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Our Enemy: The State is one of the important representative works in the history of the origin of American liberalism. He mainly takes the American national system as the context and sorts out the origin and essence of the national system. "Based on the common good" is ignorance, fantasy, moral weakness and short-sighted self-interest of the essense of the nature of the state. The state has no power as it is called, and its power is given or stolen from society. The superstition of the state makes the social power be transformed into the state power, which is actually due to political backwardness.
Facts have authenticity, opinion has no right or wrong, no matter how the book can bring a little warning mean.

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Can you define libertarianism?

I will give a quote. This is what H L Mencken said in 1926: 'It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.'

Your first book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

If you read only one book about libertarianism, read this legendary 1957 novel, a 1,100-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition, 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' It took her 14 years to write Atlas Shrugged and that wasn't working on it part-time. That was working very, very hard and at one point she stayed inside her house or on her property in California for a month. She was very intense. This is her magnum opus. Ayn Rand was born Alyssa Rosenburg in St Petersburg, Russia, and was 12 when the Russian Revolution took place and all her family's property was snatched.

How old was she when she left Russia?

Twenty-one.

So she was properly Russian.

Oh, she was Russian. You should have heard her voice! So, Atlas Shrugged is the mature, the fullest expression of her rejection of any kind of collectivism. It's probably the only novel of ideas that was written in the form of a detective story. It's a real page-turner. The heroes of the novel are the entrepreneurs in America in the mid-20th century - the steelmakers, the coal miners, the productive people have all been disappearing from public view and nobody knows where they've gone. This happens over the course of ten years, and the heroine, Dagny Taggart, who owns a railroad, which is the controlling metaphor for the novel, tries to find out where they've gone, because she's not able to run her business without all these wonderful suppliers. The ones who are left are all dolts taking government handouts.

" Atlas Shrugged is the mature, the fullest expression of her rejection of any kind of collectivism."

What she finds out is that a man, the hero, John Galt, who later becomes her lover, has been recruiting the best people everywhere to go on strike. Nothing in the economy can be done without these people, and they stay on strike until the nation comes to its senses and stops becoming a socialist economy. It's basically about the Roosevelt administration and what it did to the economy. It's a fantastical rebuttal.

There aren't many people who would think of America as a socialist society.

Well, she did. And there were lots of people who did in the 30s, 40s, 50s. Before Roosevelt, before the Depression, you can't imagine how much less government regulation there was in the United States. And that's the America that Ayn Rand and H L Mencken loved. It's a whole kind of old-school libertarianism. It's isolationism, free markets, free minds and not letting the state get too powerful. Individual rather than state power.

It is the only page-turning critique of the welfare state, the bureaucratisation of the 'altruistic' impulse, and the transformation of America from a culture of self-reliance to one of self-entitlement by an author whose four mid-century novels (with The Fountainhead, Anthem and We the Living) sold one million copies in 2009.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Mill's famous essay is an illuminating reading experience, even if you read it in college. Its thesis is to define 'the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual'. Its conclusion is that 'the sole principle for which mankind are [sic] warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection'. He goes on to say that the parental social order has no moral basis for coercing us to do anything against our will - even for our own good, let alone the good of others! He was a utilitarian rather than a libertarian proponent of natural rights, which disqualified him as a lover of liberty for Rand, but file that away and read on, unperturbed.

What's the difference?

Utilitarian political philosophy is based on the greatest good for the greatest number. Libertarian political philosophy is individual rights. This essay is about why society and the government will take over more and more of our lives and tell us what to do if we don't resist. It's the natural way of things.

Can people resist?

No, we can't resist. The price of liberty is vigilance and we aren't very vigilant people. Imagine how John Stuart Mill would feel if he were made to wear a seatbelt because the federal government tells him so. His idea is that there is no reason for society or the government to infringe on individual decision-making except for self-protection and the protection of others. We ought to defend our individual liberties. He even saw in Britain in his time a tendency for the government and society to accumulate power - what libertarians have been worrying about ever since.

But aren't human beings social animals? Aren't we like ants in an anthill?

Some are but some, like Isaac Newton, prefer never to see another human being as long as he lived. He worked in solitude and yet produced some of the greatest benefits of mankind. So, no. Some are and some of us are not.

Our Enemy the State by Albert Jay Nock.

Published in 1935, two years into the New Deal's experiment in social engineering, this wry classic on the intensifying nature of incursions by state power into private economic spheres is a classic of libertarianism. Here Nock made his famous distinction between economic man - he who actually produces wealth by producing, manufacturing and trading - and political man - he who doesn't produce anything and appropriates wealth produced by others and uses it to accomplish his own aims.

"Before Roosevelt, before the Depression, you can't imagine how much less government regulation there was in the United States."

Nock, a friend of H L Mencken, is also the author of an idiosyncratic libertarian autobiography called Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Both books are available free online from blog.mises.org.

Is it readable?

Yes! This is a book for the general reader. It concentrates on the economy and how the government is involved in managing the economy. His belief is that anybody who gets in between the furniture maker and his customer is in the middle only because he wants to get some money out of it. That's the way he views government interference in a free economy. He's a beautiful writer. He was a self-educated man, but extremely well-educated and his memoirs are about how a certain type of education is no longer very useful in America.

These people are all curmudgeons but amusing and instructive ones. You may not agree with everything they have to say, but they provide a useful counterweight to our expanding government. And we have such a huge government in America today. I don't know how much of the economy it consumes but it's got its fingers everywhere in our lives, so it's a good idea for us to read some of these old-fashioned individual rights people.

Isn't education a good example of where the state needs to step in? Education and healthcare?

Well, it depends on your perspective. From my perspective some things have become so large and unwieldy that they need some kind of central planning, but libertarians certainly wouldn't feel that way. They insist, and in fact I've been having this debate on my blog, that the free market will take care of everything, including education. My argument is that we can't afford not to educate people in a democracy because they won't learn how to become good leaders for one thing. And so you can't just let it go to chance which, it seems to me, is what libertarians would do. And as to healthcare, well, I'm conflicted about that. This government screws up everything it does. I know Britain created a good system but I'm not at all sure that we can or will. We seem unable to do it the simple way, by extending Medicare for example. That would be good. But too many interests get in the way.

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945, by George N Nash. It sounds heavy.

It is heavy. But it's easily read. If you want to know about the development of the ideas of libertarianism and Christian conservatism, it's the best book you could read. Libertarians and Christian conservatives split off after the war. There was no such thing as Christian conservatism before the war - nobody based their principles on how to govern on Christian values.

It is perhaps the most comprehensive and surely the most readable book on the rise of post-war Christian conservatism, à la William F Buckley Jr, and of its unruly, agnostic, and finally disowned older brother, libertarianism. While the Buckleyites cheered the Cold War (and most succeeding wars) and became increasingly militaristic, the libertarians continued to call for small government and a balanced budget. Soon the conservatives squeezed out the libertarians, who finally burst forth again in last year's Tea Parties. Nash's book was first published in 1996, but his insights and their cultural context are more pertinent than ever.

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I'm interested that libertarianism is an openly right-wing phenomenon. The word doesn't sound like that.

There have been attempts, especially in the 1960s, because libertarians are anti-war, to get together with the New Left, but it didn't work very well because that was pretty much all they shared. The libertarians just don't think government should take care of people.

Like anarchy?

Well, that is no government at all. These people want a little tiny government that will defend us against our enemies and police crime in the nation and they want courts that will adjudicate contracts. They think everything should be done by contract.

Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty.

This is Reason magazine senior editor Dougherty's splendidly researched 2007 survey of libertarian thinkers and activists, from Ayn Rand to Murray Rothbard and beyond, and it is full of colourful stories about the once well-known figures who settled the frontier of American radical individualism and free-market theory. Dougherty is especially good at explaining complex ideas in simple language while never taking his eye off the typically eccentric personalities that made it so.

I love the flavour it gives you of the time. In the late 40s/early 50s some of these right-wingers, like William Mullindore, who was vice-president of Edison in Southern California, and Leonard Read, all these businessmen types went off to Bretton Woods and all took acid together. This was the very beginning of acid. Mullindore said it really plugs you in and gives you voltage for thinking. He used electric company metaphors to describe his experience. Hilarious.

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The Best Books on Libertarianism | Five Books Expert Recommendations

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Can you define libertarianism? I will give a quote. This is what H L Mencken said in 1926: 'It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot.

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Although the prevailing view now is that people's society is superior to civil society, what are we really talking about when we talk about people's society？How does the true will of the "people" be embodied in concrete governance? In Marx's essay，he brought out the contradiction and tension between the civil society and the state by criticizing the jewish liberation issue. The state promises the political emancipation of its citizens, but  people live in concrete social and productive relations. The political emancipation of the state and the alienation and oppression within the society constitute the contradictions that are difficult to transcend in the bourgeois society. Abolishing religious belief cannot fundamentally solve the conflicts between people of different religions.

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Works of Karl Marx 1844

Written: Autumn 1843;
First Published: February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher;
Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9.

See Citizen in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, for an explanation of the various words for "citizen."

I
Bruno Bauer,
The Jewish Question,
Braunschweig, 1843

The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? Civic, political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and you should feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not as an exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the rule.

Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjects of the state? In that case, they recognize that the Christian state is justified and they recognize, too, the regime of general oppression. Why should they disapprove of their special yoke if they approve of the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?

The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does not have, but which the Christians enjoy?

In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jew is demanding that the Christian state should give up its religious prejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has he, then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce his religion?

By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.

The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way characteristic of the Christian state - that is, by granting privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way - that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing his imaginary nationality to the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law, by deeming himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more human beings than those to whom you appeal.

