This article argues that combining elements of the sociological theories of Johann Arnason and Peter Wagner can contribute to an understanding of the causes of the ‘new Cold War’ on the European continent. Comparisons of today’s confrontation between Russia and the West with the original Cold War are largely misleading since the Soviet model of modernity represented a radical alternative to its liberal western version. Unlike the original Cold War, the current ideological confrontation is not connected with a clash (...) of different forms of modernity. Today’s Russia lacks a clear civilizational identity and does not follow an alternative project of modernity. The recent ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics largely draws on a specific interpretation of European modernity. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the ideas of religious and political identification of modern Russia and the USA. The main conceptual positions of Russian and American philosophers, political scientists, and theologians are presented. These ideas create the specific axiological unity of American and Russian forms of culture and civilizations. The search for national idea and cultural identification is presented in the article from the position of national and international security of the USA and Russia. The author (...) pays attention to original concepts of American philosophers, which have developed new «typologies of God». From this point of view God exists in human being in the new «technocratic» or «political» qualities. The conclusions about the priority collaboration of Russia and the USA in cultural spheres are made. (shrink)

_Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity_ is a challenging consideration of what remains of ambitious Enlightenment ideas such as democracy, freedom and universality in the wake of relativist, postmodern thought. Do clashes over gender, race and culture mean that universal notions such as justice or rights no longer apply outside our own communities? Do our actions lose their authenticity if we act on principles that transcend the confines of our particular communities? Alessandro Ferrara proposes a path out of (...) this impasse via the notion of reflective authenticity. Drawing on Aristotle, Kants concept of reflective judgement and Heideggers theory of reflexive self-grounding, _Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity_ takes a fresh look at the state of Critical Theory today and the sustainability of postmodern politics. (shrink)

The article devoted to the analysis of theoretical and conceptual developments of the Russian Social Democrats in the emigrant period. The authors note that the concept of democratic socialism, which began to be formed in 1917, was considerably amended and deepened when the Mensheviks created a new party program developed in 1922-1924. The significance of this program of the RSDLP is practically not evaluated in the science literature. In the analysis of Soviet historiography, the authors of the article outlined the (...) lack of attention to the projects of the Mensheviks in emigration, as the researchers insisted on the collapse of the RSDLP in post-October period. Some of modern researchers are highly skeptical about the intellectual developments of the Russian Social Democrats after the events of October 1917. However, the authors identified a number of innovative elements in the projects of the Mensheviks in this time. The new party program is an original stage in the formation of the concept of post-revolutionary development of Russia. In the course of the inner-party discussion, the differences in assessing the degree of Russia’s readiness for socialist transformation, as well as the Bolshevik experiment with various internal political trends, were sharply denoted. The article analyzes the positions of representatives of the official Mensheviks and the right wing of the party. The authors acknowledge the significant transformation of the political attitudes of the Mensheviks, pointing to some delusional and utopian nature of a number of program theses. (shrink)

As people look for a way to ground their judgments of moral, political, aesthetic claims in the face of the postmodernists who claim nothing can be grounded, Reflective Authenticity attempts to rescue some of the critical ideals of the Enlightenment without falling prey to those who say that the Enlightenment's tenets of objectivity, reason, liberalism makes this impossible and in the face of multiculturalism, difference, and the death of subject, are outdated. Alessandro Ferrara suggests that the notion of reflective (...) authenticity offers the key to a new kind of exemplary universalism which, different from the generalizing universalism typical of modern thought, does not fall under the critique of foundationalism articulated by postmodernist thinkers. (shrink)

The article considers the modern meaning of Kant’s doctrine of war. The author examines the context and content of the key provisions of Kant’s concept of perpetual peace. The author also reviews the ideological affinity between Kant and previous authors who proposed to build alliances of states as a means of preventing wars. It is noted that the French revolution and the wars caused by it, the peace treaty between France and Prussia served as the historical background for the conceptualization (...) of Kant’s project. In the second half of the 20th century, there is a growing attention to Kant’s ethical and political philosophy. Theorists of a wide variety of political and ethical schools, pay attention to Kant’s legacy and relate their own concepts to it. Kant’s idea of war is reconsidered by Michael Doyle, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, Mary Kaldor, Brian Orend. Thus, Doyle tracks democratic peace theory back to Kant’s idea of the spread of republicanism. According to democratic peace theory, liberal democracies do not solve conflict among themselves by non-military methods. Habermas, Beck, Kaldor appreciate Kant as a key proponent of cosmopolitanism. For them, Kant’s project is important due to notion of supranational forms of cooperation. They share an understanding that peace will be promoted by an allied authority, which will be “governing without government” and will take responsibility for the functioning of the principles of pacification of international relations. Orend’s proves that Kant should be considered as a proponent of the just war theory. In addition, Orend develops a new area in just war theory – the concept of ius post bellum – and justifies regime change as the goal of just war. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of Jü rgen Habermas's "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity," a book that defended the rational potential of the modern age against the depiction of modernity as a spent epoch. The essays (of which four are newly commissioned, five were published in the journal "Praxis International," and one -- by Habermas -- first appeared in translation in "New Critique" ) are divided into two sections: "Critical Rejoinders" and "Thematic Reformulations." An opening essay (...) by d'Entrè ves sets out the main issues and orients the debate between Habermas and the postmodernists by identifying two different senses of responsibility: a responsibility to act versus a responsibility to otherness (an openness to difference, dissonance, and ambiguity). These are linked with two alternative understandings of the primary function of language: action-orienting versus world-disclosing. This is a fruitful way of looking at the issues that Habermas has raised in his attempt to resurrect and complete the project of Enlightenment. Habermas's essay discusses the main themes of his book in the context of a critical engagement with neoconservative cultural and political trends. The main body of essays offer an interesting collection of points of view, for and against Habermas's position by philosophers, social scientists, intellectual historians, and literary critics. SECTIONS &; CONTRIBUTORS: "Introduction," Maurizio Passerin d'Entrè ves. "Modernity versus Postmodernity," Jü rgen Habermas. Critical Rejoinders: Fred Dallmayr. Christopher Norris. David C. Hoy. James Schmidt. Joel Whitebook. ThematicReformulations: James Bohman. Diana Coole. Jay M. Bernstein. David Ingram. (shrink)

