Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition - Part 6 - Habermas' Critical Theory
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- čas přidán 14. 06. 2024
- You can find Legitimation Crisis here amzn.to/3AjJTWy
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Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.
![Rick Roderick on Habermas - The Fragile Dignity of Humanity [full length]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/itGtf3ZSkyQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Man, these lectures make me happy. After work, with a glass of wine. No better way to spend an evening. Dr. Sugrue is one of the rare intellectuals that is personable and can break complex things down in a simple way that anyone can understand. 👏🏻
I feel like saying. Is he really? In other words. I feel that now since he has passed his intellectual portion would say. I only did my job. You gained what you needed. He only did what was needed.
Mr Sugrue, I’m forever indebted to your lectures, what a delivery, what eloquence, what articulation, with my engineering background you make this subject more interesting than anything I have studied before, thank you Sir!
I know im asking randomly but does someone know of a method to get back into an instagram account?
I was stupid forgot the account password. I appreciate any tips you can give me.
@Kingsley Langston Thanks for your reply. I got to the site through google and im trying it out now.
Takes a while so I will reply here later with my results.
@Kingsley Langston It worked and I now got access to my account again. I am so happy!
Thank you so much, you really help me out :D
@Malcolm Luca You are welcome :)
2:02 Science-Ethics
3:01 Psychoanalysis, Hegelian Philosophy, Linguistic Philosophy 3:31 Status of Knowledge & Society
4:10 _Legitmation Crisis_
6:19 Crisis: Organic system reaches an impasse
6:39 3 Parts
1. Politics, The State
Steering Economics
2. Economy, The Market
Taxes to Politics
9:04 3. Cultivation, Socio-Cultural
10:29 3 Systems, 1 Whole
All Advanced Capitalist Societies have these
11:20 What’s the problem causing the sickness? How can we prevent further struggles?
13:44
1960s hippies
Rejected Social Norms, a socio-cultural issue
Socio-cultural-> economic problem
18:40 Legitimation Crisis are important, Generational
*Creating Society*
19:33 All societies have Order Force, Coercion, Legitimization
What makes a society legitimate?
• Powerful strength
• Rational mind
(• Wholesome heart)
23:34 Serve the Interests of
• The Whole?
- A Few? Elites?
• Human Good
27:47 Ideal-Speech
• approximating it
28:50 what do I say?
Deformed opinions due to need to get along
Teleological critique of reason
32:01
33:02 *Critical Legal Studies* at Harvard Law
Law backed up by Force
Who benefits here?
Minority/small fraction benefit is
Reason over Fighting
“What sense does that make?”
No sense - Illegitimate, get rid of it
No nonsense, No Biased Benefits
39:09 ….
Politics, Economics, Socio-Cultural
Logos Uburolous
This is not Hume or Kant
41:24 Towards a collective humanity treatment
Kant - Ought
Habermas- Human Conscious, Serious Moral Discourse
These lectures are providing me with such wisdom, I feel paralyzed with what to do with it. I want to tell all those I love to listen to this theory, but I fear that so few would understand the awesome irony of the long arc of history we all find ourselves in. God bless CZcams. I await the Philosopher King (Tyrant).
With no ads! Big brains AND a heart.
24:10 *Habermas’ skeleton key* “What Habermas is doing here is liberating us from moral skepticism based upon an attempt to universalize our rational needs, our rational desires. And our rational desires are the universally generalizable desires.”
One of the most brilliant teachers!!
So true
❤
This version of the Great Minds was so good.
Thank you so much for posting these.
I find myself quite interested in his work, and I’m grateful for this general summary. I find myself more and more agreeing with Habbermas especially his concept of constitutional patriotism.
constitutional patriotism is the stupidest soulless idea ever. Of all of Habermas ideas, that is literally the worst lol
@@BioChemistryWizard Why?
@@biasedcriticism8760 On the ground level no one gives a crap about a constitution. Its merely just some circle jerk ivory towers intellectuals would clap about. Social relations among the uneducated, educated, immigration, culture, races, languages etc. is so much more complicated.
Thank you I appreciate you for posting this
Great, brilliant exposition. I am further educated, enlightened
One of my favorite thinkers of all time. In what ways were you coerced by society today?
