The The Literature of Contemporary Progressivism

there is foucault, and if you think progressives are reading marx or derrida, you're crazier than a bluehaired SJW demiqueer. even they don't believe they've read derrida.

>progressive
Mistype? It should be "regressive."

idpol doesn't come from the people you think it does. i could understand if you put beauvoir in there because they like to name drop her (they never read her or they wouldn't) but the only ones of those they probably read are the recent pop commentaries, and maaaaybe baldwin for school because they were forced. you wouldn't pretend they read joyce if they pretended to, so why do it with foucault?

>and maaaaybe baldwin for school because they were forced.
Baldwin is invoked in several of the pop commentaries on there and by progressives in general. He's their darling writer.

They mention Beauvoir too a lot, doesn't mean they read her. Baldwin literally said that white literature gave him a human education. He's a classics worshiper that Veeky Forums could be proud of, and there's no way the idpol group has read enough of him to realise he doesn't stand for their shit.

It's the same with Beauvoir and Foucault. They might know a sentence or concept they learnt from the half a wikipedia page they read but they never seem to realise both were against the age of consent and pro sex with children.

If they dropped Joyce as often it would at least be excusable you didn't see the contradiction because that's pretty heavy obfuscation, but Baldwin isn't that hard to read and you failed like them.

No lib reads Derrida. No one at all reads Derrida.

Why do you dismiss their influence just because they aren't accepted as a totality. Even if just some ideas and concepts have influenced these politics, it is still necessary to understand the ideas in order to understand the politics. How does Foucault's (or anyone else who signed that petition) views on the age of consent terminate his influence?

For the same reason I'd dismiss Joyce as an influence for Woolf.

Foucault would consider them to be the enemy for many more reasons, but it's obvious they have no idea he or Beauvoir stood for that, because you know they'd see it as backing a pedo if they knew. They aren't influenced by him any more than they are influenced by Joyce. I might as well pretend they all read Tolstoy.

some people do, however you need very high iq in order to get it

(((progress)))

underrated post

get out

I read Feminism is for Everybody and the New Jim Crow. Guess what faggot, they were shit. You've probably never read any Hayek or Mises or Sowell. The world would be a better place if every libtard read something by one of them. Yawn.

Do you really think Hayek, Von Mises and Sowell are refuting New Jim Crow?

Add Cass sunstein and Thaler - nudge

Never read it but you need social engineering in there because disagreeing with how the government wants you to live your life is "irrational"

Friendly reminder that Veeky Forums is a libertarian board now. Assmad libfags can fuck off.

This, desu.

>littérature du ressentiment

>every sane person should eat poison, the world would be much better

>gets Derrida
>doesn't get it
There's just no winning with this one.

I somewhat agree with but there is a floor limit. You shouldn't read none of this trash, because we still have to live in a society infected by it and unless you go full monastic you can't just ignore it;

Reading a few Wikipedia articles about the gross errors of this time should be more than enough. Don't waste your time reading resentful, weak, wrong things. Don't interact with people who believe them.

Easier said than done. I live in London and even in non-retarded circles this shit spreads. I have one of the meme high corporate jobs that only exists in the capital city so I can't move out without completely redoing my life.

>most of it's american idpol
had a chance for a good thread, ruined it. typical liberal

Keep strong fundamentals, learn to be always right (see Schopenhauer, Eristic Dialectic), and then remember what these folks believe generally doesn't matter. You're arguing with mentally ill people.

Don't worry about me. It's just that no matter what Shopenhauer thought, you shouldn't completely ignore what the flavor-of-the-century madness is. In fact, Shopenhauer did spent some time and energy being assblasted about Hegelians (for good reasons).

>fanon
>progressive liberals

yeah I'm sure they'd love the works of a guy who said violent revolution was the only way for people of color to relieve their psychical problems

Ha yes, Noel "the white race must be destroyed, not deconstructed but destroyed" Ignatiev.

I don't know if you've read Eristic Dialectic, but it's all about tricks to always win a debate, regardless of the subject.