Why has Schmitt's political theology been influential among some Chinese scholars? It is pointed out in this article that this special phenomenon resulted from the Chinese awareness of the deep crisis within modern politics as well as the Chinese hope for the alternative model of modern politics. To these Chinese scholars, Schmitt, by making clear the hidden theological dimension of modern politics, seems to have offered both a sharp criticism of the tendency of mechanization of the state and a (...) creative proposal to save modern politics. Based on the analysis of the reasons for these Chinese scholars' preference for Schmitt's political theology to Marx's criticism of modern politics, it is also argued that this acceptance of Schmitt's political theology could actually hamper the Chinese efforts toward new possibilities of modern politics. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is an institutional view of the state and modern Russia, as opposed to the civilizational and formational worldview. It allows you to switch public and scientific consciousness from a statocentric to a sociocentric worldview, in its own way reveals the correlation of the categories of people, society and the state in the political universe. As a result, the history of political society appears to be a socio-dialectical sequence of public legal structures built (...) by historically changeable political norms. The analysis of institutional transitions and political norms allows us to assert that modern society, including the Russian one, is rationally moving towards a libertarian institution, i.e. to co-governance of citizens equal in law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de MaistreAbraham AndersonOwen Bradley. A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. 320. $55.00.In A Modern Maistre, Owen Bradley has sought to defend both the theoretical penetration and the practical wisdom of Joseph de Maistre, most famous of all "reactionaries" or royalist opponents of the (...) French Revolution. Bradley's own explicit philosophical premises are those of the contemporary academic Left—the blend of Foucault, Adorno, and other authors commonly known as "theory." He defends Maistre's claims on our attention partly by pointing to the kinship between the latter's critique of the Enlightenment and that of Foucault, Adorno, et al. Further, Bradley reminds us of the intimate relation between anti-revolutionary thought and historicism, here understood as the doctrine that new climates of belief and social arrangements always have their roots in what precedes them. In this as in other respects he allows us to see the kinship between the thought of Maistre and that of his younger and more liberal contemporary Tocqueville.Maistre was, moreover, a seminal thinker for the French tradition of sociology whose best-known representatives are Comte and Durkheim, and which, like him, was concerned above all with the religious conditions of social order. Maistre was himself a disciple not just of Vico's New Science but of Plato's Republic and Laws, works equally preoccupied with this topic. One of the most interesting themes of the book, in fact, is Maistre's concern with political theology.Maistre was particularly attracted, Bradley shows, to the neo-Platonic and possibly heterodox theology of Origen. The neo-Platonic emphasis on symbols, talismans, and cosmic hierarchy, according to Bradley, helped Maistre formulate his criticism of the "mechanical philosophy" of the Cartesian Enlightenment, the metaphysical premise, according to Maistre, of the Revolution. Maistre, Bradley shows us, argued against the Enlightenment's attempt to replace a politics dependent on faith with one based on modern science partly by showing that modern science itself has its roots in mysticism, magic, and enthusiasm. The Enlightenment, which understood itself as entirely secular in spirit, was ruled by a project of salvation descended from ancient gnosticism. As the gnostics sought salvation through the rejection of the world of creation, the Enlighteners sought political salvation through a rejection of all traditions and institutions, a project which culminated in the Jacobin Terror.But political violence, in Maistre's view, does not stem from theological error alone. According to Maistre, "sacrifice" in the larger sense is central to all human societies. The problem of political order is in large part how to channel the impulse to collective cruelty, which is necessary to political order but can be restrained or allowed to run [End Page 287] wild. Politics is largely theater and symbol; the wise use of these elements is indispensable for taming the love of violence.Maistre's famous assertion of the authority of the Pope is not, Bradley insists, a formula for theocracy; rather, the preservation of a spiritual power distinct from and independent of the sovereign serves to check tyranny without subverting sovereignty (132). Such a spiritual power is necessary partly to preserve "unity of fables, which will never happen without unity of doctrine and authority" (195).Maistre's interest in political theology is continuous with an interest in the political significance of cosmology. Every society, Maistre held, including the Enlightenment, has a view of the cosmos to which its conception of society precisely corresponds. Maistre himself seeks to inflect modern cosmology in various ways. Like Tocqueville and Vico, Maistre uses the doctrine of historical forces to propound a teaching on Providence. The Jacobins themselves, Maistre asserts, were instruments of Providence. Far from emancipating mankind, the Revolution "abruptly shortened" the "chain that binds man" within his proper bounds (215).Bradley does Maistre a valuable service by criticizing misinterpretations of his thought by later defenders of extra-constitutional authority, like Maurras and Carl Schmitt; Maistre himself, Bradley shows, was deeply concerned to preserve constitutional legitimacy and opposed absolutism. Bradley's most interesting chapter is his last one, on Maistre... (shrink)

The article points to various alarming tendencies of dehumanization of modern medical education in Russia and in the world. Apart from economical and political solutions, the article suggests to address the most fundamental reason for negative attitude to humanitarian subjects in modern biomedical education – the struggle between reductionist and holistic worldviews. While modern biomedicine is increasingly dominated by an increasingly rigid reductionism, which reduces living things to non-living things at the level of atoms and molecules, humanities knowledge (...) is organically characterized by a holistic approach to the human being, i. e., holistic foundations and principles. The split of these two directions projects itself in the split of basic medical subjects and humanities disciplines. The authors see the only radical way to overcome this schism as a transformation of biomedical knowledge itself in the direction of holistic reductionism – a synthesis of holism and reductionism. This integrative type of knowledge will project itself into a fundamentally different, allied, relationship between the more reductionist and holistic strands of a single integrated biomedicine. (shrink)

As part of a larger project, this paper serves as an overview that examines how “ai” 愛 as an affective concept made its way into the Chinese vocabulary, how it gained popularity at specific junctures in modern Chinese history, and the ways in which it has been adapted as a marker of modernity and a political discourse in Republican and Communist China in distinct ways. Although literary scholars have noted the significance of the shaping of love as an (...) affective concept for the project of Chinese modernity, they mainly focus on the conceptions and interpretations of love in the literature, and with a time frame from late imperial to Maoist China. The few studies about love in post-Mao era usually attribute the sources of such affect to Christianity. My paper makes a fresh contribution in three aspects. First, I take a longer historical perspective, from the 1910s to the 2010s, and dedicate, secondly, a large part of my study to the decisive impact from revolutionary radicalism to popular religions on the formation of the discourse of state propaganda and everyday politics, rather than manifestations in the literature and sources from Christianity. Third, I study some of the most controversial political figures in modern China, including Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, and Xi Jinping, rather than intellectuals and writers only. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se propone argumentar que el proyecto sociopolítico enunciado por Alberdi en Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina contribuyó a imposibilitar la constitución del moderno estado nacional cuya existencia buscó promover. El logro de dicho objetivo sólo resultará posible a partir de explicitar los supuestos alrededor de los que se estructura el razonamiento que permite alcanzar dicha conclusión; hacerlo implicará, en primer lugar, señalar las reflexiones de Aníbal Quijano en torno a (...) la constitución de los modernos estados nacionales y al eurocentrismo, en segundo lugar, establecer el carácter eurocéntrico de Las Bases y, por último, reconstruir el razonamiento que sustenta la idea directriz que atraviesa al trabajo. This paper intends to argue that the sociopolitical project enunciated by Alberdi on Bases and starting points for the political organization of Argentina contributed to preclude the constitution of the modern national state of which existence it sought to promote. Achieving this goal will only be possible by making explicit the assumptions from which the reasoning that allows to reach such conclusion are structured; it will involve, first, to point out Quijano's reflections about the constitution of modern national states and the eurocentrism, secondly, to establish The Bases's eurocentric nature and, finally, to rebuild the reasoning behind the leading idea running through the work. (shrink)

