By Susan Babbitt for The Saker Blog

Antonio Gramsci said optimism is lazy. It is because optimists believe in the result they want, regardless of evidence. More useful, Gramsci suggested, is seeing things as they are, even if bad, and starting there.

It’s more interesting. Bertoldt Brecht agreed. He learned from ancient Chinese theatre: The “thinking man” sees the storm and crouches down, becoming small.[1] In European theatre, Brecht noticed, the hero “stands tall” against the wind, uselessly. Brecht was a realist.

It doesn’t mean to cave. Brecht’s realism involves seeing a situation for what it is, discovering its real opportunities: seeing things as they are, not as you want or expect them to be.

Realism is not understood. Indeed, truth is not understood, at least not in the North, even in universities. It leads to silly ideas such as that individuals have power to seize their destiny. Individuals don’t have power to seize their destiny as human beings, realizing unique human potential, not alone.

At least, not in a dehumanizing world. It is because we cannot, alone, access relevant truths. It’s easy to show. It has to do with the nature of thinking.

Victor Hugo was a realist. This gets missed. He’s called a liberal. True, he believed in freedom but that doesn’t make him a liberal, philosophically (although perhaps politically at the time). Liberalism is a view of freedom, assumed in the book I am about to discuss. It involves a confusion about thinking, which is also a confusion about the power of individuals, as already suggested. Hugo didn’t buy it.

He had a connection to José Martí, who also didn’t buy it. Martí was a nineteenth century Cuban revolutionary, philosopher and poet.[2] He translated Hugo into Spanish. Martí also is called a liberal, even by some who sympathize with the 20th century revolution he authored, intellectually, in Cuba.[3] It is easy see Martí was not liberal if one reads him philosophically.

But few do, outside Latin America.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, released this week, is an optimistic book, by its own account.[4] The authors considered calling it Deaths of Despair and the End of Capitalism. They comment that even their own students favour the more realistic view: Students don’t favour “democracy”. The meaning of democracy is taken for granted in the book along with the value of optimism.

It is part of a misconception about truth and how we discover it. In the first place, it is a misconception about existence, evident to philosophers for millennia, although not liberal ones. If one asks how Princeton University professors and Princeton University Press get it so wrong, the answer is rhinoceritis.

Eugène Ionesco wrote about this in 1959. I explain below.

Deaths of Despair

“Deaths of despair” are by suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease. Their increase in the US is not due to globalization, automation, inequality, wage decline, financial crisis, or impunity of corrupt rich folk. Otherwise it would happen elsewhere. Such deaths are explained by meaninglessness, indignity and loss of pride in community and work. Increased despair is a US phenomenon. The US is doing something very wrong and the world should not follow.

But the problem is not capitalism.

So argue Anne Case and Angus Deaton. At first glance, the argument – that US capitalism has special toxicity – is uninteresting. Few would object, given its almost daily street massacres and 800 military bases abroad (two features not mentioned).

But the argumentative strategy is interesting. The authors want readers to learn from the US example. We should learn from the argumentative strategy. For this alone, the book is worthwhile.

Case and Seaton follow Amartya Sen, liberal political philosopher famous for his capacity building theory of development: development as freedom. Sen received a Nobel Prize (1999) for a view of global development advancing a conception of freedom similar, in theory, to that of Marx: Freedom as the capacity to realize essentially human potential. But Sen is not a realist like Marx. Some Marxists don’t know this about Marx. Allen Wood, in his valuable book about the philosophy (not just the political economy) of Marx, argues that Marx’s realism, naturalism and essentialism are the “mystical shell” of Marx’s philosophy, ignored by academic Marxists who don’t read Marx as a philosopher.[5]

He had a vision of what it means to be human, a sensible, scientific view. It is a view also argued for by the Buddha and Martí, among others. We come back to this.

According to Sen, if we identify injustices, and remove them, we get a better world.

The health system, rent seeking, and the pharmaceutical industry are three big causes identified in Deaths of Despair. The US health system is a “disgrace”, delivering the worst life expectancy of any rich country. It is a “cancer at the heart of the economy, one that has widely metastasized, bringing down wages, destroying good jobs, and making it harder and harder for states and federal governments to afford what their constituents need.” The well-being of ordinary people is subordinated to the private gain of the already well-off, including doctors and health administrators.

