This paper shows ways to develop, integrate, and transform Kant’s and Arendt’s theories on political evil into a unified Karendtian theory. Given the deep influence Kant had on Arendt’s thinking, the deep philosophical compatibility between their projects is not surprising. But the results of drawing on the resources left by both is exciting and groundbreaking with regard to both political evil in general and the challenges of modernity and totalitarianism in particular.

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.

Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir Best Graphic Novels of the Year--Forbes Jewish Book Award Finalist Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize For Persepolis and Logicomix fans, a New Yorker cartoonist’s page-turning graphic biography of the fascinating Hannah Arendt, the most prominent philosopher of the twentieth century. One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is best known for her landmark 1951 (...) book on openness in political life,The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, with its powerful and timely lessons for today, has become newly relevant. She led an extraordinary life. This was a woman who endured Nazi persecution firsthand, survived harrowing "escapes" from country to country in Europe, and befriended such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, in a world inhabited by everyone from Marc Chagall and Marlene Dietrich to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. A woman who finally had to give up her unique genius for philosophy, and her love of a very compromised man--the philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger--for what she called "love of the world." Compassionate and enlightening, playful and page-turning, New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein's The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt is a strikingly illustrated portrait of a complex, controversial, deeply flawed, and irrefutably courageous woman whose intelligence and "virulent truth telling" led her to breathtaking insights into the human condition, and whose experience continues to shine a light on how to live as an individual and a public citizen in troubled times. (shrink)

United in Hate analyzes the Left's contemporary romance with militant Islam as a continuation of the Left's love affair with communist totalitarianism in the ...

The aim of this article is to depict as accurately as possible the ideological conflict between liberal democracy and an insidious present-day version of communism, namely cultural socialism. Obviously, it is not easy to describe the essential relationships between two complex phenomena that evolve nonlinearly within a hypercomplex environment. The ideological systems of liberal democracy and cultural socialism involve both objective and subjective facts, material and immaterial components, neutral and emotion-laden aspects, deliberate and unintentional behaviors, linear and nonlinear effects, and (...) planner-dependent and observer-dependent events. They affect each other and also fall under the influence of different non-political factors that characterize the Euro-Atlantic societies. In order to cope with the complexity of this research object we adopt the methodological dualism and a praxeological approach. The system of discursive liberal democracy can be seen – from a praxeological perspective – as a spontaneous order generated and maintained by three classes of attractors: the attractors of democracy (inclusion, political equality, high level of political participation, and majority rule), the attractors of liberalism (rule-governed political agency and the right to reasonable self-determination), and the attractors of public rationality (publicness, objectivity, verifiability, and revisability). Liberal democracy subsists in any society only if a sufficient number of its members reproduce the corresponding attractors in their political (and non-political) conduct. It is important to note that it is much easier to reproduce the attractors of democracy than the attractors of liberalism and rationality. Maybe because of that the socialists strive to undermine the system of liberal democracy by perverting – in the first instance – the standards of (public) rationality. One of the most important ingredient of cultural socialism is so-called "political correctness", by means of which people are prevented from expressing genuinely and politely certain beliefs or doubts in the public sphere even if they profess the standards of objectivity, verifiability, and revisability. Under the pressure of political correctness the attractors of public rationality tend to wither, the liberal dimension of the political system disappears too, and democracy becomes a sheer tyranny. Choosing a form of political organization is not a scientific, but a socio-political matter. It is not the job of social scientists to recommend or impose political goals in general and a specific political system in particular. However, inasmuch as some goals are set, social scientists can indicate the most appropriate means of meeting them. If the Euro-Atlantic societies still value liberal democracy and want to preserve it, it is important to teach them how to reproduce its attractors and to counteract the pernicious effects of cultural socialism. (shrink)

This paper argues for a comprehensive conception of empathy as comprising epistemic, affective, and motivational elements and introduces the ancient Stoic theory of attachment as a model for describing the embodied, emotional response to others that we take to be distinctive of empathy. Our argument entails that in order to provide a suitable conceptual framework for the interdisciplinary study of empathy one must extend the scope of recent “simulationalist” and “enactivist” accounts of empathy in two important respects. First, against the (...) enactivist assumption that human mindreading capacities primarily rely on an immediate, quasi-perceptual understanding of other’s intentional states, we draw on Alfred Schutz’ analysis of social understanding to argue that reflective types of understanding play a distinct, but equally fundamental role in empathic engagements. Second, we insist that empathy also involves an affective response toward the other and their situation. We suggest analyzing this response in terms of the Stoic concepts of attachment, concern, and a fundamental type of prosocial motivation, that can best be described as an “extended partiality.” By way of conclusion, we integrate the above concepts into a comprehensive conceptual framework for the study of empathy and briefly relate them to current debates about empathic perception and prosocial motivation. The result, we argue, is an account that stays neutral with regard to the exact nature of the processes involved in producing empathy and can therefore accommodate discussion across theoretical divides—e.g., those between enactivist, simulationalist, and so-called theory-theorist approaches. (shrink)

Moral relativism is deeply troubling for those who believe that, without a set of moral absolutes, democratic societies will devolve into tyranny or totalitarianism. Engaging directly with this claim, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the roots of contemporary anti-relativist fears to the antimodern rhetoric of the Catholic Church, and then rescues a form of philosophical relativism for modern, pluralist societies, arguing that this standpoint provides the firmest foundation for an allegiance to democracy. In its dual analysis of the relationship (...) between religion and politics and the implications of philosophical relativism for democratic theory, this book makes a far-ranging contribution to contemporary debates over the revival of religion in politics and the conceptual grounds for a commitment to democracy. It conducts the first comprehensive genealogy of anti-relativist discourse and reclaims for English-speaking readers the overlooked work of political theorists such as Hans Kelsen and Norberto Bobbio, who had articulated the bond between philosophical relativism and democracy. By engaging with attempts to replace the religious foundation of democratic values with a neo-Kantian conception of reason, this book also offers a powerful case for relativism as the strongest basis for a civic ethos that integrates different perspectives into democratic politics. (shrink)

