999): 15. See too: (i) Diagne, Souleymane Bachir (Jonathan Adjemian, trans.) Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018; (ii) Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; (iii) Hourani, George F. Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018; (iv) Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2002; and (v) Nusseibeh, Sari. The Story of Reason in Islam. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
(i) Berenschot, Ward. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; (ii) Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin Press, 2009; (iii) Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996; (iv) Nanda, Meera. Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003; (v) Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. Noida, Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2015 (Penguin Books India, 2003); (vi) Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007; and (vii) Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1990.
Suggested Reading
Painting: Coloured ink on paper by Rabindranath Tagore, 25.3 x 35.7 cm, about 1929-30.
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939)
I think it is true that Freudian interpretation depends generally on the everyday reason-explanation model—sometimes called ‘folk psychology’—which it then expands in various ways, and that precisely this is one of its strengths. — Marcia Cavell
[Psychoanalysis] offers us an inclusive vision, model, or paradigm of human nature. One advantage of this model is that it acknowledges the importance of the mind’s connections both with the body (as do neurophysiology and biology) and with specific social milieus (as do the social sciences). As Freud first pointed out, a person’s behavior is influenced not only by his or her psycho-sexual development tracked through its various vicissitudes by psychoanalysis, but also by the various chemical-hormonal happenings occurring within his or her body. Behavior is also influenced significantly by the social institutions within which the individual develops from early childhood to adulthood and to which he remains vulnerable at every stage of life. Psychoanalysis’s portrait of human nature thus encourages interdisciplinary bridge building among the several disciplines concerned with the study of human nature and behavior, including several of the humanities that deal with unconscious meanings, like literary criticism and aesthetics, at the same time that it challenges most traditional views of human nature with its findings regarding unavowed impulses and processes, the persistence of infantile patterns in adult life, and unacknowledged defensive strategies.” — Ernest Wallwork
[Freud] never came to grips with the full force of the idea of a science of subjectivity. Neither have we. — Jonathan Lear
* * *
A New York Times piece some years ago by Patricia Cohen, “Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department,” summarized a recent study in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association:
“Psychoanalysis and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to ‘South Park,’ from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department. A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis—or what purports to be psychoanalysis—is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as ‘desiccated and dead,’ a historical artifact instead of ‘an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.’”
One reason that looms large in accounting for this state of affairs is the extent to which academic psychology in this country crudely conceives itself as a “scientific” enterprise (in the sense that it relies on and elevates the singular importance of laboratory experiments). And inasmuch as this putative psychological science is tied to the bio-science of (mental) health care, it fancies itself grounded in ”empirical rigor and testing,” beholden, that is, to what falls under the robust rubric of “evidence-based medicine”(EBM; what counts for ‘evidence’ in this model is extremely important). This conception strives to place psychology on par with other natural sciences while reducing the mind to the brain, which in part explains the overweening infatuation with neuroscience and the extravagant claims made on behalf of evolutionary psychology. An ancillary reason involves skeptical disenchantment with the so-called folk theory of mind from within the academic “philosophy of mind” (e.g., in its most extreme form, as ‘eliminative materialism’). This is not to insinuate that this folk theory of mind is immune to philosophical revision or extension, but only that any plausible psychological model has compelling reasons for assuming some of the key premises that animate that model. Nor is this to imply that psychology can or should ignore science, rather, it may be the case that psychology, insofar as it deals with (a narrative sense of) “the self,” with consciousness, the sub-conscious and the unconscious, and the nature of mental life generally, may be better construed as a “science of subjectivity,” wherein this peculiar science is best understood in a truly novel sense which, for the time being, often resorts to analogies and metaphors from other sciences, a situation that will likely prevail until its conceptual vocabulary becomes more settled (it is no less a coherent or systematic method or mode of acquiring and using different kinds of knowing and knowledge). It is thus not