French political philosophy has experienced a renewal over the last twenty years. One of its leading projects is Marcel Gauchet’s reflection on democracy and religion. This project situates itself within the context of the French debate on modernity and autonomy launched by the work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Gauchet’s work makes a significant contribution to this debate by building on the pioneering work of Lefort on the political self-instituting capacity of modern societies and the associated shift from religion (...) to ideology. It thus explores the centrality of the notion of sovereignty in the advent of liberal democracy and conducts this reflection within an overall discussion of the role played by Christianity in the genesis of European modernity. It elaborates an anthropology of modernity which explores the relationship between individualism and democracy and redefines modernity as a project of sovereignty which aims at creating a radically new society, the society of individuals. (shrink)

Is there a connection between power struggles and urban context? How the urban space used for the symbolic manifestation of power and social control? How urban space becomes the site of conflict and resistance? How urban nodes like squares became political apparatus in social demonstrations and revolutions? How do specific squares become symbols of revolutions? This thesis investigated these questions by viewing the city as a place formed by politics, which built upon the central concept of Meydan (Public Square), (...) as the "political order in the ideogram of the city". Focusing on public squares, it traces their sociopolitical transformations as well as their role in instigating social transformations through examples that span from the pre-modern times to the present. As the embodiment of the square in the image of the city, the historical, social and theological concept of Meydan- a term, which has mostly applied, for Iranian public squares has been studied. The Empty Locus of Power rereads squares as peculiar urban forms and representations of political ideas, when the squares of the city has become the stage for the process of politicizing, de-politicizing or neutralizing space. This thesis tries to analyze the square beyond an architectural element in the city, but weaves this blank slate, with its contemporary socio political atmosphere as a new paradigm. This interpretation, suggested the idea of Meydan as the core of the projects on the city, which historically exposed in formalization of theological ideologies. Regarding this issue, urban space of traditional Iranian cities introduced as the medium through which theological ideologies and political sovereignty took place. In pursuing such analyses, this research engages with issues ranging from details of political histories of the case studies in public squares to the master plan of the city of VIII Tehran. During the recent century, various political events and social demonstrations have been staged in Tehran as Middle Eastern Capital, which emphasize the further discussions for analyzing the relationship between socio-political dimensions of city and its urban projects that ultimately led to occupy the city and reclaim the public spaces in Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. In this sense, analyzing the major political events in modern Tehran as a city loaded with politics will lead to trace the processes of its spatial transformation. In this regard, the thesis examines the relationship between affordances of public spaces, their histories, and the emergence of social events and movements. Building on this theoretical framework, this thesis stresses on the transformative dynamism of autocratic modernization, which motivate or shape a creative tension in the form of the city. The emergence of representative pseudo political public space for demonstration of power and national identity during the First Pahlavi Era (1925-41), reoccupation of public spaces by social movements and political parties during the nationalization of Iranian oil movement till 1953 Iranian coup d'etat will be the second part and socio- political arrangement of capital as ‘Metropolis of Tomorrow' and its urban transformation during the second Pahlavi Era (1941-79) till Islamic Revolution have been examined. Analysis suggests that spatial transformations and modernization politics have led to or facilitated (directly or indirectly and, or inadvertently) political changes. Building on the foundation of knowledge established in this research, the final part of research focuses on the centrality of squares in recent social protests. Using Middle East sociologist, Asef Bayat's theory of ‘Spatialities of discontent', the final chapter explores the spatial dimension of political spaces of the city and aims to theorize the necessity of urban social movements to approach democratic space in a global context. (shrink)

In order to improve the quality of teaching social sciences, since 2022, a number of conferences and seminars have been held in leading universities. The discussion centered on the teaching methodology and content of the newly introduced course “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood”. The deepest and most open involvement of teaching and research community in this work will be able to contribute to the development of Russian socio-political knowledge, domestic scientific schools and research centers.

자신의 저술에서 민주주의를 옹호하거나 민주주의자를 자처한 적이 전혀 없음에도 불구하고 루소의 정치철학이 현대 민주주의의 정치원칙를 제공했다는데는 아무도 이의를 제기하지 않는다. 그렇다면 그 정치철학의 어떤 요인이 루소를 현대 민주주의 확립에 있어 가장 영향력 있는 사상가로 꼽히게 만드는가? 본고에서 연구자들은 루소 사상과 민주주의 연관성, 그리고 일반의지론에 대한 기존 연구들의 성과와 한계를 살펴본 후, 루소가 제시하는 “정치적 권리의 올바른 원칙”으로서의 “일반의지” 개념이 고전고대의 정치사상, 특히 아리스토텔레스의 『정치학』을 넘어 민주주의 정치철학의 현대적 전회에 어떤 기여를 하였는지 논한다.BR공화주의 관점에서 볼 때 아리스토텔레스와 루소는 연속성을 가졌다고 생각되어 (...) 왔다. 하지만 본 연구자들은 아리스토텔레스의 『정치학』과 루소의 『사회계약론』을 목차별로 비교·분석한 결과, “민주정(民主政)”에 관해 루소는 그 개념, 내용 및 역사적 평가를 아리스토텔레스와 거의 공유했음에도 불구하고, “일반의지”개념을 축으로 하여, 국가통치의 기조를 덕치주의에서 법치주의 또는 입헌주의로, 통치의 인적 기반을 ‘폴리스적 동물’에서, ‘자유롭고 평등한 인간으로서 주권자 시민’으로 혁명적으로 전형(轉形)하여, 태생적·지연적 인연이 아니라, 주권자 시민들이 이성적으로 동의한 정치적 권리에 근거하여 정립한 헌법적 원칙들에 의거하여 공화국 건국과 통치의 프로젝트를 제시했다는 특이점을 밝혀냈다. 바로 이 헌법기반의 공화국이야말로 현대적 국민국가의 정상적 통치모델로 간주되는 입헌민주주의에 다름 아니며, 결과적으로 루소는, ‘주민’ 또는 ‘인민’의 자연적 필요에 따라 자연발생적으로 성립되는 폴리스의 생태를 논한 현대 이전의 전형적 국가통치론으로서 아리스토텔레스적 개념의 정치학에서 벗어나, 자신의 이성적 국가능력을 자각하여 건국의 협약 당사자로 나선 ‘주권자 시민’이 국가 통치의 담당자라는 입론을 바탕으로 탈(脫)아리스토텔레스적 현대 정치학을 정립하였다. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to outlining the research topic to be dealt with by the author in the incoming period within the project of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. Starting from "globalization" as the keyword of current debates on political, economic and cultural destiny of contemporary world, the author delineates the subject matter of his research as the critiques of the globalization process formulated in Russia and Serbia. In terms of contents, the research will be (...) devoted to analyzing and interpreting different philosophical-theoretical, political and ideological arguments used by the critics of the globalization process in political and cultural life of Russia and Serbia. The proposed comparative approach ought to provide an insight into the influence exerted by Russian opponents of globalization on domestic critics of the process, as well as to help understand the differences in resisting globalization that stem from different political, economic, military, cultural and international positions of the two countries in today's world. The basic aim of the research is to asses theoretical-argumentative and practical-political potentials of the critiques of globalization in these two post-communist countries. U radu je izlozen nacrt teme kojom ce se autor baviti u narednom istrazivackom ciklusu u okviru projekta Instituta za filozofiju i drustvenu teoriju. Polazeci od "globalizacije" kao kljucne reci tekucih debata o politickoj, ekonomskoj i kulturnoj sudbini savremenog sveta, autor je predmet svog istrazivanja ogranicio na kritike procesa globalizacije koje su formulisane u Rusiji i Srbiji. Sadrzinski, planirano istrazivanje ce biti posveceno analizi i interpretaciji razlicitih filozofsko-teorijskih, politickih i ideoloskih argumenata kriticara procesa globalizacije u politickom i kulturnom zivotu Rusije i Srbije. Predlozeni komparativni pristup treba da omoguci sagledavanje uticaja koji na domace kriticare globalizacije imaju protivnici tog procesa u Rusiji, kao i da olaksa razumevanje razlika u opiranju procesima globalizaciji koje su posledica razlicitog politickog, ekonomskog, vojnog, kulturnog i medjunarodnog polozaja ove dve zemlje u savremenom svetu. Osnovni cilj istrazivanja je procena teorijsko-argumentativnih i prakticno-politickih kapaciteta kritika globalizacije u ove dve postkomunisticke zemlje.. (shrink)

