This article starts with a critical reflection on John Westlake’s reading of the history of empire and the English/British East India Company – for him, essentially, the proper concern of ‘constitutional history’ rather than international law. For Westlake, approaching this history through the prism of nineteenth-century positivist doctrine, the Company’s exercise of war powers could only result from state delegation. Against his warnings to international lawyers not to stray from the proper boundaries of international legal inquiry, the article proceeds to (...) recover Hugo Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency in his early treatise De iure praedae. For Grotius, corporations could wage public war on behalf of the state yet, at the same time, were in law capable of waging private war in their own right. The article proceeds to reflect on the practice of corporate belligerency in the centuries separating Westlake and Grotius; it concludes with observations on the implications of Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency today. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. The article intends to provide an account for diagnosing epistemic injustice as a social pathology and also attempts to paint a picture of some social cure of structural forms of epistemic injustice. While there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, epistemic exclusion and silencing, current discourse on diagnosing (...) as well as explicating and overcoming these social pathologies can be improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation: under recognition theory, social normative standards are constructed out of the moral grammar of recognition attributions. I shall argue that the failure to properly recognize and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit is an act of injustice in the sense of depriving individuals of a progressive social environment i... (shrink)

"This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. The book's aim is to take stock of the complicated dialogue with Hegel in the critical theory tradition, especially as reflected in the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukács, Marcuse, Habermas, and Honneth. The book is divided into the four sections. The first focuses on Adorno's Negative Dialectics, historically considered the most contentious reception of Hegel by the Frankfurt School. The two essays here (...) investigate Hegel and Adorno on modernity, as well as Hegelian and Critical Theoretic approaches to dialectics. The second section explores Ethical Life and Intersubjectivity, two common threads that run through the work of Hegel, Habermas, and Honneth. Part III delves into the principal social projects that bring the Frankfurt School into complicated dialogue with Hegel: emancipation and rationality. Finally, the last group of essays considers Hegel in relation to Critical Political Theory and presents a critical genealogy of economic institutions"--. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to defend the claim that the absolute idealism of Hegel is a liberal naturalist position against Sebastian Gardner’s claim that it is not genuinely naturalistic, and also to defend the position of ‘liberal naturalism’ from Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for it to occupy. By ‘liberal naturalism’, I mean a doctrine which is a non-reductive form of philosophical naturalism. Like Fred Beiser, I take the thesis of liberal naturalism to find (...) support in the idealism of Hegel. I begin by first explaining what philosophical naturalism amounts to. I then move on to show, using Finn Spicer’s and Alison Stone’s understandings of philosophical naturalism, how there is a stronger form of philosophical naturalism but also how there is a weaker form as well. Having established the distinction between stronger and weaker variants of philosophical naturalism, I discuss Sebastian Gardner’s recent objections to treating absolute idealism as a genuinely naturalist position. I argue that Gardner is incorrect to claim that absolute idealism is not a genuinely naturalist position on both historical and interpretive grounds, where to do so I bring in features of Hegel’s idealism to show that Hegel was committed to liberal naturalism. In the next section of the paper, I address Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for liberal naturalism. To counter this claim, I offer an Hegelian diagnosis of Neta’s charge and argue that Neta’s concern about the possibility of liberal naturalism is illegitimately motivated. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a (...) brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline. Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds. (shrink)

In Marx’s posthumously published manuscripts from 1857–1863, we find a systematic exposition of his concept of subsumption. Though much has been written about it, significant interpretative gaps persist. In this article, I begin filling these gaps by examining the emergence of Marx’s concept of subsumption. I will argue that in the Grundrisse Marx brings together distinct but complementary elements from Hegel’s theories of judgment and teleology to coin two new and well delineated concepts of subsumption that prefigure his later concepts (...) of formal and real subsumption. These two concepts may be defined as: (a) the process of acquiring the social relational property of being a means to an end; (b) the process by which changes in non-relational properties occur in something due to this acquisition – and occur to better suit said end. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)

