Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

This post is a review I wrote of  Salvatore Babones 's book 'The New Authoritarianism'  for Good reads  a couple of years ago. I intended to write an extended post on the book for the blog but never did. So here is the original review: Babones offers an account of a “new authoritarianism”: an illiberal transformation of liberalism from the classical philosophy of individual freedom to a rights-based discourse that ‘empowers’ people on their behalf and removes rights from the realm of democratic contestation. This transformation of liberalism is underpinned by the authority (or rather tyranny in Babones's framing) of a new liberal expert class of professionals and managers that control liberal institutions, nationally and globally, and filter the range of policy options presented to the voting population. This is an intriguing thesis – elements of the argument have an logic that we have heard before. Garrett Hardin suggested that human right framework...

Next talk is the USYD's Department of Sociology and Social Policy Seminar Series.  Details here . Title : Constellations of Scepticism: Contesting Climate Science and Scientists on the Blogosphere. Abstract Discussions of the role of social media in spreading ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ often centre on misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories need to be debunked. Yet, focus on misinformation alone can suggest an arena without rules or evaluative logics. This talk engages with the case study of the climate sceptic blogosphere and how they construe, construct, and contest knowledge. Analysis of the climate sceptic blogosphere, one of the first arenas of online alternative facts, suggests that there are rules that organise legitimate knowledge. The organisation of knowledge claims in this sphere hints towards an underlying worldview that makes the arrangement of some claims and stances valued and others devalued. Missing this logic leads to an analysi...