Thank you, just dashed accidentally to your platform and am glad I did
Thank you prof
great teacher
Great lecture, cheers.
Thank You!
I find that I run into the same problem here that I did with Kant's effort to get past Hume's Guillotine: the 'oughts' are simply implied at the beginning rather than worked towards from descriptive statements. Taking the description of Critical Legal Theory for example, the outcome of the examination would look very different depending on whether you feel that laws should benefit every member of society equally, should benefit society as a whole (i.e. aggregate benefits), should benefit at least some as long as none are disadvantaged (i.e. Pareto Parity). I get the feeling that, while this could be a useful tool, it still doesn't get us past the instrumental view of rationality and relies quite heavily on consensus as the legitimising factor for normative judgements.
Well, good that you mentioned it. Actually so do I. I am troubled finding out that system works under oath. What i mean by this is that unless everyone adheres to honesty. I can surely imagine a society where the demise and extrapolation of for example white people can benefit the society as a whole since "all they experience is existantional pain" (overblown, far fetched, I am aware). Humanitie's intrest, I think are not equal and olthough some universal laws might be maintained we cannot ensure that nobody uses propaganda to manipulate people into thinking that what they are doing (rasism, antisemitism) is actually good and benefits us since it is mostly our concern. People would justify cruelty by relegating others to the line of animals inept of critical finking nor feeling.
@@say_o_la3743Although you guys have good points, I think we can work that out. Yes, most premises rational philosophers generally use are "out of nowhere". But that does not mean they are necessarily arbitrary. Intuition can be a source of knowledge, that can be rationally verified after using arguments. Concerning the problemn of moral universality, we can maybe try a new concept of "universal", like Habermas suggests. A relativistic universality. That means something like: every human being has a core foundation of values that sometimes overlaps or not with other humans beings. The areas of higher overlap rating can be called more (and this is the important distinction) "universal" while the areas of least or no overlap may be very particular. For instance, survival and reproduction are obviously the most universal human values [even for people that kill themselves or doesnt have sex - like eunucs, who Montesquieu showed have even more sexual apettite making their lives a living hell], meaning people in a civilized society must have the right to survive and reproduce. Which means any laws that direct or indirectly produce death or eugeny are injust. That doesnt help us so much with the content of values, but at least shows that universality is not as much as a rigid concept. Habermas also gave us an important notion to deal with propaganda. Propaganda affects ideal speech act, acting like a coertion. One thing we could try to do is make as clear as we can how propaganda and manipulation affects human brain, through neurocience and other studies that can help us demistify our inconscious bias. A creative mixing of psychoanalisis, Jungian philosophy, marketing and propaganda understanding, sociological and antropological notions, semiotic philosophers and habermasian philosophy and we may start to see a light in the end of the tunnel. Then again we may not, but I think its worth trying, since the alternative is moral nihilism. Finally, this seems more like a system to upgrade laws, not a system to create laws. Which means you guys concerns about "how the benefit of all people" should be understood are very valid. But I mean upgrade because I think the power of it is in revealing laws that make things worse for some groups. Arbitrary laws. So we shouldnt think "how can this benefit all?" but instead, as Sugrue suggests, "Who benefits?". Meaning that if a law doesnt have a certain degree of universality (and here we are in another dead road) it should be banned. Habermas system is a law destructor. Let the legislator have stream of consciousness. Rationality will filter. I think thats the idea.
Hi, thank you so much for uploading. Do you have the rest of the lectures?
Yes, they will be posted in the near future
@@dr.michaelsugrue please, I am looking for the remainder of the lectures in this series.
@@dr.michaelsugrue Hi! Did the professor ever lecture on Hannah Arendt?
Amazing!
Marvelous. 🌹
I wonder if Habermas is happy with the current situation where some dissenting voices are censored. Would he believe that this is bad because not everyone is allowed to participate in the discussion on coercion and legitimacy, or would he believe this is good because the dissenting voices that are being censored have been so distorted by their prior religious and political prejudices that their contribution to the discussion would be a negative one?
There’s always an arbitrary reason to censor your opponents
where was the round of applause at the end?
