Political Theorist Quotes & Sayings

Have you ever read any Hannah Arendt?" I must look lost, because he explains further. "She's a political theorist."
" Anyway, she wrote this book about the trial of a Nazi lieutenant named Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s. Arendt was a Jew who left Germany during Hitler's reign, and during the trial this guy had to face up to all the atrocities he committed. Things only a monster could conceive of. However, he was examined by psychologists, and it was determined that he wasn't a psychopath, that in fact he was entirely normal. This left Arendt to determine that perfectly ordinary, everyday people were capable of crimes normally associated with only the most depraved, wicked members of society. She called it the banality of evil. — L. H. Cosway

political environment. But there is always a thin line between a peaceful election and armed conflict. We acknowledge this close relationship in the way we use martial jargon to discuss our politics. Candidates battle for states, campaigns are run from war rooms, commercials are part of a media blitz, and campaign volunteers are foot soldiers. "Politics," the Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz said, "is the womb in which war develops." Violent conflict is born out in other nations where the martial language of politics is not metaphorical. In the same year that McCain and Obama — Scott Farris

Many people have written about the economic meaning of globalization; in One World Peter Singer explains its moral meaning. His position is carefully developed, his tone is moderate, but his conclusions are radical and profound. No political theorist or moral philosopher, no public official or political activist, can afford to ignore his arguments. — Michael Walzer

As the systems theorist Fritjof Capra points out, humanity's social, political, economic, and environmental plights are all manifestations of a cultural crisis brought about by adherence to outdated conceptual models ... Under the reductionist paradigm, humans' concept of nature devolved from that of living organism to machine, and the predominant value system came to be based on the domination and control of nature rather than respect for and harmony with the natural world. — Alex Gerber Jr.

As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda
the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government
in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society. — Richard Heinberg

For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it's always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around. — David Graeber

as eminent political theorist Hannah Arendt saw back in 1951: "Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. — Brooke Gladstone