Time well spent - no comments

Just some posts I enjoyed during lunchtime: this, on class consciousness, Euston revisited, and this response, on the subject of idealism - or rather, utopianism - in the political sphere.

This, from the third article, I particularly like (my emphasis):

[Instead,] ... I think of politics in two ways. One is as an idealized debate among intellectuals. For me, the question isn't: what is Bunting / Galloway / Blair etc saying? It's: what would Mill / Hayek / Nozick / Rawls / Elster / Roemer / Sennett / MacIntyre etc say?

Politics today is so degraded that we've got to reconstruct the debate about what it should be.

Secondly, political thinking, at least on the "left", should consist partly in contrasting actually existing institutions to theoretical possibilities.

Of course, I know that a basic income, smaller state, market socialism, free immigration and direct democracy have little hope of being implemented in my lifetime.

But this is not the point. The purpose of discussing such possibilities is to remind us that real utopias are logically possible, and that the many sins of existing politics include a terrible lack of imagination.

What I was trying to do, then, was to interpret the Euston Manifesto into a form I could support - as an endorsement of a feasible utopia. If it's just an exercise in kicking the village idiot, I'm not interested.

I'd like to be able to say that the Manifesto relates and enshrines the moral principles, the moral awareness, and the fundamental framework of the kind of society in which an idealistic and questioning approach would thrive: I can't say I'm immune to wanting to give the village idiot a kick at times, but when I try to explain the growing enthusiasm I have for the Manifesto project - all the more so, having read the signers' declarations - it is perfectly expressed by the utopianism outlined above.