Philosophy profession discredits itself?

(a teensy bit of context)  (a not-so-teensy bit)

This situation is unacceptable: 8 in 10 Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism

In addition to being unacceptable (on the merits of socialism vs. capitalism), it makes a bad impression about philosophy on the wider American public which contains a great many folks skeptical of philosophy's value for society, and some of whom have influence on state university budgets.  This should be cause for alarm for the philosophers whose profession will inevitably be targeted because of this.

If ever there is an idea discredited theoretically, morally and historically, it is socialism.  Mises' 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (linked above) is an epic, monumental takedown of socialist "thought," and is widely acknowledged among defenders of the free market -- i.e., capitalism -- for being such.  (Keep in mind that a great many of capitalism's defenders are not often in agreement about what thinkers and arguments are its strongest.  Misesians may overlap plenty with Rothbardians, say, but there isn't so much overlap between Rothbardians and Randians.  Just for instance.)  Mises' book and case against socialism was most widely discussed in reference to his "calculation argument," in which he established with great thoroughness and care that a truly socialist production framework couldn't properly calculate prices (particularly for production factors, i.e., capital goods).  What role for entrepreneurs in a socialist framework, particularly if such putative entrepreneurs had to answer to some collective production bureau?  (There also is a sizable body of literature on entrepreneurship by 'Austrian school' economists influenced principally by Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Hayek.)

Socialism's defenders took Mises on regarding the "calculation problem" (which appears in the end to have vindicated Mises, if Heilbroner's testimony is any indication).  But they neglected the rest of Mises' book, which exposes patterns and habits of thought among socialists that are inimical to Western civilization.  The final chapters of Socialism concern the tendency of socialism toward cultural destructionism, for example.

The history of socialism was not only one of failure, but monumental and monumentally deadly failure.  Some 20 to 40 million or more people perished in the Great Chinese Famine alone.  Time and time again mediocrities and sociopaths with access to power were (unsurprisingly?) drawn to this ideology, or more specifically the Marxian strain of it.

If anything might have discredited socialism, it is this deadly (and often outright bloody) history.  There is no honest denial of it, no way to spin the evidence.

If anything discredits socialism it is the ethical premises it relies upon, and while ethical theory isn't subject to the same testing the way that socialism was tested historically, one uncontroversial ethical principle (if any exist at all) is that stated by John Hospers, philosophy professor and first Libertarian Party presidential candidate, more or less directly channeling his former sparring partner, Ayn Rand: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."  Socialism, by definition, contravenes this principle.

Here's the definition of socialism appearing at the top of the above-linked google search:

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

As Rand states in "This is John Galt Speaking" (Atlas Shrugged), "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."  The theme (of course?) of Rand's novel is: the role of the mind in man's existence.  (This applies in both the material and the spiritual realms, in politics and religion.)  It is only by application of the distinctively human conceptual faculty that the human race has moved from a primitive, caveman existence to modern, technologically-sophisticated society - and in any era of this progression, it's exceptional individual minds/intellects rising above the herd level, the conventional, the given, who drive further progress.  Non-human-intellect natural resources (means of production) have to be transformed by the human intellect to generate value-added or technological advance, and these minds/intellects come attached to specific individuals who are in a unique position to develop and direct this resource.  But even more importantly, ethically speaking (and not just a matter of historical explanation) the minds/intellects are their owners' to dispose of.  The whole point of her novel's heroes going "on strike" is to devote their energies/talents/minds to ends and projects of their own choosing, rather than to be forcibly subjected to the dictates of their public-sector inferiors.

Now, I'm aware that Rand-bashers typically refuse to understand Rand's point, hence their resort to any number of intellectually lazy or reckless caricatures or outright smears.  In any case, she remains socialism's most potent critic of socialism (and defender of capitalism) on ethical grounds.

Now, socialism proper - the state or collective owning "the means of production" is discredited roundly enough that defenders of it are hard to find these days.  But there's a little loophole in the above definition of socialism: "or regulated".  The same moral principle applies: under this definition the state or collective can still control and direct (under force of law) how individuals are to dispose of their intellects, talents, time and energy and the subsequent property holdings.  And significant wide-ranging regulation of people's economic lives is not only typical of most nations' economies of today, but those of the more socialist bent seek more such control.

