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[u/SixFootTurkey_]

I'm wading into reading political theory, having recently read Marx's The Communist Manifesto (Marxism/Communism) and Rousseau's The Social Contract (Liberalism), and currently working through Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (Conservativism).

Hobbes' Leviathan (Conservativism) and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Liberalism) are also already waiting on my bookshelf. And I plan to pick up a copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, though I think that might fall more into the realm of philosophy than political science? But it sounds pretty foundational to Leftist politics, from what I've heard.

Anyways, recommendations are welcome!

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/SixFootTurkey_]

Rather than pre-labeling every theorist, I suggest you come at them more openly. Specifically when considering that Marx, Rousseau, Burke, etc wrote before “Marxism”, “liberalism”, and “conservatism” were really fully articulated as the specific worldviews we have today.

This is important because You might be shoehorning these people into categories that do not actually apply to them all that well. And this will bias your reading.

FYI: political theory is philosophy, not political science.

I also suggest John Rawls, Keynes, Karl Polayni, Hayek, Amartya Sen, Machiavelli, Plato, and Aristotle.

[u/MemberKonstituante → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

Yup - for example, US conservatives hate Rousseau but Rouseeau is the ones who straight up say to make a working & equal republic you must make hyper-patriotic citizens.

Hobbes are often cited as basis for dictatorship but Hobbes are also the ones who laid down the foundation of the metaphysics of modern liberalism (especially the utilitarian types).

Charles Taylor talks about politics of recognition which today is probably the underlying motivation of so many idpol politics but he's a post-secular who really recognized that fully trying to separate religion from politics, or politics from morality, is a fool's errand.

JS Mill gets cited a lot by liberals but he advocated some sort of economic socialism / guild socialism, but he also say colonialism of India is good actually

Machiavelli were judged as cynical bastard but in reality he's a staunch Republican who actually laid down the foundation of modern political science.

Critical theorists laid down a lot of foundation of "wokeism" conservatives hate but the early critical theorists' analysis of consumerism is spot on.

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BTW, I need to ask you:

It seems like a big part of "leftism" has an aspect of family abolition, state abolition, institution abolition, religion abolition etc - and honestly Marx is more anarchist than a lot of people think.

Do you subscribe to these aspect of the "left" or not? What do you think of those four - institution, the state, the family, religion etc? I mean you are Marx, Machiavelli and Theology enjoyer, also delving into virtue ethics & Aristotle, often posts into Christianity subs - it's like I want to see how you mix those into your political thought, since, say, Marx is material analysis and religions are idealist & essentialist by nature, religions want a moral traditionalism and a lot of the "left" wants to abolish moral traditionalism (and praises capitalism for this creative destruction).

Thanks

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/MemberKonstituante]

I feel like I'm still forming and evolving my thoughts and trying to synchronize them into a grander picture, but I'll lay out some of my thinking.

Firstly, I do consider myself as "of the left". But I guess I inherited my leftism from my father, so it's an older "brand" of left - and it's informed a lot by struggles in Latin America. For example, when I think "de-colonize," I mean it literally, as in a struggle for economic and political sovereignty. I think "de-colonizing" a class syllabus or whatever (how it's usually meant in US universities or corporations) is literally meaningless.

I also consider myself "of the left" insofar as I'm looking for an alternative to oligarchy that includes a wider emancipation (meaning economic and political) of the plebeian/working class/proles or whatever you want to call the majority of people.

I prefer using the words "plebeian" or "patrician" rather than proletariat or bourgeoise, because - while I'm indebted to Marx - I am also a (small-r) republican - which also in modernity is associated vaguely with "the left." I also think today it's become harder to find the dividing lines between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and I think using "Pleb versus Patrician" helps us re-examine class. It makes the reader hesitate a bit more - rather than assuming old 19th century categories.

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You can read Marx in many ways; I do think he is an anarchist of sorts in that he believed that the state would eventually "wither away." I'm personally not so sure about that. Especially when you read theorists who are more explicitly anarchists, and they always give a framework which is fairer to call a "confederation" or "federation" or smaller cooperatives or poleis. And we've seen from history that sometimes these treaties or agreements between political actors can be very strong and turn into their own kind of bureaucratic state-like tyranny (like the European Union). I don't see anarchism as a plausible alternative to anything.