Modernization represents a political project of power and domination, marginalization and exclusion. The concepts that make up modernization-theory are deeply complicit with this and are implicated in legitimation strategies for the regimes and peoples who benefit. As with other power/knowledge projects, tropes of literality that reference materiality generate the discourses of certainty through which political persuasion takes place. These discourses are bounded by a constitutive “outside” of metaphor, and thus devalue other subjects of knowledge and (...) knowing subjects. Said’s Orientalism presents a remarkable catachresis through which an alternative understanding of knowledge-production becomes visible. This work challenges Euro-Americano-centric social science and intellectual life, because it undermines the binaries through which ideas themselves are understood as certain or not. Butler’s theory of materialization in turn conceptualizes materiality and certainty in a complementary way. (shrink)

In this article, I place management theory in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s political theology with the dual scope of offering (a) a critical examination of the Agambenian interpretation of management, and (b) an application of such interpretation to illuminate and eventually explain the nature of some decisive and persistent limitations of the discipline. The main argument is that Agamben’s theological genealogy of economy transforms the discourse on management from a matter of value to one of control. In the first (...) section, I introduce Agamben’s political theological project and a couple of fundamental elements of Agamben’s interpretation of management. In the second, I discuss three fundamental shortcomings of management as a discipline that an Agambenian interpretation of management can make intelligible. (shrink)

In the author's article Volodymyr Hurzhy "The current state of the project "Russkyi mir" and the consequences of its implementation in Ukraine" interprets the project "Russian measure" as a new form of the Russian national idea, which always had a relational-mythological core and was associated with ideas about choices Russian people. From the ideological point of view, the doctrine of the "Russkyi mir" is an option of a religiously motivated ideology appealing to the Orthodox values, specifically meaningful Russian (...) history, the Russian language as a marker of the territories to which the project is directed. These parameters make it possible to identify the "Russkyi mir" doctrine as one of the options for post-secular global religious-political projects. The vast majority of Soviet rituals and practices were "absorbed" by the "Russkyi mir" and continue to be preserved and function in modern Russia in the 21st century in a re-imagined form. But now, with the loss of sacrality of the first of the key Soviet holidays - the Day of the October Revolution - the function of "the beginning of a new world" took over the holiday of the Victory Day. This function is enshrined in the collective memory of the people through the annual military parades, the historical reconstruction of the key battles of the Second World War, the spread and consolidation in the public consciousness of the thought of determining the role of the Russian people in gaining victory over Hitler's Germany as an absolute evil. Constantly reproducing an existentially marginal situation, the state affects the key need of its citizens in the sense of global security. These representations in total show new technologies for the deployment of conflict situations, based on global competition in the plane of values. (shrink)

The volume offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages wedged between Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision of transnational intellectual history. The authors focus on the ways political thinkers outside of Western Europe sought to bridge the gap between an idealized Western modernity and their own societies. Mapping these discourses and debates (...) from the Enlightenment to the First World War, the volume helps rethinking some of our basic assumptions about the history of modern European culture and politics. (shrink)

The question of power occupied an even more central role in Marsilius' political thought than previously thought. Behind the appearances of consent in his thought lay, at a deeper level, the idea of power. The core concept of coercive power was located within the field of meaning of plenitudo potestatis through which Marsilius' new theory of the nature of power was strained and projected onto the papacy. But the modern debate about whether Marsilius was a legal positivist has been (...) wrongly posed. His stress on the necessity of a clear power structure had a biological basis. Comparison with jurists reveals the strengths and weaknesses of his treatment of power. (shrink)

In the 1940s and 1950s _The Review of Politics_, under the dynamic leadership of Waldemar Gurian, emerged as one of the leading journals of political and social theory in the United States. This volume celebrates that legacy by bringing together classic essays by a remarkable group of American and European émigré intellectuals, among them Jacques Maritain, Hannah Arendt, Josef Pieper, Eric Voegelin, and Yves Simon. For these writers, the emergence of new dictatorial regimes in Germany and Russia and (...) the looming threat of another, even more devastating, European war demanded that one rethink the reigning philosophical perspectives of the time. In their view, the western world had lost sight of its founding principles. Individually and collectively, they maintained that the West could be saved only if its leaders embraced the idea that society should be governed by moral standards and a commitment to human dignity. Since the first issue appeared in 1939, _The Review of Politics_ has influenced generations of political theorists. To complement these essays A. James McAdams has written an introduction that discusses the history of the journal and reflects on the contributions of these influential figures. He underscores the continuing relevance of these essays in assessing contemporary issues. “The essays contained in this volume demonstrate why the _Review of Politics_ is a national treasure. From Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, it has consistently attracted writers of the highest quality to think about the deepest problems of politics and the twentieth century. The themes covered in this collection range from totalitarianism and nihilism to the value of education and the dignity of the individual. Their probity and intelligence show why the _Review of Politics _has remained the premier journal for serious students of political philosophy.” —_Steven B. Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science, Yale University _ _ _ “The _Review of Politics_ has been essential reading for students of political philosophy and politics for more than two generations, including among its contributors internationally renowned scholars whose works are both enormously influential and increasingly look to be contemporary expressions of perennial wisdom. To make seminal essays of this remarkable journal easily accessible, with more to come in future volumes, is a great service to students of political science at every level.” —_Timothy Fuller, Lloyd E. Worner Distinguished Service Professor, Colorado College_ _ _. (shrink)

