ZenPundit
Friday, November 16, 2007
HOPPING ON THE BLOGOSPHERIC BOYD BOOK BANDWAGON
Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD, who gave a tour de force lecture at Boyd 2007, managed to prevail upon his publisher to sell a paperback version of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd at a price non-billionaires could afford.
I will be reviewing Science, Strategy and War in December and - tentatively - organizing a roundtable discussion at Chicago Boyz, most likely after Christmas. If you are a blogger, academic or a current or former member of the armed services and are interested in participating, send me an email at zenpundit@hotmail.com.
Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD, who gave a tour de force lecture at Boyd 2007, managed to prevail upon his publisher to sell a paperback version of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd at a price non-billionaires could afford.
I will be reviewing Science, Strategy and War in December and - tentatively - organizing a roundtable discussion at Chicago Boyz, most likely after Christmas. If you are a blogger, academic or a current or former member of the armed services and are interested in participating, send me an email at zenpundit@hotmail.com.
Labels: 4GW, boyd 2007, ideas, intellectuals, john boyd, military, military history, military reform, science, strategy, theory, war, warriors
¶ 7:05 PM 2 comments
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
A STROKE OF LUCK AND A MOMENT OF IRONY
Some of my older readers may be familiar with the late Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, a "popular" philosopher and lifelong advocate of "Great Books" and "Western Canon" programs of liberal education. One of Adler's many efforts in this regard was his editorship of The Encyclopedia Britannica 's 53 volume "Great Books of the Western World" series, which the public could buy on subscription, one volume at a time.
It seems quaint now, in the Google age, to recall buying sets of encyclopedias or series like Great Books but as a product line, it had a definite market appeal for the GI generation that had suffered through depression and world war and only about half of whom had managed to graduate high school. I suspect they liked seeing the rows of "serious", leather-bound books on a shelf and took some pride in the fact that their children, the Boomers, had access to them for school work ( though they were probably used with as little enthusiasm as encyclopedias are used by students now).
I mention this because earlier today, I picked up Adler's entire 53 volume Great Books set from a library for free, saving it from the discard pile when the librarian was kind enough to let me cart them away. Between forty and fifty years old, aside from a little dust, they are essentially brand new books of the highest quality. Few of them were ever opened and they will look quite handsome on my shelf, as I'm sure they once did on someone else's. Running from Homer to Freud they include about every "deep" book that we generally feel guilty that we never read yet. I've read quite a few ( though less than I imagined) and look forward to reading more and I am generally, quite pleased with myself for snagging them.
Part of me though, suspects that Adler would have been chagrined to learn that in 2007 a library had no room or interest in his beloved canon. Or that college students could conceivably graduate from a university without ever having read, cover to cover, any "great book" whatsoever. Times change of course but some things have a lasting value and the Net generation is missing out on some of them.
Some of my older readers may be familiar with the late Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, a "popular" philosopher and lifelong advocate of "Great Books" and "Western Canon" programs of liberal education. One of Adler's many efforts in this regard was his editorship of The Encyclopedia Britannica 's 53 volume "Great Books of the Western World" series, which the public could buy on subscription, one volume at a time.
It seems quaint now, in the Google age, to recall buying sets of encyclopedias or series like Great Books but as a product line, it had a definite market appeal for the GI generation that had suffered through depression and world war and only about half of whom had managed to graduate high school. I suspect they liked seeing the rows of "serious", leather-bound books on a shelf and took some pride in the fact that their children, the Boomers, had access to them for school work ( though they were probably used with as little enthusiasm as encyclopedias are used by students now).
I mention this because earlier today, I picked up Adler's entire 53 volume Great Books set from a library for free, saving it from the discard pile when the librarian was kind enough to let me cart them away. Between forty and fifty years old, aside from a little dust, they are essentially brand new books of the highest quality. Few of them were ever opened and they will look quite handsome on my shelf, as I'm sure they once did on someone else's. Running from Homer to Freud they include about every "deep" book that we generally feel guilty that we never read yet. I've read quite a few ( though less than I imagined) and look forward to reading more and I am generally, quite pleased with myself for snagging them.