simply a reductionist, objectivist, and naturalistic scientific endeavor. Freudian psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular is not implicated in the post-positivist (hence ‘scientistic’) “penchant for quantities” and the “fetish for measurement” that often distorts or “sullies” the natural and social sciences, symptomatic evidence for which is seen in the academic fondness for game theory, cost-benefit calculations, and Bayesian probability estimates (its paradigm of statistical inference serving as the epitome of empirical argument). In other words, and in the end, Freudian psychology shares with Pragmatism what Hilary Putnam calls the “revolt against formalism:” “This revolt against formalism is not a denial of the utility of formal models in certain contexts; but it manifests itself in a sustained critique of the idea that formal models, in particular, systems of symbolic logic, rule books of inductive logic, formalizations of scientific theories, etc.—describe a condition to which rational thought can or should aspire.” To paraphrase and quote again from Putnam, our conceptions of rationality cast a net far wider than all that can be scientized, logicized, mathematized, in short, formalized: “The horror of what cannot be methodized is nothing but method fetishism.” In the culture wars, “Freud bashing” remains commonplace in some quarters and today one finds few articulate defenders of this or that aspect of Freudian psychology from within academic psychology proper. And yet a handful of philosophers have engaged in sympathetic and sophisticated critiques of the Freudian oeuvre that serve to proffer plausible and often persuasive models of Freud’s theory of the mind, psychoanalytic concepts and therapeutic praxis: Ilham Dilman, Richard Wollheim, John Wisdom, Donald Levy, John Deigh, Jerome Neu, Jonathan Lear, Sebastian Gardner, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Herbert Fingarette, J. David Velleman, Linda A.W. Brakel, and Ernest Wallwork. Their work is essential to determining what is living and dead in Freudian psychology.
In brief, and thus minimally speaking, psychoanalytic theory provides us with a more-than-plausible philosophical and psychological therapeutic model that involves
The therapeutic model of psychoanalytic psychology entails, like most therapeutic relationships, a relation of unequal power involving scientific and therapeutic authority derived from professional training and expertise in its psychological theory(ies), hypotheses, and methods. The analyst/analysand relationship thus involves an unavoidable asymmetry of knowledge, needs and desires. It relies on forms of linguistic, symbolic, and bodily communication that assume various levels of conscious, subconscious and unconscious mental states and processes. It depends strongly on empathy, self-observation, and (clinical) judgment. It ideally requires the mastery of a therapeutic craft or art for the analyst and the eventual acquisition of sundry emotional and practical-cognitive skills on the part of the analysand. One, if not the overarching goal of the therapeutic process is to account for and overcome the analysand’s lack of self-knowledge and subsequently develop a rudimentary commitment to the process of individuation which can lessen dependency on the analyst if not allow the analysand to cease psychoanalytic therapy altogether. The knowledge of other minds in this process assumes appropriate experiential sensitivity (‘concentrated listening’) that is simultaneously individualized—built up over the course of a long and profound acquaintance with a particular person—and deeply informed. The psychoanalyst’s extensive conceptual and clinical training depends upon, involves or entails:
All things considered, psychoanalysis can be justly described as the “first great theory and practice of personal life [as it emerged with modernity],” its discoveries germane—if not central to—any viable philosophy of mind, moral psychology, psychological explanation, and the values, aims, and purposes of mental health and well-being if not human happiness or flourishing.
As Eli Zaretsky explains, psychoanalysis has accorded further psychological, moral, and cultural legitimacy to the “experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor.” It therefore builds upon (because having presuppositions and making assumptions about) individual moral and psychological autonomy (which is perfectly compatible with requisite complementary conceptions of intersubjectivity and community), widening it to encompass the spheres of “creativity, happiness, and love.” By a theory and praxis of personal life, we mean reference to an “historically specific experience of singularity and interiority, one that [is] sociologically [and historically] grounded in the [processes of modernity] ....” This experience served to free the individual from unconscious images of oppressive authority rooted in the family and gave plausible substance to the notion of a personal unconscious.
“Far from seeking to return a disturbed individual to a preexisting order, as the shaman, healer, or priest did, [Freud] formulated the analytic project as a personal and provisional hermeneutic of self-discovery, one that a psychoanalyst could facilitate but not control. In this way, he gave expression to possibilities of individuality, authenticity, and freedom that had only recently emerged, and opened the way to a new understanding of social life.”