Abstract According to idealism the world, as we perceive it, is in effect a creation of the mind. There are many different forms of idealism and this paper investigates one form of idealism that was advocated by the 4th century Buddhist Yog?c?rin Vasubandhu and one not unfamiliar in the west, especially in the works of George Berkeley. This paper suggests that when idealism, as a metaphysical theory, is set within a soteriological framework, as is the case with Vasubandhu, it serves (...) to bridge the philosophical endeavour with the religious quest as outlined in Buddhist thought. Idealism is a theory about the borders between mind and matter, and specifically about the demolition of matter. This demolition, in the hands of Vasubandhu, manages to redefine the framework of speculation by incorporating the soteriological within it and thus constructing a viable bridge between philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This article has two aims: to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and to argue that Butler's poststructuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given her pragmatic parallel with Sellars's critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to, I argue that Butler's objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from (...) a definition of woman to what one may call poststructuralist sites of woman parallels moving away from a definition of knowledge to a pragmatic account of knowledge as a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons. With regard to, I argue that the important parallels between Butler's poststructuralist feminism and Sellars's antirepresentationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her poststructuralist feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy. This article starts a conversation between two philosophers whom the literature has yet to fully introduce to each other. (shrink)

In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India. He turns to a rich and varied collection of primary sources: the _Rg Veda_, the Upanishads, and texts by the Buddhist philosophers Någårjuna and Vasubandhu, among others. In studying the West, Biderman considers the Bible and its commentaries, the writings of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Derrida, and the literature of Kafka, Melville, and Orwell. Additional sources are (...) Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ and seminal films like Ingmar Bergman's _Persona_. Biderman uses concrete examples from religion and literature to illustrate the formal aspects of the philosophical problems of transcendence, language, selfhood, and the external world and then demonstrates their plausibility in actual situations. Though his method of analysis is comparative, Biderman does not adopt the disinterested stance of an "ideal" spectator. Rather, Biderman approaches ancient Indian thought and culture from a Western philosophical standpoint to uncover cultural presuppositions that can be difficult to expose from within the culture in question. The result is a fascinating landmark in the study of Indian and Western thought. Through his comparative prism, Biderman explores the most basic ideas underlying human culture, and his investigation not only sheds light on India's philosophical traditions but also facilitates a deeper understanding of our own. (shrink)

In his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel affirms that truth is ‘usually’ understood as the agreement of thought with the object, but that in the ‘deeper, i.e. philosophical sense’, truth is the agreement of a content with itself or of an object with its concept. Hegel then provides illustrations of this second sort of truth: a ‘true friend’, a ‘true state’, a ‘true work of art’. Robert Stern has argued that Hegel's ‘deeper’ or ‘philosophical’ truth is close to what Heidegger labelled ‘material’ (...) truth, namely a property attributed to a thing on the basis of the accordance of that thing with its essence. It has since been common to think of Hegel's concept of ‘philosophical’ truth as ‘ontological’, ‘objective’ or ‘material’ in contrast to ‘epistemological’ or ‘propositional’ definitions. In this paper, I wish to add an important nuance to the existing literature on this subject: even though things have a truth-value for Hegel, the latter is always negative. I argue that Hegel's criterion of ‘philosophical’ truth, which is best formulated as ‘agreement with self’, is first and foremost intended to examine the truth-value of thought-determinations. I then argue that even though this criterion may also be applied to examine the truth-value of things (namely, even though things have a truth-value), things never fall under this definition. After reviewing several of Hegel's explicit remarks on the matter, I provide an alternative explanation to those features of Hegel's ‘philosophical’ truth which have led scholars to view it as a truth in things. Especially, I argue that what are generally seen as Hegel's examples (‘true friend’, ‘true state’, ‘true work of art’) are not intended as examples but only as imperfect illustrations of ‘philosophical’ truth. (shrink)

Letterforms are an inseparable part of a civilized literary landscape. At some distant point in history, letters started as representations of things in the world. Then, gradually, through a complex evolutionary process, they came to be defined as the closed shapes of a writing system. This photo-typographic essay is a meditation on this remarkable transition. Exploring the relationship between typography and the visual world around us, the essay looks at the twenty-six letters of the English version of the Roman alphabet (...) in four manners: as the world presenting itself in the shape of a letter, as an intended letter in space, as a flat letter on paper, and finally as a pure geometric form embodied in a typeface. Familiar letterforms are presented in fresh, surprising ways, forming an homage to the beauty of type and a reflection on its ubiquity in our visual understanding of the world around us. Alongside the fascinating images, Ornan Rotem's text offers an overview and a detailed discussion of each letter. In this unusual book, text and image coalesce to create a modern day primer on letters: a typographic abecedarium. (shrink)

