I-We

It gets a bit tiring listening to the endless diatribes against America. The other day a beard wrote how pissed off he was over American "incursions" into the land of the pure and American bombings. Fine. Agree. But you know, once, just once, I'd like to hear those same sonofabitch maulvis talk about America's role in Bosnia or Kosovo and to show a fraction of that indignation when it comes to suicide bombings by their so-called brethren.

Five women were buried alive a few weeks back in Baluchistan. Their reaction: eternal silence.

I don't know. I mean, it's like those Muslims who endlessly harp on about Palestine but will not have a word to say about the genocide of the Darfurians or Saddam's massacre of the Kurds. The Chomsky-brigade! I simply fail to understand why Pakistanis or British-Pakistanis are so obsessed by Palestine.


Fundamental assumption: the individual is the unit of analysis-groups, families, class, unions do not make decisions or the individual makes them independently of his identity, autonomously. In fact, what is society but the collection of individuals in such a view..nothing greater than the sum of its parts, certainly not a social totality.

Markets are then,by extension, nothing but the space of individualized interactions (space, not place), meeting the 'needs of strangers' in a timeless zone, free from culture, society, the polity, power relations, rather than embedded in them (Polanyi, Braudel, Granovetter).

'I' is related to a particular view of freedom. Markets and 'negative liberty'. "Anarchic" (Gauthier).

Can we then say that this shared action is good for us? Or is trust, co-operation, a matter of our own self-interest? What of deontological approaches: our commitment to shared moral values?...a 'we' rather than a self-sufficient 'I' that is independent of the world (Descartes). Group rationality? The world is, then, a constraint to unfettered thought. (Gellner: language and solitude).

On the other hand, we are reluctant to submit the 'I' to the general will or the authority of the wider community (security over freedom, the church, the state vs...)

But to say 'I and we' is already to posit two entities when in reality we chalk out different spheres all the time, and understand that they intermingle. The atomized individual hardly seems to be a person at all! [poor judgements: the gambler]. Are society, culture political affiliations, professional commitments, language etc only a constraint on the I' or is there participation ? Is the 'I' itself constituted by its relation with the 'we' (including what is excluded, the other): I-we.

Bentham (Thatcher): "community is a fictitious body". For the conservatives the anarchy of unfettered liberalism poses a threat to order that can only be stemmed by Tradition, authority, rules, the family ..the tribe. On the other hand, liberal bourgeois order is thought of as peaceful, a break away from the irrational that these forces are said to embody. Organic or mechanical solidarity?