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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Saturday, January 4, 2014

A QUICK REPLY TO ARFAMO

Let me offer an historical answer to arfamo posted comment. In the sixties, when I wrote In Defense of Anarchism, the US had a universal male military draft. During the Viet Nam War, a great many men were ordered to report for induction into the Army and then to fight in Viet Nam. Some went willingly. Many went unwillingly. And there were a not inconsiderable number of young men who anguished over the question whether they had an obligation to obey even though they opposed the policy, BECAUSE AMERICA IS A DEMOCRATIC POLITY. Now, you may dismiss such considerations as foolish, but to those faced with the draft, they made a very great deal of difference. My little book was, among other things, a direct attack on this principled defense of the obligation to obey in a democracy. The disaster of the Viet Nam War almost destroyed the Army, in response to which the military high command switched to an all volunteer army so that the US would never again have to justify ordering citizens to fight. This switch to an all volunteer army was the last step in transforming the US into an imperial power. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars would have been next to impossible with universal conscription. I never considered my book an argument for a utopian anarchist society. I have always believed that we must begin wherever we are in trying to change the world.

3 comments:

Superfluous Man said...

Another topic:
Could you add your name to this list. And get many of your present and former colleagues to do so also.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/195482023/List-Signatories-Declaration

Michael Llenos said...

Dr. Wolff,

Has anyone covered the subject of the 'back door draft' thoroughly? The only book I have read so far, on the War on Terror, is Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor. but that book was so massively laced with anti-liberal propaganda that I wondered if I was getting an objective perspective, at all, of any part of the War on Terror.

However, the one idea that I liked overall about the book, was its quasi-hidden message of karma. Marcus Luttrell, as a Christian, took the last vote of letting some (innocent, or not so innocent?) Afghan men go, which, in the end, signed his team's doom. But the idea was that because he made the final decision to let those men go, God spared his life.

I think I read the book over two years ago, and I thought it was a great story, but I have always wondered, since I read it, how very subjective the narration was to begin with?

Michael Llenos said...

By the way, I don't know if there truly was a message of karma, in the book, and put there by Luttrell, in letting those men go. That's why I called it a quasi- hidden message of karma. I just felt that perhaps that was put there in the book deliberately. Albeit, I could be wrong.