This article aims to provide an account of the relationship between transcendental claims and the project of using transcendental argumentation that differs from the mainstream literature. In much of the literature, such claims are said to have as their primary value the overcoming of various sceptical positions. The author argues that, whilst transcendental arguments may be narrowly characterised as anti-sceptical, transcendental claims do not have to be used in only this way, and in fact can be useful in several areas (...) of philosophy outside the issue of scepticism, and so can be used by transcendental arguments more broadly conceived. The author offers four examples of transcendental claims that are not used in narrow, anti-sceptical transcendental arguments. The author argues that these broader arguments use transcendental claims but not in an anti-sceptical way. From this, the author concludes that given the well-known difficulties transcendental arguments in this narrow sense seem to have had in defeating scepticism, distinguishing narrow transcendental arguments clearly from transcendental claims as such in this manner can provide a way for the latter to still serve an important role in philosophy, by showing how such claims can be used more broadly, regardless of any doubts one may have about the anti-sceptical value of such claims. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer some compelling reasons to think that issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far underacknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for making sense of the possibility of (...) deliberative democracy, on the political side of things. Our paper is divided into four principal sections. In Section 1, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Section 2, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech. In Section 3, we focus on elaborating epistemic pathologies in the context of epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice. In Section 4, we focus on explaining how Habermasian resources contribute to vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to offer a Hegelian critique of Quine’s predicate nominalism. I argue that at the core of Hegel’s idealism is not a supernaturalist spirit monism, but a realism about universals, and that while this may contrast to the nominalist naturalism of Quine, Hegel’s position can still be defended over that nominalism in naturalistic terms. I focus on the contrast between Hegel’s and Quine’s respective views on universals, which Quine takes to be definitive of philosophical naturalism. (...) I argue that there is no good reason to think Quine is right to make this nominalism definitive of naturalism in this way – where in fact Hegel offers a reasonably compelling case that science itself requires some commitment to realism about universals, kinds, etc. Furthermore, even if Hegel is wrong about that, at least his case for realism is still a naturalistic one, as it is based on his views on concrete universality, which is an innovative form of in rebus realism about unive.. (shrink)

Might paranoia bear some promise, not only danger, for democratic theory and politics? To suggest that we should treat paranoia with anything but disdain today, in the age of Q anon and other white-supremacist lies, seems dangerous. But three decades ago, feminist theorist Naomi Schor took the risk and defended female paranoia, arguing that paranoia is an appropriate affect for feminist theory and critique. This essay follows Schor’s invitation to risk proximity to paranoia. I argue that the political importance of (...) Schor’s essay lies in one particular attribute of female paranoia that she celebrates: its love of detail. To explore the promise and limitations of the paranoid love of detail I pair Schor with two 20th-century theorists – Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Each studies a paranoid woman who clings to details: Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen counts the number of teacups that she serves in her German salon. Beauvoir’s housewife collects tufts of dust. With Schor, Arendt and Beauvoir, the article argues that love of detail is a critical component not only of paranoid indictments of the world, but also of any project that desires to repair the world in the wake of paranoia. (shrink)

The years following Israel’s founding were formative ones for the development of philosophy as an academic discipline in this country. During this period, the distinction between philosophy seen as contiguous with the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy seen as adjacent to the natural and exact sciences began to make its presence felt in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This distinction, which was manifest in the curriculum, was by no means unique to the Hebrew University, but reflected the broader bifurcation (...) between two schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century. In English-speaking countries, it is generally referred to as the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. What was special about the situation at the Hebrew University, however, was that the split manifested itself in a rather small department, being embodied, basically, in one prominent representative of each school – Nathan Rotenstreich and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. This article will focus on some key aspects of the lives and thought of Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel. It will address their philosophical maturation as S.H. Bergmann’s students, their views on the goals of twentieth-century philosophy, on the philosopher’s role in public life, and the circumstances under which they started teaching in Jerusalem right after the founding of the State of Israel. (shrink)

A comprehensive compilation of legal rulings about children, one of particular historical utility and yet largely overlooked, is Muḥammad al-Asrūshanī’s Jāmiʿ aḥkām al-ṣighār. It offers a rather holistic view of the legal status of Muslim children and, more importantly, insight into common concepts of childhood and attitudes to children in premodern Muslim societies. Moreover, although drawing on the written heritage of middle-class urban scholars, the normative yet multilayered text of Jāmiʿ provides many precise details on children’s lives and their social (...) environment. This article introduces al-Asrūshanī’s unique work—its structure, contents, and sources—and offers, as a case study, an analysis of the chapter the author dedicates to enslaved children. While al-Asrūshanī intended some, or even the majority, of instances discussed in this chapter to address theoretical legal debates, others, particularly those drawn from fatwas, mirror the real experiences of enslaved minors, concubines, and enslavers. Together they provide a picture of a moderate form of domestic slavery in the Islamic world, particularly in Central Asia of the Mongol period. (shrink)