In the following, I will trace the presence of Montesquieu in Arendt’s work, giving an account of both Arendt’s praise for the French writer’s particular way of thinking the political and his approach to problems that will become central to the development of Arendt’s own thought. Firstly, I will follow Arendt down the path that led her to discover fundamental tools in Montesquieu for understanding totalitarianism “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.” Secondly, I will track the way in which the (...) Arendtian reconceptualization of some key political words—power, law and freedom—is threaded through with her reading of the French author. Thirdly, I will look into the way in which Montesquieu’s formulation of a particular link between what Arendt calls the basic experience and the political regime, allows her to go on to discover a criteria that makes it possible to distinguish between political and anti-political ways of living together; and allows us to see that there is a phenomenally essential element within tyranny and totalitarianism that ensures that it “develops the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into existence.”. (shrink)

In the months after Donald Trump's election, Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism crashed onto the Amazon bestseller lists. "Never has our future been more unpredictable," she had written in the preface to the first edition in 1951, "never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries." With an uncannily (...) accurate prescience, Arendt's dark history of her times seemed to be describing the insanity of our own. Arendt would've recognized the extremes of the twenty-first century from her own: the disenchantment with politics; the rise of conspiracy theories; self-censorship; powerlessness; tyranny and occupation, the climate catastrophe, the banality of evil. She had lived through it already. Born in the first decade of the last century, just before it lurched into war, she escaped Fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential-and controversial-public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Hannah Arendt wrote, and thought, in order to engage directly with the political chaos of her time. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. Her approach was to change the world by examining it unflinchingly, and not simply to criticise and protest. It is this defiance that attracts so many to her work today. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A new ‘political philosophy’ is indispensable to the ‘post-Corona world,’ and this paper tries to analyze the future of ‘liberal democracy’ in it. It shows that ‘liberal democracy’ faces a ‘global crisis’ that has begun before, but the ‘novel Coronavirus pandemic,’ as a setback for it, strongly encourages that crisis. ‘Liberalism’ and ‘democracy,’ which had long been assumed by ‘political philosophers’ to go together, are now becoming decoupled, and the ‘liberal values’ of ‘democracy’ are eroding. To find why and (...) how, this paper analyzes ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and the evils and propensities of ‘democracy’ that bring about further erosions of ‘liberal values.’ There may be difficult trade-offs to be made between ‘liberal’ and ‘authoritarian’ ‘values’ - and, after the experience of ‘Coronavirus,’ this paper shows the ‘illiberal or authoritarian democracy’ may become stronger. -/- KEYWORDS: democracy, liberalism, liberal democracy, illiberal democracy, the novel Coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, authoritarianism, totalitarianism. -/- EXTENDED ABSTRACT For almost a century in West, ‘democracy’ has meant ‘liberal democracy’-a political system marked not only by ‘free and fair elections,’ but also by ‘liberal values.’ ‘Liberalism’ applied to the problem of the limits of the criminal law would require commitment to the presumption in favor of ‘liberty.’ If the word ‘liberal’ is to have any utility in this context, it should refer to one who has so powerful a commitment to ‘liberty’ that she is motivated to limit the number of acknowledged liberty-limiting or coercion-legitimizing principles as narrowly as possible. So, she only believes in ‘harm-principle’ as the morally relevant reason for criminal prohibitions. ‘Offense principle’ and ‘paternalistic’ and ‘moralistic’ considerations, when introduced as support for penal legislation, have no weight at all. So, it means ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-regarding vs. other-regarding actions distinction’ based on which the human is the owner of her mind and body and everything consenting adults do is beyond the realm of morality and law. It leads to ‘individual’ ‘basic rights and liberties’ such as ‘basic rights and liberties’ of ‘speech,’ ‘religion,’ and ‘property’ and ‘collective’ ‘basic rights and liberties’ such as ‘basic rights and liberties of assembly,’ ‘civil society,’ ‘political pluralism,’ ‘democratic institutions,’ and ‘non-governmental organizations.’ ‘Liberalism’ also believes in ‘equality of conditions, ‘equal and free participatory rights in political decision making,’ and ‘collective self-governance.’ It also believes in the ‘rule of law,’ a ‘separation of powers,’ and ‘checks and balances.’ However, even under fair and free elections, the elected leaders can be ‘populists,’ ‘ultra-nationalists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘fascists,’ and ‘authoritarians’ who do not respect ‘inviolable basic rights and liberties,’ and suppress ‘minorities.’ Democratically elected leaders can routinely ignore constitutional limits on their power and deprive their citizens of ‘basic rights and liberties.’ The two strands of ‘liberal democracy’ have been coming apart in the world, and the ‘liberal’ elements of ‘democracy’ have been fraying and eroding even before the ‘novel Coronavirus pandemic.’ Even before the Coronavirus hit, there was already much discussion of a crisis of ‘liberal democracy.’ In particular, there has been a debate about whether ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy,’ which had long been assumed to go together, were becoming decoupled. This paper shows ‘liberal democracy’ faces a ‘global crisis’ that had begun before the ‘novel Coronavirus pandemic.’ It also analyzes ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘liberalism,’ and ‘democracy’ and shows that Covid-19 is a setback for ‘liberal democracy.’ What is striking about the current moment is that many of the ‘liberal’ elements of ‘democracy’ are so far holding up under immense pressure. ‘Illiberal democracies’ seemed to be emerging in many countries. This model of ‘illiberal democracy,’ in which elections continue to be held but some individual rights and liberties are curtailed, may emerge stronger from this new crisis. In that sense, the ‘pandemic’ may become a challenge not only to ‘democracy’ as such but also to ‘liberal democracy’ in particular – in other words, a system of popular sovereignty together with guaranteed basic rights, such as freedom of association and expression and checks and balances on executive power. ‘Authoritarian’ procedures may succeed in mitigating the spread of the ‘Coronavirus,’ but the world now faces another problem: that when the virus recedes, many ‘liberal democracies’ will be far less ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’ than they were before. In times of crisis, ‘liberal values’ have been ignored temporarily in the name of executive power. However, the ‘temporary’ can become ‘permanent.’ In addition, if citizens lose their faith in the legitimacy of ‘liberal democracy’ as the best form of government, and think ‘liberal democracy’ cannot function effectively during a crisis, and ‘authoritarian regimes’ manage the crisis more decisively, the world will slide towards ‘illiberal or authoritarian democracy,’ and many ‘liberal democracies’ will be at grave risk of failure. There may now be difficult trade-offs to be made between those basic rights and security - and, after the experience of Covid-19, many citizens may choose security. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

