@sysimmolator

such terrifying magnitude, such utter desolation

 London
vincentgarton.com
Joined January 2020
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The search to define a Chinese order is raising questions beyond liberal political theory. Jiang Shigong has offered a new vision of the question of political space–pointing towards the reconstruction of world empire. My latest for @palladiummag: palladiummag.com/2020/02/05/…

Jiang Shigong’s Chinese World Order

palladiummag.com
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Amodei's last essay feels like an odd artifact. Has the same sensibility as a patriotic 18th-century technician talking about the grandeur that industrial technology will bring to this or that European dynasty.
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Vincent Garton retweeted
Dan Walden@dwaldenwritesAug 1
Reading Hobbes and then reading Locke is like going from fine whiskey to hypersaturated sweet tea. It honestly feels like you’re reading something written for children.
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Also came across this unexpectedly in Jiang Shigong's book on World Empire where he invokes "information feudalism", citing Drahos and Braithwaite, though fortunately only in passing and apparently without treating it as postcapitalist. A rare miss either way?
Praxis@praxissJul 22
This is still one of my favorite papers, since it takes a stand against the intellectual shortcuts that have become so popular lately. It has been far too easy for people on both the left and the right to claim that capitalism is over and that we have somehow slipped back into++
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(Tbf, "technofeudalism" per people like Varoufakis is not really the same thing as Drahos and Braithwaite's "information feudalism" which was making a more rigorous point about IP rentierism in an international trade context, which is what Jiang is talking about here)
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One of the odder persistent misunderstandings of Mao. The basic idea of the Great Leap Forward was hyperrapid industrialisation. Even the rustication of youths was partly about the countryside being a new developmental frontier (and using it to solve urban unemployment).
-帝-@loongshihJul 17
Chiang had visions of China as an industrial superpower, Mao envisioned an egalitarian agrarian utopia. "One can imagine Chiang Kai-shek's ghost wandering around China today nodding in approval, while Mao's ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision."
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So Kojève observing in 1957 that China is the only place where the world myth of industrialisation is still alive.
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There's a broader pop historiography about Mao in the West that presents him as an illiterate peasant cult leader, which also has no particular basis in reality. He was a college librarian and studied both Chinese classics and modern European philosophy.
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"If philosophy is a tragedy, a tragedy is only philosophical if it is not taken too seriously ... If one is a Platonist, one is tempted to say that philosophy only stops being facetious when it dies." (Kojève, Reasoned History of Pagan Philosophy II)
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"Here again Aristotle was no Platonist. We cannot be sure that he realised the comedy of his situation, [but] he would certainly have taken it as a tragedy. ... Aristotelianism is not, like Platonism a deliberately comic tragedy, but a tragic, even hopeless and desperate comedy."
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Guthrie's 1962 History of Greek Philosophy incidentally cites Feng Youlan for the argument that Greek philosophy originated in commercial accounting
mica@nonredeemerApr 8
“How were the Greeks able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society.”
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The unabridged original of the Kojève blockquote in my review essay - where he says that History is the active process that transforms essence into sense (or, in other words, reality into language). Gives a good sense of his frenetic writing style.
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... ultimately chopped down to this for space:
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Vincent Garton/@sysimmolator has written an excellent review for MIH of two new books on Alexandre Kojève by Marco Filoni, (The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève) and Boris Groys, (Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography). Read it here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Alexandre Kojève as Inevitable Philosopher | Modern Intellectual History | Cambridge Core

Alexandre Kojève as Inevitable Philosopher

cambridge.org
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Perdue rightly says "proper history critiques and subverts conventional wisdom", so it's odd that the essay's engagement with contemporary China just rambles through newspaper clichés into a romantic picture of an eternal freedom-loving South struggling against a despotic North
Sam Haselby@samhaselbyMar 26
Historian Peter Perdue on Xi's "great unity thesis," the PRC's new history of China. He finds Marx is all but gone, replaced by Confucius, and a vision of China that would be in many ways pleasing and familiar to Chiang Kai-shek. aeon.co/essays/why-china-ins… via @aeonmag

Why China insists on internal unity and international harmony | Aeon Essays

China’s regime insists on national unity and international harmony. Is this anything more than an imperial posture?

aeon.co
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by the end I was wondering whether he had actually forgotten where the Yangzi delta is
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Pondering the connections of the novels I happened to have on me when moving.....
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Là-Bas - Neuromancer - Dune is a relatively coherent trilogy I think
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occasionally one really needs to say something about this genre of dullard westerners with pulpits sharing their earth-shattering insights from visiting China for a few days -- in this case not just wrong, but also impressively internally incoherent
Steve Hou
@stevehou21 Oct 2025
Great piece. This is exactly my criticism of China's political development over the last 10 years. It's becoming an insular society. In that process, it also becomes ignorant of the outside world, overconfident, and prideful, in other words, increasingly like the US.
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"they were so wary of foreigners that they were bounding up asking to take photos with me"
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