Rent seeking (e.g. lobbying and protection rackets) is the second big cause. It is not just Google, AT&T and Boeing who are to blame. According to Case and Seaton, rent seeking is most lethal in the US among medium size businesses and professionals protected from competition by political interference. This includes physicians and their associations, for example, the American Medical Association, who control access to medical schools, keeping the numbers of doctors down and salaries high.

Rent-seeking is basic to capitalism, identified by Adam Smith as the tendency to increase one’s own wealth without producing new wealth. In the US, corporate CEOs are not the guiltiest but rather, for example, car dealers, realtors, optometrists and the US Chamber of Congress. Small and medium sized businesses, through their associations, spread over the country in every congressional district, lobby for exemption from regulations and special tax breaks. Lawyers show them how to avoid jail.

The third big cause is a pharmaceutical industry which “has been responsible for an epidemic of addiction and death that earned it billions of dollars”. Although Purdue, makers of OxyContin, may lose billions of dollars of past profit, aggressive marketing to doctors and patients is still in place. The behaviour of pharmaceutical companies is like “showering gasoline on smouldering despair”.

Drug overdoses are the largest category of deaths of despair in the US. However, eliminating the drug epidemic would not eliminate the root causes of despair.

Solutions are considered: wage subsidies, raising minimum wage, anti-trust legislation, universal basic incomes, and government interference in the pharmaceutical industry. Since deaths of despair occur most among those without a BA, the educational system might be changed so those without a BA are not so disrespected.

The beast should be tamed not slain. In nineteenth century UK, at the beginning of the century, capitalism failed many. By the end, without war or pandemic, it had changed. The example justifies “limited optimism”. Capitalism can be “better monitored and regulated, not to be replaced by some fantastical socialist utopia in which the state takes over industry. Democracy can rise to the challenge.”

Strategy

The argument is well-researched, clear and engaging. But let’s look at the strategy.

Any philosophy student learns that fair argument involves considering rival views in their best light, at least to start. If you assume at the outset that your rivals are stupid and/or morally deficient, you make your job easy. Your rival may have such qualities but that’s not the place to start in good scholarship.

The authors consider socialism “some fantastical utopia” controlling the economy and that’s as good as it gets. No more is said. Yet socialism is a view about democracy, with history and arguments. It is a view about what it means for “the people” to rule themselves, different from liberalism. It may be wrong but assuming this without argument, is called “begging the question”.

But let’s assume socialism doesn’t work, for the sake of argument.

There is a more fundamental point about how the argument is organized. It is an argument, after all, about why people increasingly kill themselves in the worlds richest and supposedly most free (according to Noam Chomsky) society. It matters.

In 1975, US philosopher Hilary Putnam argued that before Einstein there existed evidence against Newton. [6] However, because Newton’s views were well-established, the empirical evidence was dismissed. Rationality works like this. If I release an object and it fails to fall to the ground, and I offer arguments against gravity, you won’t consider them. I could show you a thousand times that the object doesn’t fall. You see it with your own eyes, but you won’t give it importance. It is because what you see is implausible, even though you see it. Even without an explanation, you are confident there is one. Rational folk won’t consider my arguments. They know based on other beliefs that it’s a trick.

Putnam points out that only after Einstein reconceptualized mass and energy, did the empirical evidence against Newton, which existed and was known, become interesting. It became plausible. The point is that we consider empirical evidence when the importance of such evidence is plausible given expectations. Evidence becomes interesting when there is something which such information explains that we care about. There must be a question in relationship to which the evidence matters.

This point is now well-known in philosophy and psychology.

Following Sen, these authors consider injustices given expectations of liberal capitalism. They do what Sen does which is to take for granted a way of seeing the world that arose around the time of the Renaissance. Philosophical liberalism is a view that identifies the self with the mind and considers anything “outside” the mind to interfere with the “self” which is to interfere with freedom.[7] One of liberalism’s key ideas is freedom from “within”. Sen opposes it but not all the way. He doesn’t oppose the view of knowledge that became influential after David Hume’s empiricism evolved into logical positivism which is enormously influential still today although it is false.

