Walter Lippmann, the Indispensable Opposition

Lippmann and Dewey both confronted the problem of how to get the nation’s highly successful science to have impact in the public sphere. Dewey’s solution to the problem is well known: an underspecified form of communication which would transform the Great Society beyond the understanding of any individual into the Great Community where policies could be wisely chosen. Lippmann was more uncompromisingly pessimistic, doubting the ability of anyone–including himself–to master the range of knowledge necessary to make fully informed decisions. Nevertheless, there is a legitimate role for even uninformed publics to participate in civic deliberations: they act as adjudicators of debates in which the contending experts demonstrate their reasonability

Introduction to Deadly Delusions #5

Barry Mauer began the comic series Deadly Delusions in 2013 in response to the increasingly extreme and dangerous right-wing propaganda he had observed over the past several decades. His aim for the project has been to combine scholarship, maximal rhetorical force, and a punk do-it-yourself aesthetic. Deadly Delusions shifts away from debates about whether the media is biased or if it is fair to both sides. Rather, it asks whether the media is spreading mass delusion and pushing eliminationist policies.peer-reviewe

William Jennings Bryan's 1905-6 world tour

This article is a study of the 1905-6 world tour undertaken by William Jennings Bryan and his family. Bryan was one of the major US politicians of his era. Three times a Democratic party presidential nominee (1896, 1900, 1908), he played a prominent role in the various reform crusades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was the leading figure on the populist, agrarian wing of his party. To date, however, historians have paid little attention to his extensive travels and voluminous travel writing, in large part because hostile journalists and historians – chief among them Walter Lippmann, H. L. Mencken, and Richard Hofstadter – succeeded in casting him as an archetype of American parochialism. This study makes us aware of Bryan's published and unpublished correspondence, the memoirs of his daughter Grace, newspaper reports, and cartoons to form a reassessment of Bryan, focusing primarily on his encounters with unfamiliar cultures, and with imperialism in the Philippines, British India, and the Dutch East Indies. In so doing, it places Bryan for the first time in a global and transnational frame, and mounts a broader critique of the rigidly regional and national orientation of the US historiography of populism

Radicalism and the limits of reform : the case of John Reed

Poet, journalist, editorial board member of the Masses and founding member of the Communist Labor Party, John Reed is a hero in both the worlds of cultural and political radicalism. This paper shows how his development through pre-World War One Bohemia and into left wing politics was part of a larger movement of middle class youngsters who were in that era in reaction against the reform mentality of their parent's generation. Reed and his peers were critical of the following, common reformist views: that economic individualism is the engine of progress; that the ideas and morals of WASP America are superior to those of all other ethnic groups; that the practical constitutes the best approach to social life. By tracing Reed's development on these issues one can see that his generation was critical of a larger cultural view, a system of beliefs common to middle class reformers and conservatives alike. Their revolt was thus primarily cultural, one which tested the psychic boundaries, the definitions of humanity, that reformers shared as part of their class

Beyond the American century: Walter Lippmann and American grand strategy, 1943-1950

As the United States became a world Power, journalist and intellectual Walter Lippmann feared that it would become its own worst enemy. During and after the Second World War, he tried to steer the country towards coherent statecraft, to define the national interest and the limits of power, and give geopolitical expression to the role of the United States as the core of an Atlantic strategic system. But in response to world war, the Truman Doctrine, and the Korean War, he became pessimistic about the country's ability to conduct strategy effectively. In the prophetic tradition, he believed that a fatal symbiosis between America's growing strength and domestic politics led it towards crisis. Though at times ahistorical, Lippmann's concept of strategy deserves attention for its dialogue between power and identity, for its questioning of “ends” as well as means, and for its focus on the danger of self-defeating behaviour

The Philosophy of Social Market Economy: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Ordoliberalism

Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1978–1979 centered on the analysis of power with regard to liberalism. Foucault especially focused on German ordoliberalism and its specific governmentality. Although Foucault’s review of the ordoliberal texts, programs, and books is very faithful, there are some occasional “schematic” simplifications. Our paper will evaluate Foucault’s constitution of an ordoliberal “archive”, though more emphasis will be put on the general importance of the phenomenological orientation in Walter Eucken’s work. Hence, three tasks will guide our paper: first, an analysis of Foucault’s position; second, the phenomenological foundation of the ordoliberal discourse compared to the 18th century liberal discourse, i.e. the way in which Walter Eucken received Husserl. Third, our paper shall raise the subject of the mutual historical-epistemological complementation of philosophy and economics by taking Foucault’s analysis as the starting point. Furthermore, the consequences of a phenomenological, “eidetic” order of the economy will be discussed, focusing mainly on the expansion of competition in social domains. --Foucault,Husserl,Eucken,ordoliberalism,eidetic order of the market,social market economy

A European social model of state-market relations: the ethics of competition from a neo-liberal perspective

In this paper I portray "neo-liberalism" in its original conceptual meaning as opposed to the generic term of depreciation as which it is commonly used. I identify fair competition and the denial of all privilege as the major concerns of original neo-liberals. Ethical merit for competition might, at first sight, be based on only two principles: individual natural rights (equal liberty) and socially desirable outcomes ("unintended altruism"). It was the neo-liberal idea to put fairness-norms or universally applicable rules of just behaviour between an unqualified "input-based" ethics and an unqualified "output-based" ethical consequentialism. The enforcement of such rules is a major obligation of the state. Today, the European Union assumes the role of "guardian" of competition. In a certain, but limited sense, neoliberalism, correctly understood, can be argued to be the one founding "European Social Model". However, beyond the realm of common, universalisable interests, competition amongst social-political models seems a preferable option for Europe. --Neo-liberalism,Ordo-liberalism,European Social Models,Ethics of Competition

Individual and regulatory ethics: an economic-ethical and theoretical-historical analysis of ordoliberalism

Based on Foucault’s analysis of German Neoliberalism and his thesis of ambiguity, the following paper draws a two-level distinction between individual and regulatory ethics. The individual ethics level – which has received surprisingly little attention – contains the Christian foundation of values and the liberal-Kantian heritage of so called Ordoliberalism – as one variety of neoliberalism. The regulatory or formal-institutional ethics level on the contrary refers to the ordoliberal framework of a socio-economic order. By differentiating these two levels of ethics incorporated in German Neoliberalism, it is feasible to distinguish dissimilar varieties of neoliberalism and to link Ordoliberalism to modern economic ethics. Furthermore, it allows a revision of the dominant reception of Ordoliberalism which focuses solely on the formal-institutional level while mainly neglecting the individual ethics level

The New Journalism and the Struggle for Interpretation

Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer–editor relations inevitably shape journalists’ interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists’ interpretive responsibilities