Nicholas Kaldor was one of this century's most original thinkers on economics, his influence on British economic policy second only to that of Keynes. This book traces the development of Kaldor's thought as it underwent a remarkable evolution from his membership of the Austrian neoclassical school to his embracing of radical Keynesianism. He was also extremely quick to grasp essential changes in economic reality and to forge analytical tools to explain them. Although he was innovative from 1938 onwards, much of (...) his seminal work belongs to a coherent project of research which made him, together with Joan Robinson and Micha/l Kalecki, a leading representative of the post-Keynesian school, an outstanding critic of the neoclassical theory of equilibrium, growth, and distribution, and a convinced opponent of the monetarist school. The book also seeks to show how economic policy and political economy were closely connected in Kaldor's work. It was this that made Kaldor one of the most lucid and radical champions of the economic policies which, by blending political freedom with social justice, have been the outstanding feature of the great European tradition of social democracy. (shrink)

In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the ...

This study intended to test whether attachment to one’s own residential place at neighborhood level could represent a coping response for the elderly (consistently with the “docility hypothesis;” Lawton, 1982 ), when dealing with the demands of unfamiliar environments, in order to balance their reduction of spatial abilities. Specifically, a sequential path was tested, in which neighborhood attachment was expected to play a buffer role between lowered spatial competence and neighborhood satisfaction. The participants ( N = 264), senior citizens (over (...) 65-year-old), responded to a questionnaire including the measures of spatial self-efficacy, spatial anxiety, attitude toward wayfinding, residential attachment and residential satisfaction. Results from the mediation analysis showed that a lower perceived spatial self-efficacy is associated to a higher spatial anxiety, and both promote a more negative attitude toward wayfinding tasks in non-familiar places. This leads to a higher attachment to one’s own neighborhood, which in turn predicts a higher residential satisfaction. Thus, the “closure” response of becoming more attached to their residential place may be an adaptive strategy of the elderly for compensating the Person-Environment (P-E) mis- fit ( Lawton and Nahemow, 1973 ) when they feel unable (or less able) to cope with the demands of unfamiliar environments. (shrink)

Intergenerational justice represents a crucial theme in the on-going debate in ethics, politics and law. In what follows, I would like to show that a determined phenomenological perspective drawing from the motive of alterity can shed new light on such a topic. Importantly, my concern will be to display how this approach can provide a thorough justificatory underpinning for a responsibility towards future generations, while denouncing the main shortcomings that mainstream approaches reveal when dealing with this issue.

This article focuses on the concrete and symbolic process of construction, self-identification and self-presentation of U.S.-America as a “material” nation, a self-identification elaborated, albeit seldom by using this term, through the emphasis on its “exceptional” system of production, distribution, and consumption between the turn of the century and the immediate aftermath of WWI. It weaves together three, so far separate, streams of research such as the one on the American system of manufacturing, that on the emergence of modern patterns of (...) distribution and consumption, and the literature on the sustained efforts at “exporting” abroad the “American dream”. It charts the evolution of the business practices and of the rhetoric used to forge the notion of “material nation,” the actors involved, the implications this had for the process of real and imagined nation-making and for the different social and cultural segments comprising the nation. (shrink)

This work, in continuity with the article published by Ferdinando Casolaro and Giovanna Della Vecchia in Vol 5, 2017 of this series, in which we noted that in the centuries since the eight century B.C. at the 13th century A.D. the evolution of Astronomy and historical events have influenced the development of Mathematics, intends to demonstrate how the Architecture and Literature of the following centuries have further conditioned the development of the sciences in Italy and, in particular, of Mathematics, (...) identifying the affinities and, in some cases, the coincidences between the different forms of thought that invite us to make a serious reflection on the uniqueness of culture. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the publication of the Black Notebooks, the debate on "Heidegger and Politics" seems, more than ever, to be colonized by the sole question regarding the connection between his thought and his involvement with Nazism and its anti-Semitic ideology. Far from relativizing the importance of such a debate, the book opens up a different approach to the political implications of Heidegger's philosophy: his early work devoted to a phenomenology of life in all its facticity. This early work (...) has a genuine, although implicit, political character, which - as Ferdinando Menga argues - can be made explicit and developed in a way that yields inspiring material for a true and proper theory of democracy. Lässt sich mit Heidegger noch politische Philosophie betreiben? Seit der Veröffentlichung der Schwarzen Hefte scheint dies unmöglich oder zumindest sehr kontrovers. Ohne die Relevanz der um die Hefte entstandenen Debatte in Frage zu stellen, wird hier ein anderer Weg eingeschlagen, um, diese politische Dimension zu erkunden. Dieser alternative Zugang thematisiert die frühen phänomenologischen Schriften (1919-1923) des Autors, die um die fundamentale Frage nach einem Denken des Ursprungs kreisen. Es handelt sich um ein Denken, das für sich in Anspruch nimmt, einen genuinen und adäquaten Zugang zur ursprünglichen Struktur der faktischen Lebenserfahrung gefunden zu haben. Die zentrale These Mengas lautet nun, dass die Vorrangigkeit des Politischen gerade in dieser phänomenologischen Dimension entdeckt, weiter entfaltet und kritisch erörtert werden kann - bis hin zu Spuren einer Demokratietheorie in Heideggers früher Philosophie. (shrink)