Anyone who finds socialism attractive and yet fails to engage with Rand and Hospers (and Nozick and Mack) with due dialectical diligence is either ignorant or dishonest.  So which of these two is this 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors, and - more importantly - how did this 80 percent manage to end up supporting the unsupportable?  How poor a job did their philosophy (sic) instructors have to do in order to generate such an unacceptable result?  I understand that the philosophy majors who go on to grad school would have to do a minimally decent job of dialectic with the libertarian position espoused above (which holds that either (a) market arrangements are in fact the best-known way of improving people's economic situation as well as preserving other freedoms and republican political institutions, or (b) that non-market arrangements are the best way of improving lives where markets didn't meet the task, or both).  But what excuse is there for so many undergrads/majors for embracing such a monumentally stupid, immoral and un-American idea as socialism (whether defined in terms of ownership or of control of "the means of production")?  (The best non-market arrangement I can propose for improving people's lives is (of course?) widespread philosophical education.)

If philosophers concerned with the public image of their professors have a clue, they'll be driven to some amount of action to counteract what's going on here.  (How does socialism compare to / contrast with biblical fundamentalism, say?  With the Rapture-ready variants?  With more extreme variants than that?)  Let's put this in terms that might stimulate their competitive juices more:

Economics majors aren't nearly so favorable to socialism; "only" 1 in 4 find socialism appealing.  Now, in the undergraduate academy there are three main sectors: the physical sciences, the "soft" or social sciences, and the humanities.  Various measures of (academic) intelligence show consistently that the smartest (on average) physical sciences majors are in Physics, the smartest social scientists are in Econ, and the smartest humanists are in Philosophy.

So . . . which majors are really the smartest and least ignorant when it comes to socialism?

You can't really blame "the campus environment" for the deplorable level of Philosophy majors' support for socialism, since that toxic environment hasn't destroyed (yet) the Econ departments enough to result in their majors supporting socialism in similar numbers.  Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the Econ and the Philosophy majors can't both be right about the socialism thing; one of these groups is probably screwing up big-time.  So which group is it?  Are the Philosophy professors curious enough to find out, and perhaps clean up their acts?  This is assuming that institutional incentives related to possible departmental budget cuts by representatives of pissed-off taxpayers aren't motivation enough.

As it is, 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors supporting socialism only supports the widely-held thesis that "philosophers don't know how the real world works."  Two last points to bring up here:

(1) There is indeed a widespread problem about the relation of philosophy to the real world, and that is a tendency among highly intellectual people - academic types perhaps most especially - toward cognitive rationalism, or a fundamental breach between ideas and the world that's supposed to moor down the ideas.  (If you're a philosopher who wasn't confronted the problem of rationalism head-on, explicitly, fully and systematically, then how do you know you're not beset by it?  Note that Peikoff delves in pretty deep on this stuff in Understanding Objectivism - head on by name in Lectures/chapters 8 and 9 and implicitly throughout the first 7 lectures/chapters as preparatory work.  

(2) How would the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Kant address the socialism subject?  One thing they (well, Aristotle for sure) wouldn't do is to fail to have a rigorous dialogue with the Econ profession.  (I say Aristotle for sure, not just because of his sprawling research program, but if you open a history of economic thought you might just well find Aristotle discussed as a leading founder of the discipline - basically not surpassed for some 2,000 years until the Physiocrats et al.)  Aristotle's sensibility is such that he'd be engaged heavily with Mises' book as well as Rand/Hospers' "your life is your own to dispose of" thesis.  Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on a back-cover blurb for its "unsurpassed dialectical sensibility" or words to that effect.  It's unmistakable that this former leftist Nozick did his homework and concluded about socialism pretty much the same thing that Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Hospers did: it's indefensible as moral theory and as social science.  Would Aristotle with his unsurpassed dialectical sensibility conclude any differently?  Does Rawls' advocacy of a quasi-socialistic regime of economic and/or property rights fall afoul of the "individuals' lives are their own to dispose of" moral principle, and if it does, does this rule out as unacceptable (this aspect of) Rawls' theory?  Among leading Harvard political philosophers of the early 1970s, the ratio of Rawlsians to Nozickians was 1:1.  Wouldn't that be a more healthy representation of the philosophy profession than the (more or less) 4:1 ratio among philosophy majors?  If so, whence the disconnect between points A and B?

