Here is my latest bibliography (that should be it for a while): The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies).
Related compilations (i.e., with family resemblance of some kind):
Miscellany:
“Trump’s authoritarian backlash has already begun”
By Brian Klaas, for The Washington Post, November 9, 2018
“American democracy is now considerably safer than it was before Tuesday, but we’re not out of the woods by a long shot. For the first time in American history, a president with authoritarian instincts occupies the White House. By now, President Trump’s mimicry of the world’s despots and dictators is well-established. He attacks the press, pardons political allies while calling for the jailing of political enemies, and scapegoats minorities while wrapping himself in a symbolic flag of xenophobic nationalism. His administration is plagued with blatant corruption and ethics violations and nepotism. And his rhetoric is a constant stream of Orwellian lies, punctuated by routine incitements to political violence, and endless praise for dictatorial monsters that he doesn’t just tolerate but actually loves.
But this week, a new chapter begins in the fight to protect American democracy. The battle lines are clear: Democrats can now constrain Trump in new and crucial ways. The Trump wrecking ball — the one that he gleefully smashed into democratic institutions while Republicans in Congress watched the rubble fall — is now on a much shorter chain. Now Trump will face constraints from Democrats exercising their formal powers. But a cornered fighter can be even more dangerous. Trump might lash out against his newfound political confinement, becoming more mercurial, more willing to take risks and more authoritarian.” [….]
The rest of the article is here.
Comment:
When Trump says “Americans must unify,” what he means is that we must unite as one mass behind him and his regressive and neo-fascist politics. He cannot admit that his litany of irresponsible and irrational rhetoric has made any contribution whatsoever to a poisoned national political climate which has found most of the Right, and thus the Republican Party, slavishly adhering to “their Leader,” untethered to reality insofar as that is circumscribed by its intrinsic relation to facts and truth. He does not understand the invaluable and necessary roles of argument, criticism and dissent (including public protest) in a would-be democracy that is at once electoral, participatory, and deliberative (for him, only money and authoritarian power deserve a voice). When political pundits and talking heads on TV repeat that “all of us” must “tone it down,” or that “everybody must take a breath,” I say “f*ck that.” The President and his mass media lackeys (e.g., FOX News and Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) are the ones, in the first instance and ever since, responsible for a reckless and degrading political rhetoric that is crudely fashioned with the blunt tools of black and white thinking and forged in the fires of our most vulnerable emotions (hatred, rage, fear, anxiety, insecurity…). I feed no need whatsoever to “tone” anything down, nor should the vast majority of us on the Left.
Please tell me that these attempted bombings have no relation whatsoever to the President's irresponsible and reckless demagogic rhetoric and the support he receives from right-wing media sources like FOX News and radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh that likewise sow the seeds of hatred, rage, fear, insecurity, racism, sexism, extreme polarization, fascism, and all forms of violence.
The socio-pathological undercurrents in our society are seeping up with more frequency through fissures in the fragile membrane that is our “civilization.” The President responds by calling for armed guards at houses of worship and more frequent application of the death penalty, thereby according legal and political sanction to the very social and cultural pathologies that plague us. In brief, he proposes a new variation on Fromm’s locution, “the pathology of normalcy.”
