Ulysees

I’ve retaken up reading Ulysees. I started reading it years ago after reading excerpts in the weekend papers celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the day on which the novel was set (16 June 1904). However, like many, I found it difficult especially as I was working very hard on my thesis.

Maybe I’ll read it by Bloomsday. Will post whether I do or not.

Andrew Norton’s political identity survey

Andrew Norton is asking people to take a political identity survey on his blog.

Andrew writes:

To try to see to what people with different intellectual political identities believe, and on what they agree and disagree, I have devised an online survey of about 40 questions. There is a question on party support near the end, but the main point of the survey is to see what people willing to identify as classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and social democrats believe, regardless of their party affiliations.

It’ll be interesting to see the results. Having taken it, I have to say that I found some of the questions not very straightforward to answer.

On the boundary between the personal and the public

I have lately become more interested in what might constitute the proper boundary between the personal and the public, i.e., what is the extent to which entities external to a person should be able to impact on the decisions of a person. The key word is “should”, a question that appears to me to receive far too limited general consideration, as opposed to people optimising their own circumstances in light of decisions of others which of course we all do in practical life.

There is no obvious answer to this, of course. It might be said that it is proper for the public to impact on the personal when the circumstances are such that the impact of an individual on others can only be mediated through some non-personal means. This question also manifests itself through our daily lives: the interaction of a resident in a block of units with the body corporate of that block, a proposed development being examined by a local Council, and the interaction of businesses with the state. I suspect that people take a practical point of view in relation to this question, i.e., that they just have to deal with the nature of interactions. I certainly do.

However, the extraordinary power of the state often drives this question into full and frank view. People may accept that the state can act in the ways it does and that this impacts them. There is a prior question, though, about whether the state (in this case) should act in such ways. As discussed by numerous political scientists, the interaction of majoritarian democracy and the personal sphere is very problematic, and a gross appeal to “majority support” as a basis for impacting on the personal sphere is very poor.

A question arises as to whether the boundary between the personal and what is subject to others, could be better drawn. This is a very interesting question.