Also, perhaps philosophers might explain how Hospers - a non-Harvard man tainted by his enthusiasm for and association with Rand - has gotten little recognition for his "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of" formulation while Nozick's essentially similar point but stated less strikingly is what gets the academic attention?  What's wrong with Hospers' formulation?  How is it not a powerful moral principle?

(I once stated this principle to a Rand-basher who replied that "that's actually a Kantian principle," and whereas Kant was a philosopher this Rand-basher respected most highly, this basher wouldn't extend any credit to Rand for espousing that very idea.  Par for the Rand-bashing course, as my exhaustive experience in this area tells me.)

How on earth do philosophy (sic) majors appear utterly ignorant of such a hard-hitting formulation of libertarian principles?  Surely Aristotle wouldn't fail to engage fully and fairly with Rand, Hospers, Nozick and Mises?  Aristotle is one of the people I can confidently say didn't contribute to negative aspects of philosophy's reputation (notwithstanding hubristic STEM-lords who blame Aristotle for subsequent thinkers turning his physical theories into dogma).  He systematically eschewed cognitive rationalism.  If the only excuse today's philosophy profession has to offer for not operating at Aristotle's level is that they can't keep up with someone who had as a teacher someone who had Socrates as a teacher, then perhaps that's a legitimate excuse, but they might not like the can of worms this explanation might open up, either.  If the notion of (my hypothetical, resurrected, preferably drill-sergeant-role) Aristotle embracing socialism strikes one as ridiculous as it strike me, then one should operate accordingly.  Me, I wrote this blog post and have it duly contextualized with hard-hitting links.  (Here's even another one, right from the SEP.)  Perhaps others in the profession can take measures of their own to help salvage its reputation?

Socialism is a litmus test for sound moral and/or scientific reasoning.  In my experience, arguing with socialists is like arguing with flat-earthers; they will stop at nothing to spin the evidence in their preconceived direction, and when confronted with the Rand/Hospers/Nozick principle (especially when illustrated by an example such as a decision to start one's own business to compete with the collectively-run/regulated enterprise, or with the reality of the skills bell-curve that results in differences in income and wealth), they don't even bother spinning: they fall silent.  The socialists did a piss-poor job of responding to Mises' treatise in its full context (including his thesis about cultural destructionism), they've done a piss-poor job of even understanding Rand's main political-economic themes, they have a track record of apologetics for the most murderous and authoritarian political regimes; they have long since squandered the benefit of the doubt.  You don't even need a hypothetical example of a resurrected Aristotle to figure this out; the aforementioned figures already presented compelling arguments and the historical record of socialism's failure can't be honestly avoided.

Is the only sorry excuse for this sorry state of affairs that the meaning of "socialism" has changed between the time of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, et al and today, such that the Scandinavian welfare-state model (where the lives of the men of mind and ability, as Rand/Galt terms them, are merely extensively regulated but not owned outright) and not the USSR is the most representative case?  (As for the use of the term "socialism" to apply to Scandinavia but not to the USSR: how is the linguistic confusion run rampant here in any way acceptable in its own right?  How on earth can it look good, no matter how you spin it, that 4/5 of Philosophy majors favor socialism?)

I already linked above Alan Charles Kors' discussion of the malpractice of intellectuals (sic) during the USSR era and afterward.  Can there be an "after socialism," Kors asks, if the intellectuals don't come to grips with this malpractice?  (Unlike medical doctors they can't be sued for malpractice; it's not evident that they face any serious negative repercussions for the failures of their ideas, a point that Thomas Sowell has repeated endlessly.)  The fact that 80 fucking percent of philosophy majors find this evil idea attractive would indicate that the intellectuals (sic) are still engaged in the same malpractice, in essence.  Bad-faith rationalizations about how pro-capitalism, libertarian and/or conservative intellectuals aren't competitive in an academic environment won't cut it, and certainly won't help to rehabilitate the low to mixed public reputation of the philosophy profession.