Bauer has posed the question of Jewish emancipation in a new form, after giving a critical analysis of the previous formulations and solutions of the question. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated and of the Christian state that is to emancipate him? He replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyzes the religious opposition between Judaism and Christianity, he elucidates the essence of the Christian state - and he does all this audaciously, trenchantly, wittily, and with profundity, in a style of writing that is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.

How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. The critique of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. The summary, therefore, is as follows:

We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others.

The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.

The German Jew, in particular, is confronted by the general absence of political emancipation and the strongly marked Christian character of the state. In Bauer's conception, however, the Jewish question has a universal significance, independent of specifically German conditions. It is the question of the relation of religion to the state, of the contradiction between religious constraint and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is laid down as a condition, both to the Jew who wants to be emancipated politically, and to the state which is to effect emancipation and is itself to be emancipated.

"Very well," it is said, and the Jew himself says it, "the Jew is to become emancipated not as a Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he possesses such an excellent, universally human principle of morality; on the contrary, the Jew will retreat behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and is to remain a Jew. That is to say, he is and remains a Jew, although he is a citizen and lives in universally human conditions: his Jewish and restricted nature triumphs always in the end over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of being outstripped by general principles. But if it remains, then, on the contrary, it outstrips everything else."

"Only sophistically, only apparently, would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in the life of the state. Hence, if he wanted to remain a Jew, the mere appearance would become the essential and would triumph; that is to say, his life in the state would be only a semblance or only a temporary exception to the essential and the rule." ("The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free," Einundzwanzig Bogen, pp. 57)

Let us hear, on the other hand, how Bauer presents the task of the state.

"France," he says, "has recently shown us" (Proceedings of the Chamber of Deputies, December 26, 1840) "in the connection with the Jewish question - just as it has continually done in all other political questions - the spectacle of a life which is free, but which revokes its freedom by law, hence declaring it to be an appearance, and on the other hand contradicting its free laws by its action." ( The Jewish Question, p. 64)

"In France, universal freedom is not yet the law, the Jewish question too has not yet been solved, because legal freedom - the fact that all citizens are equal - is restricted in actual life, which is still dominated and divided by religious privileges, and this lack of freedom in actual life reacts on law and compels the latter to sanction the division of the citizens, who as such are free, into oppressed and oppressors." (p. 65)

When, therefore, would the Jewish question be solved for France?

"The Jew, for example, would have ceased to be a Jew if he did not allow himself to be prevented by his laws from fulfilling his duty to the state and his fellow citizens, that is, for example, if on the Sabbath he attended the Chamber of Deputies and took part in the official proceedings. Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private matter." (p. 65)

"There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist." (p. 66)

"Just as M. Martin du Nord saw the proposal to omit mention of Sunday in the law as a motion to declare that Christianity has ceased to exist, with equal reason (and this reason is very well founded) the declaration that the law of the Sabbath is no longer binding on the Jew would be a proclamation abolishing Judaism." (p. 71)

Bauer, therefore, demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should renounce Judaism, and that mankind in general should renounce religion, in order to achieve civic emancipation. On the other hand, he quite consistently regards the political abolition of religion as the abolition of religion as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real state.

"Of course, the religious notion affords security to the state. But to what state? To what kind of state?" (p. 97)

At this point, the one-sided formulation of the Jewish question becomes evident.

Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he becomes entangled in contradictions. He puts forward conditions which are not based on the nature of political emancipation itself. He raises questions which are not part of his problem, and he solves problems which leave this question unanswered. When Bauer says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: "Their error was only that they assumed the Christian state to be the only true one and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied to Judaism" (op. cit., p. 3), we find that his error lies in the fact that he subjects to criticism only the "Christian state," not the "state as such," that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation and, therefore, puts forward conditions which can be explained only by uncritical confusion of political emancipation with general human emancipation. If Bauer asks the Jews: Have you, from your standpoint, the right to want political emancipation? We ask the converse question: Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion?

The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological one. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism - criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology. Hence, we continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we may operate critically within it.

In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness of political emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is retained here, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, that of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state retains the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.

Only in the North American states - at least, in some of them - does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a really secular question. Only where the political state exists in its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore the relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific character, in its purity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological attitude toward religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a state - i.e., politically. Criticism, then, becomes criticism of the political state. At this point, where the question ceases to be theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical.

"In the United States there is neither a state religion nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another. The state stands aloof from all cults." ( Marie ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis, etc., by G. de Beaumont, Paris, 1835, p. 214)

Indeed, there are some North American states where "the constitution does not impose any religious belief or religious practice as a condition of political rights." (op. cit., p. 225)

Nevertheless, "in the United States people do not believe that a man without religion could be an honest man." (op. cit., p. 224)

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements; the contradiction between the state and religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions in general.

The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] without man being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he lays down the following condition for political emancipation:

"Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private matter." [ The Jewish Question, p. 65]

It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated itself from religion even if the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease to be religious through being religious in private.

But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [free state] in particular, to religion is, after all, only the attitude to religion of the men who compose the state. It follows from this that man frees himself through the medium of the state, that he frees himself politically from a limitation when, in contradiction with himself, he raises himself above this limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial way. It follows further that, by freeing himself politically, man frees himself in a roundabout way, through an intermediary, although an essential intermediary. It follows, finally, that man, even if he proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state - that is, if he proclaims the state to be atheist - still remains in the grip of religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself only by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man's freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the intermediary to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint.

The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political means that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has occurred in many states of North America. Hamilton quite correctly interprets this fact from a political point of view as meaning:

"the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial wealth." [Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 vols, Edinburgh, 1833, p. 146]

Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property.

Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way - i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being. Hegel, therefore, defines the relation of the political state to religion quite correctly when he says:

"In order [...] that the state should come into existence as the self-knowing, moral reality of the mind, its distinction from the form of authority and faith is essential. But this distinction emerges only insofar as the ecclesiastical aspect arrives at a separation within itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular churches, has achieved and brought into existence universality of thought, which is the principle of its form" (Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1st edition, p. 346).

Of course! Only in this way, above the particular elements, does the state constitute itself as universality.

The perfect political state is, by its nature, man's species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man - not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life - leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relations of heaven to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to civil society, and it prevails over the latter in the same way as religion prevails over the narrowness of the secular world - i.e., by likewise having always to acknowledge it, to restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.

Man, as the adherent of a ['citizen' in French, [ particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois [i.e., as a member of civil society, "bourgeois society" in German], "life in the state" is "only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule." Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen i.e., the participant in political life] only sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the merchant and the citizen Staatsbürger], between the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil society with his political lion's skin.

This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself, the relation between the political state and its preconditions, whether these are material elements, such as private property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, the conflict between the general interest and private interest, the schism between the political state and civil society - these secular antitheses Bauer allows to persist, whereas he conducts a polemic against their religious expression.

"It is precisely the basis of civil society, the need that ensures the continuance of this society and guarantees its necessity, which exposes its existence to continual dangers, maintains in it an element of uncertainty, and produces that continually changing mixture of poverty and riches, of distress and prosperity, and brings about change in general." (p. 8)

Compare the whole section: "Civil Society" (pp. 8-9), which has been drawn up along the basic lines of Hegel's philosophy of law. Civil society, in its opposition to the political state, is recognized as necessary, because the political state is recognized as necessary.

Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.

Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves - although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere - as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man's separation from his community, from himself and from other men - as it was originally. It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North America, for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so.

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine. At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.

Indeed, the perfect Christian state is not the so-called Christian state - which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and, therefore, adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions. On the contrary, the perfect Christian state is the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to a place among the other elements of civil society. The state which is still theological, which still officially professes Christianity as its creed, which still does not dare to proclaim itself as a state, has, in its reality as a state, not yet succeeded in expressing the human basis - of which Christianity is the high-flown expression - in a secular, human form. The so-called Christian state is simply nothing more than a non-state, since it is not Christianity as a religion, but only the human background of the Christian religion, which can find its expression in actual human creations.

The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but by no means the political realization of Christianity. The state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet profess it in the form appropriate to the state, for it still has a religious attitude towards religion - that is to say, it is not the true implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still relies on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is the imperfect state, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the supplementation and sanctification of its imperfection. For the Christian state, therefore, religion necessarily becomes a means; hence, it is a hypocritical state. It makes a great difference whether the complete state, because of the defect inherent in the general nature of the state, counts religion among its presuppositions, or whether the incomplete state, because of the defect inherent in its particular existence as a defective state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter case, religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former case, the imperfection even of consummate politics becomes evident in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance.

In order to make this contradiction clearer, let us consider Bauer's projection of the Christian state, a projection based on his observation of the Christian-German state.

"Recently," says Bauer, "in order to prove the impossibility or non-existence of a Christian state, reference has frequently been made to those sayings in the Gospel with which the [present-day] state not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to dissolve itself completely [as a state]." "But the matter cannot be disposed of so easily. What do these Gospel sayings demand? Supernatural renunciation of self, submission to the authority of revelation, a turning-away from the state, the abolition of secular conditions. Well, the Christian state demands and accomplishes all that. It has assimilated the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not reproduce this spirit in the same terms as the Gospel, that occurs only because it expresses this spirit in political forms, i.e., in forms which, it is true, are taken from the political system in this world, but which in the religious rebirth that they have to undergo become degraded to a mere semblance. This is a turning-away from the state while making use of political forms for its realization." (p. 55)

Bauer then explains that the people of a Christian state is only a non-people, no longer having a will of its own, but whose true existence lies in the leader to whom it is subjected, although this leader by his origin and nature is alien to it - i.e., given by God and imposed on the people without any co-operation on its part. Bauer declares that the laws of such a people are not its own creation, but are actual revelations, that its supreme chief needs privileged intermediaries with the people in the strict sense, with the masses, and that the masses themselves are divided into a multitude of particular groupings which are formed and determined by chance, which are differentiated by their interests, their particular passions and prejudices, and obtain permission as a privilege, to isolate themselves from one another, etc. (p. 56)

However, Bauer himself says:

"Politics, if it is to be nothing but religion, ought not to be politics, just as the cleaning of saucepans, if it is to be accepted as a religious matter, ought not to be regarded as a matter of domestic economy." (p. 108)

In the Christian-German state, however, religion is an "economic matter" just as "economic matters" belong to the sphere of religion. The domination of religion in the Christian-German state is the religion of domination.

