Well, if we develop something, we need to understand what we are doing, right? If we just do whatever we feel for, it is not really going anywhere constructive. Research and development needs to be based on sound theoretical ideas to work. I mean, if you want to build a house, you need to know mathematics, how the different building blocks should fit, a fair bit about plumbing, electrical work, architecture and so on.
The same goes for political development, you need to know what you are doing, otherwise you often just end up in being sucked into the never ending cycle of dog eats dog.
There are different attitudes to political development these days, but my feeling is, that they rest upon the wrong foundation. Usually it is a late marxist analysis on some economical foundation. I like economics, my greatest succes has actually been to point on to a Smithsonian developmental technique, but this is purely philosophical and not numbers.
You see Marx was more than a capitalist analytical thinker, he was also a platonist. The idea of the commune is Platonic, and Marx followed the fascination Plato had with Sparta, and tried to copy that. The whole idea about a wealthfarestate is really an overblown version of Sparta.
Now, being an ardent neoplatonist myself. I believe that Marx were right in some areas, and wrong in other areas. Marx was a good mathematician, no doubt, but his ideas of political order were not so good as the ideas brought forth in the French revolution. I suppose democracy as an idea was taken already, or something, I dont know.
Now the pure Marxist state has been abandoned by most countries, because they usually end up in a dictatorship and moral coldness.
Why? Because, as I see it, Marx took only the political framework of Plato, and he rejected the ideological framework of Plato. Why is that? Because as Plato were many thing, there was one thing he was most of all; he was a metaphysician, an academic on the theories of spirit.
The keen reader will have a look on the above picture, and you can see Plato in the centre pointing upwards, to G-d.
If Marx had done a spiritual dialectics instead of a material dialectics, it might just have worked. Because the absence of spirit in a political framework will take away the basic motivation of people to do good.
That is really the key to understand modern socialism I think. To understand that the discourse should be spiritual and not only material.
If you take that leap, you will see a whole new world, and actually have a chance to make it work.
I think that that is one of the main reasons mr. Obama was such a novelty, because he on one hand believes in spirit, (hope) and at the other hand believes in the materiale world (change).
This new item of political discourse has not been realised at all at the university level. But when it does, it will create a whole new strain of political debate, and a new beckoning path for people to follow.
That is true political disruption, that is Change.
G-d bless mr. Barack Obama for his new brave ideas.