Four Essays on a Liberal Theory of Law
M.S. Blackman’s essays on a liberal theory of law were written in South Africa the 1970s and 80s. Continue reading “Four Essays on a Liberal Theory of Law”
Where I Stand 09/09/2016
One of the defining features of a modern legal system is that the authorities have an official and private self. This was not true of pre-mordern systems where the king, queen, sovereign, chief or Leviathan was above the law and not susceptible to its sanction. The question is now is the ANC ushering in a new pre-modern or what Karl Popper called a ‘tribal society’ … Continue reading Where I Stand 09/09/2016
Where I Stand 05/09/2016
I have spent much of the month of August travelling down to London to see C. For some or other reason, certainly with no particular literary reason in mind, I took her on a Keats and Marx tour. Whether anybody has ever linked these two humans in any theoretical way I have no idea but for me their presence in Hampstead and Highgate, one poetic … Continue reading Where I Stand 05/09/2016
Where I Stand 04/09/2016
As Karl Popper suggested in his The Open Society and Its Enemies Platonic, Marxist and Hegelian versions of the dialectic are all attempts to return to the closed society (what he at times refers to as the ‘tribal society’). Interestingly he suggests in the first book on Plato (the arch-tribalist) that one of the methods of retaining the essential and tribal core of a society … Continue reading Where I Stand 04/09/2016
Where I Stand 08/06/2016
Like much of Hannah Arendt’s thinking the three essays published in her book On Violence tends to need some further clarification and justification if it is to stand as one single theory. Her distinctions between violence, power and authority are interesting but just how power and violence function separately is, at least on first reading, unclear to me. But as Tony Judt pointed out, that despite her often … Continue reading Where I Stand 08/06/2016
4 Putdowns by Tony Judt
Tony Judt (1948 – 2010) was a British historian who died of motor neurone disease 6 years ago. His books on French history as well as his tome Postwar are some of the great contributions to their field and it this intellectual platform that allowed him, in his essays, to write some of the most appositely humorous intellectual demolitions in literature. On David Cesarani’s biography of Arthur … Continue reading 4 Putdowns by Tony Judt
The South Africa of the Mind
I was, while walking through Glasgow, listening to the audiobook of Tony Judt’s Reappraisals – a collection of essays largely written for the New York Review of Books. It is a book that changed my mind on many things not least on Israel and Palestine but also thankfully on Judt’s friend Edward Said. This is not to say that I have changed my mind on Said’s, I believe, … Continue reading The South Africa of the Mind
