All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 395 pp., £19.99 pb. (ISBN 978-06312319682) The Threat of Race is an extraordinarily wide...

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Is it becoming more obvious today that the thinkers of the post-Hegelian era were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit’? Is our era the era of the ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy? Celebrating 200 years since the publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit this volume addresses these questions through a renewed encounter with Hegel’s thought.

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Global Citizenship and Higher Education: A Scoping Review of the Empirical Evidence:

Part 1: the essential nature and current condition of modernity the modern turn to speculative philosophy. Part 2: the development of the notion in Hegel's "Logic" the judgement, the syllogism and objectivity in Hegel's "Logic" the categories of logic and real philosophy. Part 3: the categorical syllogism and the concepts of family, love and intersubjective identity the family and personality - marriage and intersubjective identities the family and personality - family capital, children and the family's dissolution sexism, heteronormativity and plural sexualities the family and the law.

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A spectre is haunting white Australia, the spectre of Indigenous sovereignty. All the powers of old Australia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: politicians and judges, academics and media proprietors, businesspeople and church leaders.

Toula Nicolacopoulos

Papers

Racism, Foreigner Communities and the Onto-pathology of White Australian Subjectivity

The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking

Global Citizenship and Higher Education: A Scoping Review of the Empirical Evidence:

Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love: An Essay on Sexualities, Family, and the Law

Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins