The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Culture of Substantive Equality

Monthly Review

Volumn 53, Issue 7, 2001, Pages 10-19

  Mészáros, István ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347016153     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-053-07-2001-11_2     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. It is enough to think of two recent examples: (1) the practical disenfranchising of countless millions, due to apathy or manipulation, and the electoral farce witnessed after the last U.S. Presidential election and (2) the lowest ever participation of voters in the June 2001 General Election in Britain, producing a grotesquely inflated parliamentary majority of 169 for the Government party with the votes of less than 25 percent of the electorate. The spokesmen of the winning party, refusing to listen to the British electorate's clear warning message, boasted that "New Labour" had achieved a "landslide victory." Shirley Williams aptly commented that what we were witnessing was not a landslide but a mudslide.
2. David Cay Johnston, "Gap Between Rich and Poor Found Substantially Wider", New York Times, September 5, 1999.
3. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Loose Hints upon Education, chiefly concerning the Culture of the Heart (Edinburgh & London, 1781), 284.
4. Diderot's entry on Journalier in the Encyclopédie (emphasis added).
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy (London: Everyman edition, n.d.), p. 264.
6. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, translated from the third edition (1744) (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1961), 3 (emphasis added).
7. Thomas Münzer, Hochverursachte Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbärmliche Christenheit also ganz jämmerlich besudelt hat (1524), quoted by Marx in his essay The Jewish Question (emphasis added).
8. Thomas Münzer, Hochverursachte Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbärmliche Christenheit also ganz jämmerlich besudelt hat (1524), quoted by Marx in his essay The Jewish Question (emphasis added).
9. In other words, we end up with a double circularity, produced by the most iniquitous actual historical development: "liberty" is defined as (abstractly postulated but in real substance utterly fictitious) "contractual equality," and "equality" is exhausted in the vague desideratum of a "liberty" to aspire at being granted nothing more than the formally proclaimed but socially nullified "equality of opportunity."
10. From Part Two, Act 5, of Goethe's Faust. English translation by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1959). English quotations are taken from pages 267-270 of this volume (emphasis added).
11. The direct inspiration for Balzac's novella was a long tale by an Irish Anglican clergyman, the descendant of a French Huguenot priest who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This work, by Charles Robert Maturin, the curate of St. Peter's, Dublin, entitled Melmoth the Wanderer, was first published in Dublin in 1820, and immediately translated into French. (Recent edition by The Folio Society, London, 1993, pp. xvii.+ 506, with an Introduction by Virendra P. Varma.) The big difference is that while Maturin's wandering Melmoth in the end cannot escape hell, Balzac's very different way of approaching the Faust legend, with devastating irony and sarcasm, transfers the story on a radically different plane, putting into relief a vital determination of our social order.