This paper examines Hannah Arendt's notion of citizenship with reference to her account of loneliness in the modern age. Whereas recent scholarship has emphasized Arendt's notion of the “right to have rights” in order to advance her conception of citizenship in the context of global democratic theory, I maintain that this discourse threatens to overshadow the depth of her critical relation to the liberal tradition. By turning to loneliness, I aim to show that Arendt's understanding of citizenship guides a prescient (...) critique of the basic assumptions that underlie notions of citizenship within liberal political theory. On her view, these forms of citizenship do not secure liberty, but instead reproduce the very loneliness that has made modern individuals susceptible to totalitarian domination. With this, I argue that Arendt poses her notion of citizenship as an antidote to loneliness and, thus, to the vulnerability of modern political life to totalitarianism. (shrink)

George Orwell wrote to Roger Senhouse upon completion of 1984 that the work was designed in part “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.” The implications for social and political philosophy have furnished a generation of readers with frightening realizations. I will attempt in what follows to show that the implications for epistemology and metaphysics are equally central to the book’s message, and equally discomfitting to philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. The book connects totalitarianism with (...) the entire British empiricist tradition from George Berkeley to A. J. Ayer, primarily by disclosing the totalitarian implications of Berkeley’s philosophy. The result is a vision of empiricism as the intellectual foundation for totalitarianism. (shrink)

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but rather a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fundamental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or (...) historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moralizing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totalitarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism as formulated in her magnum opus—The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It argues that, to comprehend totalitarianism, Arendt forged a heterodox method of historical analysis. Employing that method, she conceived totalitarianism as a form of transcendence of historical context. In doing so, however, she ignored crucial historical contexts that were in fact related to the history of totalitarianism. Subverting her interpretation of totalitarianism as (...) transcendence, these elided contexts erupted inadvertently and repeatedly into her analysis—revealing that totalitarianism was solidly embedded in them. The Origins of Totalitarianism thus exhibits a conceptual contradiction that confuses its attempt to understand totalitarianism. (shrink)

While behaviourist psychology had proven its worth to the US military during the Second World War, the 1950s saw behaviourism increasingly associated with a Cold War discourse of ‘totalitarianism’. This article considers the argument made in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on totalitarianism as a form of behaviourist control. By connecting Arendt’s Cold War anti-behaviourism both to its discursive antecedents in a Progressive-era critique of industrial labour, and to contemporaneous attacks on behaviourism, this paper aims (...) to answer two interlocking questions: Why was behaviourism overtaken by cognitivism as the dominant theoretical orientation of psychologists in the 1960s, and what role did the concept of language play in this shift? (shrink)

This book is conceived as part of a systematic philosophy of values. Neither philosophies of value nor systematic philosophies are in fashion. It is hoped that this work will make a contribution toward their reappraisal. Classically, political philosophy was considered a part of philosophic systems, as the basic ideas of the philosophy applied to politics. Its relative neglect by the predominant school of philosophy in America and Britain has meant that certain ideas and issues in philosophy are in danger of (...) erasure by default. The neglect of political philosophy has meant, however, that ideologies dominate political discussion. The field of political discourse has, in effect, been yielded or ceded to the ideologues. Their views, concepts, statements of the issues, and solutions—in a word, the ultimate legitimacy of their approach—have been tacitly accepted. Many philosophers have never discussed ideology in relation to, and in the context of political philosophy in our time. More importantly, the connection between ideology and contemporary events has not received serious philosophic examination. One basis for this attitude may be the ideal of a "value free" social science. The well known thesis of Daniel Bell's book, "the end of ideology," has diverted attention from its study. Yet ideological politics is still with us in the form of ideologically defined political parties and political conflicts in which the ideology of the conflicting groups define the issues. Part I examines the link between ideology, totalitarianism and Plato’s ideal of the “philosopher-king.” Ideology is articulated by intellectuals seeking power, or attached to a party or faction seeking power. It is applied totalistically through bureaucracy and technology. We will go on in Part II to a critique of political essentialism. Essential models, combined with political motives and ideological formulas are the basis for total politicization. Thus totalitarianism will have been analyzed into root essential models, articulated into totalistic ideologies, by politically minded intellectuals, using a formula which politicizes all categories. Chapter five contrasts the moral values of political philosophy with the politicized standards of ideology. Chapter six contrasts the privacy and freedom requisite to evaluation of personal values, and to genuine happiness, with the total publicity of ideology. An entirely new grounding relation for politics is explicated in this book. (shrink)