While psychoanalysis was historically liable to suffer through “the familiar Weberian cycle of idealization, rebellion, dissemination, institutionalization, and routinization,” “in its heyday men and women used it to complicate, deepen and radicalize the three emancipatory promises of modernity,” namely, autonomy, woman’s equality, and democracy. These promises were not merely utopian, for Liberalism and capitalism’s contribution to mass culture, leisure time, and the possibilities of a personal life represented the economic and material conditions that enabled their fulfillment even as—then as well as today—“the same historical forces that produced the aspiration toward individuality were undermining its social prerequisites.”
At its best, psychoanalysis consisted of three intertwined threads: “a quasi-therapeutic medical practice, a theory of cultural hermeneutics, and an ethic of personal self-exploration, one that was imbued with the devotion of a calling.” The emancipatory strength of these threads was clearly visible in its continental European birthplace, while the geo-political conditions and cultural climate that later characterized post-war England and the United States served, generally (thus with exceptions), to unravel, fray and thus weaken the emancipatory character of psychoanalysis, in part as a result of the wholesale professional medicalization of psychotherapy and the ideological psychologization of conventional authority, rendering psychoanalysis prone to exploitation as a tool of social control of one kind or another.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is indeed a science of subjectivity, but not in the (positivist) manner in which the early Freud understood that term, nor is it a “natural” or “social science” as those fields of inquiry are typically characterized (of course this does not rule out their respective and distinctive possible contributions to psychotherapy). It is a science in especially close proximity to philosophy, in particular, what we’ve come to call “therapeutic philosophy,” but other philosophical approaches (e.g., ‘pragmatism’) suggest that we accord priority to praxis, in the sense of viewing theory in the service of same; others cite the significance of the existential-phenomenological tradition, philosophical methods (e.g., conceptual clarification and analysis), and spiritual or psychological and dialectical practices (e.g., self-examination, self-reflection, dialogue, and so forth) from the history of philosophy (East and West) as equally integral to psychoanalytic psychology. And of course ethics is part and parcel of this science too, and not just “professional ethics,” nor is it solely in reference to the fact that ethical presuppositions, assumptions, and values are essential to psychoanalytic theory—or better, philosophy—and praxis, but the manner in which ethics is capable of addressing wider and deeper questions of human health and well-being, human suffering and fulfillment (as do well-known ‘philosophical therapies,’ such as Hellenistic philosophies like Stoicism, Patañjali’s Yoga system, the ‘schools’ Buddhism, and Daoism, to cite the more conspicuous examples).
I’ve always thought an ability to profoundly appreciate the “cultural” (including social and political) dimensions of human psychology (as both constraining and enabling) in dialectical conjunction with the unique psychological or character traits of the individual human being has been, at least in some quarters, one of the intrinsic and indispensable virtues of Freudian (and post-Freudian, etc.) psychoanalytic psychology, as well other forms of humanistic and existential psychology and psychotherapy that are distinguishable—and some distance—from what we know as “academic,” “scientific,” “empirical,” or “experimental” psychology, in other words, that sort of psychology routinely taught in our colleges and universities, which remains rather too close to its crude behaviorist and positivist antecedents.*
While anecdotal evidence, I’ve had several conversations about academic psychology with instructors who are utterly dismissive of Freudian psychology, confidently if not condescendingly informing me that psychology is far more (i.e., robustly) “scientific” because aptly “experimental” and thus Freud (and his ideas) are but a more or less curious relic of the past, having long been superseded, much like Aristotelian physics, phlogiston theory, and the Copernican system. Indeed, Freudian psychology is sometimes characterized as a “pseudoscience.” I think it is instead a peculiar “science and philosophy human subjectivity,” a genuinely human or humane science that freely borrows from all three fields of inquiry, but has no special relationship to either the natural and social sciences or the humanities. The best analysts are not unlike philosophers (and in some instances are in fact both, like Jonathan Lear and Marcia Cavell), and some philosophers (some of whom were cited above) have provided us with our best analyses of the values and virtues of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is a science of human subjectivity or a science of the person, and thus we might rightly if somewhat innocuously or blandly say that it is an exquisitely “human science,” which suggests we locate it betwixt and between “the sciences” and “the humanities,” although perhaps that says very little by way of locating its unique status as a science (involving individual experience, intentions, and cognitive and affective behavior, hence the centrality of folk psychology, hermeneutics, ‘meaning,’ ‘symbols’…), and an intimate collaborative endeavor between the analyst and the analysand. As a human science and therapeutic regimen, it needs explicit clarity as to its philosophical assumptions about human nature, including uniquely human capacities and powers, our potential for good and evil, and so forth.
