“The Temporary Name” points (( 226 The Temporary Name 03.22.14 at 3:26 pm In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to…
“The Temporary Name” points (( 226 The Temporary Name 03.22.14 at 3:26 pm In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to…
“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”
The world’s chieftain cannot serve the general interest effectively and reliably unless convinced that serving the general interest also serves “his” self-interest – that the two interests are finally the same or non-severable. When the chieftain falls into a depressive state – of apathy, or aboulia, or neurasthenia; doubting all, negating itself to negate all – the system fails, and the will to stasis is realized, or hypostatized, as crisis.
We like to believe we are Lockean, but we suspect we are Machiavellian or on our best days Ciceronian, and we are ever-insecurely deluded about having evaded Hegel and Rousseau.
founding the sacrificial state and the incipient civil religion, a system of mutual obligations justifying living, as well as killing and dying,
One could easily – the liberalist Twitterati have shown little hesitation on this one – compare Morsi’s assumption of the right to rule by decree with acts by Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or a wide range of autocrats including Morsi’s immediate predecessor. If inclined, however, to support or excuse Morsi, one might instead invoke Franklin Roosevelt after or even before the 1941 American Declarations of War, or Abraham Lincoln suspending the Constitution to save constitutional order: Each was called tyrant, traitor, dictator by his political enemies, even amidst undoubted states of emergency. Now they are, generally but not universally, called “great.”
If Mitt Romney as presidential candidate is driven by a religious – indeed, prophetic and messianic – mission too closely held and too easily misunderstood for public words, then its essential convergence with the politics of the Republican right would be of more than biographical, cultural, or esoteric interest: It amounts to the consolidation of a new theo-political establishment waiting only for a mass-electoral mandate.