Feminism, Privacy and Radical Democracy
Val PlumwoodIn this paper I extend and apply some of the criticisms of liberalism made by feminists to make a case for radical democracy, and to try to show the connections between feminist problematisation of the liberal treatment of the domestic sphere and the project of democratising the economy and the workplace. I develop a critique of liberalism by focusing on the liberal master subject as the Man of Property, whose dominance is constructed from a multiple set of exclusions and oppressions, and his role in the founding drama of liberalism at the dawn of the modern era. I aim to show how the contradictions in his role in this founding drama results in two faces for liberalism, a fair face and a foul face, and how the disposition of public and private spaces characteristic of liberalism reveals the presence and intentionality of this master subject. The contradiction between the claim to universality in the application of liberal democratic principles and the reality of their incomplete and exclusionary application in actually existing liberal democracy is systematically disguised by the exception clauses which create the Others of liberalism. In this paper I consider the role of two of these areas of exception, reason and the liberal construction of the public/private distinction, and argue that each acts as blocks to the extension of the democratic imaginary.
Chomsky, Propaganda, and the Politics of Common Sense
Tom JenningsCurrent grass roots campaigns and movements for self-determination can be interpreted as part of a general questioning of State authority and the imperious logic of global capitalism. Noam Chomsky's analyses of US foreign policy and its news media rationalisations complement his academic studies of language and philosophy. Throughout, he insists that the common sense rationality of ordinary people is crucial for resisting the blandishments of propaganda and as a creative, potentially libertarian basis for political mobilisation against the New World Order.
This paper critically evaluates Chomsky's political writing and affirms its force and relevance. However, his class analysis of news propaganda as the 'manufacture of consent' is judged too crude to grasp the contemporary entanglements of power and knowledge. The complex functions and effects of professional intellectuals cannot be assessed outside of the power networks that give their activity coherence. In general, giving individualised forms of rationality a natural biological or transparent social status tends to preclude attention to the social and cultural contexts in which common sense, as well as power, operates. Those in struggle don't need distracting by universal truth or rationality when mobilising the collective, physical, motivational, discursive, rhetorical and intellectual resources available to them.
Communitarian Anarchism and Human Nature
David HartleyThis article argues against the widespread criticism that communitarian anarchism articulates a naive view of human nature. The two central tenets of this 'naivety thesis' are that communitarian anarchists (i) regard egoism as strictly a product of socio-environmental factors; and (ii) believe that an anarchist society will facilitate the disappearance of egoistic behavior. It is argued that this thesis is a misconception as it pertains to the three major communitarian theorists: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Petr Kropotkin. Combining textual exegesis with an account of their most important philosophical influences, it is argued that all three theorists share the view that egoism is ultimately an innate propensity of human nature, and that whilst an anarchist society would reduce the preponderance of such behaviour, it will not secure its eradication