The Case for a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism. In this article Domenico Losurdo sketches a history of the category of totalitarianism, rehearsing the various shifts it has been subject to since the October revolution. While the roots of the notion are to be located both in the violence inflected by the colonial enterprise upon indigenous populations and the violence exercised at the very heart of the capitalist metropolis, upon the poor and the outcast, such violence did (...) take on a number of unprecedented characteristics in the twentieth century phenomenon of total war. The imperatives of the cold war were subsequently to lead western liberals to the formulation of a strange indictment of the revolutionary. (shrink)

Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklärer and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his 'superman' the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. In a work that constitutes the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo instead pursues a less reductive strategy. Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's (...) anti-democratic thinking - his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics - he nevertheless refuses to treat these from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he restores Nietzsche's works to their complex nineteenth-century context, and presents a more compelling account of the importance of Nietzsche as philosopher than can be expected from his many contemporary apologists. (shrink)

DIVTranslated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time./div.

Preventive War, Pro-Americanicanism and Anti-Americanism. Protests against the war in Iraq or against American support for Israel have led to the accusation that there now exists an Anti-Americanism of the left that is virtually indistinguishable from an Anti-Americanism of the right. D. Losurdo points out that the United States was actually endowed with a certain fascination for Marx, Engels, Lenin, Boukharin or Gramsci, and that the indignation which they voiced concerning the regime of white supremacy was not unmitigated. In (...) contrast, an American Herrenvolk democracy met with widespread admiration in the leading circles of the Hitlerian regime, while American racial theorists such as Ford and Stoddard received a warm welcome in Berlin. The current celebration in the US of the imperial presidency on the part of fundamentalist Christians, along with the contempt recently shown toward America’s « allies », stems from an exclusivist nationalism which harks back to this tradition. (shrink)

Great historical crises oblige us to choose not between violence and nonviolence, but between two different forms of violence. Nonviolent movements are no exception to this rule. In the US, with the outbreak of the War of Secession, the Christian-nonviolent movement was obliged to choose between the violence of the Union-army and the violence of slavery. With the outbreak of World-War One, Lenin chose revolution, while, in India, Gandhi became the ‘recruiting agent-in-chief’ for the British army. At that moment, he (...) struggled not for the general emancipation of colonial peoples, but only for the co-optation of the Indian people under the ruling races, and this co-optation was to be gained on the battlefield. While in the past, in spite of their mistakes and oscillations, the protagonists of nonviolence were an integral part of the anticolonialist movement, today nonviolence is the watchword of imperialism, which tries to discredit as violent its enemies and challengers. (shrink)

Dans le débat sur la responsabilité de certains intellectuels allemands à l'égard de la catastrophe qu'a connue l'Allemagne au XXè siècle, des penseurs renommés comme Karl Popper ont soutenu la thèse selon laquelle la philosophie hégélienne serait une des sources directes du nazisme. C'est ce mythe que dénonce Demenico Losurdo, professeur de philosophie politique à l'université d'Urbino, dans une enquête sur les variations de " l'image de Hegel " à travers les circonstances historiques. Comment, par quelles étranges voies, la (...) philosophie du maître de Berlin, chantre de l'avènement de la liberté et théoricien de l'universalité, a-t-elle pu être identifiée à ce point à l'idéologie du " sang et (de) la terre "? Ce livre ne constitue donc pas un commentaire de plus de l'œuvre de Hegel mais une réflexion ciritque sur sa réception en Allemagne, en Itlaie et dans toute l'Europe. Il fait la preuve que, pour reprendre une expression de Carl Schmitt, avec l'arrivée au pouvoir de Hitler, " Hegel pour ainsi dire est mort ". (shrink)

This book embraces two centuries of the history of non-violence, reconstructing the great historical crises that this movement has faced. In this book the historical reconstruction is intertwined with the philosophical and psychological analysis of the moral dilemmas that great historical crises inevitably imply.

One hundred years after the October Revolution, we can try to make an assessment of its outcomes and heritage. But if we just focus on the construction of a post-capitalistic society, of socialism, our evaluation will be partial, incomplete and unable to allow an understanding of the past and the current times. So, we have to tackle this issue from a double perspective: looking to the construction of socialism but looking also to the struggle against colonial domination, against imperialism. The (...) result of a reflection on these two levels is on one side that the movement started from the October Revolution led to the vanishing of the colonial classic system, and on the other side that the construction of socialism is a troubled process of political, economical and intellectual apprehension that is unavoidably full of contradictions. This process is still in progress – in China, for instance. On the other hand, today neocolonialism carries on the tradition of exploitation and domination, generating the premises of a new large-scale war. The construction of a post-capitalistic society is once again strictly connected with the cause of peace. (shrink)

After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, an attitude spread inside Marxist movements and parties, according to which every mass movement of the subaltern classes was celebrated as an ascetic redemption of the “last” and of the “poor” men, while every prosaic and “bourgeois” demand for a development of the productive forces was ignored, in a sort of messianic wait for a bourgeois society's palingenesis. Antonio Gramsci was reluctant towards this tendency. He was interested instead in building and defending the new (...) revolutionary State, being aware of the arduous and contradictory process of construction of the new social order. Hence it springs the concern of Italian historical materialism in phenomena such as Americanism and Fordism and towards the industrial production’s techniques of organization. A concern shared by Gramsci with Lenin, according to whom the revolutionary State needs to assimilate every scientific achievement as a useful tool to ensure the development of the Soviet country and to overcome a generalized misery and a backwardness that endangered its survival. (shrink)

The war against Iraq unleashed in March 2003 spawned an attempt to silence the protest movement by accusing it of anti‐Americanism. This essay argues that the theory according to which right‐wing anti‐Americanism and left‐wing anti‐Americanism coincide is a myth. A new issue appears now, a paradox that characterizes the United States, where democracy developed within the white community concomitantly with the enslavement of blacks and the deportation of American Indians. In the American “Herrenvolk democracy,” a line of demarcation between whites (...) and people of color fosters the development of relations based on equality within the white community. Furthermore, U.S. history is marked by the fundamentalist tendency to transform the Judeo‐Christian tradition into a sort of national religion that consecrates the exceptionalism of the American people and the sacred mission with which they are entrusted (“Manifest Destiny”). Europe is unable thoroughly to comprehend the American mixture of religious and moral fervor, on the one hand, and overt pursuit of political, economic, and military world domination, on the other. But it is this mixture, or rather this explosive combination, this peculiar fundamentalism, that constitutes the greatest threat to world peace today. (shrink)