Part of me though, suspects that Adler would have been chagrined to learn that in 2007 a library had no room or interest in his beloved canon. Or that college students could conceivably graduate from a university without ever having read, cover to cover, any "great book" whatsoever. Times change of course but some things have a lasting value and the Net generation is missing out on some of them.
Labels: adler, book, culture, education, intellectuals, personal, reading
¶ 6:41 PM 6 comments
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
BRIEF CONTEMPLATIONS
I attended an interdisciplinary-but-history centered conference on Monday that included some presentations by well regarded scholars like David Kyvig and Artemus Ward. However, I was most intrigued by a sociologist who was recounting the evolution of CAPS, which is Chicago's community policing program. In essence, CAPS is COIN doctrine carried out by civil agencies. Anyone who has read John Nagl or David Kilcullen or follows the tenets of the 4GW school, will immediately recognize the premises of CAPS, though my intuition is that the OODA Loop has been much slower with the City of Chicago than it has been even with CENTCOM.
Amusingly, the professor, a younger, urban hipster-type female, reacted with visible anxiety when I pointed out the similarities with counterinsurgency doctrine.
I attended an interdisciplinary-but-history centered conference on Monday that included some presentations by well regarded scholars like David Kyvig and Artemus Ward. However, I was most intrigued by a sociologist who was recounting the evolution of CAPS, which is Chicago's community policing program. In essence, CAPS is COIN doctrine carried out by civil agencies. Anyone who has read John Nagl or David Kilcullen or follows the tenets of the 4GW school, will immediately recognize the premises of CAPS, though my intuition is that the OODA Loop has been much slower with the City of Chicago than it has been even with CENTCOM.
Amusingly, the professor, a younger, urban hipster-type female, reacted with visible anxiety when I pointed out the similarities with counterinsurgency doctrine.
Labels: academia, COIN, historians, ideas, intellectuals, personal
¶ 8:01 PM 8 comments
Monday, October 22, 2007
CHILDREN OF LIGHT, CHILDREN OF DARKNESS
Reinhold Niebuhr
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
"The biblical sense of history can make Niebuhr seem like something other than a liberal. In the '60's, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era's liberal reforms"
It wasn't Niebuhr's religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr's writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman's bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
"The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness - ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil...Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics" ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
"The biblical sense of history can make Niebuhr seem like something other than a liberal. In the '60's, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era's liberal reforms"
It wasn't Niebuhr's religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr's writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman's bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
"The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness - ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil...Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics" ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Labels: christianity, history, intellectuals, neoconservatism, philosophy, politics, reinhold niebhur, the atlantic, totalitarianism, war
¶ 6:21 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
BOOK
A CFR interview with Walter Russell Mead about God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World . ( Hat tip to Lexington Green)
A CFR interview with Walter Russell Mead about God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World . ( Hat tip to Lexington Green)
Labels: book, history, intellectuals
¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments
Monday, October 15, 2007
BUILDING AN INNOVATIVE-INTERSECTIONAL IDEA SOCIETY -PART II.
In Part I. , we looked at John Kao's call for a more innovative America and Howard Gardner's analysis of the mindsets that would be required for creative, innovative endeavors. In Part II. we continue with the analysis of Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect .
Blogfriend Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has referenced The Medici Effect many times in the past two years; in his initial post on Johansson's work, Steve gave a superb summary of the Medici Effect concept:
"In his very interesting book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Frans Johansson talks about the value of creating a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas. The Medici's, of course, were a wealthy and powerful Italian family who played an important role in the Renaissance. The family's wealth permitted it to support artists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, whose combined intellect helped burst the historical pall known as the Dark Ages"
Johansson's thesis is that breakthrough innovation is generated most frequently at "the intersection" where two or more different domains meet rather than by predictable, linear, improvements within one field (" directional innovation"). Intersectional opportunities are increasing, Johansson argues due to increased migration, trends toward scientific consilience and ready access to the improved computational tools of the information revolution.