The separation of the "spirit of the Gospel" from the "letter of the Gospel" is an irreligious act. A state which makes the Gospel speak in the language of politics - that is, in another language than that of the Holy Ghost - commits sacrilege, if not in human eyes, then in the eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme criterion, and the Bible as its Charter, must be confronted with the words of Holy Scripture, for every word of Scripture is holy. This state, as well as the human rubbish on which it is based, is caught in a painful contradiction that is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness when it is referred to those sayings of the Gospel with which it "not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to dissolve itself completely as a state." And why does it not want to dissolve itself completely? The state itself cannot give an answer either to itself or to others. In its own consciousness, the official Christian state is an imperative, the realization of which is unattainable, the state can assert the reality of its existence only by lying to itself, and therefore always remains in its own eyes an object of doubt, an unreliable, problematic object. Criticism is, therefore, fully justified in forcing the state that relies on the Bible into a mental derangement in which it no longer knows whether it is an illusion or a reality, and in which the infamy of its secular aims, for which religion serves as a cloak, comes into insoluble conflict with the sincerity of its religious consciousness, for which religion appears as the aim of the world. This state can only save itself from its inner torment if it becomes the police agent of the Catholic Church. In relation to the church, which declares the secular power to be its servant, the state is powerless, the secular power which claims to be the rule of the religious spirit is powerless.

It is, indeed, estrangement which matters in the so-called Christian state, but not man. The only man who counts, the king, is a being specifically different from other men, and is, moreover, a religious being, directly linked with heaven, with God. The relationships which prevail here are still relationships dependent of faith. The religious spirit, therefore, is still not really secularized.

But, furthermore, the religious spirit cannot be really secularized, for what is it in itself but the non-secular form of a stage in the development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only be secularized insofar as the stage of development of the human mind of which it is the religious expression makes its appearance and becomes constituted in its secular form. This takes place in the democratic state. Not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity is the basis of this state. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because religion is the ideal form of the stage of human development achieved in this state.

In the perfect democracy, the religious and theological consciousness itself is in its own eyes the more religious and the more theological because it is apparently without political significance, without worldly aims, the concern of a disposition that shuns the world, the expression of intellectual narrow-mindedness, the product of arbitrariness and fantasy, and because it is a life that is really of the other world. Christianity attains, here, the practical expression of its universal-religious significance in that the most diverse world outlooks are grouped alongside one another in the form of Christianity and still more because it does not require other people to profess Christianity, but only religion in general, any kind of religion (cf. Beaumont's work quoted above). The religious consciousness revels in the wealth of religious contradictions and religious diversity.

We have, thus, shown that political emancipation from religion leaves religion in existence, although not a privileged religion. The contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is the state which acknowledges itself as a state and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man from religion.

Therefore, we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically from Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipated politically without renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly, political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be emancipated politically, without emancipating yourselves humanly, the half-hearted approach and contradiction is not in you alone, it is inherent in the nature and category of political emancipation. If you find yourself within the confines of this category, you share in a general confinement. Just as the state evangelizes when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.

[ * ]

But, if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically and receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights of man and receive them? Bauer denies it.

"The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself admits that he is compelled by his true nature to live permanently in separation from other men, is capable of receiving the universal rights of man and of conceding them to others."

"For the Christian world, the idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the last century. It is not innate in men; on the contrary, it is gained only in a struggle against the historical traditions in which hitherto man was brought up. Thus the rights of man are not a gift of nature, not a legacy from past history, but the reward of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges which up to now have been handed down by history from generation to generation. These rights are the result of culture, and only one who has earned and deserved them can possess them."

"Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews. He declares by this separation that the particular nature which makes him a Jew is his true, highest nature, before which human nature has to give way."

"Similarly, the Christian as a Christian cannot grant the rights of man." (p. 19-20)

According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the " privilege of faith" to be able to receive the universal rights of man. Let us examine, for a moment, the so-called rights of man - to be precise, the rights of man in their authentic form, in the form which they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French. These rights of man are, in part, political rights, rights which can only be exercised in community with others. Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state. They come within the category of political freedom, the category of civic rights, which, as we have seen, in no way presuppose the incontrovertible and positive abolition of religion - nor, therefore, of Judaism. There remains to be examined the other part of the rights of man - the droits de l'homme, insofar as these differ from the droits du citoyen.

Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, that of liberty.

Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, 1791, Article 10: "No one is to be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even religious opinions." "The freedom of every man to practice the religion of which he is an adherent."

Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among the rights of man, Article 7: "The free exercise of religion." Indeed, in regard to man's right to express his thoughts and opinions, to hold meetings, and to exercise his religion, it is even stated: "The necessity of proclaiming these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent memory of despotism." Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV, Article 354.

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, § 3: "All men have received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish, or support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul."

Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 and 6: "Among these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them." (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 213,214)

Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such a degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on the contrary, a man's right to be religious, in any way he chooses, to practise his own particular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.

The droits de l'homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called "man," simply man; why are his rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be explained? From the relationship between the political state and civil society, from the nature of political emancipation.

Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l'homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society - i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. Let us hear what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to say:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Article 2. "These rights, etc., (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property."

What constitutes liberty?

Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything that does not harm the rights of others," or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: "Liberty consists in being able to do everything which does not harm others."

Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why is the Jew, according to Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of man?

"As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews."

But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.

The practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right to private property.

What constitutes man's right to private property?

Article 16. (Constitution of 1793): "The right of property is that which every citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry."

The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion ( à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. But, above all, it proclaims the right of man

"of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry."

There remain the other rights of man: égalité and sûreté.

Equality, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but the equality of the liberté described above - namely: each man is to the same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in accordance with this significance, as follows:

Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): "Equality consists in the law being the same for all, whether it protects or punishes."

And security?

Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): "Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property."

Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil society "the state of need and reason."

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society - that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims ( Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. ( Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but man as private individual [ bourgeois] who is considered to be the essential and true man.

"The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man." ( Declaration of the Rights, etc., of 1791, Article 2)

"Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights." ( Declaration, etc., of 1793, Article 1)

Hence, even in moments when its enthusiasm still has the freshness of youth and is intensified to an extreme degree by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose purpose is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. Whereas, for example, security is declared one of the rights of man, violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly declared to be the order of the day. Whereas "unlimited freedom of the press" (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual liberty, freedom of the press is totally destroyed, because "freedom of the press should not be permitted when it endangers public liberty." ("Robespierre jeune," Historie parlementaire de la Révolution française by Buchez and Roux, vol.28, p. 159) That is to say, therefore: The right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man. But, practice is merely the exception, theory is the rule. But even if one were to regard revolutionary practice as the correct presentation of the relationship, there would still remain the puzzle of why the relationship is turned upside-down in the minds of the political emancipators and the aim appears as the means, while the means appears as the aim. This optical illusion of their consciousness would still remain a puzzle, although now a psychological, a theoretical puzzle.

The puzzle is easily solved.

Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word - feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political - that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole - i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For that organization of national life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained, nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense - that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people.

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person's distinct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual's general function.

But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content.

Feudal society was resolved into its basic element - man, but man as he really formed its basis - egoistic man.

This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man.

The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty, however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life.

Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business.

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals - whose relation with one another epend on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege - is accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural man. The "rights of man" appears as "natural rights," because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence, an object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object. The political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme as distinct from citoyen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen.

Therefore, Rousseau correctly described the abstract idea of political man as follows:

"Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men."

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.

Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his "own powers" as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

II
Bruno Bauer,
"The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free,"
Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, pp. 56-71

It is in this form that Bauer deals with the relation between the Jewish and the Christian religions, and also with their relation to criticism. Their relation to criticism is their relation "to the capacity to become free."

The result arrived at is:

"The Christian has to surmount only one stage, namely, that of his religion, in order to give up religion altogether,"

and therefore become free.

"The Jew, on the other hand, has to break not only with his Jewish nature, but also with the development towards perfecting his religion, a development which has remained alien to him." (p. 71)

Thus, Bauer here transforms the question of Jewish emancipation into a purely religious question. The theological problem as to whether the Jew or the Christian has the better prospect of salvation is repeated here in the enlightened form: which of them is more capable of emancipation. No longer is the question asked: Is it Judaism or Christianity that makes a man free? On the contrary, the question is now: Which makes man freer, the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity?

"If the Jews want to become free, they should profess belief not in Christianity, but in the dissolution of Christianity, in the dissolution of religion in general, that is to say, in enlightenment, criticism, and its consequences, free humanity." (p. 70)

For the Jew, it is still a matter of a profession of faith, but no longer a profession of belief in Christianity, but of belief in Christianity in dissolution.

Bauer demands of the Jews that they should break with the essence of the Christian religion, a demand which, as he says himself, does not arise out of the development of Judaism.

Since Bauer, at the end of his work on the Jewish question, had conceived Judaism only as crude religious criticism of Christianity, and therefore saw in it "merely" a religious significance, it could be foreseen that the emancipation of the Jews, too, would be transformed into a philosophical-theological act.

"The Jew contributes nothing to mankind if he himself disregards his narrow law," if he invalidates his entire Judaism. (p. 65)

Accordingly, the relation between Jews and Christians becomes the following: the sole interest of the Christian in the emancipation of the Jew is a general human interest, a theoretical interest. Judaism is a fact that offends the religious eye of the Christian. As soon as his eye ceases to be religious, this fact ceases to be offensive. The emancipation of the Jew is, in itself, not a task for the Christian.

