BENJAMIN STUDEBAKER ATTRIBUTES modern social and political thought to Stoicism, which he understands to be at heart Neo-Platonist — by contrast with Plato’s own Platonism. In his view, it comes down to us from late Hellenism — Alexandrianism? But is capitalism Epicurean, as Studebaker avers, and socialism Stoic? Studebaker rejects the vision of socialism as society going beyond politics, which he interprets as the impossible or undesirable state without “disturbance”: an inhuman dystopia.
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BOURGEOIS SOCIETY FIRST emerges in the Renaissance, but finds its political realization with the revolt of the Third Estate. “Society,” according to the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno quoting J. C. Bluntschli, “is a concept of the Third Estate.” They set about conceptualizing and politically realizing changes that had already come to pass in emergent bourgeois society’s outstripping of traditional civilization and its Great Chain of Being.
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UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.
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Zoomers are not having sex. Sexual activity among young people is lower than ever. The expansion of online hook-up and dating apps has not changed this trend. While around 50% of 18- to 29-year-olds reported using dating apps in 2020, Generation Z seems poised to continue the decline of sexual activity since the mid-20th century. Really, this extends to all social activity: we drink less, go out less, transgress less, and socialize less than our parents and grandparents.
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The LGBT “community” has long grappled with internal fractures, particularly in relation to the distinction between sexuality and gender identity. The presumption that those who love non-traditionally and those who orient their gender non-traditionally share unified political interests has always been tenuous.
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