I won’t recount the story here.[8] What matters for present purposes is that positivism, which is the view, roughly, that knowledge consists of beliefs deducted from direct observation, failed more than half a century ago. This is because there is no such direct observation. Observation depends on beliefs.

Positivism is known to be false, and yet it still influences. It convinces some to debunk science. They notice scientists influenced by social, moral, political, and cultural values, and conclude that science is not objective. Or they notice that what was once considered true is no longer considered true, and they refer to “truth,” as if there is none.

There are no absolute truths. Sure. Truth is always partial. But to expect absolute truth is a misunderstanding of how we exist in the world, which is causally interdependent, including in the way we think. We exist and think dialectically within relations of cause and effect that include the causal effects of the physical and human worlds upon who we are and how we think. We know the world, when we do, in part because it acts upon us.

This wasn’t just Marx’s view. It was also the Buddha’s. And it was the view of countless smart philosophers, throughout time, who bothered to look at the world and notice that human beings, like everything else in the universe, exist in relations of cause and effect. Mind and body, and the world and the mind, are causally interdependent. We return to this. It matters to questions about dignity.

Psychologists now agree that we don’t think alone.[9]

Stephen Hawking, not a Marxist, describes knowledge as dialectical. He compares scientists to artists. Cosmology is highly speculative but still empirically grounded. It involves a “leap of faith”. [10] Scientists imagine how the world might be and then figure out how to test, empirically. Einstein had to envision the curvature of space before two teams of astronomers, many years later, tested it out.

Imagination makes testing relevant. So does caring. [11] If you didn’t imagine a just world, even without evidence, and even if it’s impossible, you won’t ask how to get there or why we’re not there yet.  It doesn’t make sense: If you think injustice is all there is, there is no sense to asking how to eliminate it.

The point is that science and social science, done rationally, involve something like faith: believing what cannot be proved. [12] if we can’t envision how the world might be, we don’t ask why it is the way it is in relevant respects. It doesn’t make sense to question what cannot be otherwise.

European philosophers were mistaken when they separated facts and values and said you can’t get one from the other. The view has been around for centuries. Academics, including philosophers, take it for granted that there are no facts about what ought to be, only about what is.

Jean Valjean in Les Misérables had a different view. Javert in fact had the same view as Valjean although he responded differently. We discuss this in the last section.

Intellectuals on the left buy into the “fact/value distinction”, unwittingly. Spanish author Javier Cercas’ recent thoughtful reflection on the Spanish Civil War is an example.[13] Cercas’ great-uncle fought and died for Franco. That he was “politically mistaken, there’s no doubt.” But by the end, we understand Cercas’ uncle as “a man of flesh and bone, a simple self-respecting muchacho disillusioned of his ideals.”

Cercas tells us four times in the book, using the same words, that he is a seeker of facts, not stories: Legend is unreliable, dependent on people, “volatile.” Facts are “safe” and “brutal.” He wants facts.

Fact and fiction are distinct. This is true. But they are not separable in the way Cercas annoyingly insists.

Cercas tells his great-uncle’s story as well as the story about the story of his great-uncle, which is the story of why it is important to tell that story. It is important. This much is compelling. But Cercas tells a third story, which he does not admit to telling, and of course, does not defend. (It is not defensible). It is a philosophical story he assumes unwittingly: the separation of the personal from the objective, as if the latter is only achievable if you liberate yourself from the former.

This view is known to be false by philosophers and psychologists, as suggested above.

Cercas is in its sordid grasp. In the end, he’s told the story of why his uncle went to war just to tell the story rather than “leave it rotting”. He doesn’t say he has told the story because it contributes to moral knowledge. He can’t say that. Legends can’t do that. Or so he believes, or thinks he believes.

Misunderstanding science has consequences. It leads otherwise progressive thinkers, like Sen, to suggest that we arrive at a better world if we just remove the injustices that appear to us to be injustices from the perspective of liberal capitalism.

It protects the status quo beside undermining enquiry about dignity, which matters to deaths of despair.

The authors of Deaths of Despair, like Cercas, don’t know they assume a moribund philosophical view denying truths about humanness or any human or moral value. The argumentative strategy of Deaths of Despair fails because it doesn’t consider other forms of social organization but, much worse, because it doesn’t ask how to know dignity.

