Sunday, May 9, 2010

My Life from Here

I’ve spent almost twenty years formulating recommendations about the hardest civic problem, which is:

Unsustainability, Entitlements and Governance

Regulation is necessary for survival. The survival of any society, even animal societies, depends on the presence of regulatory arrangements necessary for social control and prosperity.

Engagement, Negotiation, Accommodation

Don’t ask, “Should indigenous citizens have entitlements unavailable to others?” as though it were a matter of principle. Marxists challenge inheritance, free marketeers challenge safety nets. Theorists apply principles to matters of entitlement, and that’s a problem.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Mac Campbell, on being wrong

One of my greatest thrills is to find I've been wrong, so I welcome every chance.

The first prize for a successful attack on my thinking, is making me happy to be wrong; the second prize is to force me think more clearly.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Why I write

'Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour'

(William Wordsworth, in a sonnet written to his friend and muse Coleridge, entitled Afterthought, the last in his sonnet series on the River Duddon.)

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Homogeneity and exclusion

The tasks of reproduction of meaning systems may be differently layered from one society to the next, but where pressures develop within a society to enforce homogeneity by means of state instrumentalities, it is the task of administrators to do so by means of the redesign of procedures. Pressures to force homogeneity may originate in interest groups, but will usually have an ideological component, an enforced orthodoxy.

Ancient prescriptive texts illustrate exclusory imperatives, for example in Hebrew, “You shall annihilate them –