In Terry Eagleton's (1) The Idea of Culture, the author provides a discussion of the idea of "culture," an idea he lists among "one of the two or three most complex words in the English language." In a similar vein of thought, in Culture as Praxis Zygmunt Bauman (1) asserts that "The unyielding ambiguity of the concept of culture is notorious." Eagleton shows how culture is a concept that derives from nature. However, culture alters nature. As Eagleton (3), "Nature produces culture which changes nature." He also makes it clear that concepts of culture are most always connected to discussions of power, authority and government.
In Eagleton's view there is an intimate connection between culture, human subjectivity and government. As Eagleton (50) writes, "Since true authority involves the internalizing of the law, it is on human subjectivity itself, in all its apparent freedom and privacy, that power seeks to impress itself." In this form, culture becomes a form of universal subjectivity that operates internally in individuals. Eagleton (8) compares this relationship to the state being "the presence of the universal within the particularist realm of civil society." In this sense, individuals are governed by the state in a particular culture, but these individuals are also capable of altering the nature of the state.
Eagleton (50) explains that those in authority cannot govern successfully if they do not have some level of understanding of "men and women in their secret desires and aversions, not just in their voting habits or social aspirations." One might say that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had a better grasp on this in American culture than did John McCain and the Republican Party in the recent Presidential election. In this sense, the governed altered the state and governance by electing the candidate to office that most reflected their cultural concerns and issues.
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