[lbo-talk] Poll of Top 5 Public Intellectuals! Vote For Chomsky!

[Michael Hirsch]

Didn't the list concern "public" intellectuals? This discussion of Nussbaum is about as accessible to the public as is the Queen's loo at Windsor Castle. Dwight Macdonald was a public intellectual. Irving Howe was a public intellectual. Habermas became one. Nussbaum's work, which may be rich and needed and even influential in circles outside of her specialization, is too rarified.  

Hey, I don't make the rules.

MH

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com>
Sent: Oct 3, 2005 10:25 AM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Poll of Top 5 Public Intellectuals! Vote For Chomsky!

Martha Nussbaum's version of the "capabilities" approach has much in  
common with Marx, as she herself points out.  She frequently quotes  
with approval Marx's contrasting of the true idea of ""the rich human  
being and the rich human need" with the idea of them found in  
"political economy."

?It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political  
economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich  
human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality  
of human manifestations of life ? the man in whom his own realisation  
exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise  
the poverty of man ? under the assumption of socialism ? receives in  
equal measure a human and therefore social significance.

             ?Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human  
being to experience the need of the greatest wealth ? the other human  
being.?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

Her account of the care care infants and children need if they are to  
develop the "capabilities" constitutive of  "riches" in this sense is  
significantly influenced by the "object relations" version of  
psychoanalysis, particularly as this is developed in the writings of  
Fairbairn and Winnicott (see Chap. 4 in Upheavals of Thought).

She is the source I suspect of the best aspects of Sen's own version  
of the approach.

Ted

___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

________________________________________
`And these words shall then become
Like oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again -- again -- again--
`Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number--
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many -- they are few.'
--------Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy:
Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester" [1819]