Personally, I see the current madness as spouting the most retarded things and then suddenly find it's a great idea. I like to imagine these things myself. I would make a terrific leftist.

>LET'S HAVE TRAFFIC LANES FOR PEOPLE OF COLOUR LOL
>LET'S RENAME WASHINGTON D.C. "MALCOLM X D.C."
>LET'S ALLOW MEN IN FEMALE SPORTS BECAUSE THEY CAN BE WOMEN IN THEIR HEADS

tim wise isn't even white, he's jewish
for what it's worth i like foucault
how would you know what's bad or what's good without having read those books for yourself? i feel like this is just schopenhauer acting as an authority of taste, but i could be wrong.

>how would you know what's bad or what's good without having read those books for yourself? i feel like this is just schopenhauer acting as an authority of taste, but i could be wrong.
We can pretend that every writer and even every book is a self contained thing that needs to be examined in detail, but in practice you can safely know what to expect from a book titled "White like me" written by a Jew.

>Grouping liberal and leftist thought together
Fucking disgusting OP, 0/10. Identity Politics are antithetical to progressivism.

This. They would rather inflate their own ego by "winning" the debate, and push their own ideological agenda by sacrificing their own intellectual integrity, than argue their opinion on its own merits. It's why we have nothing but shitty articles like this today:
>iwpr.org/publications/five-ways-to-win-an-argument-about-the-gender-wage-gap/

There's already several better lists out, OP

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That's all, comrades

>Leftist & Progressive
>Oscar Wilde
Dropped.

>Non-Tumblr Feminism
>de Beauvoir
Have the people who made theses charts even read half the books on there?

>A list about Communalism without anything about the Amish or Hutterites
This legitimately might be the worst out of the lot.

>This legitimately might be the worst out of the lot.
There's not even Oneida or New Lanark on it.
>Have the people who made
Probably not. It's worse than that, though, because a lot of them believe their opponents' claims they read those books, therefore they must be lefty books. Doesn't matter if looking at the contents page would show them there're essays in there which claim communism is soul destroying.

I'm going to straight up admit I haven't read most of the books on the Communalism chart, maily because Bookchin was absolutely fucking retarded who fluctuated between supporting Eton socialism and school children murdering terrorists.

Some of the stuff on the other charts would be a straight up no for lefties too though.

Like Wilde's pro-socialism essay in this one only values socialism because it could lead to individualism. He found Victorian attempts at charity and socialism to be "living for others" and thought that altruism needed reworking.
>But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Most modern lefties are not going to get to the paragraph after that to find out he wants socialism because it could produce individualism, because saying charity is fucked up is going to get you kicked to the alt-right or libertarian or whatever camp.

Veben's probably going to make a lot of them realize their instagram condemns them, etc. You wouldn't be considered a leftist or progressive nowadays if you made your way through that list and agreed with the concepts there in. You'd probably come off as hard right to a lot of people.

Why did you (whoever made this chart) add such trash to it?

>Those involved in mainstream political discourse engage with pop stuff

Who gives a fuck? There is no god damn reason to read "Men Explain Things To Me" or "We Should All Be Feminists". These are incredibly small and thin books with the content of a shitty TedTalk. If those on News shows, which are rapidly becoming obsolete, want to talk about whatever NPR has dubbed the must buy this week for 60+ white bougie women so be it. There is no reason anyone wondering about these people should read it. You can wikipedia these works and get just as much out of it.

If you are wondering about Feminism, go read the essential works on Feminism. Selections like Butler should be kept because that is actually relevant to Gender politics.

Those titles are trash. Frankfurt school would be a much better read all around. Fromm might even be confused for a reactionary new-age guru

This is a SJW liberal list user, not a marxist one.

>Derrida and Foucault are Marxist

Why don't you read?

Bookchin always has seemed interesting. Could someone here who is familiar with his works maybe put together a chart?

bump

Of course it poison if you're in the opposing ideology. There's no reason not to understand different thinking but ideology is too strong it won't let you.