I agree with much in the article by Klass, although it appears not to adequately appreciate the extent to which Trump’s presidency is at the same time symptomatic and expressive of wider social (including environmental), political, and economic trends and forces, few if any of which, it seems safe to conclude, will be substantially addressed by the Democrats (no, that does not mean one should not vote and support them), given the constitution of both the Senate and Supreme Court, as well as the moneyed interests that continue to dominate our would-be democracy. Nor will these trends and forces be sufficiently addressed if Trump is impeached or fails to achieve a second term. Our “capitalist democracy” remains in the grips of what has been called “neoliberalism,” (although this term’s insinuations fail to do justice to those aspects of the Liberal tradition which will be essential to any robust democratic society, including a socialist one, as well as failing to properly locate and identify the essential referential object: capitalism), and the crises it face are internally and externally variegated, the foremost of the latter type being the global warming associated with climate change (see Bill McKibben’s piece, ‘A Very Grim Forecast,’ in the Nov. 28 issue of the New York Review of Books). The “internal” crises we have yet to confront arise largely, but not exclusively, from forces unleashed by the Great Financial Crisis (many of which were in existence before the financial collapse of 2008), these account for the rapid rise of authoritarian and extremist right wing movements, parties, and rulers around the globe (most of which are far worse than what we are facing in this country). Another of the trends, irrespective of the two dominant political parties, has to do with the “unchecked executive power” that has become entrenched in the office of the presidency (see, for example, the respective titles by Wills, Nelson, and Alford below). I’ll stop here, leaving you with works I recommend should one care to look beyond the horrors if not evils rightly attributed to the character and presidency of Donald Trump (which I’ve spoken to elsewhere in a paper on his pathological narcissism):
My latest bibliography is on Islam & Jurisprudence (or, if one prefers, ‘Islamic Law’). The introduction:
This compilation, like most of my bibliographies, has two constraints: books, in English. I trust the inference will not be made that this implies the best works are only in English, as it merely reflects the limits of my knowledge and research. “Jurisprudence” in this case can refer to Islamic philosophy and/or theory of law, as well as historical and existing legal systems in those countries in which Islam is (i) a state-sanctioned religion, (ii) predominant as a religious orientation in the society, (iii) or has a significant impact on the country’s legal system in one way or another. I have used the phrase “Islam and Jurisprudence” for the title to reflect the fact that it is a perilous endeavor to conclusively identify, except perhaps philosophically or theologically (and even then, there are inherent problems), Islamic law as such (i.e., in any kind of absolutist or ‘pure’ sense) in legal systems on the ground, as we say, even if we rightly derive warrant for this appellation from both emic and etic reasons. This list does not aspire to be exhaustive, although I hope it is at least representative of the depth and breadth of the available literature. I welcome suggestions for titles I may have inadvertently missed.
Related compilations:
The following material by yours truly may also be of interest:
Today is the birthday of Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980), founder, with Peter Maurin, of the Catholic Worker Movement and newspaper. Here is a short list of titles, most of which are about Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker movement and newspaper. The FBI still includes the movement on its list of “domestic advocacy groups” that it believes necessary to keep tabs on.
The Catholic Worker Movement:
See too this bibliography on Radical Catholicism.
[Apart from posting this for reasons intrinsic to the material, I want to let readers know (although we never hear from you, I trust there’s still some out there) that my blogging will be a bit light for a spell while I’m doing this research and catching up on some tasks at the home front (perhaps this could spur some of our other ‘contributors’ to actually contribute something!).]
The research I am doing on Lokāyata/Cārvāka philosophical views (for an introductory presentation of same) and the preparation for a guest post at the Indian Philosophy blog on “Indian/Indic darśana(s) and hedonistic egoism” substantially and thankfully overlaps, although I am also quickly discovering the extent of my ignorance. One thing I have learned to date comes by way of the late philosopher B.K. Matilal (the link does not list all of his writings), who has pointed out the varied treatments of ethical virtues and ideas in Indian epic literature (e.g., the Mahābhārata, which of course contains the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Rāmāyana), in particular to the sundry meanings of dharma and the role of dharma in moral conflicts, some of which amount to moral dilemmas. Philosophical discussions of ethics or moral philosophy as such is virtually absent from the Indic darśana-s or philosophical schools (there are notable exceptions on occasion and especially in Mahāyāna Buddhism), be they orthodox or āstika (i.e., Vedic/śruti in inspiration if not justification) or heterodox (nāstika),* despite their ability to treat topics in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and language with—comparatively speaking—considerable philosophical sophistication and insight. The epics falls under the heading of smṛti (memory; that which is remembered; worthy to be remembered) texts, or non-śruti (‘revelatory’) religious literature, which also includes the Dharmaśāstra-s (e.g., the Manusmṛti) and the Purāna-s (e.g., the Viṣṇu Purāna and the Śiva Purāna). Matilal urges us to examine these sources, as well as Indic literature generally for discussions of ethical ideas and principles or moral philosophy.
