Caught My Eye
Posted by Zach Wendling on 28 September 2009 | one response
Sometimes when I’m reading, a particular sentence will jump out at me as a stand-alone bit of profundity. Here are a few that caught my eye:
- “Either somebody figures out how to sell libertarianism to single moms, or we can look forward to a future of being wedded to the welfare state.” — Arnold Kling
- “Ah yes, the practical man, unhampered by the blinders of theory, refusing to drink of the inebriating elixir of abstract thought.” — Don Boudreaux
- “What is the point of social science if even relatively clear important results are ignored?” — Robin Hanson
- “The American public and political class are both strangely complacent about institutional issues.” — Matthew Yglesias
- “After the last administration, when corrupt or incompetent officials had to be pried out of their positions with tremendous public pressure and criticism, and then only after some catastrophic failure on their watch, it is a welcome change to have a President who will throw his people to the wolves almost immediately.” — Daniel Larison
One Response to “Caught My Eye”
Don Boudreaux brings to mind an essay excellently titled The Leisure of the Theory Class, although its topic is a different sort of “theory” – the kind parodied by Alan Sokal, that uses a lot of words to say nothing. The kind that validates the existence of Andrew Sullivan’s “Poseur Award.”
The article has a great sample (do not read without headache medication handy):
“[T]he discourse of the sublime might now be seen as requiring the autonomous subject, not as producing it; requiring it to delay as long as possible the recognition that the fractured social subject, the subject as event not continuum, is the ‘real’ subject posited by its theory. In other words, the discourse of the sublime produces in theory an autonomous subject position in order to negate the subject agent it in fact confronts ‘in practice,’ in the real. This practice it confronts includes, of course, itself, the theory of the sublime.”