This article addresses Hannah Arendt’s controversial engagement with European imperial ventures in Africa. For many of her critics, Arendt’s description of imperialism either duplicates the ideologically inflected accounts and justifications of mass-murder, or conveys her own personal views of Africans and peoples of African descent. I argue that Arendt’s account in the “Imperialism” chapter of the Origins of Totalitarianism must be read parallel to her discussion of the conflict in Palestine between Jewish settlers and native Arabs. Rather than provide (...) us with an anthropological account of Africans, Arendt provides a political account of the necessity for cooperation in order to blunt imperial power-politics. In a second move, I develop a normative critique from Arendt’s remarks by relying on Heideggerian aspects of “World.” I argue that Arendt’s criticisms are really directed at Europeans who were unable to take the Africans’ point of view. (shrink)

[Excerpted From Editor's Introduction] Matthew Crippen takes this up in a Marcusian critique of Wittgenstein that attends, among other things, to the place of silence in that discourse. Referring to Horkheimer’s citation of the Latin aphorism that silence is consent, Crippen is critical of Wittgenstein’s admonition that we must pass over in silence those matters of which we cannot speak. This raises fascinating questions for critical theory that Crippen explores particularly with reference to Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality. To the (...) extent that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is “therapeutic,” it may effectively contain dissent by “helping” dissenters become “well-adjusted.” Marcuse, of course, was particularly concerned with the power of Total States— and particularly those engendered by advanced industrial capitalism—to contain dissent precisely by using therapeutic techniques to maintain adjustment. Bringing Marcuse and Wittgenstein together here has particularly explosive possibilities. In the context of a Total State, transformation depends on the possibility of calling the State into question from the inside (since “total” States systematically eliminate “outsides”). This is the point at which Wittgenstein’s silence becomes most intriguing. What is it, we must ask, that we cannot say? Silence may be (as Martin Luther King, Jr. said) more than consent: there comes a time when silence is betrayal. But this is one of many places where it pays to look at what is done as much as what is said. What game, we might ask, is Wittgenstein playing? And, more to the point, what is the field of play that joins Wittgenstein and Marcuse? John Cage famously said “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it...” Crippen begins a process (via Wittgenstein) of putting poetry into play that has important implications for the public work of philosophers. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is more readily known for her political thought and social commentary on the twentieth century than for her reading of the history of philosophy. This chapter argues that Arendt’s reading reflects a distinctive methodology for the history of philosophy when compared to other prominent twentieth-century historians of philosophy and science. Specifically, the analysis focuses on Arendt’s reading of the meditative tradition in the history of philosophy. In her later work of the 1970s, Arendt highlights the transformations and the (...) abandonment of key ideas in the meditative tradition, particularly in its medieval and modern formulations. Arendt finds that the meaning of the activity of “thinking” in the meditative tradition was lost or distorted in post-Greek philosophical traditions. According to Arendt, the ancient form of meditation expressed the activity of thinking insofar as it was invested in the aporetic model employed by Socrates. Arendt’s unique insight for the history of philosophy is her argument that this loss of the activity of thinking was inextricably linked to the political and moral crisis of her time—totalitarianism. The chapter concludes by drawing out the pedagogical implications of Arendt’s reading of the history of philosophy for undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy. (shrink)

2016년 겨울과 17년 봄 사이 한국에서 발생한 정치적 사건 앞에서 요구되는 것은 ‘민주주의의 승리’에 대한 향유가 아니라, 오히려 ‘민주주의의 위기’에 대한 성찰이며, 이러한 위기에 대한 성찰은 민주주의 자체에 대한 질문이 되어야 할 것이다. 즉 “민주주의는 그 본질에서부터 필연적으로 몰락할 수밖에 없는 것은 아닌가?”라는 질문에 우리는 답해야 한다. 본 글에서 우리는 미셸 앙리의 ‘민주주의에 대한 비판’을 통해 이 질문에 답할 것이다. 글에서는 먼저 앙리의 ‘정치적인 것’에 대한 비판을 통해 ‘전체주의’가 모든 정치체제의 공통 본성이라는 점을 볼 것이고, 이어 앙리의 ‘민주주의에 대한 비판’을 (...) 검토하면서 이점을 확인할 것이다. 이후 민주주의가 기반하고 있는 다른 ‘비정치적인’ 요소, 즉 종교와의 관계를 살펴보면서, 민주주의가 하나의 정치체제로서, 그 본성상 ‘정치적인 것’을 추구하고 따라서 전체주의로 향해 있다는 점과, 그러한 몰락의 위기 앞에서 민주주의 사회의 유지와 발전을 위해 요구되는 것은 개인과 삶에 대한 존중이라는 점을 보여줄 것이다. (shrink)

