By David Harvey
Liberty and freedom are usually invoked to justify political motion. Presidents as varied as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush have equipped their guidelines on a few model of those noble values. but in perform, idealist agendas frequently flip bitter as they confront particular situations at the floor. verified via incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the pursuit of liberty and freedom can result in violence and repression, undermining our belief in common theories of liberalism, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism.
Combining his passions for politics and geography, David Harvey charts a sophisticated order extra applicable to an emancipatory kind of international governance. Political agendas are likely to fail, he argues, simply because they forget about the complexities of geography. Incorporating geographical wisdom into the formation of social and political coverage is consequently an important for actual democracy.
Harvey starts with an insightful critique of the political makes use of of freedom and liberty, in particular in the course of the George W. Bush management. Then, via an ontological research into geography's foundational innovations - area, position, and surroundings - he extensively reframes geographical wisdom as a foundation for social concept and political motion. As Harvey makes transparent, the cosmopolitanism that emerges is rooted in human event instead of illusory beliefs and brings us in the direction of reaching the liberation we seek.
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Additional info for Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (The Wellek Library Lectures)
Example text
Being suddenly struck by the urge, say, to stand naked in downtown Sydney at peak hour and recite the poems of Henry Lawson, may be more likely to lead to my seeking therapy than actually doing it. Such an urge is unlikely to be one that I endorse as mine. ” As Christoph Fehige expresses it, “desires—in the sense explained, in which ‘desire’ captures what it is for something to matter to somebody—have the last word. Every such desire, and nothing but such a desire, counts. ” C. Fehige, “Instrumentalism,” in ed.
Work, recognition and the social bond31 directly parallels the level of engagement with materiality, where bodily materiality is usually the lowest level. The study of care work reveals aspects of human agency and work that have broad anthropological value. In terms of contemporary politics, this means that debates around hospital reform, the status of nursing professions, the medical world, are not just issues concerning a few sectors amongst others in society, but reveal something very general about society as a whole, namely, as Molinier puts it, about the implicit “civilisational” underpinning of contemporary social orders.
Observing the work of nurses, one sees all the subjective work, the technical know-how and the effort of cooperation that must be put in for proper care to be provided. Such observation, however, also shows the reasons why care work is mostly invisible, indeed why care is mostly not considered a form of work, for which the providers ought to receive symbolic and material reward. Molinier distinguishes four main reasons inherent in the work of care that explain its invisibility. Given the importance of issues of care in contemporary social and political philosophy, this renewed approach to care is highly significant.