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Ideas for 'poems', 'Anarchical Fallacies: on the Declaration of Rights' and 'works'

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2 ideas

24. Political Theory / A. Basis of a State / 3. Natural Values / c. Natural rights
Natural rights are nonsense, and unspecified natural rights is nonsense on stilts [Bentham]
     Full Idea: Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
     From: Jeremy Bentham (Anarchical Fallacies: on the Declaration of Rights [1796])
     A reaction: If you want your opinion to be remembered, express it memorably! I take natural rights to be the basic principles and values which are obvious to almost everyone when they come for formulate legal rights (which are the only true rights).
24. Political Theory / D. Ideologies / 9. Communism
Levinas says Marxism is the replacement of individualist ethics, by solidarity and sociality [Levinas, by Critchley]
     Full Idea: For Levinas, Marxism is the absorption of the ethical in the socioeconomic, and so it is the disappearance of the face-to-face relation and the privileging of relations of solidarity and anonymous sociality, which he calls 'socialism'.
     From: report of Emmanuel Levinas (works [1956]) by Simon Critchley - Impossible Objects: interviews 1
     A reaction: Startling, if you are not used to this sort of thing. If you are in trouble, I should help you, not because you are you, or a human being, but because you are a member of my group? So what about the Good Samaritan? Or solidarity with humanity? Animals?