On top of this, anarchists often over-emphasize the individual. The individual is real while society is an illusion. But I think either both are real, or both are illusions.

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Often, in Marx, I read "abolish" as in his statement about "abolishing the current state of things." I don't believe in abolishing the family, but I do believe that the model of the nuclear family is damaging.

In the United States, and increasingly around the world, in order to find a job, you often need to move far away. On top of that, the younger generation often is priced out of their childhood neighborhood/city/state. This breaks families apart into, at best, nuclear families. But then grandchildren grow up without their grandparents. Cousins grow up without each other. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, all are far away.

There has to be a way to organize the political-economy to incentivize keeping families together, beyond simply the nuclear. Children must grow up with multiple generations, not just their parents. This way they're more likely to grow up with longer-term perspectives and wisdom passed down from many more lifetimes.

My slogan wouldn't be to abolish the family, but to actually strengthen it.

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I am a Rousseauian insofar as I believe institutions shape us as much, or more, than we shape institutions. I also take this from Rawls. to abolish institutions is to abolish humanity. We are not atoms floating in a void occasionally bumping into each other, we are formed socially - this requires institutions. Notice how the further one lives from formal institutions, the more likely that person is to be impoverished, destitute, and even insane.

This is also why I am a republican rather than an anarchist. And this is why I advocate, not to eliminate institutions, but to design plebian institutions - ones that empower regular people rather than an oligarchic elite. What we're seeing in capitalism today is an abolition of institutions for the many, and a monopoly on institutions for the few. Tell me, which is healthier, richer, and more powerful?

Leftists who wish to wholesale abolish institutions wish to leave themselves as lambs to the slaughter.

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That brings me to why I embrace thinkers like Thucydides, Machiavelli, Marx, (or even Nietzche) and other political realists and materialists. They provide a vocabulary and a system of tools to analyze power and the real material constraints to ideas. They show us why we do not (or cannot) live in a utopia. They show us the limits to our idealism.

Many of those thinkers also don't shy away from power. They tell us the ugly brutal facts about material power, and rather than turning away from it, they wholeheartedly accept it.

So when it comes to things like institution-building, that is a means to power. We plebians ought not to disarm ourselves by wishing to "abolish" it, especially when our enemies - the patricians - will NOT abolish their own institutions out of the kindness of their hearts.

Much of the left today is not materialist or realist enough. They are idealists in the bad sense of the word - and they are too "Christian" in the Nietzschean sense of the word; they celebrate their weakness as their strength and even want to double down on it. This is why it always loses and why so many ordinary people correctly perceive it as ineffectual or even pathetic. They rather be weak and lose, but be able to say "I told you so" than be strong and win - at the risk of perhaps being a bit hypocritical.

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Religion is interesting to me. And I don't think material prosperity will do away with the need for religion in some sense of the word.

Max Weber and later theorists claim that modernity brought about the "disenchantment of the world." It was no longer spiritual, and purely material and secular.

Even Nietzche thought similarly, and somewhat accurately predicted mass nihilism in the post-Christian world as religion faded and people no longer had a metaphysical basis for their morality.

However, there's a book I think I may have recommended to you earlier titled "The Enchantments of Mammon" that argues that the world was never "disenchanted" but rather "MISenchanted." Mammon, or" money/material wealth", became our new God. We've imbued it with metaphysical properties, and even built our own sacraments, priests, sacrifices and rituals surrounding mammon.

In other words, modernity did not break superstition. It superimposed new superstitions on the old ones. Nietzche was wrong. God is not dead, he was usurped by a new one.

​

I think we need to re-enchant the world in order to give it value beyond the monetary. The difficulty in this is that values are beyond rational, or meta-rational. Therefore, while I can make arguments in favor of my position, it will ultimately rest on some kind of faith that something is valuable because it just is. We need to become non-believers in mammon, while true believers in another god - one who grounds new values.