But then, dignity is whatever you want it to be. Who’s to say?

Rhinoceritis and the Happiness Machine

We live in an “age of authenticity”.[14] What matters is happiness and choice. Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, says we don’t have to look far to see that the ultimate authority on human well-being is ourselves. Historians refer to “myths and fictions”, not truths. [15]

Indeed, the dominant philosophy is: “Follow your dreams”. And let’s be clear: You don’t follow dreams because they’re good. It is because they are yours.

Sen, for example, refers to “shared humanity” in his acclaimed study of global development.[16] Yet Sen never asks how to know it, or what it feels like to discover or express it. He treats “shared humanity” as if it is already known. He doesn’t ask how it is known and what it costs to know it.

There is a cost, as we’ll see below.

Popular cultural anthropologist, Wade Davis, [17] claims to study cultures to know what it means to be human. Yet Davis gives a platform to some cultures. He says the life of the Waorani of Ecuador should not be preserved but as regards the Penan of Borneo, sadly, a “unique vision of life” has been lost.

Only some cultures express our “better angels”. But Davis does not say how he decides which ones. Supposedly, he just knows. It’s typical. Humanness is whatever we want it to be.

The Buddha, in contrast, focused his entire work on the question of how to know essential humanness. It’s not easy. For the Buddha, and for anti-imperialist, Martí, it is the most difficult task we face.[18]

They weren’t alone. Simón Bolívar, admirer of Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, knew European philosophers were ignorant about the Empire’s dehumanization. They couldn’t imagine what it meant to be “even lower than servitude . . . lost, or worse, absent from the universe”.[19] Bolívar’s question wouldn’t occur to Europeans: If one is lost or absent from the universe, how is one known?

If one rules the world, one doesn’t ask how peoples are known, as people. One doesn’t need to know them, or care to.

For Martí, the question was goal of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Initiating war for the liberation of Latin America (1895), Martí wrote that the party’s goal was that Cubans know dignity and know that they know dignity. [20] Remarkably, Martí went to war for a fundamental philosophical question: how to know what it means to be human and how to know we know what it means to be human.

Eugène Ionesco cared about the question. His 1959 play, Rhinoceros, is about a small town in France where people turn into rhinoceroses. At first, everyone is horrified by the rhinoceroses but eventually is seduced. Even the town’s logician happily becomes a rhinoceros, wanting to “move with the times”.

Ionesco’s play is about totalitarianism, but not political. Reason is totalitarian when no questions are raised about names: “human”, for example. In the end, Berenger, the only human left, reminds himself that “[a] man’s not ugly to look at, not ugly at all!”. However, a few sentences later he says, “I should have gone with them while there was still time”.

Berenger is now a monster. To think of himself as human, he needs to resist a way of thinking, which is a way of life, the fabric of society. It means Berenger’s claim to humanness can be dismissed, rationally, just like you dismiss my arguments against gravity, rationally.

There’s a popular thought experiment. Students like it. Suppose you could enter a happiness machine that would make it appear that all your desires are satisfied. Once you enter the machine, you will not know it is a machine. You will have a happy, fulfilled life, within the machine.

Few choose to enter. However, they don’t know why: “I know something is wrong, but I am not sure what.” They want to earn their happiness. But the machine makes it seem they do so.

No one rejects the question itself: about happiness. But why should the meaningfulness of a life be about happiness: how I get what I want? The truth is that the more you pursue happiness for yourself, the less happy you are. It involves, again, a mistake about existence and how we discover new truths.

The more you pursue your “dreams” (because you have them), the more you build up ego, which is a fiction invented by you and presupposed in everything you observe and make important. It is the ultimate judgment of plausibility, determining what you know and experience. You believe only in yourself and you get alienation, along with delusion.

The problem with the happiness machine is not that desires are not really satisfied, and it is not that by entering the machine, you do not know your desires are not really satisfied. The more interesting problem is that pursuing your desires in fact or in fiction is itself a prison of delusion.

And it makes rhinoceritis unassailable.

Hugo didn’t buy it

The ancient Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tzu, said that when the shoe fits, you don’t feel it.[21] He meant that when you live well, realizing human potential, you don’t ask yourself whether you do. The question doesn’t arise. Victor Hugo wrote: “Thoughtful people rarely use the terms, the happy and the unhappy…. The true division of humanity is this. Those filled with light and those filled with darkness”.

