Hobbes, Smith, and modern economoics.

 



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Does the social reality imply a natural reality?

I’m very interested in understanding where the boundary between what we might consider the (or a) ‘natural’ reality and our ‘social’ reality occurs. Professor Toole offers a compelling account of how the ideology of the ruling class shapes the body of knowledge and the conceptual tools available to understand social reality. Professor Toole’s account seems to imply the impossibility of social structures as being ‘natural.’ That is, the term natural social structure or formation would be an oxymoron. She writes, “social structures are…constituted by our choices and actions,” (4) which seems to indicate that social structures are the result of human choices and actions, and so they cannot exist in the absence of them. This also seems to suggest a division between our ‘social’ reality exclusively defined by and dependent on human action and choice and a ‘natural’ reality of things not affected by humans, say the ocean and uranium. I am interested in the boundary and relationship between t...
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Who can the ghetto poor steal from?

  In this blog post, I want to consider the legitimacy of criminal actions perpetrated by residents of the dark ghettos in which the victims of the crimes are other residents of the dark ghettos.  Shelby argues that when society doesn't include adequate opportunities for individuals to avoid demeaning forms of labor, crime becomes reasonable (216). This is because, when individuals are not afforded that opportunity, they can reasonably claim they are not being treated as equal members in a cooperative society and that the requirement for reciprocity is not being met (217). When members of the ghetto poor are not treated in accordance with reciprocity, they are not bound by civic obligations (213). However, all people are bound by natural duties, including the obligation not to cause unnecessary suffering and the obligation to respect the personhood of others. In Shelby’s view, a category of crimes emerge as reasonable under this framework–crimes that would violate civic obliga...
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The Chinese Dream

As the founder of the Kuomintang, Sun-Yat Sen put forth many of his visions in the party's enacted policies. One of the core elements of his ideology was the theory of the "Three Phases of the Fundamentals of National Reconstruction". This was the dominant theory at the time on how the KMT was to secure power and enact a modern state in China. The first phase was military rule/revolution, the second phase was political tutelage (党国）, and the third phase was constitutional government. The first and third phases are relatively easy to interpret. Military rule was necessary to ensure that the KMT was actually able to unite the country and defeat the disparate warlords, along with the imperial government. The third phase is also intuitive - Sun-Yat Sen envisioned a multi-party democratic state to be implemented in China. Indeed, it is the second phase that is the most controversial. Political tutelage is characterized by a period of one-party rule, by which economic and polit...
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