Malcolm X is way too problematic for progressives. I don't think even the "it's ok when non whites do it" would work on this one.

>Contemporary progressivism.
Oh yeah the progress where people are now confused about what bathroom to use.

Leftist garbage.

this.

Interested in this.

Bump.

Genuine social democrat/progressive here. These are some of the foundational works of leftist/socialist/left-liberal philosophy:

Rousseau Second Discourse; The Social Contract
Paine The Rights of Man
Bentham An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mill On Liberty; Utilitarianism
Hegel Philosophy of Right
Marx The Marx-Engels Reader
Bernstein Evolutionary Socialism
Lenin The State and Revolution
Trotsky Their Morals and Ours
de Beauvoir The Second Sex
Rawls A Theory of Justice
Fanon The Wretched of the Earth
Foucault Discipline and Punish
Marcuse One-Dimensional Man
Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Chomsky Manufacturing Consent; Profit Over People
Friedan The Feminine Mystique
Butler Gender Trouble
Crenshaw et al. Critical Race Theory

If you read all these works (I've done about 3/4s), you will notice that few completely agree with each other. Left-of-centre thought certainly ids no monolith, nor is the right. If you want libertarian or conservative recommendations I can provide them as well.

No one reads Derrida, much less understands him. Listen to Chomsky talk about post-modernism and Zizek, it is a very interesting take from a leftist perspective

The better question is have you read de Beauvoir, or even the chart? Non-Tumblr feminism is supposed to be about feminism that takes socialist or Marxist economic analysis into account on gender relations (which Tumblr fails to do), which is a central part of her writing (as opposed to, say, Wollestonecraft or Friedan). And even a cursory glance at Wikipedia would show that in that book, Wilde expounds a "libertarian socialist" political philosophy.

Speaking of, libertarian socialism may be very different from the thought of most progressives, but not all, and it is certainly ideologically distinct from any sort of individualism or anarcho-capitalism.

I often dive into this kind of pop-leftism expecting some kind of almond activation or something that at least makes me go hmmmmmm.
But these kinds of books are all just whining, speculation, and personal narratives.

depends, some of those books are serious scholarship, others are just nytimes bestseller listbait shit by greedy professors whose tenure isn't paying enough for the new townhouse

Thanks lefty. I've read a good number of these and am familiar with the rest of them. Out of curiosity what would you recommend for libertarian readings? How about conservative ones?

The Price of Inequality is good.

bump

Why? Conservatives want to preserve traditional values not uproot them even further. Have you noticed the destruction of the nuclear family? How many single parents do you know? Personally, I don't have any friends who grew up with both parents. The destruction of traditional roles played a large part in this. Progressivism is Cancer for a functioning society. Social Conservatives are the true patricians.

Jesus fucking Christ OP
>Every single title is about race or gender
I would still be perfectly happy describing myself as a progressive despite my weary cynicism and years of Veeky Forums self-indoctrination, but if this is what people - even those who self-identify with the term - understand as 'progressivism' then I'd better stop. There are plenty of important and pressing issues that progressive politics should be considering today, like whether the welfare state has a future, what our attitude to work and leisure should be, or the concentration of wealth. Instead you're all wasting your time and everybody else's patience whining about your victim complexes, or the victim complex you've acquired on someone else's behalf if you're a White Male Ally with no self-respect. Actual meaningful socio-economic issues like protectionism and state support are already becoming the domain of the (alt-)right and you're busy fighting for your right to be addressed by a special pronoun while you work your exploitative minimum wage zero-hour contract job that only exists because the government gives tax breaks to corporations that help them reduce unemployment figures. The right are winning and at this rate they fucking deserve to.

