Saving the lost ones

Simon Glendinning

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In an essay on the modern idea of political equality, Bernard Williams contrasts what he calls ‘the human point of view’ with a point of view marked by what he calls a ‘technical or professional attitude’. While the latter is concerned with conspicuous structures of someone’s life that might be by occupied by another, the former concerns an attitude towards a singular person, what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’ – an attitude characteristically exemplified in the relation to the other who is a friend. It is the one who is in view under such a singularising gaze that seems to be lost as soon as we start counting others, counting our friends. The paper explores the general haunting of the modern-Western idea of all people’s equality by the hazy spectre of what is disclosed by this singularising gaze, and asks how we might organise a response politically to the in each case unique and singular relation to the unique and singular other we call the friend – the one who is both altogether other and my equal.

Keywords: equality; democracy; socialism; singularity; friend; soul (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 B24 P2 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2022-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Oxford Literary Review, 1, July, 2022, 44(1), pp. 89 - 109. ISSN: 0305-1498

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115457/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:115457

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().