Who is your favorite political thinker?

Who is your favorite political thinker? Many people like what a political thinker has to say, and assume that it is all true, or they dislike what the political thinker has to say, and assume that none of it is true. I read a political thinker for insight, rather than doctrine.

My favorite political thinkers are Edmund Burke and Karl Marx. They seem to be polar opposites: Burke opposed abrupt political changes, and favored slow, evolutionary changes; Marx thought nothing of significance could be achieved without revolutions, and he thought revolutions would probably need to be violent.

I have read a certain amount of Burke, and more of Marx. All you really need to read is Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to understand what they have to say. Reflections on the Revolution in France can be read in one or two weeks. The Communist Manifesto can be read in one or two sittings.

Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790. When it was published the French King Louis XVI was still king. Reflections on the Revolution in France is often considered to be an accurate prediction of his execution, the Reign of Terror, which executed about 17,000 French aristocrats and other enemies of the revolutionary government, and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. These later developments only happened in response to military threats from European monarchies.

The insight I derive from Edmund Burke is that there is often wisdom in tradition. Nevertheless, Burke unrealistically idealized the absolute French monarchy and the French aristocracy that existed before the Revolution. If it was not for those external military threats, France would have probably developed a figurehead monarchy, similar to the one that exists in Great Britain.

To illustrate the wisdom of tradition, I will first discuss the sexual revolution.

During the 1950’s a the lyrics of a popular song captured the mood:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell ya, brother
Ya can't have one without the other

https://genius.com/Frank-sinatra-love-and-marriage-lyrics

In a Playboy interview Paul Newman described how it was during the 1950’s, “Nice girls did not sleep around. Nice guys did not ask them to. Those were the rules.”

When the Playboy interviewer asked, “When did you get away from all that?”

Newman answered, “It is not on the record that I ever did.”

In 1960 two thirds of marriages lasted. The illegitimacy rate was six percent.

During the 1960’s there was a lot of talk about changing to a more libertarian sex code, but as late as 1969 a Gallup Poll indicated that most Americans still thought sex outside of marriage was morally wrong.

Things really started to change during the 1970’s. Rates of divorce and illegitimacy rose. What also increased was the evidence that children raised to adulthood by both biological parents living together in matrimony have many fewer problems in life than other children.

The second change I will discuss is the civil rights movement. It is dangerous to criticize this, so I will step lightly. At the beginning of the civil rights movement advocates predicted that when blacks were given equal fights they would emulate whites. What happened instead was that whites emulated blacks, and black rates of crime and illegitimacy rose. The race gap in academic performance persisted.

A country with a high black population faces a difficult moral dilemma. If it denies blacks equal rights it will deny them to the minority of blacks who behave and perform as well as most whites. If it gives blacks equal rights it will experience the social problems we have faced since 1963.

Karl Marx’s most serious mistake was expressed in The Communist Manifesto, when he wrote, “The working men of Europe have no country.” Working class people are often fiercely nationalistic.

Marx also erred by assuming an inevitable progression from primitive communism (he means the Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras) to slavery (he means the Roman Empire) to feudalism, and to capitalism.

Feudalism only happens when an urban civilization collapses. Many parts of the world never experienced feudalism.

The revival of slavery in the Americas should have informed Marx that there was nothing inevitable about the end of slavery.

When Marx lived in England he could have learned how nationalistic working class men frequently are by patronizing working class pubs during the Crimean War.

Just as there is nothing inevitable about the transition from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism, there will be nothing inevitable about the transition from capitalism to socialism to the classless society. The classless society requires too much from human nature to ever be achieved.

Nevertheless, Marx had two valid insights: the natural tendency of unregulated capitalism is to accumulate wealth and income at the top; partly as a result, capitalism experiences increasingly destructive economic downturns.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal countered growing economic inequality by raising taxes on rich people and corporations, and with reforms like Social Security, minimum wage laws, and laws to protect strong labor unions. As a result, recessions became milder. The United States developed the largest and richest middle class in the world.

Beginning with the Reagan administration taxes have been cut for rich people and corporations. The minimum wage has lost ground to inflation. Labor unions have become weaker. Consequently, wealth again concentrates at the top; recessions have become longer and deeper. They are often followed with jobless recoveries, when economic growth continues – going to the rich – while unemployment remains high.

The writings of Marx do not predict the First World War, the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism, and the fact that today America’s white working class is a Republican constituency. They do predict the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, and the growing income gap since the inauguration of President Reagan in 1981.

I will give honorable mention to the philosophy of Confucius. Like The Communist Manifesto the Analects of Confucius can be read in one or two sittings.

In the West Confucius is often considered to be the founder of a religion. I see him as a moral and political philosopher who also discussed theology.

Confucius took economic and social inequality for granted. He also believed that those in the upper classes have moral responsibilities toward those beneath them.

