Our Own Power to Act

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Notes

1. This is just temporary. I will return to using “democracy” as soon as the essay is over. I think we desperately need to reclaim democracy from its Lockean corruption and advocate for it insistently. It is our idea, and it is the idea we need.

2. Planners all know the list well: mass transit, affordable housing, walkability, density, mixed-use, equity, social justice, etc.

3. Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, First Part, Chapter XI, “The New Idol.”

4. The Latin phrase appears in his De Cive, in the Preface.

5. This quality of transcendence is what I consider to be the reason why many capitalize the ‘s’ in State, a convention I adopt throughout this essay.

6. Spinoza calls the former potentia, the potential in our bodies to effect change in the world, and he calls the latter, following Hobbes, potestas (see Holland, 1998).