I am entertaining some possible reasons as to why ethics or moral philosophy was not systematically addressed in the philosophical schools, some of which I suspect are related to the fact that many people in contemporary society do not, of course (and for better and worse), learn their ethics or about moral philosophy from philosophers. Rather, as Colin McGinn writes in Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997), “literature is where moral thinking lives and breathes on every page:”
“Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectic between the reader’s own experience and the trials of the character he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attributes, especially in contemporary culture.”
Or, in the words of Martha Nussbaum, “the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech or of abstract theoretical discourse are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy.” The political scientist, Nobel laureate, and pioneer in the field of the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as the computational modeling of human reasoning, Herbert A. Simon, put it rather more awkwardly this way: “most human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion—a sort of hot dressing—then if it is presented wholly without affect.”
A corollary obligation would seem to follow: novelists (or playwrights, poets…) have to get it right. In other words, if we look to the arts for our lessons in morality or ethics, it presumes or assumes we have some prior ability (or at least the critics are in possession of such) to discriminate morally knowledgeable, insightful, or significant literature from that which is unavailing, ethically speaking (as a product of family upbringing and early socialization and education). In brief, readers must have, minimally, a conscience, in combination with some level of ethical individuation and moral development and awareness that sets the stage for further moral understanding and growth such that these non-philosophical sources can indeed serve as “alert winged creatures.” This does not render the work of philosophers on ethics and moral philosophy irrelevant or redundant, let alone unnecessary; it only means we might recognize philosophy does not have, nor will it ever likely have, at least for most of us, pride of place when it comes to education in moral philosophy and virtuous living (that may seem obvious in many circles, but I think professional philosophers, for the most part, are reluctant to acknowledge this).
* The six orthodox (āstika) schools of Indic philosophy: (Navya-)Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta. The schools are often grouped in pairs, thus: Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika (Logic and Atomism); (Classical) Yoga and Sāmkhya (Yoga and Discrimination or Distinctionism); Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Uttara Mīmāṃsā or Vedānta (Prior Exegesis [of the Veda] and Later Exegesis or End of the Veda-s Metaphysics). The so-called nāstika schools (sometimes referred to as the śramaṇa tradition) include Ājīvika, Jainism, Buddhism, and Lokāyata/Cārvāka. (There are more than a few sub-schools in several of the above as well.)
A couple of times a year I post notice of the unannotated bibliographies available (along with other published and unpublished writings) at my Academia page. This is the latest list, which thus includes additions since the last posting. These lists vary widely in length. The two principle constraints are books, in English (although a few lists have articles as well).
In Western philosophy, there are lots of “cats on mats” (e.g., ‘The cat is on the mat’). It does have a nice ring to it, unlike, say, “The dog is on the couch” or “The hamster is in the cage” or “The rat is at my bare feet.” I thought it worth mentioning after seeing this well-worn declarative sentence yet again in a work by Nicholas Rescher in which he discusses the epistemic significance and warrant of the notion of presumption (about which I hope to post anon). One of my favorite passages invoking this stock philosophical locution comes from Hilary Putnam’s Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981):
“[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat.’ If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions ‘cat,’ ‘on,’ and ‘mat’—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category ‘cat’ because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species a given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category ‘mat’ because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category ‘on’ because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, ‘the cat is on the mat,’ and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, ‘the cat is on the mat’ would be as irrational as ‘the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76’ would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.” — Hilary Putnam
At The Living New Deal, they’ve just added pages (and wonderful photos!) that introduce the programs intended to address the conspicuous and enduring problem of our nation’s historic “exclusion of neglected, oppressed and marginalized people in American life.” This principle of democratic inclusion was implemented in sundry programs designed to help “the elderly, women and people of color, as well as the disabled and refugees.” The rationale for adding this material to their site is well explained as follows:
“The New Dealers were, in every case, faced with a daunting task of overcoming long-established patterns of discrimination and social hierarchy, and they could only do so much in reversing ingrained opinions, habits and power relations across this country.
Nevertheless, there has not been enough appreciation of the way New Dealers tried to subvert the existing social order on a wide front. In fact, the accomplishments of the era’s progressive policies were substantial. In this section, we summarize the achievements of the New Deal that helped bring marginalized and racialized Americans into the mainstream and advance the causes of racial justice and gender equality. We focus on eight groups: elders, women, disabled, and Jewish refugees, plus the four major racial categories, African-Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans. We conclude the section with a photographic essay on inclusion of diverse peoples in New Deal work projects, called ‘Working Together.’
