Locating good Journalism in the blogosphere can be very time consuming, because there is such an extraordinary amount of bad Journalism.
Last Monday I recommended what I believe to be the best source for news about what is going on in Iraq. Yesterday I discovered what I consider the best source on Latin American Socialism and constitutional liberalism:
Two schools of thought exist running parallel with one another; one, Habermas’s theoretical system of the possibility of reason and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests [Constitutional liberalism].
The other, Bourdieu’s theoretical system argues that constitutional liberalism is a form of domination. The poor, pressed by the need to make a living, don’t have the luxury of developing the social and intellectual skills needed to participate in political deliberation.
“For Bourdieu, liberal constitutionalism’s promise of a public sphere where the only thing that matters is the strength of your arguments is inherently part of the system of domination.
In fact, Bourdieu goes even farther and argues that the poor, as a class, are incapable of forming truly independent political opinions. They cannot have a political position, because the system of domination bars them from the cultural capacities it takes to formulate one.
The distinguishing characteristic of chavista common sense is its radical rejection of deliberation as a way of arriving at political decisions and its flat out refusal to engage critically with those who dissent.”
“Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics — particularly German politics. Habermas’s theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.”
“At the center of Bourdieu’s sociological work is a logic of practice that emphasizes the importance of the body and practices within the social world. Against the intellectualist tradition, Bourdieu stressed that mechanisms of social domination and reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the social world. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Action Theory (Rational Choice Theory) as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Social agents do not, according to Bourdieu, continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic–a practical sense–and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their “feel for the game” (the “feel” being, roughly, habitus, and the “game” being the field).”