He meant truth. Some don’t believe in it. And they don’t know they don’t believe in it.

Truth and happiness don’t always go together. There’s a simple reason. We are “happy” (in the sense offered by liberal ideology)[22] when expectations are realized, when we get what we want. But expectations come from society.[23] Truth, if we believed in it, removes their lustre.

One truth, for instance, is that a fraction of the world’s population “lives well”. Another is that those who “live well” do so because others don’t. We kill and rob to be “happy”. A further truth is that we think we live well precisely because we don’t think about the people we kill and rob. They don’t count but we don’t admit they don’t count. Finally, it happens to be true that we don’t live well.

We are increasingly depressed and anxious, as shown in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean would have liked to not see the truth.[24] However, for him, it was “better to suffer, to bleed, to tear your skin off with your nails … [than to] never look openly, to squint”. Valjean wrestled with that “implacable light [that] … dazzled him by force when all he wanted was to be blind (1132).”

Hugo’s “implacable light” stands over Valjean. This alone shows Hugo wasn’t liberal. The “inner voice” of liberalism [25] is not something I can be “appalled and dazzled” by. I create it. Che Guevara called it the “bourgeois myth of the self-made man”. Recently, US scientists with no interest in revolution have agreed with Guevara about the “myth of the self-made man”. [26] They admit it undermines science.

It undermines truth.

Inspector Javert is also committed to truth. He kills himself because Valjean’s action, experienced for what it is – kindness, miséricorde – contradicts what Javert stands for, and Javert knows it. It reveals to Javert, not just an “unknown morality” but how to know it. It is humbling, scary and inescapable.

It involves profound insecurity. Hugo writes that Javert understood how “authority could be unseated, that the rules could be brought up short by a deed,… that the unforeseen commanded obedience” (1082).

How does the “unforeseen” command obedience? That is, how does a vision – moral or human – become compelling?

How does an answer to rhinoceritis become worth sacrificing for?

It is when it is true, approximately. Javert chooses death because he recognizes that truth. And it created “an immense difficulty in being”. Javert is no longer certain. He is insecure. Indeed, a “whole order of unexpected acts surged up and subjugated him … He saw in the darkness the terrifying sun of an unknown morality dawning and he was appalled and dazzled by it” (1082).

He regrets that he did not insist Valjean kill him at the barricades when Javert was a prisoner. It is what every part of his being expected. And when, instead, Valjean set him free, Javert “felt emptied, useless, cut off from his past life, demoted, dissolved” (1084). Javert’s expectations – about himself, justice, morality – are broken, and in consequence he is broken.

Javert faces “a terrible situation. To be moved”. He is moved by what happens to him, which is an act of humanity by Valjean. Javert doesn’t accept the “diverting of a rectilinear conscience … mounted on the blind iron horse of the straight and narrow” (1084). He cannot accept two roads where there had only ever been one.

But he does see the two roads.

And he knows the importance of the second one. He feels compelled. Javert’s failure is not moral. It is existential. Valjean and Javert are similarly convinced of the existence of (human) truth and what it requires: renunciation. The difference is that Valjean is capable of insecurity. Javert is not.

This is the price of discovering humanness. You can’t discover humanness, when rhinoceritis is your identity, without cost: to yourself, your expectations.

Javert’s alternative would be to acknowledge a lie, as happens in Crime and Punishment. Standing over the river, Raskolnikov “submits”. Dostoevsky writes that “In torment … [Raskolnikov] may have sensed a profound lie in himself and … that this sense might herald a future break in his life, his future resurrection, his future new vision of life”.

Case and Seaton don’t consider this possibility: the lie embedded in liberal identity. It has been considered by independistas in the South. [27] Dostoevsky suggests, and Javert knew, that learning there are “two roads” involves insecurity.

Insecurity, though, is the nature of existence. We live with much less fear and anxiety when we know reality for what it is.

Conclusion

Philosophers of science use the term “radical contingency” to refer to the dialectical relationship between knowers and the world, and the intricate causal connection between mind and body. It means that at any one moment in time, in the process of discovery, a complex array of factors is involved. There is no formula for getting it right, which doesn’t mean we don’t get it right, sometimes.

