Steven Lukes, "Power, Truth, and Politics"

We are living in an unsettling time in the United States and elsewhere, one key feature of which is the embracing of a kind of ‘tribal epistemology’: the rejection within politics by significant segments of populations of institutional and norm-governed ways of transcending partisanship. In this lecture Steven Lukes will ask why this has come about by addressing the issues raised by two suggestions of Hannah Arendt: that it is ‘in the very essence of truth to be impotent and in the very essence of power to be deceitful’ and that ‘truth and politics are on very bad terms with each other.’
Steven Michael Lukes is the author of numerous books and articles about political and social theory. Currently he is a professor of sociology at New York University.
This Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy was recorded on February 27, 2019.

[@joefriendly]

A Jewish atheist JD'63 here offers a scientific breakthru for achieving justice, at least in our courts, by our managing to pick for our judges, for a change, those humans especially gifted for the task: Breakthru: people born in midwinter, the astrological sign, aquarius, make the best judges. Not all of them, of course, but that's where to look. I figured out Genesis 49:16 points to that with, "Dan will provide justice for his people as one of the tribes of Israel." Dan is born next after Judah the goat. I've been struggling to rescue birthday from astrology for 50 years arguing it's the power of the sun in early neural development, birthday amounting to the fundamental dimension, phase, with respect to the sinusoidal annual curve of solar energy levels arriving daily in our Temperate Zone that humans have evolved to respond to with systematic differences in neural development.

[@fraxelis1729]

Ivory tower commie

[@joefriendly]

Throwing "commie" at Lukes reveals you haven't figured out the need for our institutions, like corporations, to be oriented to serving the public rather than taking advantage of the public for benefit of the rich. Great that the U of Chi law school invited him to speak.