How much could it hurt these academics for them to actually behave like the letters "PhD" behind their names would suggest?  How much does it really hurt them to seriously and fully consider that Bezos, Buffett, et al are entitled to their wealth for implementing visions that evidently no one else had the skills to do (at their level, anyway), that they're using their own skills/talents/energies/time/minds attached to their physical and moral personhood, that their activities tend to raise living standards generally, and other such truths about the capitalist system?  Short of my hypothetical resurrected Aristotle, there is the example of Nozick who went through all the alternatives on offer and found socialism - basically anything to the left of Rawls - to be woefully inadequate as serious political philosophy.  So, what did Nozick miss?  (And it wouldn't be very philosophical to peddle the easily-refuted myth that Nozick "abandoned libertarianism," now, would it.  What's the 2011 Slate article author's excuse for not acknowledging Nozick's 2001 interview?  This is just the sort of intellectually lazy, bad-faith shit I'm talking about, which seems to pass without comment way too damn much.  Heck, why don't leftist intellectuals respond to Kors and either atone as he recommends, or explain how they don't have to?  Had I somehow missed their addressing Kors' argument?  Do I need to make some exhaustive google search to confirm what I already suspect with ample justification?  Shouldn't the Kors search link provided above suffice?  If anything, the only arguments, facts and justifications here keep coming from the other direction, providing only more evidence of the academic left's shameful, credibility-squandering intellectual history.  And the mainstream of taxpaying America certainly doesn't have the patience for this far-left shit.)

Marxism, Rand, and Dialectics

I anticipate in the not-too-distant future a grand showdown between Marxists and/or other leftists (on the one hand) and advocates of capitalism (on the other) over who has best mastered the art of "dialetic." Sciabarra gives the most complete and comprehensive treatment to date of the subject of dialectics (comprehensiveness being arguably the chief virtue in dialectics - as it is in Perfectivism), and it's one that ought to just make died-in-the-wool Marxists go apeshit - that is, if they have the intellectual curiosity to enter into an, ahem, dialectic with this treatment. It really hinges on just how deep-seated their hatred of capitalism is.

If there's one group of people I absolutely refuse to go easy on, it's Marxists. The Marxist tradition proudly upholds "dialectics" as its methodological core, but one thing the Marxists haven't done to any remotely respectable extent, is to engage in the activity of dialectic with advocates of capitalism, Mises and Rand in particular. The failure to do so actually goes against the very grain of their professed ethos.

Let's keep in mind, as we proceed, that, as Sciabarra points out, Aristotle is the original grandmaster of dialectics, the greatest synthetic mind of the ancient world. Anyone with a clue about the history of philosophy notices the pattern that has emerged whenever the subject gets around to Aristotle and his influence.

Aristotle's greatness was certainly not lost on Hegel, and it is through Hegel that Aristotle has any influence on Marx or Marxists. (This makes sense of Trotsky's religious prophecy that under communism the average man will rise to the level of "an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx," and that above this new average "new peaks will rise.") The question, then, is just how much the Marxian tradition has failed to actually, ahem, integrate Aristotle into its ethos.

If we want to take the concept of dialectic seriously, then we have to see how Rand and Mises represent the next "dialectical" stage in history after Marx. The next step in the dialectic would be a "synthesis," but if we want to be Aristotelian about this, the "synthesis" could not consist in the uniting of contradictory opposites, but rather in considering opposed viewpoints, showing how at least one of them represents only a partial or incomplete "stage" of the emerging totality, and then come up not with a "synthesis" or even a reconciliation, but with a resolution to the "dialectical tension" that exists at any given stage of history. (And any Aristotelian dialectic worthy of the name takes the step of comparing the resolution with sensory observation of reality, the ultimate arbiter.)

The Marxist intellectuals have failed to do the remotely respectable task of even attempting to resolve the "dialectical tension" between themselves and the leading advocates of capitalism. As far as I'm concerned, this makes their pretense to being dialectical a massive fraud. (Don't worry, the "liberal" intellectuals will be having their own massive fraud exposed soon enough. That's for another time/posting.)