Lenin, who articulated dialectical materialism, which is a causal view of how we know the world, recognizing that cause and effect applies also to thinking, described discovering the world as it is (not as we expect it to be) as a “passage through dark waters”.[28]

It involves giving up expectations: about yourself. Martí said “To think is to serve”.[29] Cuba has quietly challenged European ideas for 200 years, especially the cherished liberal idea that we live best when we live “from the inside”, satisfying desires.

If rhinoceritis looms, and it does, Martí’s “revolution in thinking” is worth considering.

The opening verses of the Dhammapada, an accessible poetic rendering of the Buddha’s philosophy, say that when you serve others, happiness follows you “like a shadow”. [30] It follows you. You don’t have to follow it. Serving others, being useful, happiness comes by itself.

It doesn’t require “positive thinking”, just awareness of cause and effect, the nature of existence. At the start of the twentieth century, Lenin was studying Hegel’s notes on science. [31] Stalin told him not to bother, that it was more important to unify the party. Lenin replied that by the end of the century, the nature of science would be the most urgent question: how to get truth?

It is not clear what he foresaw. Reading Deaths of Despair, it is clear why it matters.

  1. Stephen Parker, Bertoldt Brecht: A literary life (2014) epigraph
  2. Carmen Suárez LeónJosé Martí y Victor Hugo, en el fiel de las modernidades (Havana, 1996)
  3. John Kirk, Jose Marti Mentor of the Cuban Nation (University of Florida Press, 1984)
  4. See review: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/deaths-despair-and-future-capitalism
  5. Karl Marx (Routledge, 2003) 266
  6. “The analytic and synthetic” in Mind, language and reality (Cambridge University press, 1975)
  7. I’ve argued this, e.g., in Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014)
  8. See e.g. R. N Boyd, “How to be a Moral Realist”, in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181 – 228; “Realism, Conventionality, and ‘Realism About’” in G. Boolos (ed.), Meaning and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 171 – 95.
  9. Cozolino, L. The neuroscience of relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (Norton, 2006) 6; Mauss et al, 2001; Larson and Almeida, 1999; Hill et al 2010 all cited in Michal Barnea-Astrog, Carved by experience (UK: Karnac Books, 2017)
  10. Jim Ottaviani, Stephen Hawking (First Second 2019) 91
  11. See e.g. “Science and religion” and “Religion and science” in Ideas and Opinions (Wings Books, 1954)
  12. So argues Philip Kitcher, for one, in Abusing Science: A Case against Creationism (MIT Press, 1982) ch. 2
  13. See review here: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/lord-all-dead
  14. Taylor, Charles A secular age (Harvard University Press, 2007) 470-9.
  15. E.g. Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens (McClelland & Stewart 2016)
  16. Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999) 283
  17. Light at the Edge of the World (British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007); The Wayfinders (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009).
  18. E.g. “Prologue to the poem of Niagara”, p. 49 in Selected works (tr. Esther Allen)
  19. Bolívar, Simón. “The Jamaica letter”, in David Bushnell (Ed.), Simón Bolívar, el libertador. (Frederick H. Fornoff, Trans) (Oxford University Press, 2003 (Originally published 1815) 19– 20.
  20. In “Montecristi Manifesto”
  21. Cited in Merton, Thomas, “Introduction”, in The Way of Chuang Tzu (Boston, MA: Shambala Press, 1992) 1 – 28.
  22. The Buddha, of course, emphasized happiness but in a different sense, explained further below.
  23. E.g. Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995)
  24. Julie Rose (Tr) (NY: Modern Library, 2009) References in text are to this edition
  25. See also Appiah, Anthony, The Ethics of identity (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 2007)
  26. Most recently, Kleinman, Arthur, The Soul of Care (Penguin Random House 2019). See review: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/soul-care-moral;
  27. So I argued in José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics (Palgrave 2014)
  28. “Conspectus of Hegel” in Stewart Smith (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 38. Clemens Dutt (Trs.) 85 – 126.
  29. “Our America”
  30. See verse 2 here: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/scrndhamma.pdf
  31. Lenin was writing Materialism and Empirio criticism (Volume 14, Collected Works)