Finally, Confucius believed that one should worship the traditional Chinese deities, but that one should not devote much time to religious dogma. When we consider the history of religious wars and persecution in the West, it is easy to agree.

 

Is joy beyhar taken already ?
Hey I saw her first guys !
Whoopeethehutt is a brilliant political porognosticater, is she nostradamus ?
No, but she has a brilliant balance of love & hate.

 

If you’re going to bring up Burke I’d suggest Thomas Paine should naturally follow their philosophical jousting beginning with Reflections and Rights of Man was intense.

 

Thomas Hobbes

 

I’m sorry but when you said you admire Karl Marx I lost all interest in reading your post. Karl Marx was the spoiled rich kid that never had to pay for a thing in his life and always cried for mom and dad to pay his way. If you know Karl Marx the way you say you do then you absolutely know I’m not lying. He wanted socialist ideals to be lazy. He also was commonly (if not all the time) frustrated with his inability to try and socialize the food industry. He is complete and utter garbage.

 

Hunter S THompson

"when the going gets tough, the weird turn Pro"

 

I said that Karl Marx had two accurate insights, and I demonstrated that he did.

 

Aristophanes

Okay kidding…. he was just an entertainer with an in your face sarcastic humor about political injustices of his time.

 

The only thing Karl Marx did worth noting was outliving Freidrick Engels and successfully giving laziness an educated pen and paper that will unfortunately live on for centuries and constantly will need rebuttal. The only country that gave Marxism a full go was Stalins Russia. Under the oppressive government lead by a Marxist ideology people predictably and quite literally starved to death.

Russias Marxist experiment likewise and even more so predictably demonized farmers, the very people who supply the public with food. Marx decried capitalist agriculture's practice of “robbing the soil” of the destruction of the physical inputs of production.

so under Marxism and not surprisingly under Stalins Russia they both felt farmers were thieves and quite literally treated them that way.

Marx has zero and I mean zero good points specially when the most basic of necessities he constantly was in frustration with. Marx was an educated moron.

 

Karl Marx
First published Tue Aug 26, 2003; substantive revision Mon Dec 21, 2020
Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/


Friedrich Engels
German philosopher

Died:

Aug. 5, 1895, London, Eng. (aged 74)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Engels

 

Karl Marx took up the cause of the factory workers who lived in poverty even though their work made the industrial revolution possible.

Marx never advocated the totalitarian methods used in his name during the twentieth century. He did inspire them, so he is not clearly innocent.

A bad person can have valid insights. Adolf Hitler knew a lot about social psychology and political propaganda.

 

Me, too. Marx was no economist and had no idea how to organize an economy.

 

Sam Adams
"Adams focused his political agenda on promoting virtue, which he considered essential in a republican government. If republican leaders lacked virtue, he believed, liberty was endangered."

The word and concept, "republican", has certainly been debased since Adams.

 

Lao-Tzu

 

Have you seen "Where the Buffalo Roam?" Eat a gummy before you watch it. It helps make the juvenile parts funny.

 

Plato/Socrates.

 

Adam Smith

Karl Marx was an "anal opening." He was a failure in life, but in death he has become the closing thing to the devil mankind has ever produced.

 

Of all the people you listed, only Karl Marx was a political philosopher. Confuscious, his literal Chinese name is Kong Fuzi, was not a political philosopher, and in China, after his death, a religion was started after him. It is considered one of the three pillars of religion in China along with Buddhism and Taoism. To the West, he is considered a philosopher in general, although not political, and wrote, which has aged well, even to this day on what is considered his view of morality from his perspective at that time. Reagan was a President, the great communicator, but not a political philosopher. We tend to identify Kong Fuzi as such, but he wouldn't at that time.

Here are my great philosophers not necessarily in order of precedence:

• Hang Fei, Legalism which is now used around the world today in every country, no matter the form of government.
• Socrates and Aristotle
• Cicero the
• Enlightenment Philosophers of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau
• The biggest economic philosophers of Karl Marx/Fredereich Englel, Adam Smith, Sir Benard Keynes, and Milton Friedman.
• Modern Philosophers born in the 20th century such as Ayn Rand, John Rawls, and Richard Rorty.

I don't consider anyone one of them the best, but I do consider each of them to be influential not only in their time, but in the present too.

 

Niccolo Machiavelli

 

Why does that not surprise me about you?

 

Thomas Jefferson

 

Donald J. Trump

 

Donald Trump cannot read. How can he be a philosopher?

 

The women's movement happened. Men who want to live with women will have to treat them as equals. It's always harder to give up an advantage than accept change overcoming a disadvantage. We're in a period of adjustment.

They did.

Both black and white communities were impacted by the breakdown in the family unit. Whites were being whites, not emulating blacks.

So has the quality gap in public education.

Blacks will do fine if they get equal treatment.

Marx wasn't right about economic downturns.

 

I'm glad I didn't have a mouth full of coffee when I read that.