Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia served as models for most of the literary utopias written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, dystopian novels began to displace their positive counterparts. Five dystopian fictions published between 1891 and 1949—Jerome’s “The New Utopia”, Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—exhibit many common themes, such as isolation, totalitarianism, technology in service of the state, rigid social organization, uniformity and social (...) control. In the twenty-first century, some of these characteristics of fictional dystopian societies have become realities in the form of unseen technological surveillance and control. Nevertheless, utopia lives on as an ideal, for instance in philosophical transhumanism. (shrink)

The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East. Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. (...) One is regaled with chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that. The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends precisely on this other world, on what happens over there. 1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry , p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP. Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

Philosophers debate how Orwell's nightmare world compares to today's world of political acrimony and discontent.

Literature of an autobiographical character acquires a special significance in the world of the bloody tragic events of the 20th century, i.e. the Holocaust, the Second World War, the realities of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms, death camps, and forced labour. Those are the recollections of experienced trauma which shatters identity, and of existential experiences of a borderline nature, of which Shalamov, a witness to the epoch, felt an obligation to talk. An anthropological analysis of Varlam Shalamov’s short story (...) titled Artificial Limbs, Etc. enables one to grasp the role of memory and autobiographical testimony as a kind of cultural and literary antidote to silence and memory distorted by the Soviet totalitarianism. The author of Kolyma Tales offered a faithful description of a world outside the‘human’ world, one which was almost impossible to describe due to its inherent moral void, level of violence, and fear of the authorities who made people forget about the crimes, victims, and oppressors. (shrink)

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. (...) Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. (shrink)

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed.

This paper is analysing the relationship between totalitarianism and art. The following questions are being thematised: whether totalitarianism and art can actually coexist and whether their conflict is truly inevitable, whether and what kind of art can exist within the totalitarian framework, and, in line with the basic concept of this paper, whether any significant artwork was produced during the Nazism era. This paper also considers the attitude of Nazi ideology towards certain forms of art, such as sculpture, (...) film, literature and painting, as well as the segments of Nazi repression in terms of artistic expression. (shrink)

This book attempts to revolutionise epistemology. A traditional goal of epistemology is to provide an analysis of knowledge in terms of more basic things. But the post-Gettier literature has made some philosophers like Timothy Williamson suspect that knowledge cannot be analysed. Kelp claims that both the traditional project and Williamson's knowledge-first project are misguided. He provides an alternative: Knowledge is an item in an inquiry-related network and can thereby be analysed in terms of its relations to other items in (...) the network, rather than of things that are more basic than knowledge.Kelp begins his book by distinguishing two types of inquiry: inquiry into specific questions (such as whether Plato's Republic advocates totalitarianism and when World War I took place) and inquiry into general phenomena (such as the rise of the Roman Empire and the origins of species). Chapter 1 argues that the goal of inquiry into specific questions—Kelp's discussion focuses on whether questions—is knowledge. This is because even if the inquirer into whether p acquires a Gettierised justified true belief that p, she has not achieved the goal of inquiry, for the question of whether p has not been properly closed for her: she can be sensibly asked to do more research. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

In trying to say what modernism is , we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not—to be properly described and understood—be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term “culture.” Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the (...) politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology . Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence.What, then, is modernism?Some have described it as a state of “chronic revolution,” that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the “new,” for the hunger to be “original”—to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics—those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole.Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation. George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Shaw are famous and infamous: famous for their innovative and influential forms of writing, but infamous for their apparent support of totalitarianism and Nazism. However, while it has long been shown that Nietzsche’s provocative language about “breeding” and “masters and slaves” was intended to enhance culture through competition, it is still an open question how and when Shaw supported biological eugenics. Via Nietzsche’s “philosophical breeding,” this article presents a new reading of Shaw’s Man and Superman: on the (...) one hand, it contrasts Nietzsche’s philosophical Übermensch with Shaw’s eugenic Superman; and on the other hand, it connects Nietzsche’s agonistic enhancement of culture with Shaw’s philosophical reflections in “Don Juan in Hell.” In contrast to Tanner’s support of eugenic breeding in his Revolutionist’s Handbook, Shaw’s Don Juan remarkably resembles Nietzsche’s notion of “philosophical breeding” toward a more competent, truthful, and autonomous orientation that is needed in increasingly complex global politics. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the problem of loneliness in Hannah Arendt in the light of her considerations about totalitarianism. We seek not only to clarify this concept, but to examine to what extent it is important for understanding certain aspects of Arendt's critique of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.