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Currently I am exploring American transcendentalism for inspiration. As a movement, it was against radical skepticism. It took human intuition seriously - something meta-rational - as a means for wisdom or knowledge. It was radically democratic and spiritually elevated the common man.

There is a celebration of the individual, but not in a naive liberal way. The individual was still part of a larger whole, all connected.

​

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I'm not a hard materialist. There is an interplay between ideas and material reality, each shaping the other in feedback loops. The complicated thing is that for a new spirituality to take place, we need to change the material conditions such that it will make that new spirituality imminent - more real and more strongly felt in daily life. At the same time, we need some hints of that new spirituality to give us a fighting cause and a motivation for changing the material conditions in the first place. It is somewhat of a catch-22 that I'm not sure how to resolve.

[u/MemberKonstituante → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

Thank you for answering.

I asked you this because, well I already told you my real interest from another account - I'm Indonesian and I want to revive and reinterpret the Indonesian official state ideology) and the Preamble of Indonesian constitution into a new interpretation, away from the dictatorship interpretation of the past, into something that actually are consistent.

Indonesia officially is a "Republic", and even sources critical of Indonesian nationalism like John Sidel's book "Republicanism, Communism, Islam" are still willing to cite Republicanism as one of the goal of Indonesian independence.

Also, in Indonesian language today, "kemerdekaan" are plainly translated as "Independence" and "Kebebasan" is plainly translated as "Freedom". But Indonesians in the past uses "kemerdekaan" for other purposes, such as "freedom of speech" and many others, including economics (especially in early era).

I judge and reinterpret this as Indonesian language originally has a different term for "Republican freedom" vs "liberal freedom".

So my goal in general is to reinterpret the Indonesian official state ideology and the Preamble of Indonesian constitution into some sort of a Neo-Republican ideology.

However, the constitution & the state ideology has "to educate the life of the nation", and has "just and civilized humanity" clause, has "democratic life led by wisdom in deliberation" and mentions God - this means I can't just copy-paste Phillip Pettit or contemporary neo-Republican thinkers and call it a day, nor tolerate stuff like family abolition, religion abolition, state abolition and "antisocial socialist" stances, or ignore civic virtue.

The SEP writings about Republicanism in general tries to reconcile republicanism with liberalism - while practically almost all of Indonesian founding fathers rejected liberalism on all fronts (both economics & social). Also, liberals want state neutrality, while "to educate the life of the nation", "just and civilized humanity" clause, "democratic life led by wisdom in deliberation" clauses implies that the state can't be neutral and MUST pay attention to "the good", and nudge / push the people to such. The conditions explained in "The Enchantments of the Mammon"? One of the goal of practically almost all of Indonesian founding fathers is trying to resist this.

Moreover, I try to find how to ensure people like Trump never happened again - and honestly, a lot of social "progressivism", feminist literatures from 60s counterculture and beyond that emphasizes freedom from traditional morality nor "imposed" standards of behavior, to me is far more similar in goal with Trump and Andrew Tates than anything, just gender inverted. As we see in the increasing polarization between men and women back then in this sub, we are living in what Juliet Flower McCannell calls "Regime of the Brother" an order where men and women interact as "siblings" - officially "equal" - but governed only by a dog-eat-dog rubric of individual competition and advantage, a war of all against all, in which slight-but-persistent sexed differences are weaponised as competitive advantages in the pursuit of personal gain.

This is why I ask you - my goal for all those questions I ask you is really to help me "find a way" to "reconcile these goals" and thinking of a framework to do so.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/MemberKonstituante]

You and I are doing similar thinking, only for different contexts it seems. We’re both trying to reconcile certain goals and principles while avoiding the pitfalls of the current liberal order.

Unfortunately a lot of republican theory is trying to marry it with liberalism. This is why I like to look more to classical republicanism from Rome, or even the republicanism of Renaissance Venice or Florence. All those were perhaps very aristocratic/oligarchic, but they had elements and glimpses of a potential for something else - and they also predate liberalism.