"It is up to them to deal with it: they themselves will decide their fate; but history is not to be trifled with." (p. 71)

We are trying to break with the theological formulation of the question. For us, the question of the Jew's capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew's capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew - not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development - to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed - has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.

"The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have no rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe. While corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet adopted a favorable attitude towards them, the audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the material institutions." (Bruno Bauer, The Jewish Question, p. 114)

This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.

Captain Hamilton, for example, reports:

"The devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoön who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit. If he loses sight of his own business for an instant it is only in order to pry into the business of his competitors."

Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals.

"The man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the religious ministry is a veritable business career." (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 185,186)

According to Bauer, it is

"a fictitious state of affairs when in theory the Jew is deprived of political rights, whereas in practice he has immense power and exerts his political influence en gros, although it is curtailed en détail." ( Die Judenfrage, p. 114)

The contradiction that exists between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Although theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact politics has become the serf of financial power.

Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its highest development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.

Judaism continues to exist not in spite of history, but owing to history.

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.

The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man - and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world - both the world of men and nature - of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man's work and man's existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.

It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable

"that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free."

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.

Here, too, man's supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged.

Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.

Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law.

Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.

By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.

Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.

Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism.

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

Christianity had only in semblance overcome real Judaism. It was too noble-minded, too spiritualistic to eliminate the crudity of practical need in any other way than by elevation to the skies.

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from himself and from nature.

Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.

Selling [ verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [ Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity - money - on them.

In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion - practical need, egoism.

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism - huckstering and its preconditions - the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

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Works of Karl Marx 1844 Written: Autumn 1843; First Published: February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9. See Citizen in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, for an explanation of the various words for "citizen." The German Jews desire emancipation.

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Week 7- The consequences and risks of defining coercive control as a vicious violent crime

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Week 7- The consequences and risks of defining coercive control as a vicious violent crime

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Coercive control is a insidious form of violence that occurs in small scales such as the family. Compared with explicit violence, it has persecuted the vulnerable women and children in daily life for a long term. However, although the conviction will be controlled by force with the aim of protecting victims' rights, it does not seem to achieve the desired results. For some marginalized women and children, they do not have a deep understanding of domestic violence, and they do not have effective communication with justice and social security services due to differences in linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Conviction may actually increase the risk of victimization.

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Be wary of unintended consequences in criminalising coercive control

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Coercive control is a key feature of many abusive relationships. It is a pattern of behaviour perpetrators use to deliberately isolate, humiliate, degrade, frighten and control their victims and is perpetrated alongside physical and sexual violence. There is much more we can do to support women living with this insidious form of violence.

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Week 10- How the shifting demographics work on elections

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Week 10- How the shifting demographics work on elections

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This six-minute conversation took place before the Americamn presidential election results came in.  They found the actual support for Trump among Latinos is much higher than polls predict.  The moderators argue that it is not useful to look at the political preferences of Latinos in particular states and counties, but rather at the composition of latinos' groups, such as nationality and age. Latinos, for example, are overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning Mexican and Puerto Rican, but with latinos under 30 making up a larger share of the population and young people generally leaning to the left, these signs augur well for republicans.

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We are still waiting for a winner to be called in this year's presidential election. But the race so far has illuminated one thing for certain - the country's shifting demographics have played a huge role in how our elections will be decided. One group that's been getting particular scrutiny this year, Latinos. They became the second-biggest voting demographic after white people for the first time this year, and that has big implications.

We're joined now by Shereen Marisol Meraji, host of NPR's very own Code Switch podcast, to talk through what we should keep in mind when thinking about Latino voters in this country. Shereen, hi.

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, BYLINE: Hi.

MARTIN: All right. So let's start with just your own observations. What did you see happening on election night as results were rolling in?

MERAJI: Well, I saw a lot of confusion and a lot of hand-wringing over why Latino support for President Trump was higher in some places than polls had originally predicted. And Rachel, that got my antennae twitching, knowing that most polling of Latino voters is not great. I spoke to Matt Barreto. He's a political science professor at UCLA. He's been working with the Biden campaign for the last few months. And he told me sample sizes for Latinos tend to be really small - too small to draw clear conclusions about their voting behavior. And these polls tend to do a bad job of polling Latinos who are not college educated and who prefer to speak Spanish.

MATT BARRETO: That's a very large segment of the Latino electorate of voters. And so these folks are systematically underrepresented in mainstream polls.

MERAJI: Matt Barreto told me that's why ahead of the primaries - and I know, Rachel, that feels like forever ago.

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: Yeah.

MERAJI: But that's why ahead of the primaries, you saw wildly divergent stories about how Latino voters were all in for Bernie Sanders. And then the next week, it was like, just kidding - Hispanics love Donald Trump. It's like, wait, what? How does that work? I think we just need to look at polling ahead of elections with a much more critical eye, especially when the polls are saying anything about Latino voters.

MARTIN: Right. OK. So considering all of the holes in polling, all the blind spots - I mean, is that why you think Latinos seem, at least, to surprise us every election?

MERAJI: (Laughter) I think that's one reason. And I got to be frank here - most politicians and journalists have work to do when it comes to understanding Latinos. You know, this week there's been so much attention on how Latino votes in Miami-Dade County in Florida went more to Trump than in the last election. And as interesting as that may be - and it is interesting - it's highlighting two groups of Latinos, Cubans and Venezuelans, that make up 4% - that's Cubans - and less than 1% - that's Venezuelans - of the total Latino population.

MARTIN: Right.

MERAJI: So, you know, I think it's really important to note, the overwhelming majority of Latinos in the United States are of Mexican origin at 60-plus percent. Next up are Puerto Ricans. Both of those groups do tend to vote more Democratic. So spending outsized energy on a couple of counties in a couple of states, it's not really giving us the full picture of the, quote-unquote, "Latino vote."

MARTIN: So does that big category just lose any significance? Obviously, Latinos are not a monolith, and there is no such thing as a Latino vote.

MERAJI: I agree. Latinos are not a monolith, nor is any other ethnic or racial identity group, for that matter. And I wish we could just (laughter), you know, stop reminding people of that because it is obvious. But with Latinos, politicians and journalists, they really need to be taking into account country of origin, race, class, age, gender, language preference, where Latinos live in the United States, how long they've lived in the United States. And Rachel, in some cases, the answer to that question is long before there was a Texas, New Mexico and California.

MARTIN: Right.

MERAJI: All of those things affect what issues are important to Latino voters. And for years, both Democrats and Republicans have been inconsistent and sloppy in their outreach to Latinos. But despite that, patterns have emerged over the years. It's notable that two-thirds of Latino voters identify as and vote for Democrats. The other third vote Republican, which - this is not a new development, and I'm not sure why it keeps surprising everyone (laughter) every time there's an election.

That said, we also can't forget that Latinos are the youngest voting demographic in the United States. So they're the second-largest voting demographic, and they're the youngest voting demographic. They have more eligible voters under 30 years old than any other voter demographic, and it's going to stay that way for a while. We know - and you've reported on this - younger voters lean left.

MARTIN: Right.

MERAJI: So back to your question - are Latinos a monolith? No. Are they a voting bloc? Maybe - but obviously one that cannot be ignored or taken for granted. And these gains for President Trump are a sign that Democrats may have been taking Latino voters for granted.

MARTIN: So Latino voters have a lot of young people in that demographic. Young people lean left. Is that kind of political orientation, is it animating those voters? I mean, is any of this turning into grassroots political activism?

MERAJI: Oh, most definitely. I know we've been talking a lot about Arizona and how Arizona is in serious play. And lately I've been reading things like, oh, well, it's because so many Californians moved to Arizona or it's because Cindy McCain endorsed Biden and suburban moms rallied and got out the vote. You know, it's Senator John McCain's revenge from beyond the grave. But actually, a huge part of that story is that Latino grassroots groups have been working for years on the ground to get out the Latino vote, the young Latino vote. And they have been spurred on by hard-line immigration policies like the SB 1070 show-me-your-papers law.

So I'm really hoping that people will look, you know, beyond the surprise in some of these election stories and for the substance when it comes to Latinos and civic engagement. But, you know, that's my wish every election cycle.

MARTIN: NPR's Shereen Marisol Meraji, host of NPR's podcast Code Switch.

Shereen, thank you. We appreciate this.

MERAJI: Thanks, Rachel.

(SOUNDBITE OF PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS' "DQMOT")

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The Role Shifting Demographics Played In The Presidential Election

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We are still waiting for a winner to be called in this year's presidential election. But the race so far has illuminated one thing for certain - the country's shifting demographics have played a huge role in how our elections will be decided.

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Week 10- Five highlighted structural features that maintain US democracy

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Week 10- Five highlighted structural features that maintain US democracy

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This article listed five factors of American structural features that the fairness of us elections is hard to destruct by the Trump team. Decentralised voting increases the difficulty of collusion and the tributaries of local voting converge to create an unwieldy transparency. Secondly, turnout in the 2020 election was high which means high attendence in voting. Thirdly, there was no apparent fraud in 2020 Election. In addtion, In the face of Mr Trump's claims about the result, the judge dismissed the appeal on the legal basis. Last, the strong and independent American media were brave enough to expose the facts of favoritism and maintain the authenticity of the election.

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Week 9- Populism has lost its original purpose

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Week 9- Populism has lost its original purpose

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This article traces the past of populism and restores the original intention of populism which is very different from the present. A populist party developed as part of the left that represented farmers and industrial workers and demanded government action to improve the economic conditions of ordinary people. The elite saw populism as the scourge of class antagonism, representing the irrational resentment of social losers and rural ignoramuses.