Anyone who respects the process of dialectic has to know that you simply cannot let opposing views go unanswered; the whole point is to be able to soundly refute and/or incorporate all the competing answers, to reach the most complete resolution available at any given stage/context. Real dialectic is supposed to be perfective in that way; fake dialectic - e.g., Marxism - doesn't respect this.

It's difficult to say just how much this failure is the product of extreme bad faith, or of some combination of other factors. It's no secret that Marxism has been likened to a religion - most especially by political "conservatives" who have only their own (non-materialist) religion to offer as an alternative. The "religion" charge carries bite because you have here a systematic world-picture that adherents say must be accepted and understood in its totality before you can rightly understand what makes everything tick. Outsiders just won't have the context to "see" the Truth of the matter. (A similar charge has been leveled against Objectivism on many an occasion, but come on. The people who level that charge need to get with it.)

As best as I understand it, that's how you end up with the notion of the non-Enlightened using an "outside" logic as against the full-context-keeping "dialectics" in use by Marxists. That's how one might end up with a doctrine of polylogism, something which Mises apparently had to contend with at nearly every turn back in his day, but which has presumably gone by the wayside given the obvious corruptions involved.

The reason the "religion" charge seems to stick with Marxism is this idea - in conjunction with the "you have to grasp the whole system first" notion above - that the "dialectic" essentially makes Marxism immune from criticism. If dialectic is the central essence and core of Marxian inquiry into the world (distinguished from, say, Hegelian dialectic by its materialist interpretation of history - a dogma which I don't think can be extricated from Marxism), then it contains within it what one might call an "irrefutable" status. In principle you couldn't attempt any refutation of Marxism without implicitly presupposing and adopting the dialectic it recommends. The (apparent) problem is that a doctrine claiming "irrefutability" sounds, on its face, to most people like a religion. (That, plus religious prophecies of a coming Communist Paradise, as per Trotsky above. Gee, who wouldn't imprison and kill dissenters if they were obstructing the path to a collective-ownership Paradise? The delicious irony here is that one person who lived through the early years of the Soviet Revolution did rise to the level of an Aristotle - but not while living under the bloody Soviet dictatorship, of course.)

This problem is further compounded in a country like America, which has been steeped in pragmatism and an accompanying skepticism-cum-cynicism regarding abstract theories ("ideology") and system-building, a contempt for intellectuals who build systems that don't correspond to commonsensically-grasped reality, etc. This also explains much about the state of the intellectual culture of America in the mid-20th century: you had system-building Marxists running a dictatorship halfway around the world, and an intellectually-defanged America offering next to nothing in the realm of ideas to answer it. (The "liberals" were defanged by pragmatism; the conservatives package-dealt America, freedom, and morality with religion.)

There is a further skepticism-cynicism toward the notion of "irrefutability" fostered by the pragmatic intellectuals' implicit (or often explicit) scientism. According to those with a scientistic mindset, the notion of "irrefutability" is a red flag because an idea is supposed to be in some sense falsifiable. (To further integrate things here, this last link is to the wikipedia page for Karl Popper, who also didn't have nice things to say about what he saw as the illiberal tradition represented by Plato, Hegel, and Marx. Also, Popper was, with Mises, a chief influence on Hayek. Ain't integration fun?) This gets into a whole area of study regarding epistemic justification and "the apriori." (This has further relevance to Mises, who argued for putting economics on an "aprioristic" praxeological footing - and who was met with opposition by the scientistic mentalities of his day. The whole context of all of this is the lack of a highly-robust Aristotelianism to counter this fallacy and that.) Scientism and pragmatism being so closely related, we have had in America's intellectual classes an opposition to system-building of whatever kind, be it religious or philosophical. That helps explain the resistance to both Marxism and Randism.

The upshot is that you have this religious-seeming worldview basically requiring agreement with its fundamentals to be adequately discussed, and doctrines like polylogism emerging to counter the "bourgeois" backlash. It seems on its face to involve willful evasion so as to justify ignoring counter-evidence or counter-argument, but doctrinaire sorts of thinking can do weird things to people. They can become deluded that they have grasped the Truth of things when they have not; it's a complicated matter whether this delusion is the product of evasion or of other things (or a combination).