This article compares the thinking of Andrzej Walicki and Isaiah Berlin on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and on Soviet totalitarianism. It suggests that Berlin saw totalitarianism as an externally imposed political system, whereas Walicki understood totalitarianism to depend both on external pressure and inner coercion. The article draws on a variety of published and unpublished sources, including personal interviews with Walicki and Berlin’s archives at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

The ArgumentThis article confronts an old-new orientation in the historiographical literature on the “Galileo affair.” It argues that a varied group of historians moved by different cultural forces in the last decade of the twentieth century tends to crystallize a consensus about the inevitability of the conflict between Galileo and the Church and its outcome in the trial of 1633. The “neo-conflictualists” — as I call them — have built their case by adhering to and developing the “three dogmas (...) of the Counter-Reformation”: Church authoritarianism is portrayed by them as verging towards “totalitarianism.” A preference for a literal reading of the Scriptures is understood as a mode of “fundamentalism.” And mild skeptical positions in astronomy are read as expressions of “instrumentalism,” or “fictionalism.” The main thrust of the article lies in an attempt to historicize these three aspects of the Catholic reform movement. Finally, the lacunae in insufficiently explored historiographical landscape are delineated in order to tame the temptation to embrace the three dogmas, and to modify the radical conflictualist version of the story of Galileo and the Church. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to prove the thesis that the attempts to transpose the cultural differentiation into the social and economical universalism and globalism must lead to repressive psychosocial totalitarianism on a large scale. Modern human sciences and politics tend to classify the individual in respect to his adaptive efficiency in interactive relation with programmed environment and to qualify him according to given imposed criteria of social functionalism. The correctly socialized individual is expected to be an (...) exchangeable functional unit assessed according to its usefulness in performing a set of particular tasks, despite his cultural background being considered as a second-rate factor, which may affect the social acceptance and correctness of his behavior. However, no community is an exact representation of society because it is held together not by functions but by the values aswell as the forms of their actualization and implementation into the common organization and their way of life. The community is not a contract upon which society is based. The identity of the individual must not be removed from the culture of the community in which he lives and from its constitutive values. It is also rooted in the past and history of striving for self-determination and cultural as well as personal subjectivity. Without these significant cultural and historical components the individual identity is nothing but an operational, programmable algorithm of functional living unit assigned to perform short-term utilitarian tasks. This approach stands in contradiction to the Aristotelian concept of wellbeing and happiness considered as striving for the common good of spiritual values by individuals as well as by human communities. Any extensive and effective civilization neglecting the higher values of moral, symbolic and religious sense of the individual, must face totalitarianism or extinction. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s unique contribution to political theory as seen primarily through the lens of his novel Invitation to a Beheading. Although most frequently interpreted as an indictment of totalitarianism, the novel depicts a form of cruelty practiced not only by totalitarians, but also by the rulers and citizens of milder political orders, including liberalism. The novel suggests that such cruelty is more insidious than that familiar to readers of dystopian novels precisely because of (...) its universality. This article demonstrates that Nabokov’s contribution to liberalism may be found in the surprising coherence between his aesthetic principles and his art, both of which critique the imposition of “general ideas” on either persons or books. What emerges is a picture of aesthetic liberalism in which Nabokov’s model for the ideal liberal citizen is neither the sensitive artist nor the apolitical aesthete, but rather the careful reader. (shrink)

