> I think, and maybe wrong, a philosophical analysis of what they fear is
> somehow the key to political action. What they fear, besides losing
> their money and power, is the loss of the hegemonic American Identity.
> It is somehow tied up with US imperialism. So kill the symbolic
> identity, hopefully you kill the whole drive to imperial domination.
> Kill the brain, kill the goul (from Night of the Living Dead).
[snip]
> Well, I've been drinking, so have become untrustworthy,,,
>
> CG
=====================
They fear exactly what RPW pointed to in his essay "The Conflict Between Autonomy and Authority"; that more will realize there is no duty to obey the law as law. That philosophical anarchism grips the masses and becomes a material force. The collective performativity of freedom.
Have one for me,
Ian
^^^^^
CB: What's up , Ian !
Didn't Wolff co-author the essay "Critique of Pure Tolerance" with Marcuse ? Angela Davis applied the critique to First Amendment tolerance of the KKK and Nazis.
Interestingly, Wolff places the origin of the study of society qua society in Adam Smith
"Now for the point of all this reminiscing. Notice that there is no room in this classification for the study of society, as we understand that notion today. Pretty much up through to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, no one had a clear, workable idea of Society as a distinct sphere of investigation sharply set off from Natural Philosophy on the one hand and Moral Philosophy on the other. Discussions of the State or the Law or such institutions as Parliament were understood to be reducible, in a manner of speaking, to, accounts of the character and workings of the individual mind or personality [or "psyche," in the Greek sense of that term.] There were of course many writers who talked about the manners and national characteristics of of the French as opposed to the English, or about the strange doings of the "primitive" peoples who were happened upon by travelers during their voyages of discovery or colonization. But though much was made of these accounts, they did not yield a workable concept of Society as an object of autonomous investigation.
The first appearance of the notion in a significant fashion, so far as I know, is in Adam Smith's great work, AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, usually referred to by the last four words of the title. Smith, looking at a market newly freed from traditional and legal constraints, and hence "free," observes that there seem to be certain "natural prices" that underlie the daily fluctuations caused by momentary variations in the supply or demand for goods and services. Corn may be cheap on a given day because many farmers have brought their harvest to market, or dear on another because rain has kept them away. As Smith says in the seventh chapter, "The actual price at which any commodity is commonly sold is called its market price. It may be above, or below, or exactly the same with its natural price." And then, two pages later, Smith makes an observation that is of the most profound significance, for all that it is, in his hands, quite inadequately theoretically explained. "The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating." The invocation of the concept of the force of gravity in 1776, when the book was published, is of obvious significance. Smith is writing at a time when, by universal agreement, Newton's theories were the gold standard of theoretical explanation. Smith is suggesting that there is a sphere of human activity -- the economic -- that is governed by laws as rigorous and objective and irresistible as the force of gravity that rules the physical universe.
The laws of this sphere are not reducible, Smith seems to be suggesting, either to the laws governing the natural world or to the laws governing human character and behavior -- neither to Natural Philosophy nor to Moral Philosophy. It seems there is need of a third branch of knowledge -- Social Philosophy, or the Study of Society."