Liberal/Libertarian:
Locke Two Treatises of Government
Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws (abridged)
Kant Theory and Practise; Perpetual Peace
Smith The Wealth of Nations
Paine The Rights of Man
Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mill On Liberty; Utilitarianism
de Toqueville Democracy in America
Hegel Philosophy of Right
Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism; The Human Condition
Hayek The Constitution of Liberty
Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Friedman Capitalism and Freedom

Conservative/Reactionary:
Confucius Analects
Aquinas Summa Theologica (Part II)
Hobbes Leviathan
Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France
Hegel Philosophy of Right
Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality
Schmitt The Concept of the Political
Oakeshott On Being Conservative; On Human Conduct
Kirk The Conservative Mind

Difficult to classify, but still recommended:
Recommended for All:
Plato The Republic
Aristotle Politics
Machiavelli The Prince

Between the World and Me was absolute dog shit.

Coats is a hack. All that book contains are clauses intent on provoking racial fear and hatred of the country which allowed him to write that book freely and make money off of it. The great irony is that the book is supposed to be addressed to his son.

I have never before read such a myopic and hateful and ignorant (perhaps stupid) view of a society.

I agree with you, I wish more people would read things outside their ideological comfort zone. I am on the left, but I enjoy reading plenty of conservatives and libertarians.

Aristotle said that, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." The only way reading differing viewpoints will 'poison' you is if you read everything so uncritically as to accept all written word as absolute truth.

You can entertain a thought without diving into it's literature.

My point was that reading something critically won't poison your mind, which you have not argued against). But I must ask you, how are you to understand an idea without actually hearing it?

>how are you to understand an idea without actually hearing it.
You can't user.

You can study a particular subject that fits within your moral compass and discuss that perspective with other people. Perhaps they have different points of view and will be happy to present them. At this point you have the gist of a particular subject and have formed an opinion of it without reading it's literature.

But any info you get from someone about a source is just an interpretation and clouded by bias. If you want to engage in an idea or an argument, and not just a pale imitation, you need to get it from its source.

Good choices. Where would you put Plato, Aristotle, and Machiaveli if you had to?

Plato as a conservative, Machiavelli as a reactionary, and Aristotle as a liberal (Although I realise that all of those classifications are very problematic)

You're right, yet again, I find myself being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Cheers, user.

>>Every single title is about race or gender
There's a few books on there about class issues.

Nickel and Dimed was a real waste of time. It was basically an entitled journalist whining about how she can't hack it as a blue collar worker, doing easy as shit jobs like waitressing at a diner, or Walmart drone. I've worked much worse jobs than that (landscaping, dishwasher,prep cook) and it was fucking fine, because I'm an American, and life here is basically fine for everyone.

>few completely agree with each other
Yes, but mostly because some of these authors influenced leftist thought, but were themselves no leftists, like Bentham, Mill, and certainly Hegel.

Hegel is on both lists, but he is really more difficult to classify than Aristotle. Nietzsche is neither conservative nor reactionary. Tocqueville and Smith could also be lumped under conservative.

These are very problematic indeed. Plato was not a conservative at all because of his utopianism (although that is nuanced in the Laws). Machiavelli was not a reactionary, he simply did not care. He viewed politics as a way of furthering your interests. If you read the Politics, you will notice that Aristotle sticks much closer to received opinion than Plato does. I would call Aristotle a conservative rather than a liberal.

Random smattering of nothing, holy shit.

The chart was about contemporary progressivism, which is not really a cohesive ideology, but a mishmash of ideas influenced by social liberalism (such as Paine, Kant, Mill, Rawls, etc.), socialism (Marx, Bernstein, Lenin etc.) and new leftism (de Beauvoir, Foucault, Crenshaw, etc.). I could seperate them out more, but that wasn't really the purpose.

Hegel could easily be on the difficult to classify list, but his ideas are so influential to development of each ideology that it didn't feel right to me to put him off in a separate list. Nietzsche is difficult to classify, but his idea of slave morality and the ubermensch served more as a foundation for fascism than any other ideology. Toqueville and Smith are paragons of classical liberalism, and could not be considered conservative in the slightest, except using the highly flawed american definitions of that word.