In light of the recent revival of the debate on radical democracy, this paper seeks to show how a critical reappropriation of Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic politics can explain the structure of a conflict-based understanding of democratic orders. In explicit convergence with Mouffe, I argue that a radical democratic project by no means needs to abandon—as many absolute democracy and multitude theorists claim—the modern political paradigm. I also show, diverging from her account, that Mouffe’s defence of a radical democratic (...) project based on pluralism and agonism would have been better served by a critical reception of Arendt’s thinking rather than that of Schmitt. The relevance of this alternative strategy—so I will argue—lies in the fact that it delivers an apt design for a politico-legal order which permits true and proper conflicts, on the one hand, while simultaneously allowing that they be dealt with democratically, on the other. (shrink)

Oxford University Press published eminent literary critic Leo Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and features a new preface from the author.

What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more clearly—in a sense, even more crudely—than any other major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of (...) modern high culture by Proust’s time, persists, I believe, in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience has, furthermore, been served by psychoanalysis—more specifically, by a certain view of sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes normative—both for an individual and for a culture—the mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu.As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the Proustian narrator’s discovery of his vocation as a writer. Let’s begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre, the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the “resurrection” of Marcel’s grandmother on the first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence of art on death. Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and Modern Culture, written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his most recent publication. Professor’s The Freudian Body/Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter. (shrink)

The logic of discovering and that of justifying have been a permanent source of debate in mathematics, because of their different and apparently contradictory features within the processes of production of mathematical sentences. In fact, a fundamental unity appears as soon as one investigates deeply the phenomenology of conjecturing and proving using concrete examples. In this paper it is shown that abduction, in the sense of Peirce, is an essential unifying activity, ruling such phenomena. Abduction is the major ingredient in (...) a theoretical model suitable for describing the tran-sition from the conjecturing to the proving phase. In the paper such a model is introduced and worked out to test Lakatos' machinery of proofs and refutations from a new point of view. Abduction and its categorical counter-part, adjunction, allow to explain within a unifying framework most of the phenomenology of conjectures and proofs, encompassing also the method of Greek analysis-synthesis. (shrink)

While in the realm of scholarly debate on intergenerational justice the mechanism of a transgenerational intertwinement has been often adopted as a chief conceptual device in view of overcoming ethical short-termism and legitimizing duties towards future generations, this paper aims at showing that there are good reasons for considering the opposite outcome. Drawing on three paradigmatic examples taken from three mainstream approaches in the debate—Rawls’s contractualism, Gauthier’s contractarianism, and indirect reciprocity—I will show how the grammar of presentism is still largely (...) operative under the surface of theories explicitly recurring to such a device and thereby advocating a chain of duties capable to reach the remote future. A short closing section will be devoted to endorsing a radical reorientation in ethics, such that a direct link to future invocations will be considered as a promising strategy for genuinely justifying intergenerational obligations. (shrink)

In this article I intend to trace and discuss a contradiction, which – I believe – lies in Arendt’s thought: the one between her concept of plurality and her concept of power. In a more specific way, I will argue that Arendt, by admitting only an intransitive understanding of power, betrays her vision of plurality, as this one cannot exclude a transitive conception of power. Furthermore, I will try to detect how this same contradiction reflects itself in another topical place (...) of Arendt’s thought, i.e. her critical opposition to political representation. Here the direction of my arguing can be expressed by a simple question: isn’t maybe representation a much more adequate way to correspond plurality than Arendt’s tendency to acclaim an aggregative and quasi-organic collective participation? (shrink)

Every order lies on the claim or pretension to give itself as an accomplished realm, i.e. as a closed scene which is capable to give shape, orientation and sense to the totality of elements embraced by it. Yet, from the same operation of ordering, a paradox soon arises, in that no order can avoid its contingent genealogy, that means: it cannot avoid the fact that, in enclosing and including something, it must simultaneously exclude something else, which, therefore, can always challenge (...) and threaten its stability or total “delimitation”. In this sense, that which is excluded can be seen as an alien element, which structurally prevents order from a definite closure and thus keeps it in a permanent movement. Now, what I would like to convey in my following reflections is that this dynamics of impossible closure of order, given to a non-appropriable alienness, is exactly the one operative in the realms of translation and tragedy, so that, once we carefully investigate these realms, we may dare to affirm that saying that orders are unclosed scenes is as much true as to say that they are constantly “in translation”, always “in tragedy”. (shrink)