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For the last four years the American commentary class has been in a state of sustained hysteria over what they call "populism". As our experts use the word, "populism" refers to the peculiar views of Donald Trump, or those of the leaders of Hungary and Brazil and Poland. More formally, "populism" is said to be the nightmare "ism" in which racist authoritarians attack the news media and ignore the authority of the learned.

I welcome anyone who wants to join the fight against conservatism, a movement that will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's presidential triumph this November. But whenever we hear our designated authorities and opinion leaders use "populism" as a synonym for everything that is wrong with that movement, we should remember that the word was originally invented to designate precisely the opposite sensibility.

Unlike other political terms, we know almost exactly where, when, and why the word "populism" came to be. It was coined in May 1891 by a group of Kansas politicos riding on a train between Kansas City and Topeka; a "populist" was to be a shorthand expression for supporters of a third-party movement then beginning to challenge the shibboleths of 19-century politics and economics.

The Populist party, as it came to be known, was part of a leftwing flowering then happening around the world, the rough American equivalent of the labor parties and social-democratic unions springing up in other lands. "Populism", as its adherents saw it, was a fine and hopeful thing, a mass movement of farmers and industrial workers demanding action by the government to improve the economic situation of ordinary people and, while they were at it, a war on corruption as well. In an extremely unusual move for the time, the populists tried, in the movement's early days, to enlist black farmers alongside white ones in the south in their fight for economic reform. (It didn't end well.)

American elites of the day were unanimous in their fear and loathing of populism. They used the movement's name as a different sort of shorthand, meaning all the pathologies that upper-class people thought characterized the lesser orders.

According to America's leading editors and men of letters, populism represented the irrational resentments of society's losers and rural ignoramuses, who brayed for silly things like the income tax, a fiat currency and a crackdown on monopolies. Populism was said to be a kind of collective madness afflicting these lower orders, in which sinister demagogues - often female - beguiled the simple-minded people of the interior. Because populists questioned the gold standard - then the sacred bulwark of academic economics - elites reviled them as ignorant and anti-intellectual. Populism, in their thinking, was the class war come to America. In a climate of unhinged journalistic hysteria, America's ruling establishment of the 1890s proceeded to beat populism down. (If you're curious, you can peruse a selection of anti-populist political cartoons from that era on my website.)

For a few decades in the first half of the 20th century, American historians thought highly of populism, seeing it as the beginning of the reform tradition that eventually came into its own in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

Then everything changed. In the 1950s, American intellectuals soured on reform movements made up of working people. Led by the most famous historian of the period, Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter, the eminent thinkers of that contented era painted populism as the great example of the scary things that could happen when society's lower orders got organized. Rather than heroes, the pops were now seen as backwoods cranks who had risen up against a sophisticated economic system they simply could not understand. The men of mid-century rationality redefined populism as a generic shorthand for everything they themselves were not: bigots, xenophobes, anti-intellectual, anti-science, paranoid. "Populists" were people who were uncomfortable with complexity and out of step with modernity.

Although these "consensus" intellectuals never acknowledged it, their psychological reinterpretation of populism was pretty much the same bill of hysterical accusations that had been leveled at reformers by conservatives in the 1890s.

There was something else that should have been familiar about the mid-century attack on populism: as in the 1890s, it served to justify the rule of society's upper echelons. The consensus intellectuals of the 1950s, like the propagandists of the 1890s, were defending a new social order in which they were now the elite: this was the dawn of managerial liberalism, with its respected experts, its gigantic research universities, its Organization Men, its collegial interest groups, and its Univac-minded administrators. In the enlightened 1950s, everyone knew that mass protest movements had no place in a period which Daniel Bell smugly characterized as the "End of Ideology". Uprisings of working people were not how you achieved reform or prosperity; such blessings could only come through the empowerment of the highly educated personnel who now ran our great corporations and our defense establishment.

And so the consensus thinkers redefined populism as a catch-all noun denoting not merely the farmers' movement of the 1890s but any situation in which democracy is out of control or in which ordinary people refuse to genuflect before social standing or scholarly attainment. As Bell put it in The End of Ideology, "populism goes further" than merely rejecting economic status: "That some are more qualified than others to assert opinions is vehemently denied." An eminent sociologist, Edward Shils, asserted in 1956 that the populist "denies autonomy" to any institution of government. Populists, he wrote, despise the justice system and politicians, scorn learning and deny the right of privacy. More desirable by far was a deferential order in which the public accepted hierarchy. Also: "a sense of affinity among the elites".

Hating populism quickly became a standard posture of mid-century academic liberalism. But there was something curious about the 50s generation's scholarly attack on the people who originally invented the word: it was wrong.

Hofstadter, whose 1955 book on populism triggered the redefinition of the word, eventually came in for brutal punishment at the hands of his fellow historians, who enthusiastically demolished his psychological interpretation of the long-ago reform movement. Populism, they found, wasn't any more backward-looking than any other movement that protested capitalism. It wasn't against industrialization. It wasn't hostile to education or learning. It was significantly less nativist or xenophobic than other groups of the time; in fact, the populists competed successfully for immigrant votes. Nor was the movement irrational or given to scapegoating: by the standards of the day it was well-informed and it kept its attention focused on economic issues.

But here's what's crazy: none of those facts seem to matter. Academic anti-populism lives on in almost precisely the same form as it did in the 1950s. Indeed, it thrives. Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery. Out of this famous scholarly mistake of the 1950s - which was descended in turn from the noxious reactionary propaganda of the 1890s - now grows the common sense of global liberalism.

Why is this? Because anti-populism is an essential part of a political myth that is dear to a certain class of people. Hating populism is the built-in corollary to this group's grand vision of how society ought to be directed: which is to say, by responsible professionals, meaning they themselves, always concurring prudently with one another, always doing their best to steer the world through complex problems. The core of this myth, as the political theorist Michael Rogin once put it, is "the hope that if only responsible elites could be left alone, if only political issues could be kept from the people, the elites would make wise decisions".

Unfortunately, elites have been making decisions of seismic foolishness for many years now: bank deregulation, Wall Street bailouts, deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic and the Iraq war, to name but a few. Besides, the context of cold war complacency is long gone. Self-assured liberalism crumbled decades ago. Consensus is an ideal that no longer beguiles the academic mind: it's all about conflict today. But somehow the old 50s faith continues to play right through it all, tootling its one-note song of anti-populist indignation even as the rightwing night falls.

I doubt that any effort of mine will suffice to rescue the word "populist" from its modern-day abusers. But what I am absolutely certain of is that instructing Americans to show more respect to their enlightened betters - scolding the public on behalf of some great consensus of the learned and the virtuous - will only cement the right's grip on power.

The only real answer, to Trump and plutocracy both, is a mass movement of ordinary people, hailing from all different backgrounds, joined together by a common desire to understand and dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless. Which is to say that the answer both to rightwing fraud and liberal elitism must come from us - from the democratic public itself.

This is an excerpt from The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is a Guardian US columnist

Topics

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We need to reclaim 'populism' from the right. It has a long, proud leftwing history | Thomas Frank

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For the last four years the American commentary class has been in a state of sustained hysteria over what they call "populism". As our experts use the word, "populism" refers to the peculiar views of Donald Trump, or those of the leaders of Hungary and Brazil and Poland.

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Week5- Radical Pacifism - Against structural violence

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Week5- Radical Pacifism - Against structural violence

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Firstly，This speech makes a distinction between violence and conflict, and puts forward the view that conflict is a means to overthrow systems of opperssion and maintain peace. The state convicted the protesters in the name of peace, on the one hand, for covering up structural violence and on the other for violence against the protesters.  And the struggles of those feminists are, in essence, fighting against society's harmful expectations of normative gender. They define the violence which not only includes Sometimes, gentle didactic action can maintain a short-term calm, but the violence rooted in it does not go away, and it requires a group of radical people to unite and bring the violence to the problem.

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The Saint Mary's Center for Women's Intercultural Leadership (CWIL) hosted Notre Dame gender studies professor Ashley Bohrer who spoke in a presentation titled "Disturbing the Peace: A Feminist Defense of Conflict in a Time of Rebellion" on Wednesday as a part of International Education Week. The talk was co-sponsored by the gender and women's studies department, the department of social work and gerontology and the department of global studies.

The event began with interim CWIL director Alice Yang presenting a brief background of International Education Week.

"The International Education Week is a joint initiative by the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Education. It is an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide and an effort to promote programs that prepare Americans for a global environment and attract the future leaders from abroad to study, learn and exchange experiences," she said.

Yang then introduced author and activist Bohrer and discussion facilitator Frances Kominkiewicz, a part of the department of social work.

Bohrer opened her talk by discussing the implications of when people define peace as all times outside of war.

Bohrer said that despite popular belief, conflict and peace work closely together.

"Those who conceive of the world as structurally violent understand conflict, not as in opposition to peace, but crucially, as a means to achieve peace," she said.

Peace advocates engage in conflict regularly, she said, as first seen by protestors in the Civil Rights movement.

Because systems of oppression are incredibly ingrained into today's society, Bohrer believes taking them down requires conflict.

Bohrer explained how society uses a definition of peace that criminalizes the voices of protestors, which she said is just as dangerous as the use of weapons.

"The state's ability to capture the discourse of space, and to coalesce support behind its violence, is through its reliance on a particular notion of peace - one that emphasizes stability, order and the denial of structural violence," she said.

After discussing how many people were arrested at protests in 2020, Bohrer said her worries lie in "the way that the peace is defined in charges of breaching or disrupting peace [by] the ruling or reigning order, which we know to be one of structural racism, police brutality and extrajudicial state-sanctioned murder."

Bohrer suggested that people should look at this issue through a feminist perspective to obtain a deeper understanding.

Examining what it means to be feminist, Bohrer reflected on the ways the movement is impeded by gender expectations and lifted by women who defy them.