Utopia is nominally a ‘nowhere’ that is also, as Thomas More tells us, a ‘good’ place. Although there are competing cognate notions, the Greek description looms large in most accounts of utopia. The details of this ideal are so specified that utopic literature consists in a catalogue (and critique) of specifications. This essay draws attention to the fragrance attributed to Lucian’s ‘Isles of the Blest’ together with Ivan Illich’s attention to ‘atmosphere’ and to the aura and the nose along (...) with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the sense of smell. Utopic suspicion is discussed as parallels are drawn with pragmatic critiques of utopia as inherently totalitarian along with the ‘good life’ in political theory and the programmatic default of techno-utopic fantasy. In the historical context of ‘conspiracy’ and the politics of living and breathing together in community, I conclude with Illich on pax and breath. (shrink)

In the first part of The Aporias of Open Society the author enters a polemic with the views of Karl R. Popper, who links open society to capitalism, sees it endangered by totalitarianism, and considers Plato, Hegel and Marx as its intellectual fathers. In the second part she makes broad reference to the findings of global capitalism scholars, including Popper student George Soros, in defining the capitalist system’s self-destructive traits, which she sees as confirmation of Soros’ claim that open (...) society’s most serious enemy today is itself. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to (...) reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

This paper analyses how the Cold War influenced the discourses on basic research and on Science and Technology Policies of some leaders of the Argentine research community. It explores two key intersections to study the Cold War: the first between politics and policies; the second between the global and the regional/national. The basic assumption is that, just as there was no one Cold War, specific regional and national traits lent specific meanings to basic research. In dialogue with the literature (...) on Latin American history of STPs, on Cold War and on the conceptual history of science, the paper identifies three discursive configurations around S&T: the first refers to the semi-peripheral scientific context; the second is associated with the ‘democracy-totalitarianism’ dichotomy, and the third is linked to the ‘development-dependence’ dichotomy. Finally, the paper also traces some connections between these discourses and the institutional models proposed by different key actors of the research community to implement STPs. (shrink)

EM Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” from 1909 is widely reread and discussed again for some ten years as it portrays a science-fiction world resting on similar technological advancements as today in the digital era. Also management literature reviewed the short story with regard to centralized decision making, rationality and totalitarianism. I argue instead, that the main theme of the short story is – in Forster’s own words – the closing of a civilization in times of transition (...) and facing major challenges. I built the argument by original quotes from Forster and by portraying the years 1906–9, when Forster developed the short story. This era before the Great War starting in 1914 was characterized by euphoric ‘futurism’ based on groundbreaking innovations like ‘long distance messaging’, ‘penny post’, ‘animated films’, Ford’s assembly line, ‘Olivetti typewriter’, ‘feature film’, ‘large ships’ and ‘air transportation’ – the ingredients of the short story as I argue. At the same time these acquitted years were characterized by increasing disintegration, instability, rebellions and a financial crisis with bailout programs. Based on the analogy and as part of speculative philosophy I reconstruct the current great challenges with Forster’ shadow of fatalism and arrive at the urgency to put more effort in addressing and researching pathways out of the crisis and towards stabilization of business and society. (shrink)

The path taken by German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting and controversial in the history of human thought, by turns radical and conservative and secular and religious. In this outstanding introduction, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth--the third and final volume in his trilogy, Julian Young examines the work of eight German philosophers and theologians of the period. He shows how they engaged with profound existential questions about individual and collective lives, (...) criticised the increasing rationalisation and mechanisation characteristic of modernity, and committed themselves to varying forms of liberalism, socialism and democracy. Young introduces and assesses the thought of the following figures: Wilhelm Dilthey, the encroachment of the natural sciences upon the study of humanity and his distinction between 'explanation' and 'understanding'; Karl Jaspers, existentialism, the challenge of nihilism and the turn to theology; Edith Stein, our understanding of other people and the philosophy of empathy from a phenomenological standpoint; Paul Tillich, philosophical theology and the 'theonomous' life; Martin Buber, Recovering the 'I-Thou' relationship in the face of modernity and religious socialism; Hans Jonas, responsibility, selfhood and threats to humanity in the twentieth century; Erich Fromm, the 'art of loving' as a bulwark against totalitarianism and the replacement of capitalism by communitarian socialism; Axel Honneth, contemporary Hegelianism and the ethics and politics of recognition. Lucidly and engagingly written, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology and theology and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, political theory and sociology. (shrink)

