Word: cottoned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those social studies concentrators "versed in deliberative democracy," I was a bit surprised to read senior Thomas B. Cotton's column ("Habermas Has Descended," Dec. 5). It's not every day one reads about the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas in the newspaper. Unfortunately, my surprise did not lead to gratification in this instance, because it seems to me that Cotton's understanding of Habermas, leaving much to be desired, has led him to some stray conclusions...
Essentially, Cotton concludes that deliberative democratic theory conflicts in a strong sense with representative democracy. After summarizing Habermas's vision of society as "a debating society in which everyone talks incessantly about everything," Cotton informs us that asking everyone (including the most unvirtuous of souls) "to deliberate continually on the most fundamental issues is not just impractical and irrational--it is dangerous...
...escape the inevitable "vicious" and/or "imbecilic" outcomes of this process, Cotton advocates a system of elected representatives who will "likely possess the virtues necessary to deliberate well." Sounds like a representative democracy is a great deal: the masses shed the burden of thinking about those weighty issues (about which they have nothing intelligent to say anyway), and let the politicians do all the dirty work. Why would Habermas be so silly to as to argue against such a wonderful system...
...there are some problems with Cotton's formulation. For one, nowhere does Habermas say that we should abandon elected government. As he writes in "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," "Discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration, but can only influence it. This influence is limited to procurement and withdrawal of legitimation. Communicative power cannot supply a substitute for the systematic inner logic of public bureaucracies" (in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun...
Degas' painting underwent a radical shift during his time in New Orleans; unfortunately, the reproductions of his paintings in the book make that shift less clear. Benfey highlights a pair of paintings to illustrate the change, the photographically realistic A Cotton Office in New Orleans and the much blurrier, Impressionistic Cotton Merchants in New Orleans. Office, as the frontispiece, is the only painting in the book to be reproduced in color. Merchants (visible in full color at the Fogg), like the other well-chosen and well-placed illustrations, is only a small black-and-white reproduction. The loss of color...