Here are three of my favourite paragraphs, some of the most relevant to that which we might now – naive bourgeois idealists such as we have all become – call ‘political philosophy.’ (I would argue that its implications must necessarily go far beyond this narrowly-focused field and into ontology and epistemology, not to mention a certain peculiar sort of deconstructive ‘psychoanalysis;’ I’ll set those implications aside for the moment.)
“Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists – unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know – are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

….

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds… With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.”

Read the whole text here.

“Republicans basically accept Mr. Bush’s vision of himself as a latter-day Harry S. Truman who has reorganized U.S. policy to meet this all-encompassing global threat. Like Mr. Bush, they see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the larger conflict with Islamic extremism, and Iran and its clients in the Middle East as yet another front. Democrats disaggregate these problems and balance them against challenges that have received too little attention from the Bush administration: the rise of China; the return of an autocratic and relatively hostile Russia; the danger of unsecured nuclear materials in unstable parts of the world; and global warming, among others. Ms. Clinton’s definition of the world the next president will inherit in a recent Foreign Affairs magazine essay fills a fat, 140-word paragraph and speaks of ‘an unprecedented array of challenges.’ In contrast, Mr. Giuliani begins with a single sentence: ‘We are all members of the 9/11 generation.’

Ms. Clinton’s view strikes us as more realistic. Al-Qaeda remains a grave threat, and the United States has a vital interest in supporting moderate Muslims against the extremist minority. But threats such as Shiite Iran should be understood and addressed differently than Sunni jihadist movements; and the rest of the world does not fit neatly into a bipolar struggle between two camps. The next president needs to be prepared to check aggression from China or Russia, or combat a pandemic.”

Read the rest of the article here.