Introduction Recent years have seen increased interest in the complex relationships between the thought of German Idealists (understood to include both transcendental and absolute idealists) and the thought of those philosophers commonly categorized as “American Pragmatists” – from Charles S. Peirce (the progenitor of this alleged tradition) to Richard Rorty and his student, Robert Brandom. This issue presents a collection of papers that, as a collection, do justice to those complex relations...

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case, two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic (...) approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world. (shrink)

What is arguably the central criticism of Hegel’s philosophical system by the Continental tradition, a criticism which represents a unifying thread in the diverse work of Schelling, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Adorno, is that Hegel fails to adequately do justice to the notion of individuality. My aim in this paper is to counter the claim that Hegel’s idea of the concrete universal fails to properly explain the real uniqueness of individuals. In what follows, I argue that whilst the Continental critique (...) (as it is particularly expressed by Adorno) is prima facie attractive, it is ultimately misguided. This is because the critics of Hegel fail to correctly understand (i) his principal argument in Sense-Certainty; (ii) crucial features of his logico-metaphysics; and (iii) his notion of wholeness. I contend that carefully explicating these important parts of the Hegelian system not only shows that Hegel’s metaphysical commitments are not those which do not leave meaningful room for or make adequate sense of individuality, but that they also reveal a sophisticated treatment of the interdependency between the categories of individuality, particularity and universality in a way which conceives of individuality robustly. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with how best to explicate the connection between Kant’s transcendental logic and Hegel’s dialectical logic. After very briefly detailing Robert Pippin’s influential account of the Kant-Hegel relationship, I offer a basic criticism of his transcendentalist interpretation of Hegel. I argue that while this works well against Pippin’s reading, there is still space to regard Hegel as doing transcendental philosophy. What is crucial here is that Hegel’s rejection of transcendental idealism does not obviously rule out the possibility (...) of Hegel being bound to transcendental philosophy itself. I proceed to show how this is possible, by differentiating the project of transcendental argumentation and the project of making transcendental claims. I argue that Hegel endorsed the latter project and not the former project. I go on to claim that one can regard Hegel’s argument for an immanent conception of infinity, and his use of Spinoza’s ‘All Determination is Negation’ principle as legitimate examples of Hegel doing transcendental philosophy in a non-orthodox Kantian manner. To put my point bluntly, Hegel is a transcendental philosopher to the extent that he is committed to identifying transcendental claims – this does not commit him to either transcendental argumentation or working within Kant’s constraints. If this is a more compelling interpretation of the Kant-Hegel relationship than the Pippinian school of thought, then it seems we can cash out the positive relationship between Kant and Hegel in a more nuanced manner. (shrink)

The merging of the positions of photographer and collector defines the drive of a certain kind of photographic work, for which the camera becomes a collecting device, accumulating a collection that speaks the subjectivity of its author – the photographer. There are, however, two impulses at work here: the photographer-as-collector and the collector-as-photographer. Both are present in the work of Martin Parr, who has openly admitted that he has ‘the collecting gene’, but also, somewhat earlier, in the work of Walker (...) Evans whose obsession with collectibles and whose mode of photographic collecting provide a striking historical precedent for Parr’s compulsive practice. My article explores the collecting impulse that motivates these photographers and, more particularly, shapes a new mode of making photographs and cataloguing social life that seem to escape established genre categories, including especially the category of documentary. (shrink)

Scholars have recently argued that Hegel posited international recognition as a necessary feature of international relations. My main effort in this article is to disprove this point. Specifically, I show that since Hegel rejected the notion of an international legal system, he must hold that international recognition depends on the arbitrary will of individual states. To pinpoint Hegel’s position, I offer a close reading of Hegel’s intricate formulations from the final paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right—formulations that are easy to (...) quote out of context just as they are transparent when considered in due context. (shrink)

Preface to the Hebrew Translation of Karl Marx's Introduction and Preface to the Critique of Political Economy .

Preface to the Hebrew Translation of Louis Althusser's For Marx.