Because of the mission of feminism, Bohrer argues today's protests fall under issues concerning feminists.

Working to change how conflict is only associated with masculinity, Bohrer spoke about how feminism fits into social evolution caused by conflict.

To end her lecture, Bohrer considered the meaning behind the slogan "No Justice, No Peace." Some consider it an echo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, but Bohrer discussed its second connotation that is rooted in conservative ideas about protest.

Bohrer approves of this chant being seen as a threat because she believes that disrupting social norms to obtain peace is key.

Bohrer then answered questions asked by Kominkiewicz and the virtual audience.

When asked about this summer's protests, Bohrer emphasized the distinct difference between violence against people and damaging property.

Rather than considering this violence against property, Bohrer asked the audience to focus on the violence committed against marginalized populations.

"I think we are always better off hammering home or talking about uplifting the violence that the state is doing, the violence that the current system does to people of color, exploited people, women, queer and trans folks, disabled people every single day," she said.

Bohrer said not acknowledging violence against oppressed people and working with them obtain peace has severe consequences.

Near the end of the event, Bohrer gave suggestions on how to be unified with others who come from different backgrounds when working together for peace.

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Gender studies professor speaks on women's roles in fight for peace // The Observer

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The Saint Mary's Center for Women's Intercultural Leadership (CWIL) hosted Notre Dame gender studies professor Ashley Bohrer who spoke in a presentation titled "Disturbing the Peace: A Feminist Defense of Conflict in a Time of Rebellion" on Wednesday as a part of International Education Week.

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Week 9- How does populism mislead liberals

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Week 9- How does populism mislead liberals

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This article shows that a large part of the liberals who voted for Trump don't know what true populism is，but are attracted to trump's party's vaunted defense of the American working class. Populism is highly exclusive, and although it claims to represent the common people, it treats white Native-Born Americans who support the populists as real people to the exclusion of other minorities. Populists are not just anti-pluralist; they are adept at polarising society, so much so that misleading voters means outright opposition between the parties, and everything seems extreme.

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Election results often resemble Rorschach tests more than X-rays: we read into them what we knew all along. Politicians and pundits see Donald Trump's surprisingly strong showing as a confirmation of the power of right-wing populism. Instead of the expected blue wave, we got a deeply divided result. Strong rural and conservative support may not have been enough to return Mr Trump to the White House, but it seems set to remain a central force in 21st-century politics. Yet such interpretations illustrate how liberals misunderstand populism.

Liberals like to think that they comprehend complexity while populists seduce the masses with simplistic solutions. Yet liberals have also lapped up tweet-length explanations of supposedly uniform global trends, as it makes the world so much easier to describe. Mr Trump's triumphs set them on a search for the most real of all real Americans in some Midwestern diner. Now they are likely to fall for his boast that the Republicans have become the party of the "American worker" - who is indeed being stiffed, but above all by Mr Trump and his party.

Liberals forget that successful movements are not based on a monolithic political identity. Trumpism has always been different things to different people. Hence one cannot just subtract Mr Trump from Trumpism. US conservatives might hail Trumpism as "socially conservative, multi-ethnic economic populism" minus a norm-breaking reality TV star. But they forget that Mr Trump's antics appealed to folks with anti-establishment attitudes. A smooth demagogue like Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator, will not necessarily have the same following.

Populists are not primarily characterised by anti-elitism. Rather they claim that they, and only they, represent what they call "the real people" or the "silent majority". They condemn all political competitors as corrupt and, less obviously, insinuate that all those citizens who fail to support them do not properly belong to the polity at all. As Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump sycophant, tweeted a few weeks ago: "Americans love America. They don't want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco" - as if the Californian city were home to a foreign enemy within the country and its votes should not be counted.

Populism is not just a matter of style. How Mr Trump and figures like Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, tweet or dress is a secondary phenomenon. It is also not really a question of economic policy. Rather it is an exclusionary, anti-pluralist form of identity politics in which white Christians or Hindus are encouraged to believe only they are "the real people" - and that they are under relentless attack by enemies, be it folks from "shithole countries" or Muslims.

Recommended

We know such leaders to be anti-pluralist because they tell us so in their speeches. The mistake is to infer that everyone who votes for them is also anti-pluralist, or even pays particular attention to what, after all, is only ever one part of a larger political package. It is not a mystery that even members of the minorities attacked by populist rhetoric might sometimes vote for populists - as apparently just happened, with more African-Americans and Latinos opting for Mr Trump. If what political scientists politely call "low-information voters" can be convinced that Mr Trump is a business genius who will revive the post-pandemic economy, or that Joe Biden has a soft spot for Cuba, it does not necessarily matter what Mr Trump said years ago about white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Populists are extremely clever at polarising societies, such that a significant number of citizens feel every election is an apocalyptic showdown between us and them. This is not enough to give majorities to rightwing populists. But their cause receives a crucial boost when they attract support from traditional financial and business elites who are willing to overlook authoritarian conduct in exchange for deregulation or lower taxes. After all, nowhere in western Europe or North America have rightwing populists come to power without the collaboration of established conservative elites.

Mr Trump was not the cause but the symptom of a larger trend in the GOP to adopt " plutocratic populism". This consists of policies that mostly benefit the 1 per cent, in combination with relentless culture wars which distract from economic ideas that most Americans do not find particularly attractive. It is a truly troubling fact that plenty of voters are apparently willing to overlook authoritarian behaviour because they prioritise their partisan commitments, or economic interests, over democracy as such.

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Liberals misunderstand the seductive appeal of populism

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Election results often resemble Rorschach tests more than X-rays: we read into them what we knew all along. Politicians and pundits see Donald Trump's surprisingly strong showing as a confirmation of the power of right-wing populism. Instead of the expected blue wave, we got a deeply divided result.

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Week 7-How gun violence shaped academics

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Week 7-How gun violence shaped academics

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When violent murders of minors and students increase, it causes considerable psychological trauma to their classmates and peers, which in turn affects their academic achievement. Schools and various educational teams are dedicated to psychological intervention and violence prevention for students. If children are repeatedly exposed to violence, their test scores take a bigger hit. Teenagers do not have a good balance between sadness and the pressure of being an ordinary student. Emergencies have great emotional fluctuations on them, making them unable to concentrate on their studies. Schools should give students more understanding and support in the face of violent situations.

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Week 6- The book review of the "On Suicide Bombing"

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Week 6- The book review of the "On Suicide Bombing"

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The author of this review has come up with some new, more anthropological ideas about Suicide bombings through reading On Suicide Bombing. He argues that the book criticizes non-Muslim stereotypes of suicide attacks and radical Islamic culture, and compares the legitimate violence that war implies with terrorist attacks and violence that is not supported by law, though the former is seen as more moral by the public. But the assumptions of liberal thought add a shred of legitimacy to the terrorist campaign to overthrow the existing regime and establish a new one. Moreover, the book reflects the ubiquity of deliberate sacrifice in all religions, and the tendency to overreact to the involvement of people of color in terrorist activities.

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I took up Talal Asad's "On Suicide Bombing" accidentally. At first, I misjudged Asad as a man with a rough grasp of English and having strange notions on anthropology. However, after reading his book, I have certainly gained some significant, anthropological perspectives on jihad and terrorism.

The introduction to his book provides us a brilliant understanding to the topic at hand. Like many people in the US and around the world, Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, through media stings and newspaper headlines. Surprisingly, he describes such projections and presentations as being 'all about emotion', mainly because of their lack of clarity of analysis and neutral assessment.

Asad is an anthropologist and an exalted figure in Arab Muslim-American academia. This work offers anthropological perspectives and accounts, after having placed the problem of terrorism within the framework of the 'problem of liberal democracy'. This book, consisting of three chapters, is essentially a collection of three lectures which he delivered in 2006 - namely "Terrorism", "Suicide terrorism" and "Horror at suicide terrorism".

For his smooth analysis, he comes up with a question that is foregrounded in some moral conceptions regarding the differences between terrorist violence and state-sponsored violence. He asks to what degree and extent these two categories differ. While this may seem problematic at first, he uses anthropological tools of analysis to address this issue.

The book (and its title) criticises the prejudicial conceptual stereotype (among non-Muslims) that a suicide bomber is the icon of the Islamic culture of death. Asad also lampoons the idea of religiously-motivated terrorism.

He starts his analysis by giving adequate evidences of and historical backgrounds to the political atmosphere. He refers to the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Asad then cites President's Bush reaction to the incident - "They were acts of war. This will require our country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve" - and also highlights Bush's and the US media's obsession with the phrase 'war against terrorism'.

For Asad, our realm of thoughts are radically preoccupied with the idea of 'moral responses', which are largely born out of and coexist with sectarian, biased and fixed places of limited morality. He clarifies this by reminding us that war is legal violence - legitimated and recognised by international laws - and terrorism (for sure) has no legal underpinnings. He scrutinises the idea of 'moral legitimacy', as described by liberal philosophers - the state is the guardian of political community; it has the responsibility of securing security and safety by any means necessary, including modes of violence. Asad also refers to Michael Walzer who argues that a political community may act immorally, but only at the last minute and under absolute necessity.

Asad then addresses the problem with liberal assumptions. It resides in a place where the excesses of war, especially those due to terrorism, are considered to be grave and immoral. However, liberal thought also legitimately recognises the permissible possibility of employing political violence during the foundation of a new nation-state, for the purpose of accommodating a new political community that has particular political preferences. This was the only reason for the refusal of the International Criminal Court to include terrorist acts as punishable offences.

After having precisely illustrated the idea of 'purposeful death', Asad highlights some instances from Judaism and Christianity. In references to Judaism, the example of Samson is evident. He was a mythical hero who killed himself to kill a large number of his enemies for the cause of the State. Later, his commitment to the cause is regarded as an act of nationalistic self sacrifice. In Christianity, too, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ can be viewed as something purposeful for the redemption of sinful community.

