Reviews for The idea of political theory

The average rating for The idea of political theory based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-07-01 00:00:00 Lisa Sica The purpose of a review is not to show that the reviewer is cleverer than the author. p395 Considering the controversial genius of George Grant, that would be a foolish enterprise to say the least. If I were still involved in some kind of formal study, I might be up for writing a thesis on the wide range of his interests. In this collection of essays, letters, reviews and reprints of some of his lectures, the clarity and elegance of his thought is infused with a rigorous urgency. While I certainly cannot endorse some of his conclusions, it seems clear that Grant was a giant in the pantheon of Canadian philosophers. What pantheon of Canadian philosophers? you may be wondering. Exactly. It was only because of references by Tom Lilburn and Robert Bringhurst that he came to my attention. I was rather shocked and dismayed to learn that he was active in Toronto at the same time I was studying philosophy and sociology at the university of BC. There I was, reading Plato and Nietzsche and Heidegger and wishing they were still here to comment and interrogate; and there was Grant, having made a close study of all three of these characters, available for dialogue. Perhaps I would have had more incentive to stay with academia if I would have read this book then. I could have moved to Toronto and done a masters with this man, if I would have known of his existence. What glorious arguments we could have had! So what was it that relegated such an important, original thinker to an obscure footnote? Perhaps it was the unease he instigated in those who coasted on popular opinion. GG has quite a lot to say on skulduggery and popular opinion; on sloppy thinking, tunnel vision, and the limits of reason. For a fundamentally prudent man, he could be rash. reason is viewed...as arising from the suppression of the instinctual....The gaining of power over nature, central to modern science, is the very cause of disease....p336 from his essay on Freud. GG was an eminently reasonable but also passionate man and he gives this idea due consideration. Without adequate foundations, both action and knowledge become shallow or perverse. In both cases, our well being as something more than comfortable animals is involved. p10 At issue is the fact that most people are content to be comfortable animals, and that the ability to think for oneself has been highly compromised and even hijacked by technology. From the backwaters of the 50;s, GG was alarmed at the direction and speed of so-called progress. In 1959 he resigned from his appointment at York University because the required texts for his philosophy courses did not meet his standards. Truth cannot be spoken in the public realm. p153 What can be the place of philosophy be in the mass world? p160 Another reason, perhaps, for Grants obscurity may well be the force of his carefully considered opinions, which endeared him to neither side in the great debates. His radical outlook embraced some fundamental contradictions. He confessed to being an old fashioned christian while deploring the tactics of Christianity. He was against abortion and capitalism. It is easier to dismiss someone as irrelevant than to engage in a serious examination of their point of view. At this moment in time, when so much that GG foreshadowed is come to pass, an ethical man is almost an anachronism. In the modern world, freedom and equality have replaced wisdom and virtue as the highest good for men and women....Are we free to make out own values? If so, whose values shall determine how we should be governed?.....Is there any truth that it is incumbent upon us to know? p8 How far...will it be possible for men to have individual freedom without disrupting too many others by their actions? How far will men have to be curbed by authority so that they do not interfere with others? p49 There can be no perfected freedom in a world where others have not found it. p234 The majority of the acquiescent think they need the organizers to provide for 'primary goods' more than we need justice. p117 The contradiction the capitalist society creates is that it has produced the possibility of overcoming scarcity- that is the conditions for overcoming class dominion and inequality have arrived; yet at the same time it has chained the mass of men to uncreative labour, work for which they have no responsibility p232. The proletariat cannot liberate itself by producing another class society, but only by destroying the very existence of economic classes themselves. p233 As Plato said, an infinite distance separates the good from necessity. p248 If man is simply an an animal, morality is an illusion. p182 Modern life has become the joyless search of joy.p46 Morality was something that very much concerned GG and part of his attention was always fixed on the moral disintegration that he observed in the excesses of a society with such dubious ethics. But he is not a moralist. In the section entitled Technology as Ontology he articulates his objections and his fears. It is the transition of meaning, creeping fascism and the universities in the pockets of corporations; it is the distortion of meaning and the loss of of the concepts and things we can no longer articulate that concern him. It is clear that the ways that computers can be used for storing 'information' can only be ways that increase the tempo of the homogenizing process in society. Abstracting facts so they may be stored as information is achieved by classification. p423 Where classification rules, identities and differences can only appear in its terms. p424 You cannot have a free and vibrant society unless there are free and vibrant people in it. p203

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-28 00:00:00 Brent Jose Cook's Tour of the incisive thought of Grant, d. 1989. Grant saw the replacement religion of Canada and the entire West as idolatrous progress toward human domination of nature and human nature. His poet friend said Grant enables one to stand up straight by naming the disease one may only intuit.