Brings to light critiques of modern tyranny written by German socialist intellectuals before and during World War II about the definition, origins, nature, and means of overcoming totalitarianism.

Bauman's work can be understood as a critical theory, but its east European context needs to be established alongside the west European sensibilities of the Frankfurt School. The question of Soviet modernity and the status of the Polish experience of which Bauman was part need to be placed alongside the more famous critique of the Holocaust, which can be more readily aligned with Horkheimer and Adorno's views in Dialectic of Enlightenment. To this end, some of Bauman's essays and arguments (...) on the Soviet and Polish experience are reviewed in order to begin to fill out this other dimension of Bauman's critique of modernity and totalitarianism. Both Bauman's views on eastern Europe, and my survey of them, are offered as hints for those that follow. (shrink)

In Western thought, it has been persistently assumed that in moral and political matters, people should rely on the inner voice of conscience rather than on external authorities, laws, and regulations. This volume investigates this concept, examining the development of the Western politics of conscience, from Socrates to the present, and the formation of the Western ethico-political subject. The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense (...) against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics. This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization. (shrink)

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)

After asking whether the concept of totalitarianism still has a meaning in today’s world, and whether its critique makes political sense, the author turns to the model provided by the two phases of Claude Lefort’s attempts to understand totalitarianism over the past 60 years. He distinguishes two distinct phases; the first is framed by critical Marxism, the second influenced by the phenomenology of the late Merleau-Ponty. The author stresses Lefort’s major works, including the role of his pathbreaking (...) work on Machiavelli, ‘ La critique du totalitarisme et l’invention de la démocratie’, ‘ Un homme en trop’ (on Solzenhitsyn and the Goulag), and ‘ La complication’ (which rejects the oversimplified interpretation of totalitarianism as simply an ideology). (shrink)

This article challenges the restrictive association of critical theory with the Frankfurt School by exploring the differential reception of Hegel by German critical thinkers on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. In the West, Theodor Adorno held Hegelian ‘identity thinking’ partly responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism. Meanwhile in the East, Ernst Bloch turned Hegel into a weapon against the communist regime. The difference between Adorno and Bloch’s positions is shown to turn on the relationship between speculation, (...) dialectics and critique. Whereas for Adorno Hegelian speculation was the root of dangerous identity thinking, Bloch saw the repression of speculative thought as a cornerstone of totalitarianism. However, it is argued that ultimately Bloch and Adorno were united in their reception of Hegel by a shared understanding that the goal of critical theory, namely the transformation of the social totality, could not be achieved without utopian speculation. (shrink)

At a central point in his much-discussed book Real Presences, George Steiner writes of the “mountebank’s virtuosity... of a Hitler,” that realises “a counter-logos which conceptualizes and then enacts the deconstruction of the human.” It was clear to Steiner’s American readers what was meant by this transposition of the term ‘deconstruction’ from the field of aesthetics and philosophy, of literary and cultural criticism, to the context of political and ideological struggle against fascism and totalitarianism in general. Steiner discusses this (...) in another context, but again with all the pathos of confession at his disposal: “I believe that the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, in today’s culture and society, implicates that of the human.” This creed closes Steiner’s discussion of the “liberals” who are treated with contempt because they preach tolerance in the face of the triumphal procession of deconstruction in the humanities. According to Steiner, such a policy of appeasement once again misjudges the degree of threat to which our social order is exposed: what starts in the humanities ends in society as the nihilistic corruption of binding human values. With the establishment of deconstruction in literary studies at elite American universities, the Occident succumbs to the powers of disintegration and ‘brutalization’ for the second time in the twentieth century—Yale of the seventies and eighties repeats Munich of 1938. (shrink)