Finally, as we’ve learned from the “Freudian Left” (the scope of which is far broader than Paul Robinson’s book) and such brilliant iconoclasts as Ronald David—“R.D.”—Laing and Thomas Szasz, as well as feminist psychoanalysis (and psychoanalytic feminists), there is a strong and unavoidable (internal and external) political dimension to psychotherapy (an early exemplification of this is found in Elizabeth Ann Danto’s brilliant book, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938).
* Hence Jon Elster’s comment (although Elster has little favorable to say about the Freudian corpus and what organically grew from it):
“… [W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights [and, I would add, psychoanalytic psychology] than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….] I believe…that prescientific insights into the emotion are not simply superseded by modern psychology in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom and understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply.” — Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Notes:
1. Jonathan Lear elaborates: “Psychoanalysis tends to move simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, it tries to discover a hidden irrationality in the thought, speech and action which presents itself as rational. On the other hand, it tries to find rationality hidden within the irrational. There among the flotsam of dreams, physical symptoms, slips of the tongue, psychoanalysis discovers that mind is active.”
2. Cf. Lear: “In the analytic situation there tends to be an inverse correlation between remembering and repeating. In the analytic situation, ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.’ So, for instance, the analysand does not remember that he used to be defiant towards his parents, but he acts defiantly now toward the analyst.”
3. Cf. the late Eugene Victor Wolfenstein: “In theory and practice Freud offers us only amelioration of and consolation for the pain of being human—only the chance to be ordinarily unhappy.”
4. Cf. Lear: “The psychoanalytic situation is structured to offer an existential Sabbath: a benign environment that does not produce too much anxiety....”
Please see: Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy: A Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature.
“Karl (Heinrich) Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.”
* * *
On the pressing relevance of Marx and Marxism for philosophy, morality (including moral psychology), and political economy
Jean-Paul Sartre captured at least one reason why Marx will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, namely, the fact that as long as this or that form of capitalism persists, Marx and Marxists have something to teach us: “As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience, which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.” I am not sure it’s true that “a philosophy of freedom,” or least the conception of such freedom, requires as a necessary condition the prior and generalized concrete transcendence of capitalism (although no doubt such an experience will further contribute to its philosophical elaboration), for we can well rely on our powers of imagination to conceive of this philosophy of freedom, even if only in a (non-pejorative) utopian sense, and even if its precise existential, psychological and material contours cannot now be determined, let alone appreciated. Marx himself provided a taste of such freedom insofar as he envisioned what social and economic progress beyond or transcendence of capitalism entails, even if his speculations regarding the precise stages of socialism and “communist” society were deliberately and fairly meager, perhaps disappointing in comparison, say, to the works of the utopian socialists and others (e.g., anarchists) both in his time and since.
Jon Elster, for example, begins to outline the philosophy and praxis of such freedom in his essay, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989). The works of the late G.A. Cohen likewise go a considerable distance in demonstrating the significance of a demanding notion of a Marxian or at least Marxian inspired equality as integral to any socialist or communist conception of freedom. And the socialist or communist future has been given substance, meaning, and aspirational direction and purpose in notable works by David Schweickart, Michael Luntley, Erik Olin Wright, and Peter Hudis, among others, as well as two important edited volumes by Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos, Vol. 1) and, Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos, Vol. 2) London: Verso, 2007.
