E16 Getting Through Security Part VI

2025-05-26

This is the audio version of the sixth part of Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020) by Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook. The fundamental problem with security is epistemological: since the enterprise is oriented towards the future, what is to be done cannot be known. Thus the prevailing mood, for all the pretense toward rationality, is anxiety. Here begins an elaboration, and critique, of Weber’s idea of bureaucracy. Here, as e...

This is the audio version of the sixth part of Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020) by Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook.

The fundamental problem with security is epistemological: since the enterprise is oriented towards the future, what is to be done cannot be known. Thus the prevailing mood, for all the pretense toward rationality, is anxiety. Here begins an elaboration, and critique, of Weber’s idea of bureaucracy.

Here, as elsewhere, and in a sense in the German critical tradition, we are using the social as the foundation for philosophical inquiry.

My apologies for the sound quality. Rough year, and these are the raw files.

Comments (3)