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Brock's avatar

Dr. Sugrue,

I am looking forward to your history, and particularly towards X.G: "The Future: Either a collective Geist that conquers alienation or a handful of Ubermenschen that destroy their own species and themselves. Justice or hybris?" and IX. BB: "Can only be a global project for our whole species, not just the West."

In addition to these sections, your treatment of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the dialectic, will, I am sure, be of great import.

Finally, I am curious how you place Stalinism historically. Many people today misunderstand it as simply a moral atrocity, whereas it is best understood as the liquidation of the socialist revolution into the global state [a]. Of course, it was morally atrocious as well, but we do ourselves a serious disservice by reducing it in this way.

Your sincere reader,

Brock

P.S. Your 1984 lecture was wonderful. Keep them coming!

[a]: i.e. The (global) bonapartist state to use Marx's term. Though of course the conditions under which Stalinism occurred were different in their contingencies from Bonapartism after the failures of 1848, if we do in fact live in the crisis of bourgeois society -- ie: if capitalism is not a 'positive' 'system' but actually just bourgeois society in crisis -- then we can see some continuity between the failures of 1848 and 1918/19. Universal emancipation by the proletariat remained a goal -- indeed, became an even more consciously-grasped goal -- after 1848, but the opposite happened after the failure of the (admittedly predictable) German revolution of 1918/19. Perhaps because 1848 was understood unambiguously as a defeat, whereas Stalin could always say that the 'world revolution' had experienced a great victory in 1917-1919.

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JerryR's avatar

Dr. Sugrue,

I don’t want to impose on you and start a long discussion but there has been an idea that has floated in the back of my mind for years which does have relevance to the history of the world.

The questions is “Why does the world/universe appear as it does?”

If one believes in a creator of the universe, not necessarily the Judeo/Christian God, but just an entity with a massive intelligence and power, why is the world as it is?

This entity with massive intelligence and power could surely have made the universe different than it is. So we have to assume that the universe created is what this entity wanted.

Leibniz phrased this as the “Best of all possible worlds.”

Now everyone can say, I personally would do this to make the world better if I had the power. Certainly the creator could also see this too and have made the world better.

But the world is as we see it. So is this world of apparently innumerous imperfections actually perfect in some way?

And if so in what way is it perfect? What is necessary for this perfection?

What would be the objectives for making this world as it is. Objectives which are not so obvious. But which might be deduced from what was made.

The answer to this question would certainly have affected human history.

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