PSIR - Strategy, resources & discussion

@Nadir_Shah i used the book by Subrata Mukherjee and Sushila Ramaswamy. It covers some aspects not in the notes and explains them clearly. But it doesn’t have Gramsci and Arendt. The Stanford docs are great for Arendt as suggested above and for Gramsci you can get some extra points from this one (don’t remember where I got it from).

Gramsci 1.pdf 

Anyone who can help in this? Short notes (sample pics) to be made after understanding a topic for quick revision.

@AzadHindFauz @Porus @Caesar 

@Villanelle @mightyraju @whatonly 

DM me. 

Thank you for helping me.

@AzadHindFauz @whatonly @mightyraju 

If you’re a beginner you’re preparing for 2020 right? Try reading the IGNOU material. That is the simplest explanation you’ll find and reading other sources will become easier after that. They have chapters on thinkers in their BA or MA course. However they don’t have Arendt, and Gramsci is covered in very little detail. For those two, you’ll need to read from separate sources (mentioned above). Just the IGNOU material won’t be enough though. Ma’am’s notes have all the thinkers from Plato to Arendt. If you are able to gain a clear understanding of every concept from the notes then you’re set. If you’re having difficulty you’ll have to read one of the standard books (Brian Nelson, Mukherjee & Ramaswamy etc). It is time-consuming, but necessary because you need to have absolute clarity on every topic. 

And don’t worry, engineering background is not a disadvantage. Can actually be quite helpful in my experience. Good luck :)

@Nadir_Shah BrianRNelson.pdf

Check if it's getting downloaded 

difficult to find critique on arendt, she is the most consistent thinkers whom we have studied

however i would have used the following  criticism

1. her justification that it was not Eichmann rather the culture of obedience which gives rise to totalitarianism takes away the onus from human action. In any system there is a culture of obedience ,either to law or to monarch, each individual cant decide right from wrong for themselves, it would amount to anarchy

2. Her idea of zoon politikon= Farid Zakarias view that constitutionalism should preeceed democractic participation, (mill as a reluctant democrat).

also political culture theorists argue that excessive pol participation leads to mobocracy. 

cant think of anything else.

@MarcusA Very true. I mainly was looking for critiques to see what could possibly be said. 

Both good points, thanks! 

I also think notwithstanding her redefinition of the political, her criticism of the “rise of the private” would still be open to the feminist “the personal is the political” argument.

Pasting this is from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Might not be directly useful in an answer but still found it interesting:

Marxists have likewise pointed to the consequences of confining matters of material distribution and economic management to the extra-political realm of the oikos, thereby delegitimating questions of material social justice, poverty, and exploitation from political discussion and contestation. The shortcoming of this distinction in Arendt’s work is amply illustrated by a well-known and often-cited incident. While attending a conference in 1972, she was put under question by the Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Albrecht Wellmer, regarding her distinction of the “political” and the “social,” and its consequences. Arendt pronounced that housing and homelessness (themes of the conference) were not political issues, but that they were external to the political as the sphere of the actualization of freedom; the political is about human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos. It may be said that Arendt’s attachment to a fundamental and originary understanding of political life precisely misses the fact that politics is intrinsically concerned with the contestation of what counts as a legitimate public concern, with the practice of politics attempting to introduce new, heretofore ‘non-political’ issues, into realm of legitimate political concern.

Thankyou very much for the help.

Good luck brother.

This is mine. Haha. Where did you get this? 

I think I posted this on the old forum platform.