Jacob Christensen

My reaction to this story (based on this story)? I’m not a buddhist.

But as a follower of Slate’s Political Gabfest, it was fun seeing one of the protagonists.

Danish political parties often have a fascinating relationship with the established political dimensions:

The Social Liberals turned out to be to the left of the Social Democrats (less surprising) and the Socialists (more surprising) on integration policy. Now the Liberals are to the right of the Conservatives on justice policy.

Or perhaps we should say that the Liberals in general are more authoritarian than the Conservatives.

I hope Tyler Cowen will forgive me for lifting half a post about Hegel:

1. He is more of a classical liberal than most people think. The correct translation does not in fact have him writing: “The State is the march of God in the world.” And he had a very well-developed theory of property rights.

2. “Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis” is a very bad representation of what Hegel believed.

3. The whole Hegelian structure becomes more plausible once you see it as motivated by the belief that philosophy had become truly, absolutely stuck after Hume and Kant. Hegel thought that his “moves” were required to get out of the mess that preceded him. I prefer the pragmatic turn myself.

4. I very much like Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel. I do not think it is what “Hegel really meant” but perhaps it is what “Hegel would have had to have really meant, had some smart people like Robin Hanson pinned his back against the wall, lectured him about futarchy, and made him write shorter sentences to boot.”

5. I believe that the secondary literature on Hegel is fraught with danger and is highly unreliable.

Just one addition: I found Shlomo Avinieri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State an interesting read.

Re. points 2+5, I remember the Danish philosopher and Hegel expert Justus Hartnack pointing out in a radio interview (!) that the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”-argument is nowhere to be found in Hegel (Hegel speaks of aufhebung, if I remember correctly). The “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”-model is of cause a cornerstone of every presentation of Hegel in political theory textbooks. More Marx than Hegel, perhaps?