A Quick Thought on SR and Politics

The most mystifying response I’ve seen to the discussions of SR and politics has been to see SR’s resolutely apolitical nature as conservative or nihilistic. On the contrary, the beauty of SR for politically interested people is that it forces one to do politics. Unlike every continental philosophy that proclaims itself intrinsically political, SR offers no such comfort to the armchair activist. In my perspective (and let’s be clear that I am not speaking for all of SR!), SR provides no theoretical camouflage to pretend that doing philosophy is somehow radical. Instead, to do politics, one must actually get involved, either hands-on or through writing explicitly about political situations. This is what I mean when I say that the positive political outcome of SR is to restore politics to its own relative autonomy. SR, for me, is the liberation of politics from philosophy. To do good politics, we don’t need good metaphysics, or even a metaphysics. (Though I must read Benjamin Noys’ work on this claim. Perhaps I will change my mind!)

[Note: I'm closing comments on this post, just so all the comments can be filtered into the post before. No use spreading the discussion over numerous posts.]