There are plenty of reasons why we should be interested in China. It is the world’s most populous country with more than a billion people and it presents thus (together with India) a singular challenge as to how a state of such magnitude can be governed.
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A Bad Bargain
Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Penguin Books 2017, republished with a new preface 2018.
Joshua Green's book has been somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury but it adds significantly to Wolff's account and corrects it at some important points. It tells in fascinating detail the story of bad bargain the American people accepted when they elected Trump.
Xi Jinping Rule
What's happening in China? On Sunday, February 25, the Xinhua news agency reported: "The Communist Party of China Central Committee proposed to remove the expression that the President and Vice-President of the People's Republic of China "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms" from the country's Constitution." Some commentators called this a bombshell.
Politics as a field of imperfect cognitive states
Imperfect cognitive states are characteristic of social and political life. But these are not the cognitive states our epistemologists have in view. We need to consider, in particular, states of uncertainty and disorientation since those are now so prevalent in our politics.
Diagnosing Donald Trump
January 21, 2018 - Over the course of the last twelve months, both laymen and experts have sought to diagnose Donald Trump. They have been asking again and again after each one of his many bewildering tweets: What is wrong with the man psychologically? I am interested in another kind of diagnosis. My question is what Trump’s elections means politically...
The disunity of knowledge
January 19, 2018 - Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.