One of the most enduring criticisms of John Dewey's political thought is that it is unsuspicious of power. This essay responds to this critique by advancing the claim that power is an integral but implicit element of Dewey's conception of human experience. Given Dewey's indirect treatment of power, this essay has two primary tasks. First, it reconstructs and develops an explicit conception of power for Deweyan pragmatism. Second, it evaluates the extent that Dewey's political and social philosophy is able to (...) criticize power relations. Taken together, I aim to provide a more coherent and realistic defense of the political dimensions of Dewey's democratic theory. This defense moves Deweyan pragmatism toward a democratic politics that neither elides conflict nor evades power. (shrink)

Dewey famously argues that the end of education is growth. This basic idea, widely criticized and often misunderstood, rests on a series of more complex arguments about the nature of education, human experience, and social life. First, Dewey understands education as the reconstruction of experience. As such, there is an intimate and inextricable relation between a person’s life experiences on one side and educational methods, content, and ends on the other. We learn by gaining a better sense of the meaning (...) of present experiences and by increasing our ability to direct future experiences (MW 9: 83). Second, we grow when learning opens up opportunities for future growth and thereby enables us to continue our .. (shrink)

Striedter's book offers precious insight into the comparative neuroanatomy of vertebrate brains, but it stops short of addressing what their evolution is all about: how effectively neural networks process information important for survival. To understand the principles of brain evolution, neuroanatomy needs to be combined not only with genetics, neurophysiology, and ethology, but also with quantitative network analyses.

THEOEY OP POLITICS. PART FIRST. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL POWER. CHAPTER I. THE POLITICAL EQUILIBRIUM CALLED GOVERNMENT...

In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. It was a devastating revisitation of Foucault's recent History of Sexuality--and of his entire oeuvre--and also an attack on those philosophers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed that desire could be revolutionary. In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place (...) in Foucault's work. There is no better introduction to Baudrillard's polemical approach to culture than these pages, in which Baudrillard dares Foucault to meet the challenge of his own thought. This Semiotext edition of Forget Foucault is accompanied by a dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer, "Forget Baudrillard," a reevaluation by Baudrillard of his lesser-known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at his infamous extrapolationist theories from his roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, and Emil Durkheim. (shrink)

Principles of legislation.--Principles of the civil code.--Principles of the penal code.

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the first participatory budgeting experiment in the United States, in Chicago's 49th Ward. There are two avenues of inquiry: First, does participatory budgeting result in different budgetary priorities than standard practices? Second, do projects meet normative social justice outcomes? It is clear that allowing citizens to determine municipal budget projects results in very different outcomes than standard procedures. Importantly, citizens in the 49th Ward consistently choose projects that the research literature classifies as low (...) priority. The results are mixed, however, when it comes to social justice outcomes. While there is no clear pattern in which projects are located only in affluent sections of the ward, there is evidence of geographic clustering. Select areas are awarded projects like community gardens, dog parks, and playgrounds, while others are limited to street resurfacing, sidewalk repairs, bike racks, and bike lanes. Based on our findings, we offer suggestions for future programmatic changes. (shrink)

