(no subject)

[phamos]

i have had a constant headache for almost a week now. it's starting to piss me off.

i've got 14 pages of my thesis done, though the introduction needs more added and a lot of editing and one page is just the beginning of the strauss section and i'm not sure where it's going to end up. but there is one completed section. i think next i'm going to work on the post-cold-war, pre-9/11 neocons and how they were sorta drifting. defense planning guidance and kristol/kagan and finally PNAC. i read a bunch of stuff on strauss today, which was sorta a digression from what i should really be thinking about -- it's much more conceptual and right now i want to focus on the historical. i think the more conceptual stuff i'm really going to need to work with juviler on, to make sure i'm not making little mistakes in interpreting things. there was a lot of talk a couple years back when i was still taking classes that SIPA really misses out on a lot of postmodern political philosophy in its core courses, and that seems to fit my experience. i didn't even take the SIPA core course, as i wasn't eligible, but my human rights classes were very focused on enlightenment thinkers. danchin tried to sneak in some other stuff, but he had a tendency to go overboard in his early lectures and then get backed up as the semester went on, so the later stuff got rushed. as such, we talked a lot about locke, mill, and rousseau, and that was the stuff i already knew very well from chicago. i was frustrated about this at the time and am only more so now. i got a little bit more from the kuflik class, including rawls and kymlicka and a greater understanding of libertarianism. but i'm still undereducated in a lot of the offshoots of marxism. i think part of that is a general feeling in the international relations community that since the fall of communism, marxist philosophy isn't relevant anymore. that may be true, but for someone who's trying to get a greater understanding of the historical situations that gave rise to neoconservatism, having to educate myself on trotsky and gramsci has been a little frustrated, because i don't have anyone to bounce things off of to see if i'm understanding them right -- to the degree that there's one right way to read them, of course.

but yeah. headache. not fun.

Comments

[this-monograph.livejournal.com]

you should get in touch with brian, who might know of some readings/recent criticism of marxist theory that would be helpful. if you want, i can give you his email addy. this is the kind of stuff he's been working on/with for awhile.