It has been argued recently that tyranny is a persisting phenomenon very much alive today, a greater danger than newer forms of misrule such as totalitarianism. One argument is based on human nature being such that the temptation to abuse political power in the form of tyranny remains a possibility in all societies. Another defines tyranny as a spiritual disorder of the soul and polity. Both date the 19th century as the time when tyranny dropped (...) out of the western political vocabulary. In this view, modern political thought, like political science generally, has been impoverished by ignorance of, or indifference to, the nature of tyranny. By contrast, I treat tyranny not as possessing an essential, unchanging nature, but as a contested political concept used for a variety of purposes by different regimes and groups. Nor do I agree that, because ‘tyranny’ was used infrequently during the 19th century, systematic abuses of political power went unnoticed and unclassified. I treat a number of cases by postulating a family of controversial and contested regime types: tyranny, despotism, absolute monarchy, Bonapartism, Caesarism, and dictatorship. From them I conclude that, after tyranny was conflated with despotism at the end of the 18th century, both concepts were redescribed in terms of newer classifications belonging to the same conceptual family. Because ‘tyranny’ was then extended to many non-political arenas, it became so trivialized as to leave no prospect of our retrieving its once potent political meanings. If ‘tyranny’ is equally applicable to teachers, husbands, fashions, or public opinion, the concept has lost its political cutting edge. It now lacks any distinctive meaning that might frame a situation and define it as calling for urgent and decisive action, especially in foreign policy. (shrink)

Current debate over the motives, ideological justifications, and outcomes of the war with Iraq have been strident and polarizing. _A Matter of Principle _is the first volume gathering critical voices from around the world to offer an alternative perspective on the prevailing pro-war and anti-war positions. The contribu-tors—political figures, public intellectuals, scholars, church leaders, and activists—represent the most powerful views of liberal internationalism. Offering alternative positions that challenge the status quo of both the left and the right, these essays claim (...) that, in spite of the inconsistent justifications provided by the United States and its allies and the conflict-ridden process of social reconstruction, the war in Iraq has been morally justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, a flagrant violator of human rights, a force of global instability and terror, and a threat to world peace. The authors discuss the limitations of the current system of global governance, which tolerates gross violations of human rights and which has failed to prevent genocide in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. They also underscore the need for reform in international institutions and international law. At the same time, these essays do not necessarily attempt to apologize for the mistakes, errors, and deceptions in the way the Bush administration has handled the war. Disputing the idea that the only true liberal position on the war is to be against it, this volume charts an invaluable third course, a path determined by a strong liberal commitment to human rights, solidarity with the oppressed, and a firm stand against fascism, totalitarianism, and tyranny. (shrink)

This paper deals with the recently published work by Hannah Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" , which is her most extensive discussion of moral issues. What emerges from this work is a fuller account of what genuine morality is. Writings that she published had prepared her readers for the idea that genuine morality is Socratic morality, which holds that it is better for the person to suffer wrong than to do wrong. That means, in the contexts of resistance to (...) totalitarianism and to tyranny and despotism, that it is better to suffer wrong than to be an accomplice or passive bystander of wrong done to others when one could be safe if one did not resist. On the other hand, Arendt makes it clear that spurious morality in the form of what she calls "the morality of mores" makes people accomplices or passive bystanders. For them, morality is merely conformity to the prevailing norms, and their conformity is underlain by self-love. Thus, morality in one conventional sense sustains political evil, while morality in the real sense impels the individual's effort to resist evil. But this paper also tries to indicate that for Arendt the evil of totalitarianism is not simply the infliction of atrocious suffering and premature death on millions of people. Rather, the worst part of the evil is that atrocious suffering dehumanizes its victims. The loss of humanity is an existential loss: a deprivation of the human status. Correspondingly, the most noteworthy aspect of resistance to evil is to give testimony to the human stature: the unique human capacity to engage in free audacious activity. Status and stature constitute human dignity; and for Arendt human dignity is essentially existential in importance and only secondarily moral. (shrink)

This paper deals with the recently published work by Hannah Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy", which is her most extensive discussion of moral issues. What emerges from this work is a fuller account of what genuine morality is. Writings that she published had prepared her readers for the idea that genuine morality is Socratic morality, which holds that it is better for the person to suffer wrong than to do wrong. That means, in the contexts of resistance to (...) class='Hi'>totalitarianism and to tyranny and despotism, that it is better to suffer wrong than to be an accomplice or passive bystander of wrong done to others when one could be safe if one did not resist. On the other hand, Arendt makes it clear that spurious morality in the form of what she calls "the morality of mores" makes people accomplices or passive bystanders. For them, morality is merely conformity to the prevailing norms, and their conformity is underlain by self-love. Thus, morality in one conventional sense sustains political evil, while morality in the real sense impels the individual's effort to resist evil. But this paper also tries to indicate that for Arendt the evil of totalitarianism is not simply the infliction of atrocious suffering and premature death on millions of people. Rather, the worst part of the evil is that atrocious suffering dehumanizes its victims. The loss of humanity is an existential loss: a deprivation of the human status. Correspondingly, the most noteworthy aspect of resistance to evil is to give testimony to the human stature: the unique human capacity to engage in free audacious activity. Status and stature constitute human dignity; and for Arendt human dignity is essentially existential in importance and only secondarily moral. (shrink)