This intellectually discomfiting, disturbingly provocative, yet still thoroughly scholarly Handbook reproduces the intellectual ferment that accompanied the Russian Revolution including the wholly polarising effect at that time of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy does not settle for one safe interpretation of the thought of this world-historic figure but rather revels in a clash of viewpoints. Most interestingly it presents a contrast between the Western editors who emphasise pure democracy and Marxian humanism with many of (...) the contributing scholars who take a more sanguine view of the Leninist political project. Perhaps reflecting the current Western political crisis, some of the volume’s other European and North American scholars more closely align with their colleagues from the Global South. Key Features: · Places particular emphasis on the key elements of Lenin’s thought – the dictatorship of the proletariat, the nature of the dialectic and the New Economic Policy · Additional comprehensive coverage includes the theory of the party, Bolshevism, imperialism, and the class struggle in the countryside · Examines the relation of Lenin’s thought to the ideas of his most influential contemporaries as well as the most eminent thinker to interpret Lenin since his death – György Lukács This Handbook is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in political philosophy, political theory, the history of political ideas, economics, international relations and world history. It is also ideal for the general reader who wishes to understand some of the most powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world and that may yet shake the world again. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of the study lies in critical reconstruction of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory as an important principle not only of modern political anthropology, but also of modern and postmodern social projects. As well as, in the unfolding of the fundamentally important both for the newest social-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological discourses of the thesis that each individual is the origin of both personal and institutional freedom and justice, making the contract first of all with himself, with his desires (...) and sorrows and then with other people and the state. Theoretical basis. The principle of social contract offered by Hobbes became a new social, methodologically significant and relevant principle of regulation of activity, which indicates essential for the modern political philosophy and the philosophy of law transition from teleological to legal ideas of justice. For an in-depth study of the philosophical and anthropological aspects of Hobbes’s contractualism, we used the historical-comparative and contextualization method, as well as the works of leading native and foreign researchers of Hobbes, who uphold the provisions on the organic affiliation of fundamental socio-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological questions about the nature of man, the relation of coercion, freedom and justice with the discourse of social contract. Originality. On the basis of a consistent analysis of the anthropological component of Hobbes’s theory of social contract, an in-depth understanding of modern contractualism and contemporary discussions in the field of its existential and anthropological component is offered, as well as the thesis that political anthropology is the core of the philosophical anthropology because it makes possible the methodologically important understanding of the basic problems of human existence – the interaction of justice and freedom, self-interest and public good, as well as it quite clearly outlines the ways to overcome the dilemmas of liberalism and communitarianism, individualism and holism. Conclusions. Political anthropology of T. Hobbes constructed in the context of a modern social project, justified the issue of interaction between freedom and justice, which is fundamentally important to nowadays, through the search for such a way of social relations, in which an individual, being in the realm of social existence, would seek to limit his own selfishness and freedom for the sake of the common will of the majority. Thanks to Hobbes, the idea of external humility in disobedience to the inner, of freedom of conscience as a "human and citizen", of an understanding of individual independence, which is not just a permissible but accepted by state power, has been acquired with exceptional theoretical and practical meaning. Thanks to Hobbes’s works, the essence was revealed by the relationship between the cooperative and the conflicted vision of man. (shrink)

The article reveals ideological-theoretical, methodological, and politico-ideological basic principles for an adequate analysis of the specifics of modern Chinese (Sinicized) Marxism. The attributive features of modern Chinese Marxism (Marxism with Chinese specifics (the adaptation of Marxism to the Chinese Context, Sinicized Marxism), as the most effective version in world history for correcting and modernizing the axiomatics of the Marxist-Leninist theoretical model of social development, as well as improving the ideology of the ruling Communist Party in order to increase the effectiveness (...) of its domestic and foreign state policies, have been characterized by means of concrete-historical and systematic comparative analysis of the ideational grounds and basic socio-philosophical postulates, political and ideological prescriptions of the program documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China. Within the framework of this study, special attention has been paid to highlighting the essence and features of the Soviet and Chinese strategy of socialist construction, created to implement Marxist socialist and communist projects, as well as revealing the scientific evaluation of the differences between the political doctrines of the CPSU and the CPC in the interpretation of objective logic (the duration of stages, goals, and objectives of fundamental economic, social, political, and cultural transformations) of the process of constructing high-level development socialism ("developed socialism") and the further progressive movement of such a society to the phase of communism. (shrink)

The article presents the problem of using the transformations in Russia of the last three hundred years as a material for creating the theory of bureaucracy, which differs from the Weber concept. This problem is being addressed through the application of concepts developed at the Rostov School of Political Science of the Southern Federal University (Russia). The conceptual apparatus is being developed to study the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet bureaucracy in connection with the process of forming an (...) opposition in Russia, free from the stereotypes of bureaucratic activity, behavior and thinking. Such opposition could not emerge in either monarchical, Soviet or post-Soviet Russia. The reasons are explained in the theory of bureaucracy, which contains a reconstruction of the Marx definition of bureaucracy as a social parasite organism, reflection of many social contradictions and embodiment of political exclusion. The cognitive situation in modern Russia is discussed; ways for the researcher to bypass the choices imposed on him by the post-Soviet authorities, the specifics of genesis and the structure of the police society in the country. (shrink)

The article shows that Russian philosophical community is very sensitive towards the history and the current state of philosophy of science and of science studies, which are a subject matter of special interest by virtue of a dedicated space in the university education system. This status is also supported by its proximity to the international philosophical mainstream of the 20th century and its specific object, its connection with science. Philosophy of science at the same time retains some neutrality in relation (...) to the dominant political ideology and proposes claims for an objective knowledge. History of philosophy of science, therefore, serves largely as a history of philosophical rationalism, and its prospects are determined by the strengthening of the role of science in modern culture. However, the modern existence of philosophy of science is undergoing substantial change and experiences a series of challenges. Among them there are the humiliation of intellectuals and scientists in society political voluntarism, mass consumption and the cult of mysticism. Under these conditions, a philosophical study of science and technology is forced to take on the challenges of social criticism and shape special civil institutions for self-preservation. Thus philosophy of science integrates the political, ethical and even social engineering components that allow for treating it as a hard core of interdisciplinary interaction of all socio-humanitarian disciplines. (shrink)

Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village.".