At a central point in his much-discussed book Real Presences, George Steiner writes of the “mountebank’s virtuosity... of a Hitler,” that realises “a counter-logos which conceptualizes and then enacts the deconstruction of the human.” It was clear to Steiner’s American readers what was meant by this transposition of the term ‘deconstruction’ from the field of aesthetics and philosophy, of literary and cultural criticism, to the context of political and ideological struggle against fascism and totalitarianism in general. Steiner discusses this (...) in another context, but again with all the pathos of confession at his disposal: “I believe that the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, in today’s culture and society, implicates that of the human.” This creed closes Steiner’s discussion of the “liberals” who are treated with contempt because they preach tolerance in the face of the triumphal procession of deconstruction in the humanities. According to Steiner, such a policy of appeasement once again misjudges the degree of threat to which our social order is exposed: what starts in the humanities ends in society as the nihilistic corruption of binding human values. With the establishment of deconstruction in literary studies at elite American universities, the Occident succumbs to the powers of disintegration and ‘brutalization’ for the second time in the twentieth century—Yale of the seventies and eighties repeats Munich of 1938. (shrink)

In The Humanist Spirit of Daoism, Chen Guying presents a concise overview of his understanding of the meaning and significance of Daoist philosophy. Chen is a leading contemporary Chinese thinker and spokesperson for a new Daoist approach to existential and socio-political issues. He was born in mainland China in 1935, but after having resettled to Taiwan, he received his education there and was a student activist in the 1960s. He became famous in the Chinese-speaking world with his writings on Nietzsche, (...) Laozi and Zhuangzi. At present he is a Professor at Peking University. This volume collects representative essays from the past 25 years which not only outline Chen's interpretation of Daoism as a deeply humanist way of thinking and living, but also show how he employs this philosophy in a critique of totalitarianism and neo-imperialism. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is famous for her influential and innovative analysis of totalitarianism. However, her thinking on political systems and ideologies is far from limited to this theorization. Arendt also criti-cizes modern liberalism and its ideological framework. Indeed, Arendt’s thought reveals many of the political consequences of world-lessness, the loss of the world in contemporary times, particularly in terms of a sense of disempowerment and the advent of a technical vision of politics. This article looks at the political effects of (...) world-lessness, exploring the emerging opposition between liberal post-politics and conservative hyper-politics. This critique of Arendt’s thought can help us better understand the issues and questions raised by liberalism. (shrink)

In this rethinking of Marxism and its blind spots, Dick Howard argues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the U.S. and abroad. The author turns to the American and French Revolutions to uncover what was truly "revolutionary" about those events, arguing that two distinct styles of democratic life emerged, the implications of which were misinterpreted in light of the rise (...) of communism. Howard uses a critical rereading of Marx as a theorist of democracy to offer his audience a new way to think about this political ideal. He argues that it is democracy, rather than Marxism, that is radical and revolutionary, and that Marx could have seen this but did not. In Part I, Howard explores the attraction Marxism held for intellectuals, particularly French intellectuals, and he demonstrates how the critique of totalitarianism from a Marxist viewpoint allowed these intellectuals to see the radical nature of democracy. Part II examines two hundred years of democratic political life--comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France. Part III offers a rethinking of Marx's contribution to democratic politics. Howard concludes that Marx was attempting a "philosophy by other means," and that paradoxically, just because he was such an astute philosopher, Marx was unable to see the radical political implications of his own analyses. The philosophically justified "revolution" turns out to be the basis of an anti-politics whose end was foreshadowed by the fall of European communism in 1989. (shrink)

Popper's critique of the philosophical doctrines underlying totalitarian ideology is powerful. Yet, having the regimes of Hitler and Stalin in full view before him, he did not give full and balanced consideration to the range of effects these doctrines can have within actually existing ideologies and regimes. The ideas he correlates with totalitarianism can and do exist in benign forms or tempered by other ideas and by institutions. Moreover, the struggle with totalitarianism is only partly a struggle (...) of philosophical ideas. Political argument and rhetoric appeal to feeling as well as intellect. This tends to be a blindspot of liberalism that often weakens it in the competition with its adversaries. (shrink)

