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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Three liberties are no liberty at all

 In this blog post, I want to partially echo Zac and Frank in their discussion of the three types of liberty Anderson identifies. Anderson lays out compelling examples as to why incomplete possession of the forms of liberty results in a circumstance that doesn’t seem to resemble ‘genuine’ freedom. This seems to imply that the state of actual human freedom is, at least partially, defined by the possession of all three forms of liberty. That is, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a free person to possess positive, negative, and republican liberty. Thus, it seems there are, or may be, other considerations that allow a person to attain a state of freedom—or will allow us to determine tradeoffs between each of the three types of liberty. However, it seems we run into a problem. Liberty seems to be a value that must supersede many other values, but perhaps not all of them. For example, economic utility cannot supersede liberty because that could allow for the possibility ...
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The Role of Ideology in Legitimization and Justification

 As I read through the Toole reading, I was especially interested in how "ideologies serve as the basis for legitimizing and justifying some behaviors" (Toole 4). This reminded me of the conversation during last week's seminar, where the topic of justification was brought up in the context of ideology. Specifically, we mentioned how even during atrocities like the Holocaust or Japanese imperialism, ideology was repeatedly touted by the government in order to justify said actions. This then leads to the logical conclusion that even in totalitarian regimes, governments still find the need to justify actions and are in some ways, still responsible to the people they rule over.  I was also interested in the idea of ideologies functioning "as a sort of myth-making" (Toole 4).  I wonder if it is only with an ideology that we can justify the actions one would usually consider abhorrent. If we extend this argument even further, one could argue that human nature is actua...
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