Fantastic
I wonder if the developments of Critical Legal Theory in the 30 or so years since this lecture have changed Dr. Sugrue’s assessment of Habermas as the ‘least dogmatic’ Frankfurt School thinker.
I can't figure out his stance on CLS. He seems to praise it in one and then frown in another lecture. Maybe he has been undecided, in a topic, that is multidimensional.
Habermas constitutional patriotism is a solid framework and has survived well enough. I would hope professor sugrue would at least appreciate that if his view has changed.
was that colored hair example Habermas' or yours? sound a lot like Adorno's take on jazz to me 😅.
Great video. I am glad I wasn't there because my arm would be aching from asking what Michael had just said. Amazing.
Insanity is not the loss of reason, it’s the loss of everything else.
How old are these lectures though? What year were they recorded in?
Around 1991
What year was this recorded? Thank you
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
Check out Rick Roderick if you haven't yet
I'm hearing the philosophy of Habermas about legitimized coercion and genuinely wonder whether his statement "Principles of solidarity" on Israel's onslaught on Gaza qualifies as a striking example of a none legitimized one. Moreover, I question the universality of Kantian ethics in the form of categorical imperative by the selective application.
Habermas is basically ignoring the ongoing genocide of people in Gaza "in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi" which is heteronyms, irrational and utterly not legitimized form of coercion of thinking.
It's a truly remarkable lecture by the brilliant My Sugrue (R.I.P) but the hypocrisy of Habermas is a stain which I'm not able to overlook.
Is there any on Hannah Arendt???
great
It would be interesting to hear some opinions about current topics by Dr Sugrue, I`m not sure if speaks of apartheid in present tense. I wonder what a man like him will think about Zizek v Peterson, something simple, nothing fancy in the vein of Professor Moeller.
What can Habermas possibly mean by the 'ideal speech situation' since his own language is 'imprisoned by meaningless jargon?' Scruton has written entertainingly on Habermas in the chapter 'Tedium in German: Downhill to Habermas.' 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands' should be required reading for all embryonic leftists. The elders may be past help.
Well said
What would Habermas have thought about the coercion of speech that is being imposed on us nowadays by an irrational minority whose very existence was, in part, made possible by the Frankfurt School?
A further atomization of individuals, departing them from the larger society in which they operate?
The utopia of the frictionless society is thrown upon us, or at least so they promise
8:25 - Governments do NOT control the supply of money or inflation. That is the job of independent central banks.
Jean-Francois Lyotard gives this video a frowny-face emoji. I thought it was good, tho. Time to hit the gym for some post-modern conditioning (all exercises are equally legitimate).
I don't know why this channel yet mainstream
The social system, the economic system, the environmental system, just like in the body, all systems work together as one system and no one system is more important or prioritized above another part or system.
In order for the environmental system to supply our needs we must care for the environmental system. All other systems are artificial extensions of the environment and these other systems should never usurp or be prioritized above the foundational system that is all inclusive, the environmental system. The environmental system is life inside the body and outside, throughout as a cosmos that is a universe. We need to care for our relationships because we are one for all and all for one and these relationships are as a universe.
Interesting to see how this critical theory has influenced the last 30 years of society. It seems that those that those groups that can't speak due to coercion have simply inverted, rather than everyone being able to tell the truth as they see it. This theory assumes that those at the bottom of a society are worse off than they would be without the society in the first place, and does not take into account that different people will naturally achieve different stations in society due to inherent talents and ambitions. Ask a South African how their lives have improved since its marxist overthrow. Poverty, disease and crime are as rampant as ever, despite new leaders being in charge.
So socialism is no worse than apartheid.
34:29
11:15
Wealth is not distributed
The real question today is who benefits from modern crisis capitalism and “bad”/socially unredeemable laws? Hint… it’s not the general population. Also, what’s to be done about these unaccountable concentrations of wealth that have assumed control and have ignorant or nefarious intentions for society and people as a whole? Hmmmm…
Well, I think that society has been sort of allured into thinking capitalism is what they need. By example view that we must provide a person with a materialistic gift. Capitalism itself, by which I mean one inevitably expoliting the planet, is inextricable from the human mind. The mass that indeed is expolited doesn't seem to mind it that much. Maybe it is due to it's unawareness or reluctance to change
But because what is purported to be "universally rationally desirable" is always debatable, as is the "evidence" supporting it, the more fundamental "universally rationally desirable" thing is the debate on this itself, and hence is a free and open public square where no viewpoints are deplatformed (except direct incitement to harm).