This essay seeks to exploe the nature and effects of the new Post-Industrial Revolution as epitomized by the digital universe, the fusion of synthetic biology and cybenetics, and the promise of genetics, engendering new hopes of a techno-utopian future of material abundance, new virtual worids, human-like robots, and the ultimate conquest of nature. Central to this prefect is the quest for transcending human limitattons by changing human nature itself, consciously directing evolution toward a posthuman or transhuman stage. Less well understood (...) is the utopia-dystopia syndrome illuminated by ttw dystopian imagination refracted in science-fiction literature in such famous twentieth-century dysopias as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984, cautioning that utopias may lead to their opposite: dystopia, totalitarianism, dictatorship. The thrall of techno-utopia based on technology as a prosthetic god may lead to universal tyranny by those who wield political power. The essay concludes that what humanity needs is not some unattainable Utopia but rather to cherish and nurture its God-given gifts of reason, free will, conscience, moral responsibility, an immortal soul, and the remarkable capacity of compasston to become fully human. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Antiutopianism: An IntroductionPatricia McManus (bio) and Darko Suvin (bio)Utopia is endangered today! Such a sentence seems redundant: utopia—the shape of the possibility that things could be better—is always in danger. But the present danger is something distinct from the dangers that historically have attended utopia. These have not gone away but, added to them, and largely superseding utopia’s other perils in our twenty-first century, is the disappearance of utopianism (...) from the culture and politics that dominate our collective sense of any future. Politically, this is a conscious and unconscious erasure serving the interests of ecocide and the present mass killings of poverty and declared or undeclared wars. Our axiom is that the unchecked drive for profits will necessarily continue serving such interests, so that we cannot take seriously either presumed new “green” interests as today enforced, or group “identities” unless they challenge that drive.The collection of essays that make up the following “bloc” contains an argument that there is a need, political and historical, to disentangle our understanding of antiutopianism today from the overt “anti-utopianisms” of previous epochs, giving weight if not shape to the Cold War identification of utopia with authoritarianism or uniformity under the fake sign of [End Page 289] “totalitarianism.” Where such older predecessors still linger, they have been turned to face the past, as if those past models of tyranny themselves buried not just particular utopias but also the need for utopia. We now have antiutopianism as a thing in itself, antiutopianism without utopia. It deserves to be taken very seriously, without the hyphen.This argument was first put forward by Darko Suvin in the final essays of his most recent collection Disputing the Deluge (Bloomsbury, 2022). The editor of that collection, Hugh C. O’Connell, glossed Suvin’s use of the unhyphenated term “antiutopianism” as follows: “we might think of antiutopianism today as the blurring of the boundaries between a stalwart negation of all utopian thought... and the hallucinatory proclamations of the End of History accompanying the triumph of the global capitalist world system.”Following the release of Disputing the Deluge, Suvin took up a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Research in Narrative, History and Memory. He developed the materials for a two-day workshop on antiutopianism in early April 2023. After conversation with Patricia McManus, that workshop was titled “Antiutopia as an Enforced Dominant Horizon of Mass Culture,” and it proposed to investigate the causes and consequences of this dominance for personality and utopianism today. It adopted the TV series Game of Thrones as its concrete exemplum. The first day of the workshop was introduced by Suvin’s presentation on the theory of antiutopia(nism), with a response by Antonis Balasopulos; the second day by McManus’s reading of Game of Thrones with a response by Lazar Atanasković. All of these presentations were rewritten for this volume of Utopian Studies. We were happy with the interest generated, which ran to over seventy registrants from all over the world.Suvin’s contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” sets the scene for the interventions that follow it. It engages with two aspects of our present in some detail, the self or woebegone “personality” of late or catastrophic capitalism, and the gathering signs of “neofeudalism,” possibly issuing into a Fascism 2.0, as a way of probing the historical horizon of this capitalism.In his response on the first day, “Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation,” Balasopoulos picked up Suvin’s focusing on the “personality” in relation to both utopia and the bourgeois revolutions. That concept is here subjected to an analysis that traces its filiations with both Social Darwinist and Marxist conceptualizations of “survival.” [End Page 290]The two essays from the second day of the workshop move from the explorations opened by Suvin and Balasopoulos to focus on analysing HBO’s hit TV series Game of Thrones. Following up a suggestion by Suvin, McManus makes the case for understanding the series as articulating antiutopianism and thriving on so doing. Atanasković, in “On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones,” examines the series’s use of an aesthetic of “Fantastic history,” and... (shrink)

Most interpretations of Orwell's political thought have concentrated on his critique of the ideology of totalitari-anism, especially as this ideology manifested itself in the 1930's in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Nazi Germany under Hitler.2 These interpretations have provided valuable insights into Orwell's own perceptions of the dangers of cen-tralized state tyranny. However, they suffer from two weak-nesses connected with the concept of totalitarianism. First, the concept of totalitarianism as it has been developed in aca-demic (...) political science has been related specifically to the Soviet and Nazi experiences, and, thus, does not adequately account for other types of tyrannical regimes.3 Second, the application of the totalitarian model to the examination of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four tends to emphasize the pro-phetic aspects of the novel and to diminish its character as an investigation of contemporary political life.4 Instead of using the normal rubric of totalitarianism, I shall examine Orwell's political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four in terms of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy, a con-cept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. (shrink)

