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How Heidegger shows us the meaning of society

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What is society? It isn’t a thing or an object like other things or objects are. In that sense, Margaret Thatcher was broadly right in saying: “There is no such thing as society”. But we do use the word widely to refer to an ‘it’ – society – so though we cannot pin it down in the physical real world, society undoubtedly has a reality in consciousness, for us. We might for example think of it as a ‘subjective object’, albeit something which is not so much thought as felt. The philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote directly about society as far as I am aware, but his reflections on the nature of ‘being’ – of human beings and other beings, including the inanimate objects of our world – show how we are each connected into the world of other people and objects. As such he sketches out how what we might call the architecture or internal wiring of society works, and thereby provides us with a powerful way of conceiving what it is that makes ‘us’ us. One of the few examples He

Karl Polanyi and the politics and economics of mass immigration

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I’m not trained in economics but I do know a bit and have been intermittently digging through Karl Polanyi’s book ‘ The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time ; said to be a core text for Ed Miliband and his close political gang. Perhaps the most interesting and arresting ideas in The Great Transformation concern what Polanyi called the ‘ fictitious commodities’ : land, labour and money. I was reminded of this when reading a post by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog yesterday. Dillow's piece jumped off from the most read post on this blog – about how our immigration debate misses the main point by focusing only on economic aspects and treating how people feel as somehow illegitimate (something which is thankfully no longer the case – partly due to the excellent recent work of British Future ). In his fascinating argument to which I’ll digress for a while here, Dillow discusses how and why public opinion differs from

In Praise of Yvette Cooper - for standing up against the paralysing ‘liberal’ consensus

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has helped ignite another of those increasingly regular cyclones of protest from our liberal-left publications about virtually any talk about immigration. Cooper’s speech on ‘Labour’s approach to immigration’ addressed this sort of attitude head-on in her introductory passage, in which she said: “ On the one hand we now have an arms race of rhetoric involving the Tories and UKIP over immigration. UKIP are exploiting peoples’ fears, fuelling anxiety and division, and David Cameron is racing to catch up. Between them they promote the idea that immigration is all and always bad, and should always be stopped. On the other hand some liberal commentators seem to think talking about immigration at all is reactionary, and concern about immigration is irrational. They give the impression that immigration is all and always good, and should all be encouraged. Both sides shout at each other. Neither are right. And most people don’t agree