Political Philosophy

You know what they say... This is the third and final part of the interview I did with Dr Jeremy Cowan, an expert in organic and permaculture agriculture, we conclude our reflections on Distributism by breaking both taboos. In this one we deal with the role of religion and politics in changing the way we grow food, but we do more than that. We delve into questions such as why religion is often unh...

t part of a conversation I had with Jeremy Cowan, who participated in my Summer 2021 Seminar on the economic theory of Distributism. Dr Cowan is a specialist in organic agriculture with a strong interest in its relationship to politics and economics. In this part of the conversation, we get into the polarizing character of current politics and how it gets in the way of imagining turning towards Di...

In this concluding segment from the 2021 Summer Seminar on Distributism, I discuss why it is so hard to imagine actually changing the economy in any meaningful way. Our capacity for collective action has been hollowed out and replaced by an expressive identity politics that cannot satisfy but works wonders to keep us all working and buying. It very effectively stops any real change from happening....

This is a selection from the fourth part of a five part seminar on Distributism from Summer 2021. It covers Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day's thoughts on the responsibility of Christians, true Christian community, and the correct attitude toward what we now recognize as capitalist realism. Day took very seriously the social teaching of the Catholic Church that emerged in the wake of the Ind...

This is a selection from the seminar I'm teaching on Distributism. For months now, thousands of Indian farmers have been protesting in an occupy-style encampment near Delhi. They fear that they are in danger of losing not only their livelihoods but their way of life due to changes in the laws leading to deregulation of the agricultural sector in India. They are worried that these changes will make...

This is a section of audio from the Summer 2021 Seminar on Distributism, an economic philosophy that isn't capitalist or socialist. Distributism advocates for a more even and equal distribution of private property. Hilaire Belloc was one of a few thinkers credited with founding 20th Century Distributism. In this video some of his ideas are discussed in the context of current application, particula...

This is a segment from the first session of the Summer Seminar on Distributism (2021), part of an hour and a half long session on the origins of Distributism in Aristotle's Politics and various Catholic encyclicals (the one mainly mentioned here is Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII, 1891, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution). Distributism is a line of thought that opposes both capitalism and socia...

This episode deals with some of the ideas from the concluding chapters of Guy Standing's book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class--A Politics of Inferno and A Politics of Paradise. He warns that without major changes we will be facing more and more interest in what he calls neofascism, or the populist and nationalist right. In the last chapter he outlines some solutions, the most discussed bein...

Guy Standing's chapter on "tertiary time" in his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class" deals with some important (and very recognizable) evils of our current work environment. The loss of control over our time is the main theme, and the harm that comes from this is sometimes very obvious and sometimes not at all. This video deals with the hidden cost of maintaining what it takes to work in...

In this video, I discuss Ch. 4 of Guy Standing's The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, which is on migration. Many in developed countries with large numbers of migrant laborers blame these laborers for taking jobs and reducing their economic prospects. Looking deeper, though, we see that they are there because globalized economic interests want the ultimate flexible and vulnerable labor pool and...

On March 27 I will begin an adventure with Heygo, a platform developed for live tours that is expanding into other content. My first topic will be What Would Machiavelli Do? Check out that and a lot of cool tours (which helps out tour guides who have been adversely impacted by the pandemic) by searching for Heygo! … More WWMD? New Talk

Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class answers this question this way: because there just aren't enough stable, well paying jobs in the new economy. In this video I discuss some of the realities of university education today, especially the trend towards trying to sell education as a commodity with a promise of being qualified for specific jobs. The watering down of educati...

I discuss some of the many important points made in Ch. 2 of Guy Standing's The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, entitled "Why the Precariat is Growing." Standing details what happened in OECD countries when emerging market countries started to out-compete them in terms of production and availability of low-cost labor. He shows how globalization, smoothed by government policies, led to the ulti...

To start this series, I introduce the author Guy Standing and discuss a few prominent themes in his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Standing writes in the 2017 preface: "Those in the precariat have lives dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation. They are denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built upper generatio...

In this concluding video in the series on The Outline of Sanity, I hit on some big themes in the last few chapters including the shallowness of mass entertainment and what makes work worthwhile. He again defends the peasant, this time as the true "settler" unlike the British colonialists who dominated parts of the world but never really settled down and cherished where they were. Writing not long...

In the fourth part of The Outline of Sanity, GK Chesterton deals with "Some Aspects of Machinery" in his usual ironic and witty way, making some solid points. I try to update his points and apply them to our current state of technology, noticing with Chesterton along the way that capitalist practices are not the most efficient or equitable way to go. Chesterton proffers his ideas on when to let go...

In this podcast I cover the section of GK Chesterton's book, The Outline of Sanity, that deals with agriculture. Chesterton does not agree that the industrialization of England was a good thing, and points out the flaws of massive urbanization. He defends the settled way of life as in some ways superior to the urban way of life. He also defends a mixed economy with some degree of socialism and a g...

As a sequel to my series on Charles Taylor's The Malaise of Modernity, I asked John Warner in to discuss Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thoughts on the development of the modern self. Warner is an expert on Rousseau's political thought. He is the author of Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations (2018) and many articles on Rousseau. His most recent article deals with Rousseau on sincerity and self-de...

Chesterton says of Christians "...if they had served their God as they have served their Pork King and their Petrol King, the success of our whole Distributive democracy would stare at the world like one of their flaming sky signs and scrape the sky like one of their crazy towers." (p. 123, The Outline of Sanity) Part 2 of this book includes discussion of how Christians actually think about topics...

I delve deeper into GK Chesterton's late work, The Outline of Sanity, as criticizes more deeply the prevailing capitalist free market imaginary and, more importantly, lays out what distributism would be like and the steps he proposes to get there. One of the strongest recommendation he gives is to break up monopolies and protect experimental uses of property from innovation-destroying competition....

In Chapters 2 and 3 of GK Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity (1926) we get perhaps one of the first identifications of and arguments against capitalist realism, the idea that we can do no better. He also anticipates some aspects of neoliberal capitalism which we are all too familiar with today, particularly the idea that workers must simply sacrifice for the greater good rather than hope to really...

This video introduces you briefly to GK Chesterton and then discusses his definitions of Capitalism, Socialism and Distributism. I point out that Aristotle's views on property in The Politics may be the origin of distributist thought, and give some background information that may help understand why Chesterton defines Capitalism and Communism as he does. Chesterton criticizes Capitalism for really...

Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis is the source of this discussion among friends. We are all reading Blanchette's book about the US pork production industry. Our conversation ranges from the limits and costs of ever-increasing efficiency in production, to squeezing pennies out of runts, to the endless quest for the uniform (and therefore efficiently processed) pig and the impact this has on the workers...

Alex Blanchette's recent book Porkopolis shows how human and animal lives become intertwined in a relationship of dependency that distorts both natures. How should we understand this type of production? What does it do to the people involved every step of the way with animals who no longer feed, procreate, give birth or die without humans intimately involved? Blanchette explores these questions fr...

Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis (2020, Duke University Press) has had more than the usual impact for a book that started out as a dissertation. Blanchette spent quite a bit of time embedding himself in the work of pork CAFO's and processing facilities. As a result he has a book that goes beyond the usual animal or human welfare argument to expose the Taylorist/Fordist nature of pork production that y...