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious (...) lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case. (shrink)

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in political thought and social science. This essay challenges how the liberal tradition is typically understood. I start by delineating different types of response—prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory—that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. Liberalism, on this account, is best characterised as the sum of (...) the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space. In the remainder of the article, I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how Locke came to be characterised as a liberal. I argue that the scope of the liberal traditionexpanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious understanding of liberalism was a product of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it. (shrink)

The texts written by Huayan thinkers are characterized by rather unintelligible expressions that identify the one with the many. Such an identity thesis can be justified by the fact that all individual objects in the world are based on the common principle of emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā). But we need to take into consideration the fact that Huayan thought emerged from the typical Chinese attitude that appreciates the inherent value of every phenomenal object. Thus the relationship between the one and the (...) many in Huayan thought can be understood in terms of the parts and the whole composed of such parts. Generally speaking, Buddhist literature in the early phase seems to represent the so-called mereological reductionism because it aims at revealing that the concept of “I” or “person” as a whole is illusory. Huayan thought points out, however, that the parts and the whole are equally significant and mutually dependent. Furthermore, it identifies the parts with the whole by showing the existence of parts of an object is a necessary and sufficient condition for that of the object as a whole. It is important to note here that Huayan thought does not simply indulge in metaphysical speculations but emphasizes its soteriological purport that an initial stage of practice contains its whole process. Although Huayan thought has been often dubbed as a philosophy of totality and considered to uphold totalitarianism, such a misunderstanding could be redressed by a survey conducted in this paper. Furthermore, since Huayan thought does not posit a singular and ultimate cause but prioritizes each and every individual, it should be seen as having a profound practical significance in this polarized society. 화엄사상가들의 저작에서 우리는 일(一)과 다(多) 사이에 동일성의 관계가 성립한다는 다소 이해하기 어려운 표현을 자주 발견한다. 그러한 동일성의 관계는 모든 개별적 사물들이 공(空)이라고 하는 공통된 이치에 기반하고 있기 때문에 성립하는 것이기도 하지만, 그 관계를 해석하는 데 있어서 우리는 모든 현상적 대상들의 고유한 가치를 인정하는 중국적 태도에서 화엄사상이 출현했다는 점을 고려할 필요가 있다. 따라서 화엄사상에서 일과 다 사이의 관계는 어떠한 하나의 현상적 대상 전체와 그것을 구성하는 부분들 사이의 관계를 가리킨다고 볼 수 있다. 일반적으로 초기불교의 문헌에서는 여러 요소들이 결합된 총체로서의 ‘나’ 또는 ‘인간’이라는 개념의 허구성을 지적하기 위하여 전체를 부분들로 환원하여 전체라는 것이 개념적 허구임을 보이는 부분론적 환원주의(mereological reductionism)를 채택하는 경향이 있었다. 그러나 화엄사상은 부분과 전체가 모두 유의미할 뿐만 아니라 아니라 상호 의존적임을 지적하고, 더 나아가 어떤 대상의 부분들은 그 대상 전체의 성립을 위한 필요충분조건임을 보임으로써 부분과 전체를 동일시한다. 그러나 화엄사상의 이러한 입장은 순전히 형이상학적 사변에만 머물지 않고 수행의 최초의 단계에 그것의 전과정이 포함되어 있다는 실천론적 의미를 내포하고 있다는 점에 유의해야 한다. 이러한 고찰을 통해 우리는 화엄사상을 흔히 전체성의 철학(philosophy of totality)이라고 규정함으로써 그것을 마치 전체주의를 옹호하는 것처럼 오도하는 경향을 바로잡을 수 있을 것이다. 또한 화엄사상은 어떠한 단일하고 궁극적인 원인을 상정하지 않고 각각의 개별자들을 우선시한다는 점에서 다원화된 사회에서 더욱 적합한 실천론적 의미를 가지고 있다고 할 수 있다. (shrink)

These thirteen articles provide theoretical and historically informed analyses of thepowerful currents that are shaping the late twentieth-century political and culturallandscape.