Le terme « totalitaire » est issu d’un réseau discursif indissociable d’actes meurtriers. D’où le sens donné à l’expression de « langage totalitaire » : un langage de coercition, lié à la violence, au meurtre et à la terreur. Les communications présentées à Cerisy-la-Salle tentent de caractériser un tel langage. Chercheurs en communication, en sciences du langage, en sociologie ou en littérature, philosophes et psychanalystes s’interrogent sur la tyrannie logique du discours de la terreur et les manipulations mortifères mises en (...) œuvre d’hier à aujourd’hui. Les analyses de Victor Klemperer sur le discours nazi et ses observations scrupuleuses sur les signes de ce régime sont une référence primordiale. Les diverses études montrent comment se met en place une logique d’assujettissement à partir du matériau signifiant et de sa mise en scène. L’interrogation porte enfin sur les formes de résistance à opposer à ce langage.The term « totalitarian » is a product of a discursive system that is inseparable from acts of murder, hence the meaning given to the expression « totalitarian language » as a language of coercion linked to violence, murder and terror. The papers given in Cerisy-la-Salle attempt to characterise this language, through the reflections of researchers in communication, language sciences, sociology and literature on the logical tyranny of the discourse of terror and its murderous manipulations, both past and present. Victor Klemperer’s analyses of Nazi discourse and his scrupulous observations on signifiers in the Nazi regime are references of paramount importance. The different studies show how the logic of subjection takes hold as it spreads from a body of signifying material and the representations given to it. Finally, the question is raised of forms of resistance to language of this kind. (shrink)