Histories of the New Deal have often noted its failures to overcome the barriers of race, gender, religion and more in American life. The New Deal revolutionized many aspects of US society and politics, but it ran up against many harsh realities of an imperfect social order that blocked and distorted the goals of reformers in the government. It would be unfair, however, to blame the New Deal for racial and other policies that were rooted in the larger contours of American society. Yet, recently there have been far too many voices criticizing the New Deal for racism and discrimination and too few looking carefully into the record to discern what the New Deal did and did not do to correct racism, misogyny and other injustices.
Let us be clear at the outset that a handful of the New Deal’s hallmark programs were marred by fundamental exclusions. The Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Act both made an exception for agricultural and domestic workers – effectively a means of preventing African, Latino and Asian-Americans from enjoying their benefits and protections. The Federal Housing Administration adopted rules that cemented residential segregation into the landscape of US cities. Native Americans saw their livelihoods badly damaged by big water projects like the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River, which interrupted salmon migrations on which the tribes depended. And, the most flagrant case of racism was Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned some 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast as the country went to war in 1942 – President Roosevelt’s single worst decision and a blight on his legacy.
Nevertheless, we need to look more carefully into the political foundations for these failures of the New Deal to treat people equally and inclusively. The biggest reason for the omissions in the Social Security system and labor protections was the power of Southern Democrats in Congress (cheap black labor was fundamental to the economic order of the south); President Roosevelt had to defer to the Dixiecrats in order to keep the New Deal Coalition together to get his programs passed at all.
The FHA rule that red-lined racialized neighborhoods – meaning that it was hard for minorities to secure mortgages and become homeowners – was written by the chief lobbyist of the National Association of Real Estate Boards. Realtors had every reason to favor racial segregation that conformed to prevailing white prejudices, and they had the political clout to see that it became federal policy.
Another case of political expediency was FDR’s capitulation to war hysteria in the widespread calls for Japanese internment, backed by a notorious record of anti-Asian agitation on the West Coast where internment took place.
A more subtle reason for the New Deal’s failures was deference to local governments in the selection of projects and distribution of funds in a variety of public works projects. That is why segregation ruled in public housing, WPA work teams and CCC camps in Jim Crow country (but not throughout the country). On the one hand, deference to localism was a strength of the New Deal because it allowed local people to choose projects they wanted and gave local politicians a stake in federal programs. On the other hand, localism crippled the national government’s ability to force change from above.
It is well to remember that the New Deal also had to cope with deeply held beliefs by the vast majority of Americans about the indolence of the unemployed, women’s place in society, the superiority of the White Race, the threat of immigration, and the worth of the disabled. It was not enough to change federal policies; the dominant culture had to be eroded. New Deal arts and cultural programs did a great deal on this front, as well. Government-sponsored writers, painters and performers were free to depict working people as heroes, to honor native cultures, and to put women in the spotlight. New Deal artists portrayed national life in dramatically new ways that included a host of ordinary Americans, featured African Americans in prominent roles and gave voice to the disenfranchised.
A striking example of New Deal rethinking of American society was the Federal Writers Project (FWP) chronicles of the experience of African Americans. Hundreds of first-person accounts of former slaves were transcribed, an unparalleled resource for historians and citizens alike. FWP writers produced such classics as James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Richard Wright’s scathing account of life under Jim Crow, Twelve Million Black Voices. Alan Lomax and others were paid to travel the South recording the songs of folk and blues musicians, creating a magnificent repository of folk music. Federal Security Administration (FSA) photographers compiled a superb visual account of popular life and suffering of all races.
In short, The New Deal generated a political and cultural revolution that began to transform the country and lay the foundation for later achievements in Civil Rights, disabled rights, women’s rights, senior citizen programs, and better treatment of Native Americans.”
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I invite our readers to visit these informative and well-documented pages, which include marvelous photographs from this period with each section.
Some Relevant Bibliographies:
Please Note: The photos here lack the detailed descriptive information that individually accompanies each of them at their respective pages on the site.