So, back to "dialectic." It's supposed to make Marxism immune to criticism, refutation, or falsification, just given what dialectic is. While it certainly would make any rigorously neo-Aristotelian philosophy immune from refutation, that raises the question: is Marxism a genuinely neo-Aristotelian philosophy? The ancients spoke in terms of fixed and eternal categories (or universals), whereas the Hegelian and Marxian traditions incorporate a philosophy of history, and then speak of the dialectic as working "its" course through history. The particular appeal of this to many intellectuals - apparently much moreso in Europe than in America - is the notion that history represents long-term progress, and that socialism represents a progression over capitalism.

The whole theory goes bust if socialism is not, in fact, a progression over capitalism.

The biggest lesson of political economy of the 20th century is that socialism cannot work, and that its intellectual adherents are deficient in understanding the ways of the world. (Isn't this just common sense? Of course socialism sucks, economically and morally.) So in beating up on Marxists, am I beating a dead horse? No. Absolutely not. The underlying phenomenon remains. Off the top of my head, my over-arching name for this phenomenon is "the separation of philosophy from reality and life." It's the phenomenon that has to be wiped out intellectually if we are going to have genuine progress toward humanity's moral and intellectual maturity.

If the Marxists were Aristotelians, they would have been much more reality-oriented, instead of being beholden to a dialectic which projects socialism as the future for humanity. What's more, they would have undertaken the effort to answer Mises and Rand - and they have not. By not doing so, they have violated the spirit of dialectic. From this vantage point, they had a grasp on a good concept, and distorted and abused it by putting it into the service of socialist politics. For Marxism, politics ends up being the tail wagging the whole systematic dog. Marxism therefore fails, on its own (dialectical) terms.

Rand, meanwhile, did not advocate capitalism as a primary, nor was her system beholden to her advocacy of capitalism. She was primarily an advocate of reason:

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

(One thing to note in connection with this is just how politics-bound the mentality of so many of Rand's critics is. They dislike capitalism, and end up rejecting Rand as a philosopher basically because of that, thereby cutting off their own noses and spiting their own faces. Their hatred of capitalism is so deep-seated that they can't see past it to her eudaemonist ethics or neo-Aristotelian epistemology. It's fucking sad, it what it is, in addition to being intellectually lazy and just downright pathetic.)

"Every philosopher claims to be an advocate of reason," the cynic might sneer. Oh, yeah? So when a David Hume is reduced to the level of saying "Reason is, and ought [?] only to be a slave of the passions," is that advocacy of reason? Methinks the sneering cynic misses the whole point. Anyway, Rand more than anyone since Aristotle advocated reason heroically, passionately, and non-contradictorily. She did affirm that egoism and capitalism follow from the consistent application of reason, but she did not hold them as primaries. She did not make her advocacy of egoism and capitalism immune from the evidence - but she did nonetheless hold egoism and capitalism to be true in virtue of all the abundant evidence. (Of course, reason itself is immune from refutation - by what means would only possibly purport to refute it?) I can't begin to fathom how the same could be said on behalf of socialism, collectivism, and anti-individualism.

If we're going to follow the "rules" of Marxian dialectic itself, shouldn't we say that Rand effectively supersedes Marx? (In the language of dialectics, the term "subsume" might be used in place of or in addition to "supersede," but the notion that Rand "subsumed" Marx is about as sense-making as the idea that Aristotle "subsumed" Plato despite their fundamental differences. "Accounted for" or "trumps" would be much better.) As best as I understand it, any Marxism worthy of the label is socialistic, and holds that any "dialectical process" ends up reaffirming socialism. If that aspect of Marxism is considered unfalsifiable by Marxists, then we have nothing other than a highly toxic and dangerous (read: DEADLY) dogma, made all the more toxic and deadly by its tightly-integrated package-deal.