In this rethinking of Marxism and its blind spots, Dick Howard argues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the U.S. and abroad. The author turns to the American and French Revolutions to uncover what was truly "revolutionary" about those events, arguing that two distinct styles of democratic life emerged, the implications of which were misinterpreted in light of the rise (...) of communism. Howard uses a critical rereading of Marx as a theorist of democracy to offer his audience a new way to think about this political ideal. He argues that it is democracy, rather than Marxism, that is radical and revolutionary, and that Marx could have seen this but did not. In Part I, Howard explores the attraction Marxism held for intellectuals, particularly French intellectuals, and he demonstrates how the critique of totalitarianism from a Marxist viewpoint allowed these intellectuals to see the radical nature of democracy. Part II examines two hundred years of democratic political life -- comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France. Part III offers a rethinking of Marx's contribution to democratic politics. Howard concludes that Marx was attempting a "philosophy by other means," and that paradoxically, just because he was such an astute philosopher, Marx was unable to see the radical political implications of his own analyses. The philosophically justified "revolution" turns out to be the basis of an anti-politics whose end was foreshadowed by the fall of European communism in 1989. (shrink)

The theme of this issue of Ethical Perspectives is the French tradition in liberal thought, and the unique contribution that this tradition can make to debates in contemporary liberalism. It is inspired by a colloquium held at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in December of 2008 entitled “In Search of a Lost Liberalism: Constant, Tocqueville, and the singularity of French Liberalism.” This colloquium was held in conjunction with the retirement of Leuven professor and former Dean of the Institute of Philosophy, André (...) Van de Putte, who found much inspiration in this tradition. A revised version of his valedictory lecture from the conference serves as the final contribution to this issue. Much contemporary liberal political philosophy is currently done in conversation with a line of liberal thinkers starting with John Locke, running through Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, and culminating in the work of John Rawls and his followers. The reasons for the enormous appeal of this philosophical tradition are, among other things, the combination of the central role of the intuitively appealing value of individual liberty with a strong rationalistic, universalistic, and normative character. The thread running through most of these liberal theories is a commitment to what the French liberal Benjamin Constant referred to as “the liberty of the moderns,” that is, liberty in a negative sense, as a lack of interference in one’s activity from others and from government. This focus has expanded over time to include a richer body of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights, for instance, in the work of liberal thinkers who have tried to integrate the insights of communitarian thought and discourse ethics in their work. However, the emphasis on individual liberty in the negative sense continues to be the normative and theoretical touchstone and default position for many contemporary liberal theories. The limitation of the canon of liberal thought to the aforementioned authors and themes deprives the contemporary debate of a rich source of ideas: the French liberal tradition. Montesquieu, considered to be the father of this tradition, provides a good example of how it can enrich current debates in liberal theory. Montesquieu’s work evinces a keen eye for the dynamics of power relations and the limitations of the power of the better rational argument. His insight that power can sometimes only be checked by an equal and opposing power, so that a system of separation and balance of powers is necessary in order to preserve liberty, is reflected in the foundations of most modern democracies. Montesquieu also argues that contingent environmental, historical, social and economic conditions play a dramatic role in determining what kind of government is appropriate for a particular society. On his view, ignoring these facts when framing a government can inadvertently end in despotism. Montesquieu’s observations challenge us to reexamine some of contemporary liberalism’s universalist and rationalist claims. Benjamin Constant is most famous for his distinction between two kinds of liberty: the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. The ancient form of liberty manifested itself in the active political participation of citizens in the ancient republic. While this form of government and decision-making was suitable for small, homogeneous city-states, Constant argues that it is impracticable for large modern nation-states. Hence, the concept of modern liberty shifts to an emphasis on the rule of law and the non-interference of the state in private matters. This form of liberty is familiar to us from contemporary liberalism – and Constant cherishes this form of freedom as much as any liberal does today. However, his position is complex: he also argues that the liberty of the ancients should not be neglected. Active political participation is needed to ensure that the government is executing its duty of preserving the modern form of liberty by publicly pointing out violations. The contemporary relevance of Constant’s work is clear when we consider the alleged “democratic deficit” that plagues the EU and international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. Not only does this democratic deficit threaten the modern form of liberty by placing decision-making processes out of sight of the people, it also threatens citizens’ sense of self-respect derived from self-governance. Constant’s argument for the necessity of combining the liberty of the ancients with that of the moderns provides a fruitful resource for confronting these contemporary issues. Tocqueville’s work on liberalism benefits from his opportunity to observe a society founded on liberal democratic principles – the United States of America – in action. In his Democracy in America, he examines the social consequences, both intended and unintended, of building a society on ‘the equality of conditions’, as he defines ‘democracy’. Tocqueville sees a tension between the democratic value of equality and the aristocratic value of the rule of the best. He observes that democratic societies do not necessarily choose the best leaders and instead promote mediocrity instead of virtue, talent, and excellence. Democracy also confronts citizens with the threat of ‘soft despotism’, where a government that preserves the outer