The aim of this paper is to (i) reject the notion that one can ascribe no metaphysical commitments to Hegel; and (ii) argue that the kind of metaphysics one ought to ascribe to Hegel is a robust yet immanent/naturalist variety. I begin by exploring two reasons why one may think Hegel’s philosophical system has no metaphysical commitments. I argue that one of these reasons is based on a particular understanding of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher, whereas the second reason is (...) centred on a particular understanding of the philosophical viability of metaphysics as a form of enquiry simpliciter. My discussion of these ways of seeing the motivation for regarding Hegel in an anti-metaphysical way concludes with a rejection of the interpretation of conceiving Hegelianism without metaphysics. I then move on to address what I take to be the more pertinent and serious issue of what kind of metaphysician Hegel was. To this end, I argue that the best way of understanding Hegelian metaphysics is by conceiving of it as a combination of Aristotelian first philosophy and Kantian critique. To put this in the form of a slogan, I interpret Hegel’s metaphysics as a form of speculative naturalism. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy’s “pharmakon”—both its “poison” and its “cure.” Traditionally, Hegel’s philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel’s philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s, Philippa Foot’s, and Putnam’s (...) opposition to the fact-value distinction; the rehabilitation of Hegel’s theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the “cure” for analyti... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish a substantial positive philosophical connection between Bas van Fraassen and Hegel, by focusing on their respective notions of ‘stance’ and ‘form of consciousness’. In Section I, I run through five ways of understanding van Fraassen’s idea of a stance. I argue that a ‘stance’ is best understood as an intellectual disposition. This, in turn, means that the criteria for assessing a stance are ones which ask whether or not a stance adequately makes (...) sense of things. In Section II, the discussion turns to Hegel’s notion of a ‘form of consciousness’. I argue that Hegel’s notion of a ‘form of consciousness’ is best understood as comprising a worldview. The principal advantage of articulating stances in a Hegelian way is that such an interpretation improves on the previous five ways of understanding stances. This is because a form of consciousness explicitly details both the theoretical and affective attitudes that van Fraassen is after. Therefore, why Hegel is potentially a better source of understanding stances than the other accounts is that forms of consciousness most clearly illustrate the pragmatist elements of a stance. (shrink)

Responses to Naturalism: Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism.

Kantian moral theory is construed as the paradigm of deontology, where such an approach to ethics is opposed to consequentialism and perfectionism. However, in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, Kant understands historical progress in terms of the realisation of our rational capacities, to the extent that such emphasis on capability actualisation amounts to a form of moral perfectionism: wars and incessant periods of armed conflict lead rulers to grasp the value of peace, because war and armed (...) conflict prevent human beings from achieving self-realisation. For Kant, in order to enable self-realisation, states must work together to establish a federal union of republican governments. The aim of this chapter is to (i) articulate and defend a perfectionist dimension of Kantian ethics; and (ii) propose that an insightful way of articulating Kantian Cosmopolitanism can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. Following Honneth’s model of diagnostic social philosophy, I argue that armed conflict is best understood in terms of a particularly complex form of social pathology, where the peaceful resolution of such conflict requires a complex form of diagnosis and therapy. Under such an account, leadership involves taking the lead in diagnosing armed conflict as arising from an especially traumatic asymmetrical recognition order, and in proposing genuinely practical therapeutic solutions to resolving conflict by advocating specific progressive transformations to the current asymmetrical recognition order. (shrink)

Engels explained his admiration for Balzac by pointing to an apparent discrepancy between Balzac’s literature and his politics. Despite his sympathies for the French nobility, Balzac’s realism “compelled” him to portray this class in unflattering terms. In this article, I challenge Engels’s reading, arguing that Marx’s scattered remarks on Balzac take us in a different direction. Specifically, I argue that in his remark on Balzac’s The Peasants Marx pinpointed the author’s preoccupation with the spread of bourgeois ideology into the nobility. (...) Building on this remark, I analyze several of Balzac’s works showing that insofar as Balzac lambasted the nobles, his critique was primarily directed towards nobles who had adopted bourgeois ways. In this light, and against Engels’s observation, Balzac’s critique of the nobles appears to stem from his sympathy to aristocratic values rather than conflicting with them. In showing that affinities between Balzac, Marx and Engels did not depend on Balzac expressing anti-noble sentiment, I argue that the admiration the fathers of communism had for the monarchist’s prose exemplifies a partial, yet typical convergence between socialists and conservatives in their critique of modern bourgeois society. (shrink)