In The Medici Effect, Johansson tackles both cognitive tools as well as social environment that facilitate innovative thinking and productivity. Like Edward DeBono's lateral thinking exercises, Johansson encourages conscious and methodical attempts to find novel, intersectional, combinations of concepts; he points to cultivating an autotelic mindset; reversing one's premises to smash through "associative barriers"; using multiperspectivalism ( agreeing here with Howard Gardner); and defusing the social factors that inhibit organizations from effectively brainstorming. These are all solid suggestions, though most have been made elsewhere as well.
More attention is paid in The Medici Effect to the social environment that is interactive with the innovator in helping to create a climate conducive to synthesis and the generation of insight. moreover, Johansson identifies the creation of a dynamic and stimulating "community"as a critical factor for sustaining an innovation:
"Garfield offer's two reason for Magic's [ a sword & sorcery card game that was a cult hit] success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles"
Gaming is itself, a very powerful tool for teaching adaptive thinking skills and for driving the assembly of a " value network" that can be turned toward productive purposes. Indeed, Johannson spends a great deal of time discussing the potential of these networks to function as a two-edged sword in regard to innovation. Moreover, the social and financial organization clustered around the innovator can be determinative in the success of the innovation in a way that is wholly counterintuitive, according to Johansson. Excess support brings restrictions in the form of vested interests from old value networks, stigmatizing failures that are a necessary part of the learning curve and blunting internal motivation with the distracting prospect of extrinsic reward. There is cognitive strength in " staying hungry" and needing to stretch resources with value-added thought ( see Don Vandergriff's Raising the Bar).
What Is To Be Done?:
Looking elsewhere, like The Smithsonian Magazine's "37 under 36 Young Innovators" we see many mining Johansson's intersections or using Gardner's Synthesizing and Creative Minds but these bright folks are social outliers. What we need is re-engineering of institutional cultures and structures, particularly that of our educational system to balance the development of analytical prowess with generative, creative, synthesisizing, capacities. John Hagel recently had a post at Edge Perspectives with a number of sage suggestions for driving innovation:
"Diversity. As Scott Page and others have persuasively suggested, new insight and learning tends to increase with cognitive diversity. This principle highlights the importance of designing institutional arrangements that extend well beyond a single institution, with particular attention to the opportunity to connect to diverse pools of expertise and experience. Diversity can often be enhanced by connecting into spikes – geographic concentrations of talent – and by targeting “brokers” within social networks, creating a multiplier effect in terms of the number of participants that are potentially accessible.
Relationships. It is not enough to have cognitive diversity. By itself, cognitive diversity often breeds misunderstanding and mistrust, seriously limiting the opportunity for people and institutions to learn from each other. Long-term trust based relationships, on the other hand, make it easier to engage in productive friction – the clash of diverse perspectives in ways that produces deep new insight and learning. The challenge is that these kinds of relationships often take a long time to develop and are hard to scale. Innovative institutional arrangements can help to accelerate and scale the formation of these kinds of relationships.
Modularity. When activities are tightly specified and hard-wired together, the opportunities for experimentation and tinkering are very limited. Segmenting people and activities into discrete modules with well-defined interfaces can help to create much more space and opportunity for distributed innovation and learning."
Read the rest here.
In practical terms, what does this mean for schools, corporations, universities and governments ? In my view, "hard-wired" hierarchy with rigid requirements, stiff penalties and centralized decision-making is going to have to be relegated to niches in the future rather than being the dominant form of organization that it is today. Hierarchy, with it's mania for control and accountability, remains useful for transactional delivery systems upon which reputations depend, logistical flows upon which production processes depend and security procedures upon which safety may depend. That being said, hierarchy will have to yield to more lateral, more collegial, more networked, more ecologically oriented models of connectivity where the generation of new ideas represents the lifeblood of an organization.
