Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "I Knew Thatcher u0026 Reagan Personally – and I Put TRUMP Up There. Hillsdale College President Dr. Arnn" video.

At 8 mins Dr Larry Arnn, that understanding Trumps position as neither simply traditional Republican or Democrat, is to view its though Aristotle's Politics. I think first we have to understand the anti Hegelian claims of the New left French theoretical philosophers Foucault Derrida Deleuze. In their work after 1968 running into the 1990's. The left then in 1970's were overtly anti authoritarian (from Adorno Marcuse) which might be conflated with anti elitist. However as they achieved instituional political power over the decades in the long march though the institutions, the "application" of or praxis of the theory involved them applying the schema of the designated "un-privileged", "de-privileged" as top down burocratic general logic. This general or universal logic is contrasted by Deleuze and Serres's explicitly with a logic of process, algorithmn, function. The latter "lateral" incremental logic allows the gradual entry into the binary "vertical" logic of burocracy of margins or minorities etc. The thing is once in power they now apply these "lateral process" as ideas dogmatically vertically. This then looks like they are all Hegelains now in power. But, the Hegel they rejected was the mechanical Hegelian rationality, the disenchantment of nature, and its sublation into institutions of science and law. But we have to be carful here: From very top tear discussions i had with people of the left in Germany in around 2017-19, I pushed them on Hegel as an Aristotelian. It seems the Hegel they are taking up is the Hegel interpreted as Aristotelian. That is change is determined by potentiality and actuality of nature. Question is though is the actualised "potentiality" of human nature, one in which the infinite unlimited "possibilities" science law and technology actually over determine any simply natural potentialities. Thus while they can appeal to an image of a naturalising institutionality for actualising potential, what they are doing is equivocating scientific legal models of possibility with potentiality. It means they can take up their stage two movement of environmentalism from Hegelian Speculative Realism, and so claim to be about rootedness in nature, while at the same time applying this through wholly scientific and legal operators. For example they can talk about the family the community as opposed to government, but in practice it means the entry into these "private spheres" on the basis of risk determined by science and law. if you like they are going to "naturalise" the private sphere as a domain of zero risk and maximum health efficiency. Primarily though medical welfare systems it is directed then to the poor not the middle classes themselves. I have discussed aspects of this at length over last two days in comments on Novara Media "on Catastrophe and the West from a week ago so about 10th. I already knew the intellectual far left David Harvey and Alex Callinicos, both have emphasised an Hegelian somewhat naturalised Marx around 2009 following the 2008 financial crisis. Now the lesson is take from this is that way back like 7 years ago i would criticise those opposed to the new left for just reiterating 1950's 1960's Popper Berlin liberal criticisms directed at the Hegelian left. i claimed that the new left were anti Hegelian and so the post World War Two Cold War liberal criticism was anachronistic and incongruent. Thing is now they are all Hegelians so ironically, those much earlier liberal Critics of "woke" especially by people at the NCF, are appropriate now. In the UK perhaps but not the US. So I'm reading Berlin again now, his lectures are on YouTube too. The figure on the left maybe of interest here is Serres.
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Upto 16 mins: the tariffs as a continuation of an Aristocratic class by other means, in the 19 century can be expressed as Aristotelian and Hegelian. A Hegelian Right. its also possible i think to describe free market liberlaism in these terms if we think of the free market, as determined by economic science and Rights law through efficiency differentials of production, as also the pseudo Hegelian project to rationality transform human nature though and in terms of economic exchange and efficency. So where the new left might class the family as a patriarchal and patriarchy, passive reproducing model of privilege and de privileged. and so seek to change or replace this private sphere with instituional public services, the liberal right can talk about the family in terms of cost to the State and so Tax payer. and so seek instituional systems to make it better at producing market suitable labour producers and consumers. the whole question for both has been taken over by just importing ready made Human Capital from overseas like the third world. For the left its all a post colonial settlement or justice towards a global equality, for the liberal right its tax free health and education paid for Human Capital. the family then is otiose in this debate for both. This would be an Hegelian left and right in which the "great replacement" is the replacement of families with instituional provisions for affordances for immigration.
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at 21 mins. when you attach to a law a content like "risk" or "efficiency" or equailty" or indeed absolute freedom" then you don't need president as these become legal functions without limit. that is no limit in time but also no spaceal limit no categorial limit no limit between public and private. its all a continuum with no ethical categories, and so can transform the world with just the one open law and scientific metric. its not so much a problem like "judge made law" its in the content and legal form that places science particularly medical science as the measure of the content differentials. We might say its "medical doctor made law".
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22 mins spot on.
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The full argument or interpretation for the above would involve first lookig at Kant's first Critique and the Categories of Quality and Quantity. Then look at Hegel's logic and how he deals with those Categories in terms of an exchange or sublation from Quality to Quantity, by reason. This corresponds to the moves in Hegel's Philosophy of Right from Ethical life and its categories to Rational Spirit. then look at this from the point of view of marginal differential economics as system of change progress and transformation, then to Foucault's lectures in late 1970's on neo liberalism and Deleuze and Serre's on the differential applied to social theory. its a lot of PhD's that is.