This article aims to carry out a historical, philosophical, and political analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of communism. To achieve this end, a series of texts by the author, published between 1986 and 2021, are referenced, where the question of communism is approached in relation to themes such as totalitarianism, community, the common, literature, democracy, and capitalist civilization. The paper investigates the development of Nancy’s approach until it reaches its more or less definitive form in the mid-2000s, within (...) the framework of the debate on “the Idea of communism” (Alain Badiou). The interpretation of Nancy’s position in this international debate leads to the two main contributions of the article. First, the characterization of an ontological or existential understanding of communism radically differs from other current positions and does not have antecedents within communist theoretical traditions. Secondly, the identification of a threshold in Nancy’s thought, and by extension in contemporary thought, where the sense of “communism,” as the demand for granting inestimable value to every existence, communicates with the search for another “spirit” for our time. (shrink)

ExcerptCarl Schmitt (1888–1985) is known as the most consequential German legal and political mind of the twentieth century.1 Many crimes of the Nazi regime found support in his conceptual justifications, and Schmitt is called the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich with good reason. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists must grapple with the author in order to understand the course of totalitarianism in modernity. Whether literary historians should do so is far less settled, though he was fascinated by their (...) object of study. His writings on literary topics are said to reveal much about Schmitt’s person, politics, and period, but little about literature itself.2 This explains why his “Don Quijote und das Publikum” (“Don Quixote and the Public”), published in the arts and cultural journal Die Rheinlande in 1912, was almost unknown in literary studies for a century.3 Schmitt’s text on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes has not been reprinted, and until recently it had not been translated from the original German. Size has a role too. At under two thousand words, the text has probably escaped notice due to its small scale.4 Recent English and Italian translations in major humanistic journals may signal the end of its obscurity though.5 “Don Quixote and the Public” is at the door of literary studies. The question now is not whether to respond, but how. (shrink)

What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology, in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling logic of an idea, an idea “by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.” “The movement of history and the logical process of this notion,” Arendt continues, “are supposed to correspond to each other, so (...) that whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.’”2Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history on the basis of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class—and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders—unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the “insecurity” of philosophical questioning . 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute and, related to the topic of politics, “The Jewish People Don’t Dream” . Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography and La Fiction du politique . Nancy has written “Sharing Voices” in Transforming Hermeneutics and La Communauté désoeuvrée . Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle. He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch is a celebrated philosopher and novelist. Was she a political theorist? It has been argued that she concentrated upon the personal and the moral at the expense of the social and the political. However, this book urges the contrary. Murdoch had lifelong interests in politics, literature, and philosophy. More than that, Murdoch sees experience, historical experience, as the foundation upon which literature, philosophy, and political theory are based. Hence, in reading Murdoch we get a clear insight (...) into the nature of the political world in the twentieth century. From an early political radicalism to a later scepticism over political possibilities, Murdoch reacted to and thought about the great political events of the twentieth century, notably the Holocaust, the rise and fall of ideologies, the possibilities of utopianism, and the realities of political tyranny and totalitarianism. Her political philosophy conceptualized relations between moral and political spheres. Her novels deal imaginatively with questions of migration, refugees, sexuality, and freedom. Her letters and journals provide moment to moment reactions to political events. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article reviews the book Ayn Rand e il fascismo eterno. Una narrazione distopica, by Diana Thermes. This is the first Italian book specifically devoted to Rand’s thought and novels. Thermes has conducted her study in a remarkably original way, profusely interrelating Rand’s fiction works with the long-standing tradition of dystopian literature and her analysis of collectivism with the most significant contributions on the nature and causes of totalitarianism, as well as illustrating the relevance of Rand’s ideas (...) in the face of present-day challenges. (shrink)

