QUOTES: I'm just about finishing up (well, finishing up writing, anyway... editing to follow) a paper I've been working on over the summer on solidarity, and I just wanted to share with y'all probably the most amusing exchange of all the ones I've read for the paper:
Michael Walzer, "The Moral Standing of States" 212: "Foreigners are in no position to deny the reality of that union (between a people and its government, whatever the type), or rather, they are in no position to attempt anything more than speculative denials. They don't know enough about its history, and they have no direct experience, and can form no concrete judgments, of the conflicts and harmonies, the historical choices and cultural affinities, the loyalties and the resentments, that underlie it. Hence their conduct, in the first instance at least, cannot be determined by either knowledge or judgment."
David Luban addresses this best in "The Romance of the Nation-State" (395): "I find no plausibility in this…why presume we are ignorant? We aren't, usually. There are, after all, experts, experienced travelers, expatriates, scholars and spies; libraries have been written about the most remote cultures. Bafflingly, Walzer does not mention the obvious sources of information even to dismiss them."
Interestingly (or perhaps psychotically, depending on your perspective) I've acquired about 20 single-spaced typed pages of notes to myself (not including collation of quotes from sources--just potential lines of argument, most of which I've dropped). Also, every time I start writing, I think of this exchange from NewsRadio:
Dave: How do I know this isn't just 24 pages of hysterical ranting?
Bill: I thought that's what you were going for.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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