Hierarchy is Newtonian; Free Scale and Modular Networks are Darwinian. An innovation nation is, by definition, adaptive.
ADDENDUM:
Sir Ken Robinson " Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
In Part I. , we looked at John Kao's call for a more innovative America and Howard Gardner's analysis of the mindsets that would be required for creative, innovative endeavors. In Part II. we continue with the analysis of Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect .
Blogfriend Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has referenced The Medici Effect many times in the past two years; in his initial post on Johansson's work, Steve gave a superb summary of the Medici Effect concept:
"In his very interesting book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Frans Johansson talks about the value of creating a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas. The Medici's, of course, were a wealthy and powerful Italian family who played an important role in the Renaissance. The family's wealth permitted it to support artists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, whose combined intellect helped burst the historical pall known as the Dark Ages"
Johansson's thesis is that breakthrough innovation is generated most frequently at "the intersection" where two or more different domains meet rather than by predictable, linear, improvements within one field (" directional innovation"). Intersectional opportunities are increasing, Johansson argues due to increased migration, trends toward scientific consilience and ready access to the improved computational tools of the information revolution.
In The Medici Effect, Johansson tackles both cognitive tools as well as social environment that facilitate innovative thinking and productivity. Like Edward DeBono's lateral thinking exercises, Johansson encourages conscious and methodical attempts to find novel, intersectional, combinations of concepts; he points to cultivating an autotelic mindset; reversing one's premises to smash through "associative barriers"; using multiperspectivalism ( agreeing here with Howard Gardner); and defusing the social factors that inhibit organizations from effectively brainstorming. These are all solid suggestions, though most have been made elsewhere as well.
More attention is paid in The Medici Effect to the social environment that is interactive with the innovator in helping to create a climate conducive to synthesis and the generation of insight. moreover, Johansson identifies the creation of a dynamic and stimulating "community"as a critical factor for sustaining an innovation:
"Garfield offer's two reason for Magic's [ a sword & sorcery card game that was a cult hit] success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles"
Gaming is itself, a very powerful tool for teaching adaptive thinking skills and for driving the assembly of a " value network" that can be turned toward productive purposes. Indeed, Johannson spends a great deal of time discussing the potential of these networks to function as a two-edged sword in regard to innovation. Moreover, the social and financial organization clustered around the innovator can be determinative in the success of the innovation in a way that is wholly counterintuitive, according to Johansson. Excess support brings restrictions in the form of vested interests from old value networks, stigmatizing failures that are a necessary part of the learning curve and blunting internal motivation with the distracting prospect of extrinsic reward. There is cognitive strength in " staying hungry" and needing to stretch resources with value-added thought ( see Don Vandergriff's Raising the Bar).
What Is To Be Done?:
Looking elsewhere, like The Smithsonian Magazine's "37 under 36 Young Innovators" we see many mining Johansson's intersections or using Gardner's Synthesizing and Creative Minds but these bright folks are social outliers. What we need is re-engineering of institutional cultures and structures, particularly that of our educational system to balance the development of analytical prowess with generative, creative, synthesisizing, capacities. John Hagel recently had a post at Edge Perspectives with a number of sage suggestions for driving innovation:
"Diversity. As Scott Page and others have persuasively suggested, new insight and learning tends to increase with cognitive diversity. This principle highlights the importance of designing institutional arrangements that extend well beyond a single institution, with particular attention to the opportunity to connect to diverse pools of expertise and experience. Diversity can often be enhanced by connecting into spikes – geographic concentrations of talent – and by targeting “brokers” within social networks, creating a multiplier effect in terms of the number of participants that are potentially accessible.
Relationships. It is not enough to have cognitive diversity. By itself, cognitive diversity often breeds misunderstanding and mistrust, seriously limiting the opportunity for people and institutions to learn from each other. Long-term trust based relationships, on the other hand, make it easier to engage in productive friction – the clash of diverse perspectives in ways that produces deep new insight and learning. The challenge is that these kinds of relationships often take a long time to develop and are hard to scale. Innovative institutional arrangements can help to accelerate and scale the formation of these kinds of relationships.