PHOTO ID 121339257© Designer491| Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT When physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be apparent conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters future physicians’ commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. We use an ethical dilemma that was presented to a group of third-year medical students to examine how ethics education might be causing (...) them to give undue deference to autonomy, thereby undermining their commitment to beneficence. INTRODUCTION The right of patients to choose which treatments they prefer is rooted in today’s social mores and taught as a principle of medical ethics as respect for autonomy. Yet, when physicians use their clinical knowledge and skills to advance the well-being of their patients, there may be a conflict between patient autonomy and physician beneficence. We are skeptical that today’s medical ethics education adequately fosters a commitment to beneficence, which is both rationally defensible and fundamentally consistent with patient autonomy. I. An Ethical Dilemma The impetus for this paper arose when students who were completing their third clinical year discussed a real-life ethical dilemma. A middle-aged man developed a pulmonary hemorrhage while on blood thinners for a recently placed coronary stent. The bleeding was felt to be reversible, but the patient needed immediate intubation or he would die. The cardiologist was told that the patient previously expressed to other physicians that he never wanted to be intubated. However, the cardiologist made the decision to intubate the patient anyway, and the patient eventually recovered.[1] Students were asked if they believed that the cardiologist had acted ethically. Their overwhelming response was, “No, the patient should have been allowed to die.” We looked into how students applied ethical reasoning to conclude that this outcome was ethically preferred. To explore how the third-year clinical experience might have formed the students’ judgment, we presented the same case to students who were just beginning their third year. Their responses were essentially uniform in recommending intubation. While there is likely more than one reasonable view in this case, we agree with the physician and the younger medical students that intubation was the ethically appropriate decision and will present an argument for it. But first, we explain the reasoning behind the more advanced medical students’ decision to choose patient autonomy at the expense of beneficence. II. Medical Ethics Education and the Priority of Autonomy Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, first published in 1979 and now in its 8th edition, is a significant part of the formal ethics education in medical school.[2] Students learn an ethical decision-making approach based on respect for four ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. While Beauchamp and Childress officially afford no prima facie superiority to any principle, the importance of respect for patient autonomy has increased through the editions of their book. For example, early editions of their book opposed the legalization of physician-assisted death compared to recent editions that defended it.[3] As another example, Beauchamp and Childress make paternalism harder to justify by adding an autonomy-protecting condition to the list of conditions for acceptable paternalism.[4] Authority, they contend, need not conflict with autonomy—provided the authority is autonomously chosen.[5] “The main requirement,” they write, “is to respect a particular patient’s or subject’s autonomous choices, whatever they may be.[6] In the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, autonomy now seems to have a kind of default priority.[7] However, the bioethics discourse has strong counternarratives, noting some movement to elevate the role of beneficence and to respect the input of stakeholders, including the family and the healthcare team. Ethics education achieves particular relevance in the third clinical year when students become embedded in the care of patients and learn from what has been called the informal curriculum. They observe how attending physicians approach day-to-day ethical problems at the patient’s bedside. In this context, students observe the importance of informed consent for serious treatments or invasive procedures, a practice that highlights the principle of patient autonomy. In both the formal and informal curriculum, medical students observe how, in the words of Paul Wolpe, “patient autonomy has become the central and most powerful principle in ethical decision-making in American medicine.”[8] In short, students appear to learn a deference for patient autonomy. This curricular shift in favor of autonomy coincides with legal developments that protect patients’ rights and decision-making with respect to their healthcare choices. The priority of autonomy in medicine benefits patients by reflecting their choices and, in some cases, their fundamental liberty. III. The Practice of Medicine and the Commitment to Beneficence There are many critiques of the dominant place that autonomy has in biomedical ethics,[9] especially considering that autonomy seems to be biased toward individualistic, Western, and somewhat American culture-driven values.[10] In addition, many bioethical dilemmas are cast as a conflict between autonomy and beneficence. Our point is that medical students bring to their study of medicine a commitment to beneficence that seems to be suppressed by practical ethics education. We think this commitment is rationally defensible and should be nurtured. It is striking that young medical students have a pre-reflective commitment to beneficence at all. For, as we mentioned, it is not just medicine but Western culture generally that prioritizes autonomy in settling ethical dilemmas. In wanting to act for the good of others (rather than simply agreeing to what others want), physicians are already swimming somewhat against the cultural tide.[11] However, doing so makes sense, given the nature of medicine and the profession of healing. When prospective medical students are asked why they wish to become physicians, the usual answer is some variation on caring for the sick and preventing disease. It is unlikely that a reason to become a physician is to respect a patient’s autonomy. It would be easy to dismiss medical students’ commitment to beneficence as a mere intuition and contrary to a more reasoned and deliberative approach. Beauchamp and Childress seem to minimize the value of physician intuition, stating that justifications for certain procedures are “…supported by good reasons. They need not rest merely in intuition or feeling.”[12] Henry Richardson writes that “situational or perceptive intuition…leaves the reasons for decision unarticulated.”[13] We think this is a crude and rather thin way of understanding intuition. Some bioethicists have defended intuition as essential to the practice of medicine and not something opposed to reason.[14] In the case we describe, we believe the ethical justifications s for the patient’s intubation are fundamentally sound: the patient did not have a “do not intubate” order written in the chart, the emergency intubation had not been foreseen, so the patient did not have the opportunity to consent to or reject intubation; the patient had consented to the treatment for his cardiac disease so his consent for intubation could have been assumed;[15] and the consequences of respecting his autonomy did not justify allowing him to die.[16] While it is possible to have more than one reasonable view on this case, we think the case for beneficence is strong and certainly should not be dismissed out of hand. We do not deny that if a patient makes a clearly documented, well-informed decision to forgo intubation that this decision ought to be respected by the physician (even if the physician disagrees with the patient’s decision). But, in this situation, as in many others in the practice of medicine, the patient’s real wishes and preferences are not well-articulated in advance. There are many cases where a physician acts based on what she believes the patient, or the surrogate, would want, sometimes in situations that do not allow much time for reflection. An example might be resuscitation of a newborn at the borderline of viability. In their ethics education, beneficence would mean acting first to save a life. If the patient or surrogate makes an informed decision to the contrary, a beneficent physician respects that autonomous decision. In the case presented, the patient expressed gratitude to the cardiologist when extubated. But what if he had expressed anger at the physician for violating his autonomy? There are those who could argue that not only was intubation ethically wrong but that the cardiologist put himself in legal jeopardy by his actions (especially if there had been a written refusal applicable to the specific situation). In the example we use, we point out that the cardiologist may not have escaped a lawsuit if the patient had died without intubation. His family, when hearing the circumstances, may have sued for failure to act and dereliction of the cardiologist’s duty to save him. Beyond a potential legal challenge for either action or inaction, there is an overriding ethical question the cardiologist had to address: what course would be most satisfying to his conscience? Would he rather allow a patient to die for fear of recrimination, or act to save his life, regardless of the personal consequences? In the absence of real knowledge about the patient’s considered wishes, it is most reasonable to err on the side of promoting patient well-being. A physician’s commitment to beneficence is not necessarily a way of undermining a patient’s autonomy. In acting for the patient's good, physicians are also acting on what it is reasonable to believe a patient (or most patients, perhaps) would want, which is obviously connected to what a patient does want. Pellegrino and Thomasma argue that beneficence includes respect for a patient’s autonomy since “the best interests of the patient are intimately linked with their preferences.”[17] Instead of conceptualizing ethical dilemmas in medicine as conflicts between autonomy and beneficence, it is possible that medical schools could teach students that truly practicing beneficence is a way of valuing patient autonomy, especially when the patient’s wishes are not specific to the situation and are not clearly expressed. CONCLUSION It is important for students and practicing physicians to understand the principle of respect for patient autonomy in a pluralistic society that demands personal self-determination. However, the role of the physician as a beneficent healer should not be diminished by this respect for autonomy. Respecting a patient’s autonomy is grounded in and manifested by physician beneficence.[18] That is, seeking what is good for the patient can only be good if it respects their personhood and dignity. We propose that a commitment to beneficence, incipient in young medical students, should be developed over time with their other clinical reasoning skills. Such a commitment need not be sacrificed on the altar of patient autonomy. Beneficence needs greater relative moral weight with students as they proceed in their ethics education. - [1] S. Jauhar, “When Doctors Need to Lie,” New York Times, February 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-need-to-lie.html. [2] T. L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). [3] Louise A. Mitchell, “Major Changes in Principles of Biomedical Ethics,” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2014): 459–75, https://doi.org/10.5840/ncbq20141438. [4] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 238. [5] Beauchamp and Childress, 103. [6] Beauchamp and Childress, p. 108. [7] For other accounts that prioritize autonomy, see e.g. Allen E. Buchanan and Dan W. Brock, Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–39; R Gillon, “Ethics Needs Principles—Four Can Encompass the Rest—and Respect for Autonomy Should Be ‘First among Equals,’” Journal of Medical Ethics 29, no. 5 (October 2003): 307–12, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307. For examples of critiques of these accounts, see footnote 9. [8] P. R. Wolpe, “The Triumph of Autonomy in American Bioethics: A Sociological View,” in Bioethics and Society: Constructing the Ethical Enterprise, p. 43. [9] V. A. Entwistle et al., “Supporting Patient Autonomy: The Importance of Clinician-Patient Relationships,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 25, no. 7 (July 2010): 741–45; C. Foster, Choosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and Law, 1st ed. (Oxford ; Hart Publishing, 2009); O. O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh 2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). [10] P. Marshall and B. Koenig, “Accounting for Culture in a Globalized Bioethics,” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics: A Journal of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics 32, no. 2 (2004): 252–66; R. Fan, “Self-Determination vs. Family-Determination: Two Incommensurable Principles of Autonomy,” Bioethics 11, no. 3–4 (1997): 309–22. [11] Arguments stressing the importance of beneficence, as ours does here, certainly approach paternalistic arguments. We set aside the complex issue of paternalism for purposes of this paper and simply note that the principle of beneficence as such does not say anything specifically about acting against the patient’s will. In the case study that focuses this paper, we do not believe the patient’s will or wishes were clearly indicated. [12] Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, p. 20, see note 2 above. [13] H. S. Richardson, “Specifying, Balancing, and Interpreting Bioethical Principles,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 25, no. 3 (January 1, 2000): 285–307, p. 287. [14] H. D. Braude, Intuition in Medicine a Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, 2012). [15] R. Kukla, “Conscientious Autonomy: Displacing Decisions in Health Care,” The Hastings Center Report 35, no. 2 (2005): 34–44. [16] M. Schermer, The Different Faces of Autonomy: Patient Autonomy in Ethical Theory and Hospital Practice, vol. 13, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002). [17] E. D. Pellegrino and D. C. Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good - the Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 29. [18] Pellegrino and Thomasma, For the Patient’s Good. 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A new history of liberalism which argues that liberalism has been predicated on definite morality and should be viewed as an attempt to encompass both fear and hope. Liberalism, argues Alan Kahan, is the search for a society in which people need not be afraid. Freedom from fear is the most basic freedom. If we are afraid, we are not free. These insights, found in Montesquieu and Judith Shklar, are the foundation of liberalism. What liberals fear has changed over time (...) (revolution, reaction, totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, poverty, and now populism) but the great majority of liberal thinkers have relied on three pillars to ward off their fears and to limit the concentrated power that causes fear: freedom, markets, and morals, or, to put it another way, politics, economics, and religion or morality. Most liberal thinkers emphasize one or two pillars more than another, but it is typical of liberalism down to the Second World War to rely on all three, although there were always minority voices who preferred to stand on only one leg. After WWII, "thin" procedural/market liberals, who wanted to strip any moral or religious basis or purpose from liberalism, dominated "thick" liberal moralists, who thought liberalism needed a moral basis and/or goal. It is the political contention of this book that liberalism is most convincing as program, language, and social analysis when it relies on all three pillars, and that the relative weakness of liberalism at the end of the twentieth century had much to do with neglect of the moral pillar of liberalism. Its historical contention is that for much of the past two centuries it did rely on all three pillars. But Kahan also argues that liberalism is not only a party of fear. It is also a party of hope, or the party of progress. Many of the contradictions typical of liberalism derive from the seemingly contradictory effort to encompass both hope and fear. If in case of conflict fear often trumps hope for liberals (loss aversion applies in politics as much as in economics), and utopia is subject to indefinite postponement, progress in personal autonomy and development has always been at the heart of liberalism. Liberals typically support their hopes on the same three pillars of freedom, markets, and morals which they use to ward off their fears. Nevertheless, in one respect those historians and political theorists who identify liberalism with laissez-faire economics are not wrong. It is characteristic of liberalism then that it bases its hopes not on the state but on civil society, which for liberals is the common source of a free politics, a free market, and of morals. Alan S. Kahan is Professor of History at the Université de Versailles. His previous books include Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion: Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls (Oxford 2015), Alexis de Tocqueville (Continuum Books) and Mind vs Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction Publishing, 2010). (shrink)