The road to hell is paved with arousingly vague terms
Being governed and governing others is irrational behavior. The only rational thing to do is to call out its illegitimacy.
I dk sounds like he is just recapitulating a type of religious ethic in secularized German
Legitimacy follows context. Context is the human condition (the sin nature). The solution is Christian Truth and Knowing: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Nevertheless, text demands the immediate culture and socio-economics. All life is a conundrum. The solution is an individual, personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. As Adler says, "...a return to scholasticism." Marxism is a dead, violent end.
'Superficial' synonyms:
Unphilosophical; unwise; unlearned.
'Crisis of legitimacy' definition:
What Yankee economics is in, now.
I couldnt finish it. What a bad theory. Describing how social, economic, and political issues can manifest themselves in each sphere? Trivial. And then going from is to ought? Ridiculous. He then claims that moral righteousness is created because it is deemed "rational" by himself or a group? How naive. There will always be rational arguments for and against any moral proposition, and many of these contradict each other, so nothing is right just because it can be argued for or is "rational". What does it even mean that something is a "rational" end? Ridiculous as a starting point, since what is rational is what is discussed as a good reason, and good reasons always require some premises - therefore, reasons need ultimate premises that are not themselves reasons (or, "rational" arguments). Ugh, I cannot believe people swallow this.
I really have to ask, have you read any of Habermas’ work? He was writing for decades and his magnum opus ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ is a two volume work that stretches on for almost 1200 pages
This was a great video, but there are limits to what can be explained in 00:44:06
Now that’s not to say I completely agree with Habermas. I have the exact same reservations that I do with thinkers like Wittgenstein, and Rorty
Taking away the metaphysical causes morality to become unanchored. I think what Habermas is trying to do, is use Communicative Rationality, combined with the hermeneutic theory of someone like Gadamer
Habermas even calls his theory Utopian, but the argument he puts forward is quite striking. It’s like if the Dialectic of Enlightenment tried to offer a solution to the problems that they saw rather than just criticising
Habermas’ theory has a real sense of praxis to it and I think personally he’s really worth reading. Don’t just let your opinions be formed by this video
Dad says you are trying to create a conclusive moral argument about the inconclusive nature of moral arguments.
@@dr.michaelsugrue Dad didn't understand what I was saying. I am criticizing the use of "rationality" as the ground / absolute premise for a good moral argument. The idea that something is good because it is "rational" is insensible because what is "rational" is exactly never a premise but a movement from premise to conclusion. Premises are never rational, or if they are, it is because they are not fundamental premises but have premises of their own. So since premises are never "rational", the absolute foundation for a moral statement can never be that it is "rational".
@@wilbur4379 Yes I have read him, though not much. And I am very critical about Gadamer being used for objective ethics. At best, hermeneutics can be used as moral descriptivism or moral relativism. I don't think you can say that something is morally right (in the objective sense) because a community of people have acted as if that was the case. It simply does not follow, since it would be going from "is" to "ought".
@@palantir6165 Dad! Mom! Stop fighting! Can’t ya see Meemaw is crying!?
Wonderful and concise précis.
My problem with the wholly just system is that whilst it will do the largest amount of of good to the largest amount of the population, it will inevitably lead to destruction of meritocracy which in turn will stifle mode of productivity gains. In addition, it more recently has been used to improve justice for minority interests at the expense of the majority.
It also does not take into differences between the sexes, between the races and within the races, our biology tends to produce a continuum within any particular trait, that leads to a normal distribution of a characteristic. We are not homogenous.
Of course, it's nice in a hypothetical theoretical framework. And please keep in mind, this is still 1991. He (Michael Sugrue) had hopefully no concept of today's modernity, and its complexity. One should by now understand and be very doubtful when you hear “universal” or “consensus” or any spinoff and improvement on Hegel's theory.
