Sharp Slab
DE LA DÉMOCRATIE
EN AMÉRIQUE,
Alexis de Tocqueville
DE LA DÉMOCRATIE
EN AMÉRIQUE,
Alexis de Tocqueville
In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. He begins his book by describing the change in social conditions taking place. He observed that over the previous seven hundred years the social and economic conditions of men had become more equal. The aristocracy, Tocqueville believed, was gradually disappearing as the modern world experienced the beneficial effects of equality. Tocqueville traced the development of equality to a number of factors, such as granting all men permission to enter the clergy, widespread economic opportunity resulting from the growth of trade and commerce, the royal sale of titles of nobility as a monarchical fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture.
In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. He begins his book by describing the change in social conditions taking place. He observed that over the previous seven hundred years the social and economic conditions of men had become more equal. The aristocracy, Tocqueville believed, was gradually disappearing as the modern world experienced the beneficial effects of equality. Tocqueville traced the development of equality to a number of factors, such as granting all men permission to enter the clergy, widespread economic opportunity resulting from the growth of trade and commerce, the royal sale of titles of nobility as a monarchical fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture. Tocqueville described this revolution as a "providential fact" of an "irresistible revolution,
Eudaimonia
He believed he was a philosopher engaged in the pursuit of Truth, and did not claim to know it fully. Socrates' acceptance of his death sentence after his conviction can be seen to support this view.
Socrates’ apparent respect for democracy is one of the themes emphasized in the 2008 play: Socrates on Trial by Andrew David Irvine. Irvine argues that it was because of his loyalty to Athenian democracy that Socrates was willing to accept the verdict of his fellow citizens. “Socrates felt compelled to express his views”
While some of the later contributions of Socrates to Hellenistic Era culture and philosophy as well as the Roman Era have been lost to time, his teachings began a resurgence in both medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East alongside those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Socrates is mentioned in the dialogue Kuzari by Jewish philosopher and rabbi Yehuda Halevi in which a Jew instructs the Khazar king about Judaism.
Socrates’ death is considered iconic and his status as a martyr of philosophy overshadows most contemporary and posthumous criticism. However, Xenophon mentions Socrates’ “arrogance” and that he was “an expert in the art of primping” or “self-presentation”. Direct criticism of Socrates the man almost disappears after this time, but there is a noticeable preference for Plato or Aristotle over the elements of Socratic philosophy distinct from those of his students, even into the Middle Ages. Some modern scholarship holds that, with so much of his own thought obscured and possibly altered by Plato, it is impossible to gain a clear picture of Socrates amid all the contradictory evidence. That both Cynicism and Stoicism, which carried heavy influence from Socratic thought, were unlike or even contrary to Platonism further illustrates this.
Plato's dialogues are among the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity. They demonstrate the Socratic approach to areas of philosophy including epistemology and ethics. The Platonic Socrates lends his name to the concept of the Socratic method, and also to Socratic irony. The Socratic method of questioning, or elenchus, takes shape in dialogue using short questions and answers, epitomized by those Platonic texts in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine various aspects of an issue or an abstract meaning, usually relating to one of the virtues, and find themselves at an impasse, completely unable to define what they thought they understood. Socrates is known for proclaiming his total ignorance; he used to say that the only thing he was aware of was his ignorance, seeking to imply that the realization of our ignorance is the first step in philosophizing. Socrates exerted a strong influence on philosophers in later antiquity and has continued to do so in the modern era. He was studied by medieval and Islamic scholars and played an important role in the thought of the Italian Renaissance, particularly within the humanist movement. Interest in him continued unabated, as reflected in the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Depictions of Socrates in art, literature, and popular culture have made him a widely known figure in the Western philosophical tradition. Socrates did not document his teachings. All that is known about him comes from the accounts of others: mainly the philosopher Plato and the historian Xenophon, who were both his pupils; the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes (Socrates's contemporary); and Plato's pupil Aristotle, who was born after Socrates's death. The often contradictory stories from these ancient accounts only serve to complicate scholars' ability to reconstruct Socrates's true thoughts reliably, a predicament known as the Socratic problem.
Cognitariat
Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s work revolves mainly around the aesthetics of the contemporary psychosphere. His latest books include Futurability, Phenomenology of the End, and The Soul at Work.
