“hyperintegration”

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Tom Friedman’s typically large-minded view of the world is on good display in Sunday’s New York Times, “Advice from Grandma,” on importances of social imagination for national well-being in a global economic environment and the importance of governmental facilitation of this, which I categorize as a matter of comparative advantage through knowledge-intensiveness.

practicing the “Idea of Human Development”

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Habermas notes in his “Author’s Preface” to Europe: The Faltering Project that “The final essay...[which] deals with the structuring infuence that a normative theory of the public sphere can have on the design of empirical research...is particularly close to my heart.”

Normative theory is different from “Critical Theory.” McCarthy, in his new book, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development is involved with Critical Theory.

a healthy market is a fair market

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Jürgen Habermas is residing on Long Island this autumn, hosting a seminar on political theology. I haven’t intended to get into Habermasian exchanges soon, let alone another round of exchanges on religion. But the domain is relevant to prospects for health care legislation in the U.S., so I forwarded to the Habermas group the link to an article in today’s New York Times that is pertinent, and I provided some commentay. But text turns up lousy at the Yahoo! Groups site (turns up better in the emails distributed) and isn’t revisable. So, here’s my commentary, subject to improvement.

theory of communicative action, 2008

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The times are amazing. This season, are we witnessing the original emergence of a truly global “conversation” (among Euro-American and Euro-Asian ministries) on the governance of democratic economies? The recent globality of finance-capitalistic advents have relied on a notion of inherently (or natural, social-darwinist) self-corrective rationality, what Alan Greenspan calls “the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works” (10/23) that fails with exotic financial instruments. (That “critical functioning“ always was, since Bretton Woods, more regulatorily constrained than pure free marketers wanted to admit.) All leading and emerging economies now anticipate formation of a new Bretton-Woods-like balance between innovation and regulation through tighter interregional coordination of economic policies.

tectonic shifts in The Estate

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Like every news junkie (I imagine), I'm fascinated by what's happening this month to Wall Street.

I don't think that the financial crisis is a fundamental (structural) economic event (though a severe credit crisis has a recessional—viscous—domino effect). It's a milestone for democratic capitalism—what I call the fairly free market. More fairness (public protection) is coming to the U.S. market.

geoengineering as primary philosophical venue

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In case you've gotten dissociative about global warming (crisis fatigue), consider the prospect that common dissociativeness throughout consumerist society increasingly entails need for radical measures taken by powers romancing planetary-scale technologies that would allegedly Save our children from tragic suffering, but could devastate the Earth further.

Religiously-motivated programs and broadly-public goods

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The Obama campaign sees a proper place for religious organizations in the sphere of public funding, but any stance would be controversial. Today, I’ve tried to provide a way of steering between competing camps—between evangelical motives and separation of church and state—relative to recent discussion of Senator Obama’s interest by The New York Times.

That might be regarded as a street-level version of my June 22 discussion of Habermas' recent lecture, noted earlier. But I really am moving further away from Habermasian views of his ever-important topics that make his evolving project so distinctive, though apart from mine.