In the last chapter, he cunningly makes some observations about the Western liberal humanitarian approach, which borrows a few characteristics from the over-arching humanitarian principle. For instance, the so-called western liberals are not excessively troubled when armed men kill unarmed brown people, or when armed brown men kill unarmed people. Their moral outrage peaks only when brown or black people become the subjects or actors, as parts of selective, politically-loaded responses.

In short, this book deals with some difficult questions and precisely criticises liberal assumptions on terrorism and suicide bombing. Above all, it is an insightful and meaningful academic analysis, which led someone to briefly review the book as one which you wouldn't want to read on a plane.

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Talal Asad's "On Suicide Bombing" Sheds New Light On Jihad | Youth Ki Awaaz

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I took up Talal Asad's "On Suicide Bombing" accidentally. At first, I misjudged Asad as a man with a rough grasp of English and having strange notions on anthropology. However, after reading his book, I have certainly gained some significant, anthropological perspectives on jihad and terrorism.

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Week6 - Analyzing the mind of territorists 

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Week6 - Analyzing the mind of territorists 

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This article attempts to analyze the thoughts of terrorists and find out the causes of violent thoughts through brain imaging research. Moreover, the study of extremists introduces the notion of sacred values, that certain values are so sacred to people that they are unwilling to violate them, regardless of the cost or consequences. The suicide attacks reflect the militants' feverish willingness to fight to preserve their sacred values.

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The Dangerous Quest to Understand the Minds of Extremists

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A group of researchers from across the globe examined the brains of extremists to figure out what makes them turn violent. This is what they found.

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Week 5- Analysis of Violence against female health workers

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Week 5- Analysis of Violence against female health workers

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This report reflects various forms of violence against female heaklth workers among countries. Violence is not limited to verbal violence and sexual harassment， but widespreadly it is reflected in the unequal treatment of female workers, which people have become accustomed to. Female health care workers are acquiesced not to have the ability of male staff, and get few promotion opportunities. Because women were acquiesced to be vulnerable from the beginning, rights were naturally held in the hands of men.The lack of power makes the violence become blatant and gradually popularized. Women who realize that they are oppressed choose to leave because they can't resist effectively, while the women who accept their weakening stay. This is the problem of adverse selection.
Additonally, on the issue of public calls for an end to violence against female health care workers, I find that many people like to raise the issue to the whole health care group, but this obscures the underlying gendered power dynamics. If we can't accurately point out that violence originates from the lack of rights and transfer the rights from male to female workers, the problem of unilateral violence of female workers will not be solved.

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Violence against female health workers is tip of iceberg of gender power imbalances

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Tackling gender power relations is key to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of health workers and the ability to deliver quality care, say Asha George and colleagues Twenty five years ago the Beijing Platform for Action for Women advocated for women's rights to health.

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Week 2-The link between drugs mortality and community police activity

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Week 2-The link between drugs mortality and community police activity

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This news examined high rate of the fatal drug overdoses in Philadelphia and  found that frequent police arrests indirectly contribute to the high death rate. Heavy policing of minor offenses has caused drug users to waver in their determination to seek help from the police, thus missing the optimal timing of the rescue.
In connection with this week's topic, the police, acting as agents of justice against criminals, do not make residents feel secure and address the problems of drug addiction effectively. The right of law enforcement has not effectively helped disadvantaged groups, but it has served as a deterrent to the people.It made me wonder whether the judicial system ignored the people-oriented principle and only demanded a precise crackdown on crime, which seemed callous in terms of human emotion.

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Newswise - Washington, D.C. (September 15, 2020) - An important examination of the ecology of fatal drug overdoses in Pennsylvania's largest city has revealed a devastating confluence of poverty, policing tactics, and crumbling housing stock. Conducted by Lallen T. Johnson, assistant professor, American University's School of Public Affairs, and Tayler Shreve, Ph.D. student at AU's School of Public Affairs, the study reveals a relationship between overdose mortality and the conditions of neighborhoods in a city in which nearly three out of every 10 residents know someone who has suffered a fatal overdose.

The study, The Ecology of Overdose Mortality in Philadelphia, has published in Health and Place.

"We knew already that neighborhoods differ in their abilities to address many social problems and solicit resources from city agencies that may be helpful to residents and stakeholders," said Johnson. "However, it is less clear how attributes of urban neighborhoods, such as housing conditions and local police responses, are related to fatal drug overdoses, particularly in Philadelphia, which is the sixth most populous city in the United States."

In 2016, Philadelphia had an overdose mortality rate of 59.4 per 100,000 residents, ranking it second in the nation among United States counties with at least 1 million residents. Researchers analyzed Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office data from 2011 to 2017 to model overdose mortality using community-level indicators of social control, disadvantage, and the built environment.

According to Johnson and his co-author, ZIP codes with more police arrests for minor offences have higher overdose mortality rates. This suggests that variations in police activity across neighborhoods may shape individual decisions to call for help when witnessing or experiencing an overdose. Fear of legal penalties has the potential to isolate persons who are experiencing overdose symptoms from critical medical care, thus increasing the likelihood of subsequent death.

The study also indicates that overdose deaths occur most frequently in areas with higher concentrations of vacant, aged, and dilapidated buildings that can provide a potential space in which illicit drugs can be consumed. Although such spaces may provide refuge from police contact, they also isolate people who use drugs from critical care in the event of an overdose, and thus increase the likelihood for fatalities to occur. Researchers believe that local policies and practices that strictly regulate the conditions of the built environment may help prevent properties from reaching points of disrepair in the first place.

The new research highlights the need to understand the social contexts in which drug mortality is most salient and underscores the need for comprehensive interventions to address multiple risk factors for negative health outcomes.

The study supports calls for interventions that reduce the harms associated with drug use, while also deemphasizing formal criminal justice system processing and punishment. Reliance on the criminal system to address drug use and addiction has the potential to yield significant public health consequences.

"We need to learn more about how social, environmental and legal conditions across places over time influence drug mortality," said Johnson. "For example, while Good Samaritan laws provide witnesses immunity from prosecution under certain circumstances, future research should consider whether conflicting public health and justice system goals undermine their potential."
About American University's School of Public Affairs Established in 1934, American University's School of Public Affairs (SPA) is ranked 14 by U.S. News & World Report, offering undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and executive-level programs to build and enhance careers in public service. The school offers a unique pairing of access to Washington, D.C. with world-renowned faculty and transformational research, driving progress in policy, politics, law, and public administration. SPA is also ranked third in the U.S. and first in the D.C. area for public affairs research impact.
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Abandoned Buildings, Fear of Calling Police Contribute to High Rate of Fatal Overdoses in Philadelphia, New Study Shows

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Newswise - Washington, D.C. (September 15, 2020) - An important examination of the ecology of fatal drug overdoses in Pennsylvania's largest city has revealed a devastating confluence of poverty, policing tactics, and crumbling housing stock. Conducted by Lallen T. Johnson, assistant professor, American University's School of Public Affairs, and Tayler Shreve, Ph.D.

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Week 4- Anti-government protests in Thailand

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Week 4- Anti-government protests in Thailand

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Thailand is waging a revolution to overthrow the monarchy. The young people kept taking to thr street, and asked for three reform requirement which are dissolving the current military government of Prayuth, making a new consititution and limit imperial power. Whether the fate of Thailand can be returned to the hands of the Thai people through this reform is unclear, because none of a social revolution can be achieved only rely on street protests. However, this movement could be treated as the prelude of the future Thai democratic reform, representing rise of a younger generation of Democrats and providing political reformists characters more opportunities in the future.

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Thousands of young people in Thailand are defying the authorities by gathering in the streets and calling for change in some of the biggest pro-democracy protests the country has seen in years.

An emergency decree banning such rallies was issued by the government in an attempt to clamp down on the largely peaceful demonstrations that have also targeted the monarchy.

Despite this, the student-led democracy movement continues to march, leading to numerous arrests.

But what is behind this new movement led by young Thais?

What's happening?

The growing pro-democracy movement has been calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha - the former army chief who seized power in a 2014 coup and was later appointed as premier after controversial elections last year.

Disillusioned by years of military rule, protesters are demanding amendments to the constitution, a new election and an end to the harassment of rights activists and state critics.

They are also calling for curbs on the king's powers - a demand that has led to unprecedented public discussion of an institution long shielded from criticism by law.

Thailand's lese-majeste law, which forbids insults to the monarchy, is among the strictest in the world. Those found guilty of breaching it face up to 15 years in jail. Critics say it is used to suppress free speech.

In an attempt to "maintain peace and order", the Thai government has issued an emergency decree banning large gatherings, limiting groups to a maximum of four people.

But protesters have since been marching against the ban, with hundreds taking to the streets of the capital Bangkok. Some have been targeting the prime minister's office, and the government has responded by deploying riot police.

Among those arrested in the latest demonstrations are three protest leaders - the human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, student activist Parit Chiwarak, widely known by his nickname "Penguin", and Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul.

Mr Anon, 36, was the first to openly break the taboo on discussing Thailand's monarchy by calling for reforms in August. Ms Panusaya became one of the most prominent faces of the protests after she delivered a 10-point manifesto urging royal reform later that month.

The two men have been arrested before. But Ms Panusaya, 21, had not been arrested until now. She was taken away in a wheelchair while giving a three-finger salute.

The three-fingered salute is a gesture taken from the Hunger Games film franchise, where it is a rousing symbol of defiance against an authoritarian state.

Unlike previous conflicts between the Red and Yellow shirts - supporters of opposing political factions in Thailand - this conflict is between older and younger generations.

How did it all start?

Thailand has a long history of political unrest and protest, but a new wave began in February, after a popular opposition political party was ordered to dissolve.

It followed elections in March last year - the first since the military seized power in 2014. For many young people and first-time voters, it was seen as a chance for change after years of military rule.