Even when you start with the best of pure intentions. Guess who's attracted to positions of power and implement this in good faith? Narcissists, Machiavellian's, psychopaths and a few naive good people. Who will survive this ultimately and end up sickly abusing this power. The misconception of giving power to the “government” is somehow better than giving it to the “corporations” while expecting not to find the same type of predatory people is laughable.
Once you start defining the universal good thing, codifying it, anyone (like he said himself) should be worried and ask themselves the basic question, what if I'm wrong? How would I even know? What if science changes or is updated, theirs 1000 more questions from thousands, maybe billions of people to consider? How do you scale this agreement system globally? It's ludicrous.
And Some naive people accepted this (in best-case scenario) and we now have these global power structures (who you never see on the other side of the world) dictating to us what they think the universal good is.
The flaw and dishonesty to think nobody will game such a power structure or abuse it eventually. It is beyond comprehension even in the theoretical realm.
Anarchists would be fine bruh... it's the epitome of the free market...
Dad shook his head. "Without the enforcement of contracts and property rights, and the limitation of violence social cooperation breaks down and there can be no civilization, much less markets."
Dad said a humorous comic film could be made of a woke anarchist missionary just graduated from some fancy US university who crosses the bridge from El Paso to Juarez carrying a Kindle with the works of Lysander Spooner and Emma Goldman and Prince Kropotkin and Noam Chomsky and other anarcholuminaries in order to fix what is wrong with the Juarez Drug Cartel, Mexico and the Universe. Exchanging a smart seersucker suit for a genuine Guatemalan poncho, Honduran sandals and handwoven Brazilian trousers obtained on Ebay, our missionary could enter some sleepy cantina and say: "Hey there amigos, tequila is not fit for human consumption, this place smells like horse piss and you are all oppressed Latinx people of color held down by the state and the Church and the cisheteropatriarchical nuclear family. Fortunately for you, I'm here to explain the many advantages of spontaneous "mutual aid" given freely without coercion so beautifully limned by Prince Kropotkin to any of you thirty thousand coked up desperadoes with military grade weapons who are questioning or waxing introspective about your murderous life in the narcotics traffic. That handful among you thousands of hired cartel killers who are feeling a little sheepish or lacking validation about their interest in spiritual guidance and personal growth and anarchist political wet dreams must remember that just because your peevish Boss would kill you and all of your relatives if he found out you were getting this political/psychotherapeutic emancipation from an anarchist provider outside your HMO network, you needn't feel ashamed or afraid. I'm buying a round of Mountain Dew for the whole bar. To anarchism, the political theory of arrested development everywhere!" Then half a dozen armed men enter and hit the missionary in the head with a rifle butt. He wakes up in the office of the Cartel Boss. Some cartel coke fiend waving a pistol who has been up for two days is screaming in Spanish at the anarchist missionary, who understands none of it. The Boss says, "Relax. He won't hurt you. Let's have a drink and you can tell me about this "anarchism" you have come so far to explain to me. The Boss listened for several hours. Astounded by these theories, after several more hours of discussion the Boss was so deeply moved that he said simply, "These ideas are the only practical blueprint for a world without violence or coercion. I am going to put all of my money and power and personnel at your disposal to bring to the attention of people everywhere the anarchic mutual aid that will free us all from injustice and avarice. I am appointing you my number two man and your job is to allocate my resources toward the propagation of anarchism globally. My men will drive you to your new office." They shook hands warmly, the sun was just coming up as the Boss said over his shoulder to the driver, "Enterrarlo en el desierto".
Good lord! Ragging on capitalism (again). Maybe I'm wrong, but I think none of the infamous Frankfurt School members or other Marxists (neo or otherwise) actually lived in Communist China, the Soviet Union or its satellites, Communist Cuba, Communist Vietnam, Communist Korea, or any other totalitarian state. Perhaps a dose of Ceausescu's regime in 1970s Romania (painfully familiar to me) would have been their road to Damascus experience. I can never take many of these theories seriously. What's in the Communist Manifesto is one thing; its actual implemention is vastly different. That's why we leave our childish ideals behind when we are faced with Real Life 101.
