Chris Hedges, teaching inmates marx, weber, locke…

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_intellectuals_we_abandon_20160904

“…I taught his “Politics and Vision” last spring in a maximum-security prison in Rahway, N.J., to students earning their B.A. degrees. Intellectuals in our society who are poor, especially those of color, are trapped in environments and schools, and too often prisons, that make learning difficult and often impossible.

In prison these intellectuals, struggling against odds that most in this hall cannot imagine, convert their cells into libraries. My class was consumed by “Politics and Vision”—Machiavelli’s advocacy of “calculated violence” and call for the power elites to be skillful pretenders and dissemblers; Locke’s ability to convert property into an instrument for coercing citizens into political obedience; Weber’s understanding that the modern hero, unlike the classical hero battling fortuna, had to struggle against a bloodless, faceless system “where contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures” and where “even charisma has been bureaucratized.” The ideological mantra of corporate oppression—sine ira et studio, without scorn or bias—is, as Weber knew, a weapon to crush those with the passion, outrage, courage and vision to effect change. Wolin warned in the book that “each individual bore the awful responsibility for choice at this ultimate level but each was denied anything like the scientist’s sense of certainty.” He quoted Weber, whom he loved: “The ultimate possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.”

This course expanded, at the requests of my students, from the required 12 class meetings to 24 and then 36. As they sat in a circle in the prison classroom week after week hunched over the text, my students began to discern that Wolin had another quality besides brilliance. He cared. And he cared about them. They were his demos. When we finished Marx, the class fell silent. One of my students then lamented that they had been waiting all semester for Marx and now it was over. I promised that once we had completed the book I would give a final lecture on Marx. By then you could feel Wolin’s presence in the classroom….” see link