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We are driven between agnosticism and superstition: agnosticism as despair of understanding the nature of society and its transformation, superstition as identification of our professed ideals and our recognized interests with the habitual forms of their enactment in established institutions and practices. An important example of such superstitions is the belief, graced with a hundred lives in the core of practical economics, that a market economy has a single natural or necessary legal-institutional form. A market is a market, a contract is a contract, and property is property.
The Universal History of Legal Thought
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.”
__The view I am rejecting assumes that one can complete the work of ethics first, attaining an ideal theory of how we should act, and then in a second step, one can apply that ideal theory to the action of political agents.__ As an observer of politics one can morally judge the actors by reference to what this theory dictates they ought to have done. Proponents of the view I am rejecting then often go on to make a final claim that a “good” political actor should guide his or her behaviour by applying the ideal theory. The empirical details of the given historical situation enter into consideration only at this point. “Pure” ethics as an ideal theory comes first, then applied ethics, and politics is a kind of applied ethics.
Philosophy and Real Politics
Raymond Geuss
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