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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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This is a bunch of nonsense. Pragmatic political science making falsifiable predictions has nothing to do with the origin of the word. And insofar as it does all of the scholarship of the humanities including history, economics and psychology are subject to your criticism.

The long answer is probably a 10,000 word post in itself.

I mean it is, but given you're proposing to throw out every analysis of power relationships since Machiavelli in the same bin as Marxism on the grounds that the object is just too complicated and irreducible you're going to have to make a more convincing argument than saying De Jouvenel is self serving, even as his analysis destroys much of the liberal assumptions he ostensibly holds dear.

I find it weird to accuse a school of thought that includes people with such dissimilar political views as Pareto, Mosca and Schmitt of being mere ideological vehicle. Surely if we take your analogy, that would amount to holding a lecture that included both Harvey Weinstein, Valerie Solanas and the Pope.

And what then would the lecture be about that they'd agree on if not the structure of relationships between the sexes in a purely descriptive sense.

No what it sounds like to me is that you'd really like to believe in your own particular idealism and that shattering it into object level power politics must be defended against for reasons that are beyond rationality.