As today's battles rage between those who march under the banner of liberty and those who unfurl the flag of equality, even an engaged partisan might be forgiven for occasionally wondering whether the game is, after all, worth the candle. For one thing, neither party simply rejects the other's principle – properly understood. Egalitarians routinely emphasize that their concern for equality is, also, a concern for true liberty; thus Michael Walzer, writing “In Defense of Equality,” finds it “worth stressing that (...) equality as I have described it does not stand alone, but is closely related to the idea of liberty.” 1 Libertarians tend to be less enthusiastic in their embrace of equality, but almost all endorse some form of equality or other – for example, equality of political rights or equality before the law. It would seem, then, that the differences between egalitarians and libertarians are really over the meaning and scope of equality and liberty, and that putting the issue as one of equality vs. liberty may be misleading. More important, one can wonder whether either the egalitarian or the libertarian combination of the principles of liberty and equality is worthy of support. What society has exalted personal liberty, has taken rights more seriously, than ours? Yet who can easily dismiss Solzhenitsyn's charge that our worship of freedom has resulted in “destructive and irresponsible freedom” being granted “boundless scope,” leaving us defenseless against “the corrosion of evil”? 2 The cause of liberty against tyranny surely continues to command our support; but what conclusion ought we to draw from the facts that liberty in absentia seems so markedly more attractive than liberty in practice, and that the qualities manifested in the struggle for liberty seem so superior to those that come to the fore once liberty is secured? (shrink)

I would describe myself as an accidental humanist, if not atheist. That was very much how I felt when I found myself on June 4, 2010, standing at the podium of the sixty-ninth annual conference of the American Humanist Association. I was receiving the Humanist Pioneer Award. But what did I do to deserve the honor? The golden letters on the beautifully crafted award said: “To Wendy Liu for her pioneering work that advances Humanist values and critical thought through cross (...) cultural perspectives on American Society.” The “pioneering work” presumably meant my writings on US-China relatedtopics, especially the collection of essays on my understanding of America from a Chinese and non-religious angle. As an aspiring writer, I was happy to be recognized for anything, not to say that particular angle. But that angle, with which I stumbled my way to the San Jose conference, was not an accident. It had come a long way with me on a journey starting in Xian, China, my hometown. Talking about Xian, the terracotta warriors of Qin Shihuang, the first Emperor of China, would probably come to one’s mind. Visitors have marveled at the work of ancient artisans, especially the rendering of individual facial features of the clay soldiers in eternity. In contrast to that humanistic touch was the cruelty of Emperor Qin, who ordered that upon his death the entrance to the underground mausoleum be sealed on completion, entombing the laborers inside to keep it secret.1 This is a brief but telling picture of humanism vs. tyranny in China–the once-upon-a time China. (shrink)