But the military had taken steps to entrench its political role, and the election saw Prayuth Chan-ocha - the military leader who led the coup - re-installed as prime minister.

The pro-democracy Future Forward Party (FFP), with its charismatic leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, garnered the third-largest share of seats and was particularly popular with young, first-time voters.

But in February, a court ruled the FFP had received a loan from Thanathorn which was deemed a donation - thus making it illegal - and the party was forced to disband.

Thousands then participated in street protests. However, these were then halted by Covid-19 restrictions, technically banning the gatherings under Thailand's coronavirus state of emergency - breaking the ban carried a possible two-year prison sentence.

But things heated up again in June when a prominent pro-democracy activist went missing.

Wanchalearm Satsaksit, who had been living in Cambodia in exile since 2014, was reportedly grabbed off the street and bundled off into a vehicle.

Protesters accused the Thai state of orchestrating his kidnapping, which the police and government have denied.

In recent months they have widened to call for curbs on the powers of King Vajiralongkorn, who now spends most of his time abroad.

The protesters have challenged the king's decision to declare Crown wealth as his personal property, making him by far the wealthiest person in Thailand. It had until now been notionally held in trust for the benefit of the people.

There have also been questions over his decision to take personal command of all military units based in Bangkok - a concentration of military power in royal hands unprecedented in modern Thailand.

What happens next?

The movement's ability to continue to amass the large-scale rallies seen in recent months will be difficult following the crackdown on public gatherings, especially with some high profile campaigners detained outside Bangkok.

However, at least one student leader has vowed that the demonstrations will continue. In footage shared widely on social media, Ms Panusaya said the government's emergency measures should be ignored.

In recent months, small "flashmob" type protests that are easy to organise and can quickly disperse have been mobilised in smaller cities, driven by social media.

And now, people of all ages, from all parts of the country - aside from die-hard royalists - appear to agree with the student leaders that the monarchy is fair game in any overhaul of Thailand's institutions, says the BBC's Jonathan Head.

It is only a matter of time before we see more of these protests in Thailand, our correspondent adds.

Whether the demonstrations will have enough of an impact to force constitutional change remains to be seen.

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Thai protests: How pro-democracy movement gained momentum

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Thousands of young people in Thailand are defying the authorities by gathering in the streets and calling for change in some of the biggest pro-democracy protests the country has seen in years. An emergency decree banning such rallies was issued by the government in an attempt to clamp down on the largely peaceful demonstrations that have also targeted the monarchy.

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Week 4- Chinese people living in Japan take part in the parade protested APA hotel

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Week 4- Chinese people living in Japan take part in the parade protested APA hotel

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This is a spontaneous protest organized by Chinese in Japan to protest APA hotel's distortion and denial of the brutal history of the Nanjing Massacre. In this protest, the Purpose of the Chinese people is clear: to safeguard the dignity of the Chinese nation on the premise of peace between China and Japan.  This seems to be a fight between some Chinese people and Japanese hotel groups, but in reality it is a fight with Japanese right-wing forces.  Although the demonstrators did their best to avoid disturbing residents and businesses, holding only hand signs and banners, police intervened to stop Japanese right-wingers, rather than those associated with the hotel, from running into the crowd.

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Rallies in Tokyo over APA hotel’s wartime aggressions denial

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Week 3-Arguments against Immigration and Freedom of Association 

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Week 3-Arguments against Immigration and Freedom of Association 

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Wellman's artical of "Immigration and Freedom of Association " mainly talked about states have rights to determine their own immigration policy  or have rights to exclude the immigrants.  Wellman raised the idea of freedom of association which is a component of self-determination. By drawing an analogy that private associations have the right to admit people to membership, but the discretion to exclude, therefore a legitimate state has rights to exclude all outsiders as well.  There are some arguments/ critiques from freedom of association. In one aspect, what connects the self determining community to a particular territory, such that the state representing that community is entitled to control who has access to the territory?  Also, even if citizens have an interest in maintaining associative ownership, it remains an open question as to whether they have a corresponding moral right.

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Week 2-Editorial：Kansas Citians don’t trust the police. How can they believe in new anti-crime plan?

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Week 2-Editorial：Kansas Citians don’t trust the police. How can they believe in new anti-crime plan?

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This editorial showed although the government has put in place a rigorous reform program for Kansas City's policing problems, citizens and civic organizations are suspicious of police practices. What caught my attention was not the content of the editorial, but the polarizing commentary at the bottom.  Some readers showed confidence or indifference in the police，but some readers angrily rebutted readers who have shown their trust and said they are the white crowds who had never exprienced anything. The difference in the response of the people caused by the targeted law enforcement by the police show the class gap.

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Week 3- The tragedy of illegal immigration：Essex lorry death

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Week 3- The tragedy of illegal immigration：Essex lorry death

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Last year, the news of the truck killing caused a stir in the society. Although there were initial rumors that the victims were Chinese, as the incident unfolded, the identity of the victims was confirmed as the Vietnamese stowaway. It is reported that stowaways hiding the truck itself is a refrigeration equipment, the environment is very cold and bad. Even if smuggling means unknown risks and even death, these People in Southeast Asia still have a deep yearning for European and American countries, which is a hangover from the colonial for a long time. In recent years, Vietnam's low-cost labor force helped to accelerate the incoming of foreign manufacturing, promote the economic development of their own, but in the exposed the lack of high-end talent.  The gap splitted between rich and poor, and dissatisfaction with the class differentiation, are  bloody facts. When the local agricultural producers and manufacturing were in excess , they could only choose to flee, although they know escape can't solve the problem fundamentally.

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The bodies of 39 people have been found in a lorry trailer in Essex.

The vehicle was found shortly before 01:40 BST at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, police said.

Essex Police said the trailer has been moved to a secure location where the bodies of those inside - a teenager and 38 adults - can be recovered.

The driver, named locally as Mo Robinson, 25, from Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

Essex Police said the trailer arrived via ferry from Zeebrugge, Belgium, into Purfleet on the River Thames.

The ship docked in the Thurrock area shortly after 00:30, the force said.

It is believed the lorry then left the port about 35 minutes later.

Deputy Chief Constable Pippa Mills said identifying the victims remained a "number one priority", but was expected to be a "lengthy process".

The National Crime Agency said it had sent officers to assist and identify any "organised crime groups who may have played a part".

Essex lorry deaths: Latest updates

Why do people risk their lives to get to the UK?

Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, said the trailer appeared to be a refrigerated unit, where temperatures could be as low as -25C.

He described conditions for anyone inside as "absolutely horrendous".

A spokesman for the Bulgarian foreign affairs ministry confirmed the truck was registered in the country.

"The Scania truck was registered in Varna (on the east coast) under the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen," he said.

"Police said that it is highly unlikely that they are Bulgarians," he added.

Police have appealed for witnesses and anyone with information about the lorry's route to contact them.

The force said it believed the tractor unit - or front part - of the lorry had come from Northern Ireland.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was an "unimaginable tragedy and truly heartbreaking".

Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, he said: "I know that the thoughts and prayers of all members will be with those who lost their lives and their loved ones.

"I'm receiving regular updates. The Home Office will work closely with Essex Police as we establish exactly what has happened."

'Contempt for life'

Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was " shocked and saddened", while Thurrock MP Jackie Doyle-Price said it was " sickening news".

During PMQs, Ms Doyle-Price said: "To put 39 people into a locked metal container shows a contempt for human life that is evil. The best thing we can do in memory of those victims is to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice."

Mr Johnson responded saying "all such traders in human beings should be hunted down and brought to justice".

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said it was an "unbelievable human tragedy", adding: "Can we just think for a moment of what it must have been like for those 39 people, obviously in a desperate and dangerous situation, for their lives to end, suffocated to death in a container?"

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told the Dail that investigations would be undertaken to establish if the lorry had passed through Ireland.

Tricky task of catching the people smugglers

Since the Calais migrant camps were shut three years ago and security measures were increased at Dover and the Channel Tunnel, people smugglers have increasingly moved to other routes.

Asked which ports are being used, the National Crime Agency told me: "All of them."

More dangerous methods are being used to get human cargo through.

The most common one is being hidden in the back of a lorry, but increasingly commercial shipping containers are being used, sometimes even refrigerated ones of the type seen on the back of the truck in Essex.

Risks are substantial for the migrants, who can pay £10,000 or more for a space on these vehicles.
Read more: Tricky task of catching the people smugglers
How many migrants have died in transit?

The number of migrants who die in transit has been recorded by the UN since 2014.

Since then, five bodies of suspected migrants have been found in lorries or containers in the UK:

2014: An Afghan migrant was found dead at Tilbury Docks, Essex. He was in a shipping container, with 34 Afghans who survived

2015: Two migrants were found dead in a wooden crate in a warehouse in Branston, Staffordshire. The crate had been sent from Italy

2016: An 18-year-old migrant was crushed while clinging to the underside of a lorry in Banbury, Oxfordshire

2016: A body was found in the back of a lorry in Kent, which had travelled from France

Data was not collected in the same way before the migrant crisis began in 2014, but such deaths are not new.

In 2000, 58 Chinese migrants were found suffocated to death in a lorry at Dover.

In 2015, the bodies of 71 people were found in an abandoned lorry on an Austrian motorway. Police suspected the vehicle was part of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human trafficking operation.

Essex Police has set up a casualty bureau for anyone concerned about relatives to call.

The British Red Cross has confirmed staff and volunteers were helping "those dealing with this terrible tragedy".

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Lorry driver held as 39 found dead in trailer

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The bodies of 39 people have been found in a lorry trailer in Essex. The vehicle was found shortly before 01:40 BST at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, police said. Essex Police said the trailer has been moved to a secure location where the bodies of those inside - a teenager and 38 adults - can be recovered.