What is happening now in Ukraine is, in essence, the further implementation of the Stalinist plan to deprive Ukrainians of their historical memory, the continuation of the "Stalinist-Bolshevik" ethnocide. Not surprisingly, monuments began to appear in us as "the leader of the peoples", and the holiday of the Victory Day became a public holiday "the triumph of Stalin's ideas" and the Communist Party ideology "united and indivisible". Instead, dates such as the Day of Unity of Ukraine, the Day of Remembrance (...) of the Victims of Holodomor and political repressions are, to put it mildly, unpopular to the authorities. (shrink)

"... some very serious critiques of French existential phenomenology and post-structuralism... the contributors offer some refreshingly new insights into some tried and 'true' philosophical texts and more recent works of literary theory." -- Philosophy and Literature "By bridging the gap between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, the authors of The Thinking Muse: Feminism and the Modern French Philosophy largely overcome the cultural polarity between 'male thinker' and 'female muse'." -- Ethics "These engaging essays by American Feminists bring toether feminist philosophy, existential (...) phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. The editors provide an excellent introductory overview, making this an ideal book for courses in feminist theory and philosophy and modern French thought." -- Philosopher's Index "The concerns raised in this volume are substantial.... a solid addition to the canon of American feminist philosophy." -- Philosophy and Literature "... a forum for feminist appropriations of existential and post-structuralist philosophy." -- Canadian Philosophical Reviews Marking a radical shift in the traditional philosophical separation between muse (female) and thinker (male), The Thinking Muse revises the scope and methods of philosophical reflection. These engaging essays by American feminists bring together feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, and recent currents in French poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics by Paul SagarJames A. HarrisPaul Sagar. Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 229. Hardback, $37.00.Paul Sagar's invigorating book is a reconsideration of Adam Smith in the sense that it challenges much that is received wisdom in current scholarship. First and foremost, it rejects (...) the idea that Smith was preeminently a moral philosopher concerned with the threat to civic virtue posed by commercial society, and yet intent on giving commercial society a moral vindication nevertheless. Sagar—rightly, in my view—wants us to recognize Smith as having been a political thinker. Too much work on Smith still assumes that there is not much to say [End Page 323] about his political thought because he regarded all but the most minimal government as an obstacle to the proper functioning of markets. Smith is supposed to be a "classical liberal" bent on preserving as much natural liberty as possible in the face of government's relentless overextension of its powers of regulation. In Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Donald Winch rejected that approach to Smith in favor of a portrait of the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations as an eighteenth-century thinker with an eighteenth-century thinker's concerns. Sagar's project is quite different. This is a book on Smith's political thought that does not once deploy the term 'Whig.' Sagar's Smith does not wholly float free of his historical situation—the questions he addresses are those posed by the end of feudalism and the advent of modernity—but situating him in the particular circumstances of Britain in the age of revolutions is not Sagar's concern. As Sagar sees it, the fundamental issues addressed by Smith's political thought concern the distinctive form taken by commercial society in the modern era. Smith, according to Sagar, held that all advanced societies are commercial societies. Commercial society as such needed no vindication. The question, rather, was what kind of commercial society a modern state wanted to be. That was a political question insofar as it was a question about the kind of freedom that mattered and about the kind of institutions needed to make that freedom a reality.Defined in maximally general terms, freedom for Smith was the absence of domination, where domination is understood as a lack of security in respect of one's physical safety and possessions. The condition of the poor and powerless had always been one of subjection to the will of the rich and powerful. What changed that, according to Smith, was implementation of the rule of law. This is in itself not a new reading of Smith, but what distinguishes Sagar's version of it is the care with which he examines both the place of the rule of law in Smith's historical account of the emergence of liberty in modern Europe and the precise nature of the connection between the rule of law and freedom. First, on Sagar's view, there needed to be a comprehensive picture of domination and slavery, which had been the normal condition of almost everyone for almost all of human history. Then there needed to be an explanation of how it was that, at one particular historical moment, domination was slowly but surely challenged by the emergence of law and law courts considered as independent of political power. In England, this was the story of the common law and of judges who held office for life, rather than at the pleasure of traditional possessors of power. It was the story of security in property, of the backing of property by law, and it was a largely urban story, of burghers who managed to enlist monarchs on their side in the battle against the barons. It was, in other words, in large part a medieval story, and one consequence is that there was more to say about the rise of liberty in the modern age than that it was caused inadvertently by... (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine the development of autonomy in the philosophical works of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After outlining the centrality of this development to what I call, following Robert Pippin, "philosophical modernity," I show that the figure of genius described in Kant's third Critique becomes the model for the "aesthetic" versions of autonomy articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger under the names of "sovereignty" and "authenticity" respectively. According to these more recent formulations, autonomy is not understood as rational self-legislation, (...) but as a quasi-artistic "self-creation." Moreover, in each of these versions of aesthetic autonomy, I claim that in spite of a disavowal of mimesis understood in a Platonic sense, an implicit reliance is placed upon the operations of a "higher" sense of mimesis, a mimesis of freedom, that enables autonomy to be exemplified and, paradoxically, "imitated." For Kant, this mimesis of freedom accounts for both the continuity and discontinuity of art-historical traditions. In Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, this covert deployment of mimesis has implications for our understanding of historicity more generally, and the relationship between history and modernity in particular. After showing what these implications are, I comment on the problems and limits of "aesthetic autonomy," especially when it is understood politically or collectively, and utterly decoupled from any moral constraints. (shrink)

Starting bioethics in Russia we were motivated with the idea of the democratization of our society on a basic micro-social level. The country was swift enough to take several important steps in this direction on the macro-social level, i.e., to adopt a new constitution with guarantees of human rights and rights of ownership of private property, to elect the parliament and the president. But these modernizations in the Russian political facade did not sufficiently change the internal structure of (...) the society–the net of everyday relationships in the home, at work, at school, in hospitals and other places. One of the most brilliant philosophers of the Russian “silver age,” L.S. Frank, wrote in the beginning of the century that a tyrannical state grows out of tyrannical interpersonal relationships. Political revolution not grounded in a social evolution on the basic level of satisfying “simple” human economic, physical, and psychological needs could reproduce only the same totalitarian pattern under a new ideological label. Events resulting from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 proved the wisdom of his statement. Russia could suffer the same fate today. (shrink)