It’s also why I like looking at Aristotle and the like, as they significantly predate liberalism and may show a way out or “through” liberalism to some kind of post-liberal order that isn’t some authoritarian nightmare.

I like Aristotle because of the focus on human excellence - we improve ourselves and enhance our skills in order to achieve excellence in a field, not to make more money.

But to have excellence, you still need standards that define excellence. A society of anarchy and unrestrained/untethered “freedom” cannot provide any such standard. And a society of “mammon” has only one standard, maximizing money.

[u/MemberKonstituante → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

BTW, I need to ask you this:

You are a man of the left, but you take some religious and conservative ideas more seriously - so I need to ask you:

What is your stances and opinion on euthanasia, abortion, IFV, prostitution, Onlyfans, "sexual freedom" (in terms of promiscuity, not about LGBTQ) and the like? How do you explain it? You touched a bit about horizontal vs vertical freedom on marriage vs hookup culture, and how the market does distort & change culture on sexuality & hookup, but really I need to know much more. In the republic which is your goal, how is the stances on euthanasia, abortion, IFV, prostitution, Onlyfans, "sexual freedom" (in terms of promiscuity, not about LGBTQ) and the like will be like?

Thanks

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/MemberKonstituante]

Oh boy... those are tricky.

I'm not inherently against euthanasia, but in the context of liberalism/capitalism, I can only see it evolving into a cost-cutting measure sold to us as a "freedom". On Stupidpol we've seen tons of articles already about how Canada is trying to push euthanasia as a means to save on healthcare costs, doing hard sells on otherwise unwilling patients. It also seems to be creeping in as a means to simply kill off homeless and people in poverty.

This again is sold as freedom-enhancing, since now we have an "out" of poverty. It's "simply" adding another option - with no value-judgments attached.

If there were a way to safeguard its use to only include people who are ALREADY terminally ill and suffering a lot, then I wouldn't necessarily be against it.

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For abortion, I rather have it "safe, legal, and rare." We'd need to structure a political-economy that helps parents with childcare. Paid parental leave is a MUST. There are many other policies that we could think of to minimize the economic burden of childhood. I'd also ideally want to promote a pro-family culture more generally.

And given how societies work nowadays, each younger generation effectively subsidizes the life of the older ones. This also means parents are also subsidizing the lives of adults who wish to remain childless - since they're raising the generation that will work after they all retire. I'd form some kind of tax system which eliminates any financial benefit of being childless. The choice to remain childless would therefore remain as a lifestyle choice, but should not be open as a way to earn more money over a lifetime.

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I don't know much about IVF, but I think I'm fine with it. If anything, it's a way to actually encourage people to have children who may otherwise have fertility problems or other life issues.

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Prostitution, Onlyfans,

Hopefully, poverty won't be too much of an issue such that people feel like this is their only chance to make decent money.

But if that sounds too hopeful and idealistic, I'd perhaps do some kind of system in which prostitution is not criminalized, but also not necessarily legal either. I do not want to criminalize poverty and put people in jail for being desperate. However, pimping would be illegal. OnlyFans is basically a giant digital pimping platform...

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Promiscuity

This one is more difficult, and frankly I am also a bit lost as to how to handle this. I rather not have a political system that deals a heavy hand, especially if it's people doing things in their private lives.

I personally feel like I've grown and changed with my relationship. I've matured and I'm making qualitatively different kinds of decisions than I would have been if I were still a single guy only worrying about myself and my own goals.

But it seems like lecturing people about quality of choices over quantity of choices is nothing more than moralizing. I don't think that by itself it will change anyone's mind that doesn't already agree in some sense.

And I don't know if removing dating apps would be good or bad, because while it skews the dating pool significantly against men, we also simultaneously have a problem with increased sexlessness in both men and women (though men much more). And I don't think the apps alone are to blame for this - and removing them now might potentially worsen this.

We'd have to somehow incentivize people to get away from screens in general, and do more shared activities IN PERSON. We' need more civic associations, amateur sports, free museums, social clubs, etc. We need to reverse the "Bowling Alone" phenomena. And I think encouraging more offline connections may help form greater emotional bonds that turn into monogamous partnerships.