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the move or limiting the scope of legislation from government to locality can be seen as a classic Hegelian double move rationality: first is the recognition against "his" reading of Kant, that the individual in Kant is an abstraction from context social and psychological. So the individual in themselves in Kant is not a source of "given" content eg free exchange, but schematised content. ie conditioned. the conditioning spheres or categories like family (domestic) community "local" then are limits to absolute rationality and spirit eg legitimacy and consent. so the reflective recognition of the limited individual in context is also a rational for the state , at a distance to go to work on these traditional limits in the name of positive freedom, freedom as escape from slavery to natural needs to freedom as capability or positive right. Thus the natural context must be transformed by science and law for greater efficacy and freedom. As heyek tells us this involves vast amount of data measurement and tracking and setting up of limits of continuity for quantity measurements to track and so be verifiable as evidence of progress. This this process of transformation or sublation in Hegel is set as the synthesis of the two abstract in then selves of the individual and the State sovereign one. Thus its a kind of dynamic process version of the social contract wherein absolute individual and leader are mythical abstractions to be replaced by many middle terms in dynamic progress. the problem is the individual is now as negative freedom freedom from has gone. As as the idea of the head of State as absolute actor the executive or emergency power in itself alone. but not only has the individual gone out of the picture but the State itself is only seen as limit to the universal international order of science and law with its claim to a universal global environmental emergency. Hegel's absolute reason is pure international law and science as content in international institutions. Actuality from limited potentiality. In the background then science and law are seen as possibly escaping context and possessing towards absolute unlimited truth. Even if this is fraught with internecine and political confect between the science on the way. Traditional views of the Social Contract like Locke's then are seen as based on errors of abstraction of objects like individuals. They are then static not dynamic and only reflect in a confused way the historical moment for their time. Marx just adds class to this, power and economic science as the master science for all others. indeed the it is the incoherence and instability in liberal economic science that means its not really a science in the long run but a heading to contradictions and collapse. Marx sees himself as mealy turning economic pragmatics of individuals which is subject to compositional fallacies, contradictions and conflict leading to endogenous instability and Crisis and collapse. Marx wants to make it a "systematic science" in the sense in Kant and Hegel as a system with in built stability. ie I read this as meaning given to economic science wide cosmological conditions for a genuine dynamic stability or continuity or conservation a pseudo foundation from everywhere like symmetry axioms might claim to be or permanence or essence. Liberalism still claims crisis are exogenous not systemic and also though like Hegel does not recognise anywhere outside of the system of law and science dominion. Unlike Locke you cant go out to the woods to chop trees for free or own labour costs. liberalism pretty quickly goes to work with these Hegelian tools on the poacher of free game, by saying in Hegelian continuity incremental terms: they steel free game now they will be steeling the kings Gold next. Then you might think poaching is so dangerous a slippery slope, toward animal cruelty and freedom, that its requires the death penalty, its Treason with a small "t". Then if someone steels the Kings gold this is quantitatively much worse than the poacher so they need to be tortured din public broken on the wheel and hung draw and quartered. Suddenly worship of absolute reason science and law takes you back to the middle ages. The promised land is not a spirit of agreement and removal of all conflict its that movie "The Devils". and yes there is a conservative theological Hegel too: back in 20the century these tended to be facis*t orientations. So all the politics of the 19th and 20th century are all versions of Hegel? No but if you read him too much you might end up thinking that there is no way out. .
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Gosh i thought this would just be antidotes. I'm up to 24 minutes and its 9:30 at night. its great though I'm gonna pick it up again tomorrow. The quangoes are all the middle terms in the process of sublating the individual and the sovereign.
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opps! i meant "anecdotes".
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Unable to post my work today on Hegel here. Maybe its too long? Or we are already in the Hegelian State.
