The Rise of Absurdity in Western Philosophical and Political Views

Abstract

Classical liberalism failed when philosophical thought turned away from the Scottish School toward the German school. The solution is to look back, not to Kant as a starting point in an effort to move forward, but to some of Kant’s contemporaries, those that the criticisms of Kant and other German school philosophers eventually silenced and banished from consideration. I propose that the Enlightenment went wrong when we eventually abandoned the Scottish School for the German School. Over the last two hundred plus years, philosophy has progressively elaborated upon ideas that were flawed, slightly at first, at the start into what now might be simply called absurdity.

Furthermore, I propose that the acceptance of Neoplatonic ideas of Thomas Hobbes by the Federalist, and their eventual total victory in United States domestic politics and interpretation of law, combined with other factors such as passions of the Transcendental generation and a progressive increase in bad philosophical ideas in the form of ideologies, completed the destruction of Classical Liberalism/Republicanism and lead to absurdity in economic thought and policy, as well as political theory and politics. These factors affect not only policy and history in the United States but have come to shape geopolitics and history.

Keywords: philosophy, absurdity

JEL Classification: P16, Z28