Who benefits from our laws? Mostly corporations.
Society as a whole and yourself personally benefit from laws
@@user-hu3iy9gz5j Notice the qualifier
The GATT does not remotely benefit the typical worker here or in third world countries. The lowest standards for worker and environmental safety are codified by this very corporatist treaty. It removes sovereignty from governments and lets multinationals make the rules. This is a major bias and shows an arrogance in delivery and shallowness of knowledge I hadn't expected from the prof.
18:00 more like tax the hell out of the middle class but leave the richest alone because they control the politicians
Habermas, socialist-libertarian?
...an idiot.
He rejects anarchy, referring to new york blackouts. He fails to see that riots are not the wild collapse of society, but the hastened expropriation and thereby rectification of the injustices of adcanced capitalism. The social cultural system of society is only to blame for the disorganized method in which it happens, namely the alienation, atomization and polarization of society.
In fact Habermas was reinventing the anarchist wheel when he considered that every coercion (or hierarchy) can only be legitimized if there is a reasonable consensus among the affected. Anarchy is not the absence of order and governance, it is order and (self-)governance.
Dad said anarchism is an understandable enthusiasm in the young, the pardonably mistaken optimism of inexperience. Spooner, Kropotkin, Goldman, Rothbard, or you, are not able to provide historical examples of any significant extent or duration of these make believe escapes from human nature (the Paris Commune?). Human beings evolved from hierarchical social animals. They still are hierarchical social animals. Rousseau's perverse idea that people are naturally good requires that amour propre have a Virgin Birth Myth, where individually good people are corrupted by a society composed solely of other equally good people who are inexplicably corrupted by everybody else's natural goodness. Who gets to decide what is reasonable? German mandarins? What is the evidence that the greatest achievements of the history of the world, the Great Wall of China, the Apollo Program, the Italian Renaissance, winning WWII, could have been done by spontaneous voluntary cooperation? None. Oh, and by the way, spontaneous voluntary cooperation is exemplified in hippie communes groovin' sustainably with nature in eastern Oregon, but regrettably, also in lynch mobs. The Sinaloa Cartel is made up of 25-50 thousand narco trafficking killers with military grade weapons. Once we defund the police and abolish borders and drug laws, what is the anarchist plan for dealing with criminal cartels? You gonna talk them into giving themselves up? Are you going to insist that they not use guns and bombs to advance their goals? Are you gonna create an anarchist army that is acephalous and thus useless or are you going to use the Care Bear stare?
@@dr.michaelsugrue FIrstly, thanks for your reply. Secondly, pardon me for any language mistakes in my attempt to response to your comments on anarchism, English is not my first language. I have come to admire you after watching and enjoying your very well delivered and information-dense lectures, which is why it disappoints me that you give me a most superficial critique of anarchism, to the point where it almost seems to be satire. You have managed to compile the "greatest hits" among the most commonly used, largely bad-faith arguments against anarchism and libertarianism. I will deal with them point by point:
@@dr.michaelsugrue 1. "Anarchism is childish and utopian."
It is quite petty to respond to this but it is such a cliché to call anarchism and anarchists childish and naive (or anarkiddie, the in-house term) and utopian (you use the word "optimistic" which boils down to the same thing). These are the most common bad faith tropes that have been used throughout anarchic history. Anarchism tends to find support among the young, because the young tend to, at some point, question the promises of state-capitalist hegemony as it is juxtaposed to the injustice and inequality they see and experience in their lives. At that moment of conciousness, the young tend to not have to much to lose, as they do not own anything except duties and debt. Without skin in the game it doesn't really make sense to play it. This confines itsself mostly to the West, where our minds have been colonized by the current paradigm the longest and most thorough. Anarchism, is however alive and jumping in colonized parts of the world, among all genders, ages and ethnicities. Now, concerning the "optimism" of anarchy. Anarchism is the only ideology that openly admits: "No, perhaps we do not know much for sure, so let's find out together". A very realistic and almost nihilistic notion. At the other hand, believing that the human race can live sustainably within its boundaries of knowledge, power and finite spacetime while upholding exploitative hierarchies ad infinitum, that is truly utopian.