signs of the liberty of the moderns nevertheless controls the behavior of its citizens in minute detail through a system of detailed rules ostensibly aimed at their welfare. This paternalism is an even more insidious threat to liberal values than the hard variety of despotism, since it is so difficult to detect and done in the name of liberal values themselves. Taking Tocqueville’s observations seriously would add complexity to attempts to theorize about the modern social-democratic welfare state. The contributions to this issue supplement and critique mainstream liberal thought and its relation to contemporary issues through a serious engagement with the French liberal tradition. Annelien De Dijn’s contribution discusses Bertrand de Jouvenel, a lesser-known 20th Century representative of the French political tradition she terms ‘aristocratic liberalism’. This tradition has its roots in the work of Montesquieu, and emphasizes the importance of intermediary bodies, most importantly the aristocracy, in providing a check to the top-down power of despotic state authorities and the bottom-up power of revolutionary leveling tendencies, both of which threaten liberty. De Dijn situates Jouvenel in this tradition, but then indicates an important difference between his thought and that of his predecessors: his most significant work, On Power, is not only on French history, but on European history. Pointing to the enthusiastic reception of this work in the Anglophone world, she suggests that the rise of totalitarianism in Europe gave the anti-totalitarian features of aristocratic liberalism a broader appeal. Valentino Lumowa’s paper concerns Constant’s classic text, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Lumowa argues that in order to understand Constant’s piece, we must be aware that its two parts were written under different historical circumstances and decipher the argumentative thrust inherent in the text. Following Stephen Holmes, he argues that to understand the shift Constant made in the second part of the text, we should read it within the context of the increasing influence of the ultra-Royalists in the legislature during the Bourbon Restoration. However, in contrast to Holmes, he contends that the spirit of both civic and individual freedom, which enlivens representative system, is the backbone of the text in its unity. Demin Duan’s essay investigates an apparent ambivalence between liberal and imperialist tendencies in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, which has already drawn some attention from Tocquevillian scholars. These interpretations of Tocqueville and his writings on empire generally agree that Tocqueville stands in a recognized tradition of liberalism, which is characterized by respect for human rights, individual freedom and a sense of universal humanism. On this standard view, Tocqueville’s support of imperialism represents nothing but an unfortunate breach of his own otherwise consistent liberal thinking. Duan’s article questions this standard position. By questioning the assumption of Tocqueville’s liberalism in the first place, he tries to gauge the influence of both the old republican tradition and the new liberal perspective on his thinking. In conclusion, he argues that Tocqueville’s overall thought, especially his notion of freedom, is very much informed by an old republican tradition. His support of French imperialism could be better understood from this perspective rather than be rendered simply as a deviation from liberal norms. Pawel Marczewski’s contribution is an attempt to show that Tocqueville’s conception of liberty transcends the divisions between negative and positive aspects of freedom. He begins by juxtaposing this conception with the opposition drawn by Constant between liberty of the ancients and liberty of the moderns. While Tocqueville and Constant shared a concern for the preservation of individual rights, Tocqueville was much more reluctant to accept the modern loss of the communal dimension of liberty. He did not accept the view that jouissances privées, private pleasures, are the main compensation that the modern world has to offer for the lost ancient treasure of political participation. The essay then looks into the relevance of Tocqueville’s standpoint for current debates between liberal defenders of negative freedom and republican advocates of freedom as non-domination. Participants on both sides of the debate seem to be so devoted to showing that their particular approach provides the best guarantees against actual and possible threats to liberty that they overlook the fact that their definitions of freedom remain significantly similar. By arguing that ‘to be free is to be guided by one’s own will’, contemporary republicans, as well as their liberal counterparts, move along the lines drawn by Constant towards private pleasures. By questioning the inevitability of this turn, Tocqueville provides us with a valuable contribution to these discussions in contemporary political philosophy. Finally, André Van de Putte’s contribution, an adaptation of his emeritus speech that closed the conference on French Liberalism, appeals to Tocqueville in order to draw attention to the importance of intermediary, dialogical bodies in mitigating the implicit despotic tendencies of the democratic drive to equality. In Tocqueville’s view, the transition from the feudal corporate inequality to democratic individual equality was not a clean break. Rather, this transition is a continual process of democratization that is driven by a desire for equality, or egalité des conditions. This dissolution of distinctions of estate, class and status has the unintended consequence of concentrating the diffuse power of these entities into a centralized state, which is responsible for ensuring the equality of all under the law. This process leaves increasingly isolated and atomized individuals to face the power of a monolithic state in defense of their freedom, and moves toward a soft, paternalistic despotism. Constant’s freedom of the moderns is not sufficient to protect individuals from this centralized power. Democracy also requires the political freedom of the ancients. Van de Putte argues for a system in which atomized individuals organize themselves into intermediary bodies that, in a Montesquieuian balance of powers, can enter into dialogue with each other and the state on more equitable terms. Van de Putte’s contribution closes with a plea for a conception of democracy as a regime of dialogue. (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of (...) class='Hi'>totalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgement analyses our experience of the beautiful and the sublime in relation to nature, morality, and theology. Meredith's classic translation is here lightly revised and supplemented with a bilingual glossary. The edition also includes the important First Introduction.