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Here is a vanilla version with lots of examples and references cut out. Note (part a): i wanted to be clearer about Hegel's Philosophy of Right through discussion of his view of the (liberal) Social Contract. I can't find my selections of the PR but the whole of it along with internal links to Marx's critical notes can be found on the web site ********. Though there are long entries on Hegel's "Social and Political Philosophy" on line, in both the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. SEP contrast a non metaphysical reading with a metaphysical reading of the PR. They reference a number of commentators and interpreters on each side. For me i have contrasted Robert Pippin with Steven Houlgate. Also SEP claims the post world war two liberal criticisms of Hegel area misunderstanding. They explain that the famous quote, the state is: “the march of God in the world”, was a student note in his Hegel lectures notes, that found its way into the published book, even though its a student note on his notes. Also J.N. Findlay "The Philosophy of Hegel" (1958/1966), claims the liberal critique is wrong (Ch 11: The Philosophy of objective spirit). Findlay though discusses Hegel's view of the traditional distinctions between types of governance in say Aristotle as only cases for that historical context and not applicable to the modern world. I think Hegel ought to have realised that these archetypes of States in Aristotle are too determined as ontologically independent and separable. That is if we emphasise a non metaphysical reading say Pippin (Hegel Shadow Logic) drawing on aligning process as inference with Sellers space of reasons and algorithms) we must see that these apparently distinct types of State or rule, are not so Categorically distinct. that the apparent general logic (Houlgate Hegel''s logic that would distinguish there senses and references in terms of binary logic disjunctions (square of opposition necessary and sufficient conditions definitions essences and so on), are subject to processes of change that as metric continuities can move from one so called category through to the others. This means any one archetypal state can "becomes" another by gradual inferential logic that can then transform by degree one type into another. This reading is typically rejected by Zizek for instance. For Hegel though increasing efficiency as the path from one to another type of State places them in a kind of hierarchical order of freedom, that mirrors also the real historical development.
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Note (part b) here is no relativism here rather degrees of progress for freedom, order these types of State as what an objective rational will would will. Findlay discusses Hegel on Monarchy. On the one hand Hegel holds Monarchy to bean antiquated through back an anachronism from previous more primitive socio political orders, and irrelevant in the modern age with the many complex legislative and acting institutions, leaving the Monarch mere "hieroglyph". However Hegel was pro Monarchy, that the one Monarch is the concrete and natural correlate to the "idea" of the State. In this we see that Hegel himself was not so engaged in a purely de-naturalising project, that the features must be expressed in natural terms also. Also from Findlay we see that Hegel's recognises burocracy and administrative reason, the dis-enchantement of nature, cannot determine political directions and responses alone. it cannot judge and determine an action from reason alone. The monarch then is the final decider
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Note (part c) It is curious that the modern or post modern left also have a central role for the natural archetype in stages towards objective freedom and Spirit. It is in the form we see the view that leaders must be of the natural image and personality of the people. This is not mere tactics, it is there substantively as the archetype and naturalisation of the idea say of woman. This is in the fac*st theory of Chamberlain as the further as archetype but he draws on Kant. For Schmidt the furher is that who decides the exception the emergency. The lefts international global emergency of climate change has a similar role in Schmidt, except the decision does not flow from one leader responsible, but from vast dispersed and networked scientists and institutions, within which no one is responsible. In the UK COVID lock down was not an emergency decision to suspend the rights and freedoms of populations, rather it was done within the determinations of risk and harm. Thus it was suspension of individual freedoms and rights as a massive policy response within utilitarian terms of minimising risk of harm. However since this determination of risk is modelled as a kind of continuous function, the emergency event is now linked by degree to very small risk calculations. Ironically then, where as the Criticisms of the declaration of a State of Emergency was that once put in its is never removed, this emergency by degree of quantity can then force all manner of minor risk to be treated as emergency. ie the risk, of the risk, of the risk, of a real emergency. So you can have the creation of a functionally equivalent dictator totalitarian State, with only scientist/doctors and Mills principle of minimising harm for the greatest number. Difference is with all the network shell scientific institutions and multiple authors of manifold papers and reports, no one is responsible. Agency and responsible are lost in a sea of disseminations and diversions.
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Note (part d) References: I ended up doing this stuff following reading Philip Bobbitt's "Terror and Consent" when it came out in 2008. I followed this up in US legal theory of the constitution and executive powers via Arendt Derrida Agamben and Schmidt. I worked on these though Kant's Theory of aesthetic judgement. which I was trying to read as a reworking of themes in Aristotle's Politics and rhetoric, though his metaphysics. I set Houlgate and Pippin in opposition, via their readings of Hegel's Logic. Indeed Houlgate's interpretation begins with the metaphysical Being and Nothing and then works forward, while Pippin begins at the end with inference and epistemology moving towards the front of the book via Categories. Houlgate never got round to addressing the inference at the end of the book and Pippin never got round to discussing the high metaphysics of Being and Nothing. Pippins link to Sellers is his earlier work on Kant and Hegel. I got to work on Sellars to express what was going on now, with the increasing use of Bayesian inference and risk, and the distinctions between two sorts of reason and two sorts of nature. That is in Sellars Space of reason and space of nature, and the manifest image of man and the scientific image of man. with also Bernard Williams. All this came from reading John McDowell's Mind and World in 2003. and an undergraduate course on Politics and the Social Contract. I suppose i am saying revolutionaries on the way up read Pippin , but once in a place of power read Houlgate. Thing is what Hegel's sees as closed determined actuality of potentiality as reason, in inference is merely one possible path within nexus or field of possibilities. In the later as each path is laid by degree forwards so past possibility are now in the else where and new possibility not possible in the past become possible. the later structure is not pre determined by origin or end but is open. The comparison or contrast here between Aristotle and modal logic on change is inspired by work by David Webb.
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