The political scientist and former Bavarian Minister of Culture Hans Maier has created a historically profound, theologically educated, literarily and musically highly sensitive, politically mature body of work, with which he has inscribed himself in the (intellectual) history of the Federal Republic. This book is the first to contain contributions by renowned scholars and politicians on the rich work and impact of the Catholic scholar and politician Hans Maier. It thematises and appreciates in detail his view of German history and (...) the traditions of political thought, his critique of political language, political theology, totalitarianism and political religions, but also his contributions on Catholicism and modernity, his writings on literature and music, and finally his influence as an academic teacher, public intellectual and politician. With contributions by Udo Bermbach, Thomas Brose, Ahmet Cavuldak, Horst Dreier, Hermann-Josef Große Kracht, Jens Hacke, Oliver Hidalgo, Hans Günter Hockerts, Patrick Horst, Horst Möller, Heinrich Oberreuter, Henning Ottmann, Mark Edward Ruff, Hans Otto Seitschek, Michael Stolleis, Bernhard Vogel, Peter Graf von Kielmansegg, Theo Waigel and Markus Zimmermann. (shrink)

This inquiry examines various philosophical conceptions of identity and the clash between different identity narratives in the history of philosophy. The main goal of this paper is to show how the European philosophical idea of identity was developed. This paper explores the emergence of European philosophical identity narratives, which have shaped the ideas of justice, truth and community in Europe. It studies the foundational identity narratives that underlie the contested idea of a shared European heritage in law and culture, such (...) as the ideas of equality, tolerance, rule of law, pluralism and the rejection of totalitarianism, and their relevance for current debates on philosophical ideas of self and identity. Identity is an open process. It is a dynamic hermeneutic category, which is constantly reinterpreted and reinvented. There are various philosophical traditions of Cogito – some of them perceive it as foundation of all knowledge and some of them perceive it as a mere illusion. In all these philosophical perspectives, the self is understood only through interpretation. The self is constituted as a narrative, as a text. Understanding oneself means understanding oneself in front of a text. The self is reinterpreted all over again only in light of narratives provided by culture. The task of hermeneutics is not only understanding of a subject, but also rethinking the subject. (shrink)

Are utopian visions viable in the 21st century? Utopia has been equated, for many, with totalitarianism. Such visions are not acceptable. The loss of utopian visions altogether is also unacceptable. This book argues that American Pragmatism and Feminist theory can combine to provide a process model of utopia that pushes to build a flexible future that helps us deal with change, conflict, and diversity without resorting to fixed ends.

Oswald Spengler (1880--1936) is best known for The Decline of the West, in which he propounded his pathbreaking philosophy of world history and penetrating diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. This monumental work launched a seminal attack on the idea of progress and supplanted the outmoded Eurocentric understanding of history. His provocative pessimism seems to be confirmed in retrospect by the twentieth-century horrors of economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the emerging global environmental crisis. (...) In Prophet of Decline, John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess this visionary thinker and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilization. Farrenkopf's assessment ranges widely, placing Spengler's philosophy in its intellectual historical context and covering Spengler's ideas on democracy, capitalism, science and technology, cities, Western art, social change, and human exploitation of the environment. He also illuminates the implications of Spengler's thought for contemplating from a fresh perspective the future of the United States, the leading power of the West. Prophet of Decline is highly relevant today as many take the opportunity at the turn of the century to ponder again the direction in which humankind and our global community are moving and approach with concern the uncertain future amid globalization, hypercomplexity, and accelerating change. An interdisciplinary book about an interdisciplinary thinker, it is a substantial contribution to the literature of historical philosophy, political science, international relations, and German studies. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is one of the most prominent thinkers of modern times, whose profound influence extends across philosophy, politics, law, history, international relations, sociology, and literature. Presenting new and powerful ways to think about human freedom and responsibility, Arendt's work has provoked intense debate and controversy. 'Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts' explores the central ideas of Arendt's thought, such as freedom, action, power, judgement, evil, forgiveness and the social. Bringing together an international team of contributors, the essays provide lucid accounts (...) of Arendt's fundamental themes and their ethical and political implications. The specific concepts Arendt deployed to make sense of the human condition, the phenomena of political violence, terror and totalitarianism, and the prospects of sustaining a shared public world are all examined. 'Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts' consolidates the disparate strands of Arendt's thought to provide an accessible and essential guide for anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this leading intellectual figure. (shrink)

A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...

