October 13, 2003

KAUTION: KRAUTS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE.

All very true. My poli-sci readings at Reed were filthy with "The State" which has a sort of culture potency in most of the world with a aristocratic past. It has a kind of quasi-spiritual quality even in the writings of Marxist critical theorists; it has never translated well to the U.S. where, if you are familiar with some American political scientists (see Bollenbach, Democracy and the Wild West, 1986) you will of course note that the point of orgin of political legitimacy in the US was often based on the will of the collection of individuals in a frontier-driven non-aristocratic society, rather than a collective will analagous to the individual will of a supreme ruler, and which, in practice, often lead to dictatorship, and which serves as the essential metaphor of the State shared by German Marxists and anti-Marxists, or especially, fascists, which, when adopted by early US academics, tended to discount native systems of political ideology for analyzing political legitimacy; an analogous problem occured in the arts, when art training was adopted into the University systems far more directly after WWII, and when Eurocentric art historical methodologies, orginating often with the very same critical theorists, were imposed on the interpretation of "high art" cultural products, when the great transformative powers were originating in the artwork, rather than the critical positioning.

There are still not nearly enough dependent clauses available here to really capture that style.

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