Abstract
The Great War, as it was known until 1939, set in chain a series of catastrophes and crises that have largely defined the long twentieth century: economic, political, cultural, and metaphysical. Philosophy was not unaffected, either within academe, or more widely. Nearly each of the major philosophical movements, from analytic philosophy through to post-structuralism, was directly or indirectly formed in response to the civilizational crisis the Great War inaugurated, and different perceptions of its causes and significance. This chapter surveys the territory, and looks forwards to the different contributions collected here.
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Notes
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Badiou (2007), Hobsbawm (1994) and Fukuyama (1992) conclude that this event of the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the post-war century. Badiou (2007: 2–3, 7) refers to the century as one shaped by ‘Soviet’, ‘totalitarian’ and ‘liberal’ movements, war and revolution equally: as one ‘long tragedy… the tragedy of unfeeling manipulation of human material’. Everything before 1914 was but a ‘prologue’ in comparison to what came thereafter, a short century of the ‘passion for the Real’ ending over the last two decades with a ‘second Restoration’, for Badiou a profoundly ambiguous terminus. Francis Fukuyama inversely claimed in 1992 that the twentieth century was coming to a close with the ‘end of history’, the fall of communism and victory of liberal capitalist democracies in the post-war ideological battle. He has since rethought this unusual prophecy.
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Also see Fromkin (1989).
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A special debt here is owed to William Altman, whose work and passion did much to inspire this initiative.
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There are a number of classic studies on the impact of the war on literature, from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), illustrating the influence of the war poetry of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, shaping a pessimism towards the fate of Western civilisation, together with the rise of modernist forms of expression.
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See, for example, Aristotle, Politics VII 15; 1333b23–1134a-38.
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‘Schmitt was opposed to the extension of the European order, where international law was the property of “civilized states”… He argued that the extension of international law to recognize non-European states as sovereign equals towards the end of the 19th century was a sign that Europe “had lost the consciousness of the spatial structure of its former order” …’. David Chandler, ‘The Revival of Carl Schmitt in International Relations: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 37 No.1 (2008): 43.
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Jeffs, R., Sharpe, M. (2017). Introduction: European Thought, After the Deluge. In: Sharpe, M., Jeffs, R., Reynolds, J. (eds) 100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50361-5_1
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