@@dr.michaelsugrue 2. "show me examples"
For contemporary examples of anarchic societies one can look at Chiapas and Rojava (don't say that these are not anarchic, because that fails to recognize that anarchism is a method, a praxis, a neverending abolition of hierarchies, and not an end in itsself (no true scotsman yada yada)). There are many, many historical examples of anarchist and anarchic societies, cultures and even religions. If you apply yourself without prejudice and honestly look for them, you will find them. Moreover, there are plenty of societies with highly communal living practices, as the material conditions they face demand a self governance based on mutual aid. Think of indigenous societies that are responsible for the protection of the amazon and other natural sanctuaries, not because of state mandates or for profit, but because ecology forms a necessary part of their self-governance. These societies may not be called anarchist, as it is a Western philosophy derived mostly from a critical and radical reading of enlightenment thought. De facto, however, they are living proof of stateless and classless self-governance. For further reading on the 'utopian question' and anarchy in practice, I recommend reading the works of Peter Gelderloos (especially Anarchy Works, and Worshipping Power), a contemporary anarchist writer. These counterarguments have also been broadly discussed in the works of Bakunin, Malatesta, Goldman and the likes, most of which is freely available on the internet.
@@dr.michaelsugrue 3. "People are bad" aka the human nature argument.
It becomes tiresome after a while to hear this one, as it is probably the oldest critique. First off all, it rests on the false assumption that anarchy requires people to be perfectly good and/or that anarchist think that humans are naturally good (but society corrupts them or something like that). Both assumptions (man is good; man is bad) can be used as arguments for anarchism. If man is good, there is no justification possible for imposing hierarchies on another human. If man is bad, it would be in everyone's rational common interest (wink to Habermas i guess) to not allow any one to rule, at least no human (maybe only a god of some sort would suffice (religious anarchism is a whole nother topic, but definitely interesting for a man with so much affinity for the bible like yourself)). You could say that the perfect system needs a form of hierarchy that functions as a meritocratic funnel, where the good people gain power by good deeds, and bad people lose power by doing bad deeds (some people will even argue that capitalism is best suited for that, which is laughable). The problem with this is that it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Who was first, the good human or the hierachy that confirms their goodness? The ones at the top of the hierarchy decide what is good, consolidating their own power and serving their interests. Especially a system that, in theory, allows for and promotes social mobility, like neoliberalism, incentivizes competitive and violent behaviour. What is good, what is reasonable (in your words) and who has power, are fundamentally connected within every society. So naturally, in an anarchist society, what would be considered "good" would be whatever ensures the most positive freedom for all, which is free and unhindered coöperation and assosiation. If one wants to conclude anything from the study of human nature and what constitutes good and evil, one can say that what defines humanity is adaptability to change through learning and labour, which will in turn consistently and dialectically redifine morality. Unfortunately, this adaptability can also be used for widespread participation in oppressive hierarchies, but this use has a shorter history than one would think. This is also why anarchists believe active intervention is needed in the pursuit of social justice, instead of waiting for the "natural goodness" of man to free itsself from "evil oppression". What is the justification for this pursuit? It can simply be enough that the burden of proof is on the side that wants to impose or uphold hierarchy, as people are born free.
These ideas are clearly flawed, in that they seem to judge 'fairness' on the basis of acceptance by all, and by benefit to the whole. There is no justification given for this, and above all, no reference to human nature and what works and has worked in nature. For example, the role of woman in taking care of children in the home can be seen to have worked throughout the ages. With women increasingly acquiring the 'freedom' to go out to work with men, we see children falling 'mentally ill' in that they cannot see meaning in their lives. Societies exist because they WORK, in every way, for all concerned, and in such a way as to perpetuate their essence to the next generation, not because they are judged to be 'fair'. They are the product of evolutionary trial and error, not the ideas of philosophers. Sugrue seems to think that there is a mystery to be solved as to why capitalism leads to problems. There is no mystery - the Frankfurt School stated their intention as being to undermine Western values in order to destroy capitalism and usher in some form of communism or neo-Marxism. Capitalism's failure was to educate it's children to guard against such an attack on their values.