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

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

Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation (...) and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project. (shrink)

The Shadow of Totalitarianism develops a new way to think about the problem of evil in politics. Beginning with the commonplace idea that the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century marked the emergence of a new form of evil, Javier Burdman finds early seeds of thinking about this form in Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. Far from being an isolated object of inquiry, evil, Burdman argues, has long shaped and been central to philosophical understandings of political action and (...) judgment. Systematically analyzing the relationship between evil, action, and judgment in the work of Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, The Shadow of Totalitarianism aligns evil in politics with a desire for moral certainty, hence the emphasis on the need to accept and affirm uncertainty in current ethical theories. The careful philosophical analysis through which Burdman develops this inquiry contributes to a better understanding of some of the theoretical complexities involved in the problem of evil and provides conceptual tools with which to approach it. (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)

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 first political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse. The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interest. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and (...) consequentialist theories, conservative. Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education met New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identified opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. This book illustrates these legacies in the writings of Habermas, Derrida, and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidence, and totalitarianism. (shrink)

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

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely (...) contribution to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work. (shrink)

All the manifestos for a ‘total work of art’ after Wagner were political programmes: political, however, in a sense directly antithetical to the modern idea of the political. The goal of the total work of art was the formation of the people as a homogeneous political body, as the other of the social and political division, conflict and uncertainty inherent in the whole movement of democratic revolution since the 18th century. In each case the union or synthesis of the arts (...) prefigures the reconciliation of the classes as the condition of the unity of the people. But who is this people that will realize itself in the total work? Is it the same people for the artists of the Bauhaus as it is for the leaders of the Third Reich? These are the questions I try to answer through an interrogation of the continuities and breaks in the re-workings of the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the programmes of the Bauhaus and the policies of National Socialism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In The Longing for Total Revolution, Bernard Yack claims not to account for totalitarianism but simply to unearth a new, specifically modern mindset. Still, the problem of totalitarianism, and whatever connection it might have had with that mindset, lurks throughout his book. Yack convincingly posits a relationship between a troubling new sense of historical embeddedness and novel totalist thinking. But his sense of the range of responses to historicity proves too limited to illuminate the connection between the (...) longing for total revolution and the advent of totalitarianism. Another look at Yack’s two culminating figures, Marx and Nietzsche, suggests a more illuminating alternative. (shrink)

Some theorists on the left believe that “Islamism is a creative space for political articulations of protest against present inequalities” and that “Islamism is not a religious discourse, but a political one. It is a debate about modernity.”1 Other left apologists for Islamism treat it solely as a contestation of capitalist globalization and therefore attribute a progressive character to it.2 To do so, however, they have to remain blithely oblivious to the fact that a religious fundamentalism,3 and not a progressive (...) movement, is at work. Scholars of the left like Susan Buck-Morss could not be more wrong when they invoke…. (shrink)

By the fourth decade of the twentieth century... the earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. George OrwellThe subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.Hannah Arendt.

_Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism_ provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge. In these chapters, internationally renowned historians and cultural theorists discuss landmark debates about the uses and abuses of ‘the talking cure’ and map the diverse psychologies and therapeutic practices that have featured in and against tyrannical, modern regimes. These essays show both how the Freudian movement responded to and was transformed by the rise of fascism and communism, the Second World War, (...) and the Cold War, and how powerful new ideas about aggression, destructiveness, control, obedience and psychological freedom were taken up in the investigation of politics. They identify important intersections between clinical debate, political analysis, and theories of minds and groups, and trace influential ideas about totalitarianism that took root in modern culture after 1918, and still resonate in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they suggest how the emergent discourses of ‘totalitarian’ society were permeated by visions of the unconscious. Topics include: the psychoanalytic theorizations of anti-Semitism; the psychological origins and impact of Nazism; the post-war struggle to rebuild liberal democracy; state-funded experiments in mind control in Cold War America; coercive ‘re-education’ programmes in Eastern Europe, and the role of psychoanalysis in the politics of decolonization. A concluding trio of chapters argues, in various ways, for the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis, and of these mid-century debates over the psychology of power, submission and freedom in modern mass society. Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism will prove compelling for both specialists and readers with a general interest in modern psychology, politics, culture and society, and in psychoanalysis. The material is relevant for academics and post-graduate students in the human, social and political sciences, the clinical professions, the historical profession and the humanities more widely. (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)

In ‘The Open Society and its Enemies,’ Karl Popper contrasts closed and open societies. He evaluates irrationalism and the different kinds of rationalism and he argues that critical rationalism is superior. Living in an open society bestows great benefits but involves a strain that may in some people engender a longing to return to a closed society of tribal submission and an attraction for irrationalism. Attempts to recreate a closed society lead to totalitarianism. In the light of Popper’s arguments (...) I criticise contemporary identity politics and I show that identity politics is irrationalist and tends to totalitarianism. (shrink)

This article recovers Claude Lefort’s engagement with the issue of populism, which was inspired by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a major figure in French politics during the late 1980s. I show how Lefort developed both an analysis of populism as a pathology of modern politics and a new vision of representative democracy as the alternative to populism. In doing so, Lefort drew upon his more familiar theory of democracy and totalitarianism, his study of the history of (...) French political thought, and his partnership with Pierre Ronsanvallon, who was also developing an analysis of populism in response to Le Pen. Lefort’s approach to populism has outlived the context in which he first expressed it. Over the last decade, a number of prominent political theorists have drawn on Lefortian themes to formulate their own accounts of populism and democracy. In many cases, their arguments are quite similar to those that Lefort was expressing in the late 1980s and 1990s. A particular version of Lefortianism, which was foreshadowed in the writings of Lefort himself, has become one of the defining democratic theories of our political moment. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Marx project : a brief overview -- Origins of totalitarianism : ideology and terror -- The tradition -- First pillar : "labor is the creator of man" : on labor, necessity, and loneliness -- Third pillar : the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach -- Second pillar : violence is the midwife of history -- Die Aufhebung : as the state withers a new politics arises and philosophy fades away.

The objective of this article is to show that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism is indebted to the analysis of National Socialism elaborated by Franz Neumann in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. It is argued that Arendt adopted the central thesis of Neumann according to which Nazi Germany is a ‘non-state’ and that this thesis as well as its presuppositions are discernible in her overall approach, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution (...) to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today.The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work.Claude Lefort teaches social and political theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He was a founder, with Cornelius Castoriadis, of the influential independent journal of the left, Socialisme ou Barbarie. John B. Thompson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

My reflections will have more of an interrogative than an affirmative character. And the questions will be posed not only to others but also to myself. At the outset let me broach two questions. First, why is this work ethic needed; and second, who needs it? And at the same time I should like to translate some of the general ideological and cultural problems that have been discussed here into the language of political economy and sociology. This should, it seems (...) to me, enable us more quickly to find the common language between our emotionally colored discussions about Russia and the "Western" understanding of it. Otherwise, regardless of whether we discuss our Russian situation from a Slavophile or a Westernizing point of view, what one always gets in the final analysis is that Russia cannot be understood with the intellect. And if that is so, then why all this "intellectual noise". (shrink)

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

The second part of the interview with Dr.Sci.Proleiev, Doctor of Philosophy, devoted to the understanding of the phenomenon of "philosophy in the USSR" (first part: Proleyev, S., Zborovska, X., Mironenko, R., Kostenko, O., & Shulha, M. (2018). Philosophy as a School of Life at the Time of Totalitarianism. Part I. Thinking in the Space of Soviet Myths.