The motif of literature abandoned by Foucault in the 70s can find new possibilities and resurface transformed from an ethical perspective that continues focusing on the language. Language and subject are not two vertebral topics in Foucault’s reflection, but a single framework in which literature, disappearance of the subject and ethics are linking different paths of the same journey. Western man largely questioned in Foucault’s works appears together with other subjectivities that challenge him and make us think about (...) the limits and possibilities of the subject. In this sense, we propose literature as a practice of subjectivation in which language frees from imposed limits, literature as an ethical practice. (shrink)

The rapid technological transition requires the adoptive approach to the digital conduct of public and private institutions. Countries and companies strive to integrate a balanced understanding of digital ethics and sustainability concepts from various standpoints, which results in a dispersed and uncategorized knowledge base. This work presents a literature review on digital ethics published from 2010 to 2020 in three technical libraries and one library maintained by the community of philosophers. The investigation process integrates a thorough review of digital (...) ethics concepts in the leading academic libraries using keywords representing various concept applications. This study’s outcome is a quantitative and sectorial categorization of works on digital ethics, followed by a holistic review of concepts, maturity level, and conclusions on each category. This work aims to understand the trends from a technological and philosophical perspective towards designing a sustainable digital ethical frame-work applied in digital services that fulfill sufficiency thresholds of justice and do not foster overshooting of planetary boundaries. The first version of a holistic framework based on the literature review is presented at the end of this work. It will be extended in future work. (shrink)

October fourteenth of this year marks the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. This provides occasion to reflect on the political and philosophical thought of one who, due to her concerted effort to understand the political terrain of her time “without banisters”, can be characterized as one of the most original and insightful political theorists of the twentieth century. The unorthodox and even elusive character of her claims has often made them seem contradictory, as if incapable of forming a coherent political (...) theory. This has made for a burgeoning literature and lively debates on, for instance, how to understand some of her central categories such as action, freedom, power, and authority; how to read her work, that is, whether through the lens of her political theory as laid out in The Human Condition or through the lens of her examination of the elements that crystallized into totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism; and whether her existential politics contains elements of decisionism, or, rather, her insistence on plurality and speech offers a version of participatory politics. (shrink)

This book examines the entire range of sacred literature produced between the sixteenth- and nineteenth century to give a comprehensive account of Sikhism. Dealing with the historical evolution of the Sikh tradition, it discuss issues like self-image, identity, and ideology.

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the (...) creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on totalitarian regimes. For her, such a political development becomes possible particularly because people abrogate their faculty of thinking. Totalitarianism, in turn, breeds conformity, engenders an ethics of alienation. Moreover, language, too, loses its hermeneutical ability to conjure up other possible, alternative, imaginative scenarios, as the regime clamps down on the use of words and phrases, creating a rhetorically univocal echo chamber from which it becomes increasingly more difficult to (...) escape. The observations of Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist, corroborates Arendt’s reflections, underscoring her perennial relevance on this matter. (shrink)

Aesthetics is not a subject usually associated with North Korea in Western scholarship, the usual tropes being autocracy, counterfeiting, drugs, human-rights abuse, famine, nuclear weapons, party-military dictatorship, Stalinism, and totalitarianism. Where the arts are concerned, they are typically seen as crude political propaganda. One British museum specialist writes that North Korean visual art is an "art under control," and one Russian historian insists that North Korean literature is devoid of the "beauty of language."1 As the short turns of (...) phrase and value judgments indicate, there has been no real attempt in English to engage the North Korean aesthetic on descriptive terms.North Korea is not a liberal .. (shrink)

Introduction: Teaching and misleading -- Ethical fables and antifeminist exempla -- From sermon story to novella -- Lives of saints; lives of sinners -- Classical and vernacular exempla -- Magister amoris -- Afterword in time of plague.