Psychology, Relativism and Politics New York University Press

Returning to a pre-Marxist perspective to provide a political philosophy for the left that is based upon psychology rather than on "objective circumstances of human existence", "Psychology, Relativism and Politics" suggests that the principal political debates of the 21st century in the developed world will be over the forms of political institutions, and that those debates will reflect relative preferences for forms of understanding issues in the political world.;This book attempts to build into current standards for political equity a theory of the psychological "price" different personalities have to pay within different governmental systems in order to operate at their best. Kreml argues that fundamental epistemological arguments over the nature of analytic and synthetic cognitions (as debated, for instance, by Kant and Hegel) have in fact been debates reflecting different psychological preferences for different forms of knowledge, and that standards of equity have to apportion psychological "prices" too.;In Part 2, Kreml applies this perspective to the American government, arguing that its inefficacies result in large part from cognitive imbalances that decentralized cognitively analytic structures have created to prevent the emergence of the synthetic cognition.