He has written over two dozen published books. In 1962, at the age of 13, Berardi became a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, but was expelled due to “factionalism.” He participated in the events of May '68 at the University of Bologna, where he graduated with a degree in Aesthetics. During this time he joined the extra-parliamentary Worker's Power Group and met Antonio Negri.
During this time he joined the extra-parliamentary Worker's Power Group and met Antonio Negri. Berardi founded the magazine A/traverso in 1975 and worked with the magazine until 1981, when it reached its high point of publishing. Like others involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis.
Unlike orthodox Marxists, Berardi's autonomist theories draw on psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis and communication theory to show how subjectivity and desire are bound up with the functioning of the capitalism system, rather than portraying events such as the financial crisis of 2008 merely as an example of the inherently contradictory logic of capitalist accumulation. Thus, he argues against privileging labour in critique and says that “the solution to the economic difficulty of the situation cannot be solved with economic means: the solution is not economic.”
Two of Berardi's books, The Uprising and Breathing, are closely related speculative works which treat the global financial crisis, financial capitalism and the subsequent protest movements of the early 21st century such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. In both works Berardi criticizes neoliberal financial capitalism, claiming that its supporting infrastructure of automation (e.g. computer trading on the stock market)—together with standardized computer language conventions on social media (e.g. the like button on Facebook)—hollow out language to the detriment of human actors who naturally communicate in more sensuous and subjective ways. As remedies Berardi suggests poetry and "chaos"—citing the elegies of Rilke and Guattari's work on chaos—as methods for human subjects to overcome the lived experience of market logic. Additionally both books cite the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Marx's Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein, and Symbolic Exchange and Death by Baudrillard. In The Uprising Berardi rejects economic discourse, asserting that economics itself is not a science but rather a form of political ideology. Consequently he further rejects the notion that neoliberal economic policy is based in the objectivity of science, but is instead merely a political program and an undesirable one.
Keynesianism
John Maynard Keynes is the founder of modern macroeconomic theory. His ideas are the basis for the school of Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
In 1933, her book The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Robinson coined the term "monopsony," which is used to describe the buyer converse of a seller monopoly. Monopsony is commonly applied to buyers of labour, where the employer has wage setting power that allows it to exercise Pigouvian exploitation[11] and pay workers less than their marginal productivity.
Monetarist economics refers to Milton Friedman's direct criticism of the Keynesian economics theory. Simply put, the difference between these theories is that monetarist economics involves the control of money in the economy, while Keynesian economics involves government expenditures.
During his time at Cambridge, Piero Sraffa met twice John Maynard Keynes, who invited him to a collaboration. This request led Sraffa to write two articles about the Italian banking system published in 1922, the first (The Bank Crisis in Italy) in The Economic Journal (edited by Keynes) and the second (The current situation of Italian banks) in the supplement of the newspaper Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian). Keynes also entrusted Sraffa with the Italian edition of his A Tract on Monetary Reform. The meeting with Keynes was undoubtedly a fundamental turning point of Sraffa's biography.
From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."
The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.
Freedom, Security, Order, Peace, Chaos, Harmony, Autonomy, Rules, Equality, Rights, Duty, Progress, Reform, Tradition…
Community
Socialism is a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is considered by many to be the “father of anarchism”. His background was as a French socialist, politician, philosopher, economist and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists. Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.
Socialist politics have been both internationalist and nationalist; organised through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and at other times independent and critical of them, and present in both industrialised and developing nations. Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice. While retaining socialism as a long-term goal, since the post-war period it came to embrace a mixed economy based on Keynesianism within a predominantly developed capitalist market economy and liberal democratic polity that expands state intervention to include income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state. Economic democracy proposes a sort of market socialism, with more democratic control of companies, currencies, investments, and natural resources.
Social ownership is the appropriation of the surplus product, produced by the means of production, or the wealth that comes from it, to society as a whole. It is the defining characteristic of a socialist economic system. It can take the form of community ownership, state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and citizen ownership of equity. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as “the synthesis of community and property”. Some consider his mutualism to be part of ‘individualist anarchism’ while others regard it to be part of ‘social anarchism’.