"... 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)

This volume provides theoretical construction to the extraordinary events that resulted in the collapse of communism worldwide. The authors attribute a great deal of the problems of totalitarianism to its blind acceptance of a Marxist philosophy of practice. With the failure of communist practice, the collapse of the Marxist paradigm was quick to follow. At its roots, this volume is a critique of the idea that we can have "scientific knowledge" of the social and political future.

Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Tzvetan Todorov; David Bellos The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared by Henry Rousso; Lucy B. Golsan Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison by Ian Kershaw; Moshe Lewin Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the use of a Notion by Slavoj Zizek.

Does Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of life include an ethical and political dimension? It appears that the writings about Marx already include such aspects, especially in reference to the problem of social determinism. More generally, however, our attention must be focused on what Henry calls the transcendental genesis of politics which accounts for the lack of autonomy of the political field, just like in the case of economics. Politics may then be analyzed against that background, for instance in the writings on (...) totalitarianism and democracy. The frame given by transcendental genesis is also tied to the fundamental opposition between barbarism and culture which pervades the axiological implications of Henry’s work. Because culture is always referring to a “culture of life,” it allows connecting life and its immanent reality with ethical/political questions. (shrink)

In this article I aim to clarify the role of science and technology in Weil's account of the formation and maintenance of the bureaucratic state as a totalitarian form of State, which allows to identify the similarities between capitalist, fascist and communist regimes. In the first section I characterize Weil's conception of modernity. Having The Need for Roots as my main reference, first, I reconstruct Weil's conceptualization of human nature, after I explore the meanings and signs of uprootedness and Weil's (...) critique of Marxism. In the second section, I analyze the relationship between Revolution, Totalitarianism and the invention of the bureaucratic State. I retake Weil's critique of Marx and the Marxists arguing that science and technology must be subjected to a new criticism today, for they have been reduced to mere means of a totalitarian logic, which ultimately reinforces social oppression. I conclude by rescuing Weil's defense of the fundamental value of individual freedom and of thought, for our humanity lies in it. (shrink)

Louis Dumont is a distinguished Indianist but his later work has undertaken to ground an allegedly general need for holism and hierarchy in comparative historical sociology. Dumont's anti‐individualist thrust, depicting as it does modern Western culture as an aberration, a kind of social disease inviting in the long run an even worse cure—the nemesis of totalitarianism— enjoyed in the 80s the status of a modern classic of sociological wisdom. Even those who, like the new humanist thinkers in France (Luc (...) Ferry, Alain Renaut, Tzvetan Todorov) fight the influential antimodern stances of Heidegger or Leo Strauss, have come to share Dumont's strictures against individualism. This paper describes the main theses of Dumont's latest book, translated into English as Essays on Individualism, while at the same time sketching a liberal critique of his anti‐individualist bias. (shrink)