The XIX International Panarin Readings, convened on December 23, 2021, were dedicated to the memory of Professor Valery Nikolaevich Rastorguev (1949–2021) from the Department of Philosophy of Politics and Law at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University, who was a long-standing organizer and initiator of these readings. The Panarin Readings, initiated in 2003 following the demise of the notable Russian philosopher and political scientist, Alexander Sergeyevich Panarin, have now evolved into an international forum. Since 2008, the (...) primary venue for these readings has been the Department of Philosophy of Politics and Law at the Faculty of Philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The central theme of the conference’s plenary session was Russia’s national identity amidst strategic instability. The summary encapsulates key insights from over two dozen plenary reports presented by a diverse group of scholars, politicians, publicists, and theologians from various countries. These presentations highlighted both the challenges faced by modern states in preserving national identity and the crucial need for the scientific community and policymakers to pay close attention to this issue. (shrink)

The article discusses the current topic of international interuniversity exchanges in the field of theater education. The subject of the study is the interaction of theater schools in Russia and China within the framework of the experimental Russian–Chinese theater and educational project of the Central Academy of Drama and the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts. The project has been implemented since 2015. According to the terms of the project, Russian and Chinese teachers of acting and (...) special disciplines work together in St. Petersburg and Beijing. Upon graduation, students receive diplomas from two universities recognized in both countries. The author, a direct participant of the project, analyzes the results of this experiment from the position of compliance with the principles and requirements of the dialogue of cultures.  The novelty of the research lies in the substantiation of the cultural value, the prospects of the modern version of the interaction of theater schools in Russia and China. The results of the study were the following conclusions: in the implementation of the Russian-Chinese theater and educational project, all the basic conditions are present and fulfilled, which make it possible to determine the events, events and their results that took place within the framework of the project as a full-fledged dialogue of cultures. Today, as never before, there are points of contact and mutual enrichment of the cultures of Russia and China. There are mutually significant cultural ties, dialogue and interaction of cultures. This variant of intercultural interaction is also productive from the point of view of innovation, creating a unique field of cross-cultural experiments. (shrink)

One of the world's pre-eminent Max Weber scholars here presents a comprehensive analysis of Weber's ambiguous stance toward modernity considered from a normative, theoretical, and historical point of view. The book is in two parts. Part I scrutinises Weber's world view. On the basis of his thinking about the meaning and inter-relationships of science, politics, and ethics in the modern era, Weber is seen as the embodiment of a social scientist and political thinker who exposes himself to intellectual risks (...) and existential tensions while resisting final solutions. It includes a masterly analysis of Weber's two famous speeches 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation'. Part II considers Weber's unfinished project on the sociology of religion. Piecing together planned and partially completed works on Islam and Western Christianity, Schluchter locates them in the history and theory of Weber's overall work. This reconstruction of Weber's work on religion emphasises its interplay between religion, economy, politics, and law. (shrink)

The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered (...) an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados. (shrink)

The paper discusses the philosophical and historical doctrine of the Russian philosopher and historian George Petrovich Fedotov. The author focuses on the analysis of imperial issues in the works of G.P. Fedotov, especially of his views on the cultural history of the Russian empire and the essence of imperial project in Russia. Fedotov reconsiders the historical experience and revolutionary catastrophe of Russia and searches for the foundations of the social and cultural processes determining the events of Russian (...) history. Fedotov’s works offer a variety of interpretations of the political and cultural phenomenon of empire. This reflects his evolution as a philosopher of history: the focus of his vision shifts from the Medieval Rus to the Empire of Peter the Great, then to the collapsed empire of Nicholas II and finally to the USSR. Fedotov’s concept of Empire evolves into a timeless cultural-philosophical phenomenon but originates from the historical description of the centralization of power in the feudal monarchy of Ivan the Terrible. The evolution of the philosophical and historical views of Fedotov is influenced by the changes of his attitude to the historical conception of Klyuchevsky. In the 1940s Fedotov considers the empire as a universal idea. The concept of empire proposed by Fedotov gives an understanding of the Russian historical development, especially the causes of the decline and fall of the Russian Empire. Fedotov associates the cause of the salvation of Russia with the study of ancient Russian culture, in which he founds a moral and political ideal of the “Republic of Saint Sophia.” The paper shows heuristic potential of Fedotov’s cultural and philosophical ideas on the vocation of spiritual elite and the creative role of personality in the process of nation-building. (shrink)

The paper examines the sense in which Gianni Vattimo’s story of a long goodbye of modernity along with an interminable weakening of Being inaugurates a leftist philosophico-political project. The hermeneutics of “weak thought” is criticized for (a) its ambiguous concept of interpretation; (b) its way of integrating proceduralism in post-metaphysical philosophizing; and (c) the unhappy marriage it promotes between nihilism and emancipation. Finally, a philosophico-political version of hermeneutic ontology based on the idea of situated transcendence is suggested (...) as an alternative to Vattimo’s nihilistic socialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Political Theology of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott, and: Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration by Gretel Van WierenKevin J. O’BrienA Political Theology of Climate Change Michael S. Northcott grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2013. 335 pp. $30.00Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration Gretel Van Wieren washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2013. 208 pp. $29.95These two excellent books, A (...) Political Theology of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott and Restored to Earth by Gretel Van Wieren, offer distinct directions for Christian environmental ethics: Northcott develops a rigorous analysis of climate change as a failure of enlightenment rationality and politics, while Van Wieren argues that those who care about the earth can connect with it through the practice of ecological restoration. Northcott theologically defines a complex global problem; Van Wieren theologically engages a community-based solution. Each book advances Christian environmental ethics in important ways; considered together, they have much to teach about the content and methods of the field.Northcott’s A Political Theology of Climate Change argues that climate change is a “cosmopolitical crisis” and that Christians should embrace a more ecological and theological politics in response. Theologians and ethicists have long argued that environmental degradation has cosmological roots: The belief that human beings are separate from nature makes global-scale degradation and pollution acceptable. Northcott adds a nuanced political analysis, noting that modern politics is based on a denial “that the weather is political, or that politics influences the climate” (46). Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for contemporary political structures insisted that storms and floods were not divine responses to human behavior, so modern nation-states are premised on an ideological separation from nature. Climate change reveals the failure of such thinking, so the facts of climate change pose an inherently political challenge.Thus, failures to act on climate change are political failures. Mainstream politics cannot consider that economic growth is unsustainable because it is premised on ignorance about nature. Nations cannot collaborate to solve the problem because they have no common moral agreement “about the ends and goals of human life” (245). Any response to climate change that simply extends [End Page 198] the enlightenment project—by ascribing “rights” to the natural world, or by trusting existing secular political structures—is doomed to failure. Instead, climate change calls for a different cosmology and a different politics.Northcott argues that both can be found in the Christian tradition. Natural law thinking respects the relationship between human beings and external moral standards “set into the structure of the cosmos,” demanding careful accounting for the atmospheric consequences of human action (246). Virtue ethics teaches the ideal of politics as a “community of friendship and love,” nurturing practices of participation in the good life, lived with less consumption and less destructive energy (200).Northcott hopes that small-scale communities inspired by Christian cosmology and Christian politics will transition away from destructive practices and thereby demonstrate a new way of life to the world. His book concludes by reasserting that because climate change is a political problem, it is fundamentally a theological problem, calling human communities to “re-create the historic and customary connections between nature and culture, land and life, love for neighbour and nature which are central to the Jewish and Christian messianism of empire-challenging love” (316).In contrast to Northcott’s focus on political and philosophical failures, Gretel Van Wieren’s Restored to Earth seeks a “more positive, solution-oriented” approach to Christian ethics (viii). The book is about reconnecting humans with the natural world through ecological restoration, “the science and art of repairing ecosystems that have been damaged by human activities” (2), and it argues that restoration models moral life by creating physical, intellectual, emotional, communal, and spiritual connections with the natural world.Van Wieren begins with an interdisciplinary definition of ecological restoration and argues that views on the practice depend upon varied definitions of nature. She then moves to a nuanced account of restoration ecology as a spiritual practice (chapter 3) of community formation (chapter 4). Evocatively recounting a controlled prairie burn in Illinois on Maundy Thursday, Van Wieren... (shrink)