The bulk of Lange's contributions to economics came during his American interlude of 1933–45. Despite being an ardent socialist, Lange deplored the Marxian labor theory of value because he was very much a believer in the neoclassical theory of price. In the history of economics, he is probably best known for his work On the Economic Theory of Socialism published in 1936, where he famously put Marxian economics and neoclassical economics together. In the book, Lange advocated the use of market tools (especially the neoclassical pricing theory) in economic planning of socialism and Marxism. He proposed that central planning boards set prices through "trial and error", making adjustments as shortages and surpluses occur rather than relying on a free price mechanism. Under this system, central planners would arbitrarily pick a price for products manufactured in government factories and raise it or reduce, depending on whether it resulted in shortages or gluts. After this economic experiment had been run a few times, mathematical methods would be employed to plan the economy: if there were shortages, prices would be raised; if there were surpluses, prices would be lowered. Raising the prices would encourage businesses to increase production, driven by their desire to increase profits, and in doing so eliminate the shortage. Lowering the prices would encourage businesses to curtail production in order to prevent losses, which would eliminate the surplus. In Lange's opinion, such simulation of market mechanism would be capable of effectively managing supply and demand. Proponents of this idea argued that it combines the advantages of a market economy with those of socialist economy.
Democracy
Plato lists five types of regimes: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.
Noocracy where nous means 'wise' and kratos means 'rule' therefore 'rule of the wise' ) is a form of government where decision making is done by wise people. The idea is proposed by various philosophers such as Plato (philosopher king), Gautama Buddha and Confucius.
Autocracies are ruled by a single entity with absolute power, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regular mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for implicit threat). That entity may be an individual, as in a dictatorship or it may be a group, as in a one-party state. The word despotism means to “rule in the fashion of despots” and is often used to describe autocracy.
According to Juan José Linz there are three main types of political systems today: democracies, totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes with hybrid regimes. Another modern classification system includes monarchies as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three. Scholars generally refer to a dictatorship as either a form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
The political legitimacy and authority of the monarch may vary from restricted and largely symbolic (constitutional monarchy), to fully autocratic (absolute monarchy), and can span across executive, legislative, and judicial domains. The monarch is head of state for life or until abdication. The succession of monarchs in many cases has been hereditical, often building dynastic periods. However, elective and self-proclaimed monarchies have also been established throughout history. Aristocrats, though not inherent to monarchies, often serve as the pool of persons to draw the monarch from and fill the constituting institutions (e.g. diet and court), giving many monarchies oligarchic elements. Monarchs can carry various titles such as emperor, empress, king, and queen. Monarchies can form federations, personal unions and realms with vassals through personal association with the monarch, which is a common reason for monarchs carrying several titles. Monarchies were the most common form of government until the 20th century, by which time republics had replaced many monarchies. Today forty-three sovereign nations in the world have a monarch, including fifteen Commonwealth realms that share King Charles III as their head of state. Other than that, there is a range of sub-national monarchical entities. Most of the modern monarchies tend to be constitutional monarchies, retaining under a constitution unique legal and ceremonial roles for the monarch, exercising limited or no political power, similar to heads of state in a parliamentary republic.
Pragmatism
“Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.” [Charles Sanders Peirce]
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view that holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions.
In the 20th century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics; however, logical positivism doesn't stress action as pragmatism does. The pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection. Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character (although Peirce's pragmatism is not nominalist) and because it takes the broader functioning of language in an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations between language and world.
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest form of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered “real”. The radical latter view is often first credited to the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato as part of a theory now known as Platonic idealism. Besides in Western philosophy, idealism also appears in some Indian philosophy, namely in Vedanta, one of the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, and in some streams of Buddhism. Epistemologically, idealism is accompanied by philosophical skepticism about the possibility of knowing the existence of any thing that is independent of the human mind. Ontologically, idealism asserts that the existence of things depends upon the human mind; thus, ontological idealism rejects the perspectives of physicalism and dualism, because neither perspective gives ontological priority to the human mind. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of phenomena.
While Sharp Sans Display No.1 ends its round monolines with diagonally sheared terminals, Sharp Sans Display No.2 shears those terminals on a 90° angle. This small distinction allowed us to create two unique but interconnected font families. Designed for ultimate utility, Sharp Sans is our use-it-for-everything font. The last addition to the collection is Sharp Slab, the Egyptian-slab serif companion to Sharp Sans.