democracy and marxism are absolutely religious in character
I have 0.75 confidence that you’ve never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different—that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
I’ll cop to not having read much of Sen, but he seems like a clear odd one out in your list. He respectfully tips his hat to a few Marxian ideas in his work (see e.g. pages 14 & 15 of “The Moral Standing of the Market”, and the handful of shoutouts to Marx in On Economic Inequality), but I got the feeling he was more of a centre-left liberal than a hard leftist. See also: an actual commie’s Amazon review complaining that Development and Freedom is too pro-market, centrist, and wishy-washy.
Moss_Piglet claimed democracy and marxism were religious in character. Sen is arguably wishy-washy in his Marxism (though you can be pretty far left and still be very harshly criticized by some communists for not being left enough), but there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Sen’s commitment to democracy.
Yeah, I don’t doubt Sen has a staunch commitment to democracy, and I don’t care much about Moss_Piglet’s claim that democracy & Marxism are religious in character. Taken literally it’s obviously true in some sense. (Both democracy & Marxism are popular ideologies, and popular ideologies, like religions, demand broad normative commitments from adherents while making assorted truth claims, at least some of which are false.) What I’m sceptical of is Multiheaded’s characterization of Sen.
I have 0.75 confidence that you’ve never read even a review of a book by, say, Jurgen Habermas, or Amartya Sen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, or Eric Hobsbawm. These people have nothing in common, someone might object; their fields are vastly different—that is so, but all are considered eminent scholars, all offer nuanced arguments in favour of greater democracy, and all have explicitly Marxist or at least hard-left views on socioeconomic matters.
Frankly, you strike me as a walking, talking example of Dunning-Kruger.
I’ll cop to not having read much of Sen, but he seems like a clear odd one out in your list. He respectfully tips his hat to a few Marxian ideas in his work (see e.g. pages 14 & 15 of “The Moral Standing of the Market”, and the handful of shoutouts to Marx in On Economic Inequality), but I got the feeling he was more of a centre-left liberal than a hard leftist. See also: an actual commie’s Amazon review complaining that Development and Freedom is too pro-market, centrist, and wishy-washy.
Moss_Piglet claimed democracy and marxism were religious in character. Sen is arguably wishy-washy in his Marxism (though you can be pretty far left and still be very harshly criticized by some communists for not being left enough), but there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Sen’s commitment to democracy.
Yeah, I don’t doubt Sen has a staunch commitment to democracy, and I don’t care much about Moss_Piglet’s claim that democracy & Marxism are religious in character. Taken literally it’s obviously true in some sense. (Both democracy & Marxism are popular ideologies, and popular ideologies, like religions, demand broad normative commitments from adherents while making assorted truth claims, at least some of which are false.) What I’m sceptical of is Multiheaded’s characterization of Sen.