This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

What are we to make of Western Buddhism? Glenn Wallis argues that in aligning their tradition with the contemporary self-help industry, Western Buddhists evade the consequences of Buddhist thought. This book shows that with concepts such as vanishing, nihility, extinction, contingency, and no-self, Buddhism, like all potent systems of thought, articulates a notion of the "real." Raw, unflinching acceptance of this real is held by Buddhism to be at the very core of human "awakening." Yet these preeminent human truths are (...) universally shored up against in contemporary Buddhist practice, which contradicts the very heart of Buddhism. The author's critique of Western Buddhism is threefold. It is immanent, in emerging out of Buddhist thought but taking it beyond what it itself publicly concedes; negative, in employing the "democratizing" deconstructive methods of François Laruelle's non-philosophy; and re-descriptive, in applying Laruelle's concept of philofiction. Through applying resources of Continental philosophy to Western Buddhism, A Critique of Western Buddhism suggests a possible practice for our time, an "anthropotechnic", or religion transposed from its seductive, but misguiding, idealist haven. (shrink)

The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal (...) container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal (...) container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

While we are familiar with socialist and fascist aesthetics, liberalism is not usually thought to permit a political role for literature. Nussbaum has attempted to fill this lacuna. She sketches a “liberal aesthetics” by linking three aspects of literature to her normative proposal. The representation of suffering is connected to the capability approach; the presentation of ethical dilemmas to political liberalism; and the reaction of pity to legal and political judgment. Literature is thus hoped to contribute to the stability of (...) liberal democracies. For over 25 years, individual works by Nussbaum on the value of literature have been critiqued on aesthetic grounds: for not dealing with form, for denying the polyphony of texts, for having a limited conception of readerly identification, and for using an elitist and generically limited selection of material. As of yet, no criticisms have, however, considered the full oeuvre of Nussbaum’s defense of literature, and none have examined this aspect of her work in light of her political philosophy. By placing the aesthetic and political aspects of Nussbaum’s work in conversation, this article investigates the proposed relationship between literature and liberalism. It argues that each component of Nussbaum’s liberal aesthetics contains a political danger: foreclosing discussion of intergenerational responsibility; obscuring questions about which doctrines are permissible in the public sphere; and encouraging stereotypes of marginalized people. Literature, understood like this, may risk exacerbating present tensions within liberalism, rather than bolstering its stability. (shrink)

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, David Riesman and Hannah Arendt were engaged in an animated discussion about the meaning and character of totalitarianism. Their disagreement reflected, in part, different experiences and dissonant intellectual backgrounds. Arendt abhorred the social sciences, finding them pretentious and obfuscating. Riesman, in contrast, abandoned a career in law to take up the sociological vocation, which he combined with his own heterodox brand of humanistic psychology. This article delineates the stakes of the Arendt Riesman (...) debate by examining Arendt’s critique of social science and Riesman’s defence of a sociological interpretation of totalitarianism. In addition, the article argues that Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism misdescribed the nature of Nazi and Bolshevik societies in ways that damaged her political account more generally. Riesman intuited that weakness and, as the following article shows, modern historical research has confirmed it. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible. Many philosophers from Hobbes through Berkeley and Hume to the pragmatists, the logical positivists and (above all) Wittgenstein have devised such theories and criteria in order to discredit their opponents. I argue 1) that such theories and criteria are morally obnoxious, a) because they smack of the totalitarian linguistic (...) tactics of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 and b) because they dehumanize the opposition by portraying them as mere spouters of gibberish; 2) that they are profoundly illiberal since if true, they would undermine Mill’s arguments for free speech; 3) that such theories are prone to self-contradiction, pragmatic and otherwise; 4) that they often turn against their creators including what they were meant to exclude and excluding what they were meant to include; 5) that such theories are susceptible to a modus tollens pioneered by Richard Price in his Review Concerning the Principle Questions of Morals(1758); and 6) that such theories are prima facie false since they fail to ‘predict’ the data that is it their business to explain (or, in the case of criteria, fail to capture the concept that they allegedly represent). The butcher’s bill is quite considerable: some of Hobbes, a fair bit of Locke, half of Berkeley, large chunks of Hume, Russell's Theory of Types, verificationism in its positivist and Dummettian variants, much of pragmatism and most of Wittgenstein - all these have to be sacrificed if we are to save our souls as philosophic liberals. (shrink)