It does appear we are, as yet, a rather long way from overthrowing the irrational, cruel, and obdurate “aristocracy of capital” and thus the rule of capitalists and its corresponding forms of alienation, including the “economization of social relations” that together make for the marrow of capitalism. In other words, there has yet to be sufficient or widespread appreciation of the fact that the best or good life, or at the least necessary conditions for universal or generalized welfare, well-being and happiness (i.e., self-fulfillment or eudaimonia) cannot be defined by criteria and standards derived from industrial production and consumption, by an inordinate desire for wealth or fame, by purely hedonic pleasures within the parameters of present hedonism, or by narcissistic psyches fully formed in childhood; that the moral psychological development embodied in processes of individuation and self-realization must be available to and possible for everyone.
We remain far from a world in which the best (i.e., the true) interests of workers, or the masses generally, are not canalized into a social Darwinian pursuit of economic advantage, or determined by the crass ideological parameters of “bread and circuses” or the “pathology of normalcy,” in other words, a state of affairs in which the masses can live without a chronic sense of material uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety. It appears to be a rather distant future in which a Marxist and Gandhian-like political economy is guided by larger political, social, and philosophical ideals cultivated in the soils of personal and democratic experience, a political economy that accords pride of place to the moral and “spiritual” development of human beings, in which economic progress is achieved in the first instance by the universal provision of basic needs for life and human flourishing, by an economic self-sufficiency in harmony with ecological processes and principles and thus the built and natural environment, by a political economy forged in the fires of the struggle for justice and motivated by the endless pursuit (after Condorcet and Godwin) of human perfectibility as enshrined in the tripartite motto or secular trinity that emerged from the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (or ‘community’).
Put differently, we look forward to the day in which the economy is no longer dependent on the production and cultivation of distorted and artificial needs or individually and socially debilitating desires, a time and place in which the masses are not bound and bewitched by an overwhelming need to be psychologically indemnified by possession and consumption of goods and services. This would be a world in which egregious displays of conspicuous consumption no longer exist unabashedly alongside absolute and relative poverty. This would be a world in which the aristocracy of Capital no longer contributes to the systematic dehumanization of workers in the form of commodified labor and labor markets, in which the false promises of a good life defined by consumption and irresponsible affluence no longer make mincemeat of the pursuit of happiness or systematically and thus ruthlessly thwart the capacities and capabilities of individuals alone and in concert to uniquely realize self-chosen values or exemplify the endeavor to live a virtuous life.
Marx and Marxists will continue to speak to us so long as we remain unable to fully articulate and significantly realize the ends made possible by universal achievement of the satisfaction of basic material human needs, those ends associated with the recognition and fulfillment of moral and spiritual values, virtues, and needs by way of the subordination of economic life to the goals of establishing the conditions necessary for the generalized pursuit of self-actualization or self-realization. Marx and Marxists will continue to speak to us so long as most of us lack the innate incentive toward worthy living, for realizing in some significant measure and within the constraints of human dignity and self-respect, a capacity for self-realization in which autonomous, self-directed living is at the same time an associative or communal life characterized by an interdependence based on a division of labor with respect to the individual realization of values.
Please see the following compilations, all freely available on my Academia page (perhaps in honor of Marx’s birthday, you might begin with the Marxism bibliography):
The following, albeit lightly edited, is from the Bread and Roses Centennial Committee’s (1912-2012) Facebook post several years ago accounting for the distinction between May Day and Labor Day in this country:
“Ever wonder why the U.S. celebrates Labor Day, the first Monday in Sept, while May 1 is a day recognized around the world as a workers’ holiday, a day of solidarity between workers of all nationalities? It was bound up with the struggle for the shorter workday – a demand of major political significance for the working class. ‘Eight hours for work —eight for rest—and eight for what we will.’