I use conservatism not in the common sense, but in the philosophical sense in which his ideas fit in more neatly with thinkers like Confucius and Maistre, based on his emphasis on the importance of social cohesion as maintained by institutions such as religion, social hierarchy, and governance by the superior class. This is not a perfect classification, but it is better than putting him in the other camps, even without considering the Straussian interpretation of The Republic.

I agree, Machiavelli was not a reactionary, but by the same token he emphasized order and stability over the ideals of freedom or equality, so it is the least bad classification. And Aristotle argued for constitutional government, which is a hallmark of classical liberal philosophy.

What year are you? And where do you go to school?

Why are you interested?

Smith's heritage does not only belong to classical liberalism. You could be misled by only reading Wealth of Nations, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments (esp. Chapter V on the influence of customs) allows for a conservative reading just as well.
As for Tocqueville, it is nonsense to call him a classical liberal. Conservatives and even socialists have been influenced by him just as well, and his Ancien Régime and the treatise on pauperism advocate viewpoints we would call conservative now. The American definitions of conservatism actually do exclude Tocqueville and Smith more than your own definition, as in America conservative is more closely connected with laissez-faire economics, which Tocqueville and Smith reject.
Plato was not a 'philosophical conservative', whatever that means. He does not care about social cohesion more than other thinkers, and certainly less than Aristotle. Even if we consider a Straussian interpretation of the Republic, Plato is still no conservative. Look up Strauss, The City and Man, p.127, where he talks about Plato's idealism.
Machiavelli does not see order and stability as goals in themselves. Constitutional government in Aristotle has nothing to do with a constitution.
In general, these classifications are useless, and even more useless when thrown around so carelessly.

Because you sound like an underclassman that's taken a survey class, possibly two, and maybe a little extra-curricular reading. Beyond that, no grounding in the subject. That explains the arbitrary nature of your selections and your hoaky taxonomical distinctions. You're also very obviously biased against the 'progressive project', which all together make you ill-suited to curating a 'guide's to the 'essential' literature.

You little ingrate.

Your interpretations of Toqueville, Smith, etc. could be considered heterodox at best, and entirely misguided at worst. Smith certainly didn't advocate full stop laissez-faire economics, but he did favour a variant of economic liberalism, which "philosophical conservatism" (i.e. the intellectual tradition of conservatism) and leftism reject. Tocqueville similarly advocated constitutionalism, a key part of liberal philosophy.

As for the others, I acknowledged that their classification was hazy, which is why I initially did not attempt to classify them, but I did justify my picks. Machiavelli saw order as the goal BECAUSE it best advanced the interests of the ruler. Utopianism/idealism does not preclude conservatism, and it certainly doesn't preclude reaction-ism. Conservatism is not simply an upholding of received opinion.

You do make a good point about classification being difficult, and perhaps pointless, but I will remind you that the purpose was not to classify thinkers, but to list thinkers who provide the intellectual framework of contemporary political ideologies. For that purpose, you provide no counterargument or evidence of your own.

Wow, what a good way to make a perfect ass of yourself. Instead of attacking my argument, you assumed my background (incorrectly, I may add), then used that assumption to attack my credibility without providing an argument or any credibility of your own. Please come back with a real argument and some integrity and try again.

We aren't having an argument; you do not have standing to engage in one. I am putting you in your place, you little faggot fuck.

>Oh my goodness what an alpha male, listen to how confident he is in himself, he must be right. And I didn't know I was gay either, thank you man-god for telling me, I will now shut-up and go suck dick.

You obviously lack the depth to speak on the subject. Go back to /pol/ where they fall for this shit, you dense fuck.

Faggotry on Veeky Forums has nothing to do with 'sexual orientation', you dumb stupid idiot.

>dumb stupid idiot
Now I'm not sure if this trolling or if you are actually that intellectually bereft. If anyone else knows, I would love to hear your opinion on the matter.

The more you post, the more you prove me right. Please, keep debasing yourself for my amusement, slave.