Clanak raspravlja o odnosu izmedju paradigmatskog statusa filma i upotrebe filmskih analogija u psihoanalitickom diskursu filozofije Slavoja Zizeka koji cini temelj njegovog kritickog diskursa o drustvu i kulturi uopce. U prvom dijelu, polazeci od novijih rasprava medju nekolicinom engleskih i americkih sveucilisnih intelektualaca o kontroverznim vidovima djelovanja Slavoja Zizeka u akademskoj zajednici i na siroj javnoj sceni, u prvom dijelu clanka prikazuju se neki usporedni primjeri i unutrasnji pokretaci kontroverzije sadrzaj-forma u filozofiji i pop-kulturi te Zizekovo razumijevanje te kontroverzije. U (...) drugom dijelu raspravlja se o Zizekovim sporadicnim refleksijama o meta-egzemplifikaciji i obrazlaze teza da kod Zizeka, na pretpostavkama ontologije virtualnog, presutno djeluje dvostruka, paradigmatska i analogijska, koncepcija inherencije u odnosu primjera i principa te zamjena analogije predmet? analogijom analiz?, sto stvara tipican konflikt izmedju metonimijske i metaforicke evazivnosti diskursa. Na toj pozadini vrednuje se ponovo opci prigovor protiv Zizeka o?virtualnom totalitarizmu? lisenom kontingencije smisla i ukazuje na mjesto subjekta izvan diskursa kao druge osnove za analizu uvjeta istinitosti. U trecem dijelu ispituje se i metodoloski vrednuje Zizekovo vlastito razumijevanje njegovog postupka filmske ilustracije i njegovo osebujno performativno razrjesenje epistemoloskog problema filmske interpretacije kroz montazu imaginarne identifikacije ili?empatije? s filmskim objektima, koje s?m naziva?perverzijom? ili?ljubavlju?. U cetvrtom dijelu analizira se ocigledni nesrazmjer izmedju Zizekove primjene doktrinarnih zaliha psihoanalize u kritici kinematografije, s jedne strane, i njegove teorijski oskudno razradjene apoteoze?kinematickog materijalizma?. Argumentira se da taj nerazmjer donosi u rezultatu ono sto Zizek odbija u nacelu: supstituciju materijalizma analize i kontingencije uvjeta u potrazi za istinskom holistickom koncepcijom smisla, sto, u konzekvenciji, izokrece psihoanaliticki diskurs o kinematografiji u hermeneuticki. (shrink)

This volume presents itself as an exercise in political philosophy, where politics, broadly defined, is taken as having to do with the relationships between ruler and ruled, the issue of authority, problems of social conflict, and the very objectives of social action. What is unusual about its perspective is its attempt to articulate such a philosophy on the basis of a philosophical anthropology, one that is especially influenced by the work of Merleau-Ponty but that also acknowledges the influence of Paul (...) Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel. One immediate result of such an approach is that politics is seen to be better grounded in terms of hope than in terms of the metaphors of vision or will, neither of which are held be to able to avoid the threat of falling into tyranny or anarchism, both extremes tending to become forms of totalitarianism. (shrink)

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories (...) of justice--essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years--needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times. (shrink)

The practice of philanthropy, which releases private property for public purposes, represents in many ways the best angels of our nature. But this practice's noteworthy virtues often obscure the fact that philanthropy also represents the exercise of private power. In The Tyranny of Generosity, Theodore Lechterman shows how this private power can threaten the foundations of a democratic society. The deployment of private wealth for public ends may rival the authority of communities to determine their own affairs. And, in (...) societies characterized by wide disparities in wealth, philanthropy often combines with background inequalities to make public decisions overwhelmingly sensitive to the preferences of the rich. Allowing private wealth to dictate social outcomes collides with core commitments of a democratic society, a society in which people are supposed to determine their common affairs together, on equal terms. But why exactly is democracy valuable? How should these values be weighed against the liberty of donors and the many social benefits that philanthropy promises? Lechterman explores these questions by examining various topics in the practice of philanthropy: the respective roles of philanthropy and government, public subsidies for private giving, the use of donations for political speech, instruments of perpetual giving, the rise in giving by commercial corporations, and effective altruism as a guide for individual giving. These studies build to a surprising conclusion: realizing the democratic ideal may be impossible without philanthropy--but making philanthropy safe for democracy also requires fundamental changes to policy and practice. (shrink)

This paper makes an argument for the democratic value of distrust. It begins by analyzing distrust, since distrust is not merely the negation of trust. The account that it develops is based primarily on Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in Why We Can’t Wait. On this view, distrust is the confident belief that another individual or group of individuals or an institution will not act justly or as justice requires. It is a narrow normative account of distrust, since it concerns (...) a specific normative task. Distinctions between vertical and horizontal distrust, as well as trust and agnostic trust are also discussed. This paper argues that distrust’s democratic value lies in its ability to secure democracy by protecting political minorities from having their voices ignored. As such, distrust can be viewed as a kind of Madisonian “check and balance” that works to prevent tyranny. Distrust also works to secure democracy by forging new or alternative forms of democratic participation. The main example discussed in this paper is King’s involvement in the Birmingham Campaign during the Black Civil Rights movement in America. In this case, King and his supporters’ distrust of fellow White citizens and political institutions led to alternative forms of political expression such as non-violent protests, boycotts, and other forms of civil disobedience, all of which led to greater racial justice by working to alleviate White tyranny. (shrink)