Scholars like Alison Kadlec, Melvin Rogers and R.W. Hildreth have recently confronted the claim that Dewey’s pragmatism lacks resources to approach issues of power, but they have not given a unified account of what theoretical framework Dewey’s pragmatism provides to grapple with such issues and to articulate standards for social criticism. In this article, I explore one such framework: Dewey’s outline of a social philosophy developed in his Lectures in China. Here, Dewey derives immanent standards for social criticism through (...) sociological and historical perspectives. Such standards are articulated in terms of social relationships of mutuality and recognition in and between groups; on such standards, social institutions and practices are to be criticized in so far as they embody relationships of domination disabling individual development and social and political participation. Dewey’s critical project extends to cultural sources of normative authority, and I further explore his social philosophy in terms of an ‘immanent cultural criticism’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic by James E. CrimminsAndrew GustafsonUtilitarianism in the Early American Republic James E. Crimmins. Routledge, 2022.There are many important influences on American Pragmatism, but one which is frequently overlooked is the influence of Utilitarianism, both on American thought in general, and American Pragmatism in particular. It is difficult to imagine anyone better to write this book than James Crimmins. As a leading Bentham (...) scholar, among his twelve previously published books on utilitarianism, he is editor of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the four-volume set Utilitarians and Their Critics in America, 1789–1914 (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). His vast knowledge of the history of utilitarianism, which he has spent his entire career investigating, makes him the perfect author for this very helpful book on the influences of utilitarianism in early American thought. It is a rich sourcebook that can help direct anyone looking to do more research in this area. Here, Crimmins provides a thorough historical account of the influence of utilitarianism on the development of early American thought and the rise of pragmatism, giving reason to believe that utilitarianism was more impactful on American pragmatism than is often realized.The first chapter highlights why utilitarian influence on American law and politics is overlooked and why it should not be. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how American thought leaders came to know of Bentham's work, and chapters 4–7 discuss concrete examples of thinkers who brought utilitarianism to bear on issues in America (for example, Hoffman on legal studies in chapter 4, Livingston on legislative law in chapter 5, the death penalty debate in chapter 6, and Thomas Cooper's wide-ranging influences in chapter 7). The epilogue provides a specific set of arguments for why the utilitarians' influence on American Pragmatism should be more widely recognized and investigated.Crimmins begins the book by explaining why utilitarianism, as an influence in early American politics, is typically excluded and ignored by thinkers from John Dewey to Élie Halévy. One reason is that William Paley's Principles of Political and Moral Philosophy (which was used widely as a moral text in US universities throughout the 1800s) was published in 1785, and Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was published in 1789, and even then Bentham's ideas didn't gain public circulation (and then only in French) until Etienne Dumont published the three-volume Traités de législation civile et pénale in 1802. But the more important reason utilitarianism [End Page 106] has not received attention, according to Crimmins, is due to the dominant focus placed on Locke's natural law and rights view being the lens by which American politics has been understood. Some have challenged this Lockean consensus and pointed out that republican virtues drawn from the ancient Greeks and others show up in ideas such as the "right to happiness" (which is a right that is found nowhere in Locke) (20). Crimmins shows that there was a very strong emphasis on "public utility," "general welfare," and happiness, and this frequently outweighed concerns for natural rights for thinkers like Thomas Paine, John Adams, Nathaniel Chipman, Joseph Haven, and many other early American thinkers. Furthermore, utilitarian considerations can be found in the Constitution and federalist papers, and even Tocqueville explained American thinking through the lens of utilitarian concerns.Bentham was ambitious in attempting to promote codification of law in many countries worldwide. While Bentham had made offers (some accepted, some rejected) to help in the codification of law to various countries, ranging from Catherine the Great's Russia to France, Portugal, Spain, and numerous South American countries, he spent much of the last quarter of his life focused on trying to provide his services to the new United States. In chapter 2, Crimmins provides a history of the dissemination of Bentham's ideas in the United States, highlighting some of the key promoters of his ideas in the United States, including Richard Hildreth and John Neal, as well as John O'Sullivan, Gilbert Vale, and, of course, Thomas Cooper. Crimmins also provides a meticulous account of Bentham's personal attempts... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon FerdinandDavid TooheyMapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity BY SIMON FERDINAND Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019Mapping Beyond Measure is a geographical and theoretical critique of map art and the tradition of modern mapmaking. The book focuses in depth on a few related examples of map art and departs from critical (...) theory and post-Marxist readings of space. Simon Ferdinand emphasizes fine art and art-film as appropriate counterweights to the authoritarian calculation in modern cartography and, unexpectedly, map art’s critique of mapmaking.Mapping Beyond Measure follows the well-trodden path of critiquing a medium, mapping, and map art as irredeemably authoritarian.1 Situated in this approach, Ferdinand argues that map art reproduces modernist cartography’s assumptions even while critiquing mapping. Aiming to subvert this shortcoming, Ferdinand explores Peter Greenway’s semi-abstract map art films that do not prioritize science over artists. Greenway’s films, especially A Walk Through H, are shown as being as close to an idea of mapping beyond calculation as possible. Indeed, for Ferdinand, Greenway’s map art films are an improvement on “postmodern” theorists.Mapping Beyond Measure explores a small, though logically (and practically) related group of map artists. The first three chapters explore differing approaches to map art, from Soviet painting that unintentionally [End Page 126] heralds globalization and map art’s latent desires to dominate the world, to more contemporary map art about looming societal collapse through the death of nature and mass casualties from aerial bombardment of cities. The following two chapters focus on how mapping creates nation-states. These chapters elucidate the tragic inability of map artists to escape globalization and calculation, the latter exasperated by G.I.S. techniques. These map artists serve as an ensemble that spotlights what, to Ferdinand, are inevitable difficulties that ethical practitioners of map art face in escaping the pitfalls of calculation in mainstream mapping.In chapter 6 Ferdinand explains how Greenway’s film A Walk Through H gets as close as possible to challenging map art through semi-abstract, two-dimensional additions to maps and using movie cameras to create an illusion of movement. Thus, the hierarchy of scientists over artists is partially dismantled. Indeed, Ferdinand lauds Greenway for creating alternatives to established political theorists. Interestingly, Ferdinand replaces ontology with the concept of “chorein” suggesting a more fluid conception of mapping that is not available in theories of space or cartographic practices of calculation. Nonetheless, compared to one of the articles referenced, Ferdinand downplays the destructive nature of chorein as a militaristic, colonial use of maritime space to emphasize its creative potential.2Ferdinand’s examples are primarily Eurocentric, even, surprisingly, in the exception: his focus on Japanese map artist Satomi Matoba. Here Ferdinand departs from Eurocentric examples only to focus on Japan—the most privileged nation-state in Asia. Even in this focus on Japan, which also includes Hawai‘i, Ferdinand does not depart from a frame familiar to Europe: World War II. Indeed, the discussion of Pearl Harbor (a U.S. military base) focuses on U.S. foreign policy, not on Hawai‘i. This thematic choice is relevant to other map artists in Ferdinand’s book. Ferdinand’s critique of calculability is based mainly on the consequences of Nazism, as theorized by Stuart Elden. However, Ferdinand’s theoretical interventions on uneven development in maps and map art would have been more substantial with the addition of detailed, localized, narrative accounts of violence suffered by non-white populations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and various European cities. Instead, we get an anonymous logic of maps that uses the idea of the past and potential [End Page 127] future destruction of cities to assume that everyone suffered to the same extent in World War II.While I am reluctant to criticize a book for not offering a solution to what it critiques, to a certain extent, the solution offered by Ferdinand contradicts his normative critique of calculability. In exploring Alison Hildreth’s map art, Ferdinand praises nuanced, temporally layered artistic explorations of ecological destruction and extinction. Likewise, A Walk Through H, is... (shrink)

Cet ouvrage a reçu le prix Jean Maitron en 2008. La préface d’Yvette Roudy explique à la fois le sous-titre « parcours d’une féministe » et l’orientation de cette biographie faite du point de vue de l’action de Marie-Thérèse Eyquem, parvenue dans la seconde partie de sa vie à la tête du Mouvement démocratique féminin dans le sillage de François Mitterrand. C’est sans doute la similitude de leur « jeunesse française » – conservatrice, catholique, et engagée dans le régime (...) de Vichy – qui expliq... (shrink)