Monday 25 February 2013

The Philosophy of Poverty and the Poverty of Philosophy

The government of the United States of America has persuaded many people, and not j u s t the majority of its own citizens, to see its country's victory i n the Cold War as a victory of the ideas of freedom and democracy, j u s t as i t presents the events of 9 / 1 1 as an attack upon those same values. But to what extent can these values be understood without reference to the material conditions of society? Freedom and democracy tend to have a different meaning depending on whether one lives i n a r i c h or a poor country, j u s t as they mean different things to the elite and to the underclass of a country. This opens u p a different way of reading the situation and i t emerges even f r om the Bush administration's own major policy  document, if one reads i t carefully enough. The National Security Strategy of the United States (henceforth NSS), published i n September 2002, acknowledges that poverty and inequality are among the causes of terror:

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