Already at the opening of the 19th century workers in the United States made known their grievances against working from ‘sunrise to sunset,’ the then prevailing workday. Fourteen, sixteen and even eighteen hours a day were not uncommon. The 1820s and 1830s are full of strikes for reduction of hours of work and demands for a 10-hour day were put forward in many industrial centers —the Mechanics’ Union of Philadelphia, led a strike of building trade workers in Philadelphia in 1827 for the 10-hour day — Lowell’s ‘mill girls’ Mill did the same.
The 8-hour day movement, which directly gave birth to May Day, is connected to the general movement initiated in the U.S. On August 20, 1866, delegates from over 50 craft unions formed the National Labor Union. At its founding convention the following resolution dealt with the shorter workday: ‘The first and great necessity of the present, to free labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which 8 hours shall be the normal working day in all states in the American union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.’
The First International adopted the Eight-Hour Day in Sept. 1866 at [its] Geneva Congress … : ‘The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive .... The Congress proposes 8 hours as the legal limit of the working day.’
The Second International, held at Paris in 1889, designated May 1st be set aside as a day upon which the workers of the world, organized in their political parties and trade unions, were to fight for the 8-hour day. The Paris decision had been influenced by events in the U.S. in 1886 where there had been a call for a general strike on May 1st, 1886, for the 8-hour day.
Strikes and lockouts in 1885 increased to about 700 and the number of workers involved jumped to 250,000. In 1886 the number of strikes more than doubled. On May Day, 90,000 marched in Chicago, in New York, 10,000 marched to Union Square. Eleven thousand marched in Detroit. May Day rallies in Louisville and Baltimore were remarkable for their black-white unity. In NYC, labor leader Samuel Gompers, told the crowd, ‘May 1st would be remembered as a second declaration of independence.’
But the event that guaranteed May Day a place in the history of the working class took place three days later at Haymarket Square in Chicago. There, an 8-hour Association was formed long in advance of the May 1, 1886 strike. Events of May 3 and 4, which led to what is known as the Haymarket Affair, were an outgrowth of the May 1st strike. A demonstration on May 4 at Haymarket Square was called to protest a deadly attack of the police upon a meeting of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works on May 3, where six workers were killed and many wounded. The meeting was peaceful and ended when the police marched into the Square. A bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing a sergeant; a battle ensued and seven policemen and four workers were dead.
A witch hunt against militant workers, especially the anarchist leaders followed and eight men were arrested. The trial produced no evidence that any of them threw the bomb, nor that any of them had conspired to throw it. Prosecuting Attorney Julius Grinnel said in his closing remarks, ‘Law is upon trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands that follow them…. Convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and save our institutions, our society.’
Seven men were sentenced to death; two petitioned for clemency and had their sentences commuted to life in prison; and 21-year-old Louis Lingg exploded a dynamite tube in his mouth while in jail. The four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One year after the hanging of the Chicago labor leaders, the American Federation of Labor voted to rejuvenate the movement for the 8-hour day.
May 1st, which was already a tradition, was chosen as the day to re-inaugurate the struggle for the 8-hour day. Yet leaders of the A. F. of L. limited the strike movement. While May Day picked up momentum across the world, it lost steam in its country of origin. In 1905 the AFL disavowed May Day altogether, choosing instead to celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September, the national holiday sanctioned by the federal government in 1894. May Day in the U.S. was nevertheless still celebrated. In 1910 the Socialist Party brought 60,000 into the streets of New York City for May Day, including 10,000 women of the Shirt Waist Makers’ Union.”