Modularity. When activities are tightly specified and hard-wired together, the opportunities for experimentation and tinkering are very limited. Segmenting people and activities into discrete modules with well-defined interfaces can help to create much more space and opportunity for distributed innovation and learning."
Read the rest here.
In practical terms, what does this mean for schools, corporations, universities and governments ? In my view, "hard-wired" hierarchy with rigid requirements, stiff penalties and centralized decision-making is going to have to be relegated to niches in the future rather than being the dominant form of organization that it is today. Hierarchy, with it's mania for control and accountability, remains useful for transactional delivery systems upon which reputations depend, logistical flows upon which production processes depend and security procedures upon which safety may depend. That being said, hierarchy will have to yield to more lateral, more collegial, more networked, more ecologically oriented models of connectivity where the generation of new ideas represents the lifeblood of an organization.
Hierarchy is Newtonian; Free Scale and Modular Networks are Darwinian. An innovation nation is, by definition, adaptive.
ADDENDUM:
Sir Ken Robinson " Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
Labels: creativity, culture, education, futurism, hierarchy, horizontal thinking, howard gardner, ideas, innovation, insight, intellectuals, metacognition, network theory, networks, synthesis
¶ 8:05 PM 2 comments
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
APPLIED NEUROLEARNING
My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).
The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily "must reads".
It's a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!
My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).
The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily "must reads".
It's a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!
Labels: attention, blogroll, book, brain, cognition, creativity, education, eide, ideas, intellectuals, intelligence, metacognition, science, teaching
¶ 6:14 PM 0 comments
Saturday, August 18, 2007
ADDED TO THE BOOKPILE
Labels: 21st century, book, cognition, education, futurism, horizontal thinking, howard gardner, insight, intellectuals, intelligence, psychology, theory
¶ 10:15 AM 6 comments
Thursday, May 10, 2007
SINISTER WISDOM
Carl Schmitt was one of those brilliant German intellectuals who, in the anti-democratic traditions of elite European authoritarianism and illiberalism, lent their prestige and moral authority to Fascism. Like his contemporary, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Schmitt became an enthusiastic Nazi and an academic bully. Unlike Heidegger, who in his malice or dotage fellated the radical New Left, Schmitt never recanted his National Socialist past.
That being said, Schmitt's deep learning and insights about the state, the struggle for power and war should not be ignored lightly because of his wicked politics any more than we should eschew learning from the writings of Mao ZeDong, Franz Fanon or Sayyid Qtub. Only a fool ignores the ideas of the enemy.
With that caveat, I recommend Schmitt's " The Theory of The Partisan".
A major hat tip to my friend and fellow blogger Marc Schulman who I suspect unearthed this link in his own research into Alexandre Kojeve.
Carl Schmitt was one of those brilliant German intellectuals who, in the anti-democratic traditions of elite European authoritarianism and illiberalism, lent their prestige and moral authority to Fascism. Like his contemporary, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Schmitt became an enthusiastic Nazi and an academic bully. Unlike Heidegger, who in his malice or dotage fellated the radical New Left, Schmitt never recanted his National Socialist past.
That being said, Schmitt's deep learning and insights about the state, the struggle for power and war should not be ignored lightly because of his wicked politics any more than we should eschew learning from the writings of Mao ZeDong, Franz Fanon or Sayyid Qtub. Only a fool ignores the ideas of the enemy.
With that caveat, I recommend Schmitt's " The Theory of The Partisan".
A major hat tip to my friend and fellow blogger Marc Schulman who I suspect unearthed this link in his own research into Alexandre Kojeve.
Labels: europe, history, insurgency, intellectuals, military, philosophy, schulman, theory, totalitarianism, war
¶ 8:04 PM 2 comments
