The interview with Robert Paul Wolff was good. But after spending most of yesterday listening to intellectual history and literary theory lectures I was in a theory, history, and society mood. This is actually a letter of response to Wolff. First...man does he sound welcomely familiar...in a good way.
Martin Peretz and Michael Walzer are familiar to me through a pattern of thought that I picked up from studying Leo Strauss. Sure the central issues are Zionism and Israel, but there is another, back story here. It is the social and historical impacts of theory and philsophies. (Zionism is also a theory of state and a theory of society.)
These latter are in turn often governed by either given or assumed concepts of human nature. One of the connections, maybe the most intimate, between philosophy and theology, is that both contain assumptions about human nature. In rough terms analytic schools tend to conceive human nature in terms of reasoning machines. Many of the continental schools take a much darker veiw, Heidegger and being toward death, or Adorno's negative dialectics, or the various Freudian schools where desire seems to reign supreme.
It seems to me that the big three: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam contain extreme views of human nature. Many of the current social, political, and literary theory assumptions about human nature can be traced back, in a Nietzschian-Focauldian geneology to the OT. In a sense Peretz, Walzer, and of course Strauss all share a very biblical sense of human nature. In crude terms you can label these views an unflected bigotry (kill all Canaanites), or much more subtle in Walzer case, the need for just causes, and just wars (kill all Canaanites), and I'll skip Strauss, except to say he seemed to embody a very biblical disapproval of almost everybody. I give that impression a simple label, Hobbesianism. After spending a few days going through the Leviathan, something I didn't want to do, I would say Hobbes was a despicable human being in a very nasty world and it shows. Strauss loved him. For me, the pages were dripping with blood, and showed not one once of kindness.
At one point as I was trying to just get through the Old Testament, I slipped and begged God, you old bastard, give me something human. It finally came in the story of Ruth on the threshing floor... Not much, but at least Boaz didn't take advantage, accepted her into his household, and gave her permission to go work in the fields for her keep.
The Leviathan reads like the Old Testament. It was quite a contrast to my readings in Spinoza. Spinoza's basic construction was a human nature composed of passions, something on the order of Hobbes' mechanistic view of internal forces that needed to be controlled internally by reason, and externally controlled by following a rationally constructed ethics. I would call Spinoza a humanized Hobbes.
One of the subthemes of the early enlightenment was a battle over human nature, in a general sense a pull away from religious constructions toward secular ones that tried on several different models, which in turn became the foundational elements of the modern social sciences. It seems that your assumptions about human nature tend to manage your concept of society and most especially its laws and customs. Of course that collective social envelop works in a dialectic way to construct your concept of human nature---chicken and egg.
The whole field of economics is super-saturated with theories of human nature---most of which are nasty. Hence, the entire collection of babble known as neoliberalism, which is for practical purposes an anathama to any concept of human decency, good will, or even just healthy living.
In Wolff's blog he writes:
``I cannot make that decision for you, and neither can Smith and Marx and Durkheim and Freud and Weber. All I can do is to promise you that if you side with the oppressed, with the exploited, with the occupied, then the next time you decide to seize a building, I will be with you...''
http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/
Yes, that sure was a lesson of the old days. You do have to pick sides, but that doesn't stop the analytic-critical machine. Note Smith, Marx, et al. had pretty comprehensive theories of human nature, and they all share a certain Aristotlian sense of human nature as a universal given or constant.
We no longer believe that human nature is a fixed given, and have tended to develop all sorts of relativist constructions that basically come down to the idea we are a product of our society and its history. As these change, so do we. That's were to add to the sylabus. Below is a link to a highly interesting panel discussion from the UCB East Asian Studies institute:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jcdoVIoNJo
The program title is ``Marxism and Confucianism Today, Comparative Philosophies in the Eurasian Realm.'' I highly recommend it for anybody interested in the intersection of philosophies and societies. It is an illustration of just how different people can be in their concept of human nature and society.
As a sidebar. I found this link by searching for Martin Jay, who appears briefly. He made a couple of interesting points. He wondered why Hegel seemed much closer to a Chinese construction, where as Kant seemed utterly foreign and incompatible. I sure would have liked a response to that one.
CG