Sundry Reflections in Honor of May Day (International Workers’ Day)
“Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”—Eric Hobsbawm
“In the Marxist tradition, self-realisation is the full and free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual. [….] Under suitable conditions, both [political democracy and economic democracy] can be arenas for joint self-realisation.”—Jon Elster
“We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can only be a hothouse and unreal culture where itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make we are not cultured. [….] Industry without art is brutality.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Eleven Criticisms of Capitalism
—From Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010)
Economic Democracy
“I have argued that economic Democracy, as a system, will be less alienating than Laissez Faire. To summarize the reasons: Workers will have more participatory autonomy under Economic Democracy, because the degree of workplace democracy will not be restricted by the capitalists’ need to keep open all options for profit. The labor-leisure trade-off should be more in accordance with the general interest under Economic Democracy, because workers will have a greater interest in promoting more flexible, less frantic, more meaningful working arrangements, as well as shorter hours and longer vacations, than do capitalists, who bear the costs and risks of such changers (under Laissez Faire) but do not receive the full benefits. Workers are likely to be more skilled under Economic Democracy, because neither competitive pressures nor the need for control will push so hard toward deskilling.”—David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996)
America the Possible: The Values
[….] “Many thoughtful Americans have concluded that addressing our many challenges will require the rise of a new consciousness, with different values becoming dominant in American culture. For some, it is a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all, the possibility of a sustainable and just future will require major cultural change and a reorientation regarding what society values and prizes most highly.
In America the Possible, our dominant culture will have shifted, from today to tomorrow, in the following ways:
We actually know important things about how values and culture can be changed. One sure path to cultural change is, unfortunately, the cataclysmic event—the crisis—that profoundly challenges prevailing values and de-legitimizes the status quo. The Great Depression is the classic example. I think we can be confident that we haven’t seen the end of major crises.
Two other key factors in cultural change are leadership and social narrative. Leaders have enormous potential to change minds, and in the process they can change the course of history. And there is some evidence that Americans are ready for another story. Large majorities of Americans, when polled, express disenchantment with today’s lifestyles and offer support for values similar to those urged here.
Another way in which values are changed is through social movements. Social movements are about consciousness raising, and, if successful, they can help usher in a new consciousness—perhaps we are seeing its birth today. When it comes to issues of social justice, peace, and environment, the potential of faith communities is vast as well. Spiritual awakening to new values and new consciousness can also derive from literature, philosophy, and science. [….]
Education, of course, can also contribute enormously to cultural change. Here one should include education in the largest sense, embracing not only formal education but also day-to-day and experiential education as well as the fast-developing field of social marketing. Social marketing has had notable successes in moving people away from bad behaviors such as smoking and drunk driving, and its approaches could be applied to larger cultural change as well.
A major and very hopeful path lies in seeding the landscape with innovative, instructive models. In the United States today, there is a proliferation of innovative models of community revitalization and business enterprise. Local currencies, slow money, state Genuine Progress Indicators, locavorism—these are bringing the future into the present in very concrete ways. These actual models will grow in importance as communities search for visions of how the future should look, and they can change minds—seeing is believing. Cultural transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.” [….]—From James Gustave Speth’s “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part II,” Orion magazine (May/June 2012)
Global Justice
“[A]ffluent people in developed countries have duties to respond to globalization with measures that would strengthen developing economies because otherwise they would take advantage of people in developing countries. A person takes advantage of someone if he derives a benefit from her difficulty in advancing her interests in interactions in which both participate, in a process that shows inadequate regard fro the equal moral importance of her interests and her capacity for choice. In the case of globalization, the central difficulties are bargaining weaknesses due to desperate neediness. [….]
[M]ajor unmet transnational responsibilities [are located] in two aspects of globalization. The first corresponds to the familiar charge that transnational corporations exploit. In transnational processes of production, trade, and investment, people in developed countries currently take advantage of bargaining weaknesses of individuals desperately seeking work in developing countries, in way that show inadequate appreciation of their interests and capacities for choice. Responding to this moral flaw, a citizen of a developed country ought to use benefits derived from this use of weakness to relieve the underlying neediness. The other aspect corresponds to familiar charges of inequity in the institutional framework that regulates world trade and finance. The multinational arrangements that sustain globalization depend on tainted deliberations in which the governments of developed countries take advantage of the weak capacity to resist their threats of governments of developing countries. Citizens of developed countries should support arrangements that would be the outcome of responsible deliberations based on relevant shared values, a shift that would entail giving up large current advantages to promote the interests of people in developing countries.” — Richard W. Miller, Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Suggested Reading:
Relevant bibliographies freely available on my Academia page: