Saturday, September 27, 2008

The Circle Theory


This is something I've been kicking around for awhile, and which I decided to put down on paper.

The idea is...well, I'll let my chart explain. Tell me what you think. I found myself being universally negative, even about things I agree with, so don't take it to heart.

Click to view full-size.

2 Comments:

lizz said...

Um, intresting. I don't think I completely understood it.

meg said...

It seems to me there are a lot of political theories that are left out of this circle.
I mean, for starters, non-socialist forms of fascism, of which there are plenty.
Secondly, it doesn't seem to represent well the role accorded to the state by many of these perspectives, and doesn't really explain where explicitly anti-state political philosophies sit on it. I think the fact that you have free market ideas and imperialism in the same quadrant speaks to this problem. Where would leftist anarchism and extreme forms of right-wing libertarianism sit on this circle? Would they be close or far apart?
And what is the horizontal axis supposed to represent? Is it meant to be the 'left' or 'right' nature of various conceptions of the social order? (In which case, what constitutes each?)
Also, Barack Obama is hardly a communist. The dude's main advisors are all pulled from places like the University of Chicago Law School - much more a bastion of conservative legal theory than of communism.

I do like attempts to graph political ideas in a more complex fashion than the usual linear spectrum of right/left, though. I think this is an interesting way of doing it

Question for you (since I don't read your blog all the time) - do you necessarily think having a government equals fascism? That's kind of the sense I get from this. Which is perhaps why I find it unclear exactly where the state sits on the circle.

-megan