Philippine Democracy Online

By Christopher Ryan Maboloc       According to Herbert Marcuse, one of the accomplishments of modern society “is the non-terroristic, democratic decline of freedom – the efficient, smooth, reasonable un-freedom which seems to have its roots in technical progress itself.” By implication, Jeffry Ocay writes that it is worthwhile to examine closely how modern politics and its technology as an apparatus of power, to use the words of Mario Bunge, has been employed to “to control, transform or create things or processes, natural or social,” in order to achieve “some practical end deemed to be valuable.”

by Christopher Ryan Maboloc         Hungry and dying, without water or medical provisions, and pushed from territorial waters, the fate of thousands of Rohingyas fleeing Burma who are stranded in decrepit wooden boats, once again emphasizes that the claim that sovereignty above all else define for any country the meaning of justice. This discussion all brings us back to Hegel and Hobbes and what the meaning of an “imagined community” as coined by Benedict Anderson is all about. For Anderson, a nation is a politically constructed concept. It points to a perceived commonality and belief that people share in terms of their identities which determine for them the very terms of their association – social, political and economic. Self-realization, in this respect, depends on a set of values that citizens in an associative relation share with each other. National solidarity, which dictates how people frame national and foreign policies, is grounded on those things...