It's nothing personal / November 2, 2022 by Nathan Jones “The enemy is anyone who questions liberalism, globalism, individualism, nominalism in all their manifestations. This is the new ethic of liberalism. It’s nothing personal. Everyone has the right to be liberal, but no one has the right to be anything else.” — Aleksandr Dugin in The Great Awakening vs. the Great Reset (2021)
Under the justification of a possessive individualism / October 27, 2022 by Nathan Jones “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death.” — Carl Schmitt, paraphrasing Hegel, in The Concept of the Political (1932), translated from German by George Schwab
An insurmountable obstacle to the reactionary project / October 18, 2022 by Nathan Jones “The phenomenon of self-consciousness, together with the institutions and processes that support it, constitute one reason why past forms of life are not a real option for the present, and why attempts to go back often produce results that are ludicrous on a small scale and hideous on a larger one. This can be seen, above all, with reactionary projects to recreate supposedly contented hierarchical societies of the past. These projects in any case face the criticism that their pictures of the past are fantasies; but even if there have been contented hierarchies, any charm they have for us is going to rest on their having been innocent and not having understood their own nature. This cannot be recreated, since measures would have to be taken to stop people raising questions that are, by now, there to be raised.” — Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985)