a critique of liberalism
October 5, 2006
Reading Richard Rorty’s embrace of liberalism (in Achieving Our Country, and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and Philosophy and Social Hope) you’d be forgiven for thinking that pragmatism’s close links with the deconstruction of Derrida implies that these two programmes of rejection of foundationalism naturally embrace liberalism (phew; I can’t believe I wrote that!). Thankfully, help is at hand, in the guise of Michael Sandel and his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I’m seeing now that liberalism as per Sandel reaches it limits at its conception of the person – the autonomous, free though strangely transcendent agent that traditional (Rawlsian) liberalism posits. This struck me as an interesting (in a nerdy kind of way) critique of liberalism, which hitherto I’d felt some allegiance to, via Rorty and inferentially via Derrida. So maybe I’m no longer a liberal? Right now I need to find out how Sandel’s communitarian views fit with deconstruction, it at all, as well as the impact his critique has on Rorty’s liberal conception. For this I’m reading Sandel and the intriguing symposia proceedings from Critchley, Derrida, Laclau & Rorty called Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Wouldn’t it be great to build a communitarian based critique not just of liberalism, but of deconstruction and pragmatism? I suspect deconstruction will come out clean.
December 4, 2006 at 12:19 pm
[...] But, as troubled in prevous posts of this blog (Oct 5, 06: Sept 30, 06), what are the boundaries of a programme of education and at what point can one claim that a particular resource (as above) falls within a nominated resource library of such a programme? Using the specific goods and services of the formal transaction that are warranted via the customer relationship as defining the relationship between educational ’supplier’ and consuming agency is misleading; such a focus serves only to highlight the spectral (to use the language of Derrida) or the un-real quality of education. In that sense then, the tag of ‘customer’ as the type of agency with whom suppliers of formal leadership education have a relationship, seems less useful. To what is the consuming agent of leadership education, once she has entered into a transactive relationship (i.e. the consuming agency as customer) with the supplier of leadership education, entitled to precisely? What has her purchasing (direct or indirect) power bought her that she doesn’t already have? Answering this with ’simply access to the goods and services of a programme of leadership education’ isn’t quite fair since this aludes to the customer as inexpert and passive; neither does it acknowledge the genuine learning outcomes that may emerge as a result of this purchase. But it does highlight the relative arbitrariness of the relationship between the notion of customer and consumption. Posted by executivezen Filed in Uncategorized [...]