The article is devoted to philosophical anthropology in the works of Russian religious thinkers of the 20 th century during their period of emigration. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the main approaches to understanding human nature and its image in the philosophy of Russia abroad. The article identifies a common direction in the development of anthropological concepts, despite individual differences in the views of Russian religious philosophers. The review and analysis begin with the personalism of N.A. Berdyaev, (...) who considered the problem of man to be central to philosophy. In his work The Fate of Man in the Modern World, Berdyaev offered a personal understanding of the new epoch of the 20 th century and proposed his own project of Christian anthropology. His intellectual ally, B.P. Vysheslavtsev, in the book The Ethics of Transfigured Eros, developed an interpretation of anthropological ideas based on an original understanding of the conscious and unconscious in man. Vysheslavtsev extended his ethical framework by introducing the concept of self-knowledge, which he considers the essence of a creative personality. The article further examines the book Reality and Man by S.L. Frank, which provides a comprehensive view of this philosopher’s anthropological beliefs. The foundation for Frank’s anthropology is the idea of personal being, which has been substantiated and developed in Christian thought. L.P. Karsavin developed anthropology from the perspective of the philosophy of all-unity, understanding individual personality as dependent on higher (“symphonic”) personalities. He fully incorporated the doctrine of personality into the metaphysics of all-unity, in which the Trinity serves as the main principle in the development of the entire created world. The last section of the article delves into an analysis of anthropological ideas as presented in the works of V.V. Zenkovsky. In his work Principles of Orthodox Anthropology, Zenkovsky built his argument on the image of God found in human consciousness and justified an anthropological ideal grounded in church doctrine and Orthodox theology. According to the author of the article, all the considered thinkers of Russia abroad recognized the significance of philosophical anthropology and the need for its further substantiation in the context of the Christian worldview. (shrink)

This project envisages a study of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and of the role played by metaxy in his vision of political philosophy. Metaxy already defined by Plato as the "in-between" matrix of the human condition is for Voegelin a powerful notion that symbolizes the intermediate state in which man experiences diverse and opposing tensions such as the ones between immanence and transcendence or mortality and immortality. The metaxy constitutes the realm of the divine-human mutual participation (methexis), and its (...) locus resides in human consciousness (nous), there where the divine reality manifests itself as the origin of being. Being the field of intermediation between opposing forces, man has to keep the balance of consciousness in order to differentiate the noetic and pneumatic dimensions and so attune his life to the divine ground of being. This project claims that for Voegelin metaxy shapes the possibility of the philosophical, historical, political and religious orientation in life. Indeed, Voegelin's approach deserves recognition as an option adequate for addressing the intellectual challenges engendered by modern and postmodern philosophies. (shrink)

The first part of this evolutionary study of the persistence of the autocratic/oligarchic variety of personal rule in Russia provides a historical overview, followed by two theories explaining why it persisted, interrupted by brief “times of troubles,” for over 500 years. Edward Keenan, on the one hand, hypothesizes successful long-term adaptation to a demanding environment. Richard Hellie, on the other hand, develops a theory of service-class revolutions and a cyclical pattern based on the methods of Russian elites for overcoming (...) relative backwardness. Neither theory takes a neo-Darwinian approach.The second part examines neo-Darwinian evolutionary approaches. In the cosmic perspective of Big History, the human species in its relatively brief existence has had an accelerating impact on other species and the earth’s environment. Biologists modeling complex systems come to a similar conclusion. Agent-driven history, as modeled by demographer Noël Bonneuil, raises questions about the adequacy of the historian’s traditional single-trajectory narrative approach to “the time of human history” and also critiques the biases built into the mathematical models of many evolutionary thinkers. An evolutionary approach to human history does not restrict itself to organic replication, but takes into account populations of evolving human skills and also group projects that act as evolutionary forces as well as units of selection, and outlive generations of organic populations.The third part applies this approach to the Russian tradition of state power by showing how group projects operate as evolutionary forces in a variety of modern power systems. The “parable of the tribes” avers that the aggressive agent in any given power system—ideological, economic, social, military, or political—dictates the dynamics of the system. The “braided stream” approach shows, however sketchily here, how agent-driven modern power systems interact, coevolve, and produce hybrid forms. The Russian tradition is highlighted in this evolutionary context. (shrink)

In the field of philosophy, the common view of philosophy as an essentially Western discipline persists even today, while non-Western philosophy tends to be undervalued and not investigated seriously. In the field of Japanese studies, in turn, research on Japanese philosophy tends to be reduced to a matter of projecting existing stereotypes of alleged Japanese cultural uniqueness through the reading of texts. In Nothingness in the Heart of Empire: The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Kyoto School in Imperial (...) Japan, Harumi Osaki resists both these tendencies. She closely interprets the wartime discourses of the Kyoto School, a group of modern Japanese philosophers who drew upon East Asian traditions as well as Western philosophy. Her book lucidly delves into the non-Western forms of rationality articulated in such discourses, and reveals the problems inherent in them as the result of these philosophers' engagements in Japan's wartime situation, without cloaking these problems under the pretense of "Japanese cultural uniqueness." In addition, in a manner reminiscent of the controversy surrounding Martin Heidegger's involvement with Nazi Germany, the book elucidates the political implications of the morality upheld by the Kyoto School and its underlying metaphysics. As such, this book urges dialogue beyond the divide between Western and non-Western philosophies, and beyond the separation between "lofty" philosophy and "common" politics. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as (...) research methods. Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)