(Peikoff might recognize Marxism as a form of mis-integration, as it fits well with his theme concerning the special toxicity and deadliness of fully-integrated but false worldviews. This is why he prefers the pragmatic dis-integration of the "liberals" over the dogmatic mis-integration of the "conservatives." If there ever was a false dichotomy that's undermining America's strength, it's the presented alternatives of pragmatism and dogmatism. (Meanwhile, the best that passes for "system" and "synthesis" to American mainstream Humanities-academics is Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls-groupie Thomas Nagel chides Robert Nozick for his "libertarianism without foundations." For Nagel's idea of what counts as foundations, there's A Theory of Justice - but not the works of Ayn Rand or David L. Norton. Really nice, huh? By the way, Nozick demonstrates way more "dialectical" sensibility than Rawls does - as evidenced by his willingness to actually look at the pro-capitalist literature and thereby reach much more sensible conclusions. As an added bonus, he also tears Marxism a new gaping you-know-what. Just because he wasn't going to entertain the bullshit rationalistic contrivance of the "Original Position" that has had academics wanking all over one another - in many cases, at taxpayer expense - for decades, doesn't mean he isn't as concerned with foundations, or that he wasn't a much better philosopher than Rawls. But then again, Rand was a much better philosopher than Nozick, which makes the academic Humanities look like a pretty sorry state of affairs, doesn't it? By the way, here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia - as representative of the interests and concerns of the academic mainstream as any, as the entry on the "Original Position" above indicates - has to say about the very Americentric concept of individualism. And there you have it. Oh, and don't worry, I'll be getting around to a full-on treatment of Rawls's bullshit anti-eudaemonistic Original Position in due course.))

If, however, intellectual honesty trumps socialism in the dialectical hierarchy, then any Marxism worthy of the name is always and forever fucked.

Any neo-Marxian figure, to be true to dialectics, has to confront Rand (and Mises) and reach the new harmonious resolution to the "dialectical tension." All evidence points to them having defaulted in this task, to have left this tension unresolved, to have (imperfectively) left things hanging, leaving it up to real (neo-Aristotelian, pro-capitalist) dialecticians to do the work. While this reaffirms the validity of (neo-Aristotelian) dialectic, Marxism can be said to be a resounding failure by the standards of dialectic.

And that's how Marxism is undermined from within.

Next stage: Perfectivism.

(Ain't integration fun? :-) )

OUP's "Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction"

The "world's leading academic press" has a series of books out in what it calls Very Short Introductions. Picking up its Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction by James Fulcher, a professor of Sociology at Leicester, we encounter this at the end of the first chapter, which is titled "What is Capitalism?" (a great title for a first chapter in a book on capitalism, I might add):

So, the answer to our question is that capitalism involves the investment of money to make more money. While merchants have long done this, it is when production is financed in this way that a transformative capitalism comes into being. Capitalist production depends on the exploitation of wage labour, which also fuels the consumption of the goods and services produced by capitalist enterprises. (p. 18)

Can we get a facepalm over here?

Now, this is simply, unequivocally, absolutely unacceptable for a reputable presentation about capitalism. Exploitation doctrines have long since been exploded by Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Nozick, Rand, and others with any lick of common sense. This is intellectually incompetent if not dishonest. It doesn't matter one fucking bit if the author meant "exploitation" in some benign dictionary sense ("to make productive use of: UTILIZE"); the use of the term "exploitation" in connection with capitalism is without question associated in the public consciousness with the pejorative sense intended by Marx and his spawn.

Fucking unacceptable.

Who is running the Oxford University Press's editorial department for these "very short introductions"? (As it happens, I have purchased one of these, on Aristotle, only because I know its author, Jonathan Barnes, to be a respected Aristotle scholar. But I can't place any general trust in the series.) And why would they hire this particular work out to a professor of Sociology, rather than, say, a professor of Economics who might actually have a clue? Amongst major academic disciplines, that of Sociology has got to be one of the most pathologically left-wing ones around (certainly outside of the Humanities, anyway).

There are several references to Marx (a long-discredited, bad-faith opponent of capitalism, the last guy you'd want to read to get an accurate analysis of the subject) in the index to this little book, but none whatever to leading champions of capitalism like Mises (who arguably is to economics what Aristotle is to philosophy) and Rand.

I didn't bother with the rest of this corrupt little book after that. Best as I can tell from skimming it, it would read much like that mediocre encyclopedia entry dissected by Rand in her "What is Capitalism?" essay. That was, like, 45 years ago, and yet these dumbass sociology professors apparently haven't made any progress whatsoever in all that time.