Obama, John Rawls, and a Defense of the Unreasonable

by: Nonpartisan

Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 20:30

 If you want to understand President Obama's soul, read his books.  But if you want to understand his beliefs, read John Rawls.  The Harvard academic, who died in 2002, was the most important philosopher of liberalism in the twentieth century, mostly because, in so many ways, Rawls' ideas describe the world we live in.  That has never been more true than today, when our President has, consciously or unconsciously, exalted Rawlsian ideas to the position of the greatest possible good.

Care to hear more about this explanatory model that is so central to Obama's thought, whether he acknowledges the influence or not?  Read on.

In defense of Paul Rosenberg's amateur psychology

by: Jacob Freeze

Sun Mar 29, 2009 at 10:05

In Mr. Rosenberg's defense, I have to say that psychiatry and psychology have been useless in the public arena for the last eight years, at least, and although Mr. Rosenberg's awkward essays in diagnosis probably annoy me even more than they annoy those critical commenters, because I'm occasionally on the receiving end of his tendency to demonize the opposite side of any given issue, Mr. Rosenberg's psychological essays nevertheless represent a continuing project to transform political discussion on the internet into something a little deeper than "gotcha" sensationalism.

It's almost a given that political discussion on the internet is shallow. A blogger who mentions Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Putnam, John Rawls, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Thorstein Veblen, Benedetto Croce, or Max Weber is merely displaying idiosyncratic intellectual baggage, which most readers will comprehend not at all, no matter how many links are supplied.

We have nothing in common, except the news of the day.

In this condition of mindless dependence on whatever curiosity may have temporarily amazed the deculturated multitude of internet news-consumers, Mr. Rosenberg's amateur psychological analysis may be wrong, but it isn't misguided, and the triviality of almost all other political discussion on the internet can't be justified by claiming that anything deeper would trespass on the turf of academic or psychological professionalism.

Psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, and even history have been neutered in the realm of American political discourse, and if Mr. Rosenberg has the balls to resist our ongoing intellectual impoverishment, he deserves more praise than blame.