The paper focuses on a neglected instance of the Platonic reception of Heraclitus in the Republic, trying to show that it’s likely that Plato’s passage makes an allusion to Heraclitus’ B97 and B85. The main claim is that Plato’s use of the image of dogs looks back to Heraclitus, which invites an exploration of the possibility that at least some elements of Plato’s kallipolis might derive from Heraclitus – particularly from some ethical and political fragments. A brief survey of these (...) suggests a deep philosophical affinity among the two authors in several important areas, and questions the commonplace traditional interpretation of Heraclitus as a defender of aristocratic morality. (shrink)

Functionalism in sociology has recently come under the critical scrutiny of philosophers of science who, by extending their analyses of the physical sciences, have attempted to examine its scientific credentials and resolve some of its basic methodological difficulties. These analyses, however, have tended to raise more problems than they solve and, in the process, they have sought to either trivialize or refute one of the main features of functionalism, viz., its teleology.

Given that the modernist narrative seems inexorably headed for Chapter 11, the search for alternatives tends to turn, first and foremost, to allegedly transcended, “pre-modern” models of social organization. This helps explain not only the thriving, but also a return to religion and tradition. This state of affairs is routinely used to relegitimate the faltering of such an obviously “emancipatory” undertaking as the modernist project by reinforcing standard modernist theodicy, according to which all evil is a function of “greed” and, (...) most of all, the persistence of “superstition and myth,” i.e.,religion and tradition. Cause and effect are reversed: the project is presumably…. (shrink)

Ebonics—Italian Style Usually, one has to read a book in order to evaluate it. Harney's book on “Italian” immigrants has the dubious distinction of capturing much of what is wrong with it on its cover. The very title prefigures its basic problem. Eh, Paesan! presumably refers to a particular greeting these immigrants employ in addressing each other. But there is no standard term “paesan.” The proper Italian word is “paesano,” which in its many dialectal renditions becomes “paisah,” “paisan” or variations (...) thereof. The same goes for the antecedent “Eh!” which in most Southern Italian dialects is actually “uí,” “ué,” “eeeeh,”…. (shrink)

Ever since Walter Benjamin drafted his theses on the philosophy of history, Critical Theory has attempted to theorize beyond the crisis of modernity and its concept of progress as what Adorno mockingly described as a linear trajectory from Adam and Eve to the Atom Bomb, Auschwitz and the Gulag. Today, over half a century after the defeat of Nazism, in the post-communist age of nuclear disarmament, the telos of progress would have to be updated, at best, to a consumerist wasteland (...) punctuated by McDonalds and Disneylands—an immensely less catastrophic but equally debilitating spiritual outcome. Although the Frankfurt School was always…. (shrink)

Today it is generally acknowledged that 1989 not only closed the 20th century prematurely, but also marked a major turning point in modern history. While there is hardly disagreement concerning the nature of the bipolar world left behind, accounts of the geopolitical configuration of what has replaced it have all failed, in various ways, to capture the dynamics of new post-Cold War political realities. Both apologists for the liberal-democratic status quo, who celebrated the alleged end of history, and old leftists, (...) who foresaw nothing but more misery and exploitation as a result of the now unopposed expansion of American imperialism, deduced their conclusions from questionable ideological premises and, more importantly, on the basis of shared misconceptions about exactly why the USSR collapsed. (shrink)

Once a vocation, being an intellectual today has become a profession. Like day traders or divorce lawyers, “public intellectuals” pack their briefcases in the morning and off they go to make a living in “the public sphere.” Unlike day-traders and divorce lawyers, however, who at least have no illusions as to who they are and what they do, public intellectuals still pretend to follow a higher calling. They like to see themselves as the theoretical vanguard of an otherwise inarticulate and (...) unsophisticated mass in need of guidance. Of course, this is nothing new. As in the dark ages of “pre-modernity,”…. (shrink)

After the French Revolution, when “Left” and “Right” came to designate the two main political orientations in Europe, “modernity” became the dominant metaphysical horizon within which almost all political questions have been formulated. As Panajotis Kondylis has shown in Konservatismus and other works, earlier “pre-modern” conservative visions lingered on, buried mostly in fading institutions, but their time was up. In the 20th century, the major political ideologies—Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism, liberalism, etc.—have all been alternative modernist proposals for social reconstruction, concerned primarily (...) with how to modernize society in what these ideologies postulate as the most efficient, just and rational way. Most…. (shrink)

The subtitle of Jacoby's book, “Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy,” aptly captures the way the present American political situation is usually perceived. Unlike conventional wisdom that celebrates this state of affairs as the achievement of genuine consensus, Jacoby bemoans it as an indication of general confusion: the result of the exhaustion of radical alternatives and a collapse of those utopian visions that generate political projects. The evidence seems compelling. Any cursory survey of the kind of issues being (...) articulated by the various presidential candidates positioning themselves for the November 2000 elections supports this diagnosis. In a country…. (shrink)

The thesis concerning the totalitarian character of the Enlightenment was originally articulated, if only briefly, during the heyday of the California exile of the Institute for Social Research, then suddenly dropped. Dialectic of Enlightenment was never completed and it was around that time, the mid-1940s, that Critical Theory went into its notorious theoretical hibernation. As Nancy Jachec shows in “Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics,” the next two decades were wasted on forays into aesthetics, psychoanalysis and opportunistic liberal apologetics such as (...) The Authoritarian Personality — nothing radically different from what run-of-the-mill liberal ideologues such as Clement Greenberg were also doing. (shrink)

What is one to do with a work whose modest opening lines by the editor proclaim it to be “one of the most crucial documents in European Marxism since … well, since maybe ever”? Almost as if to reinforce this claim, the book comes padded with no fewer than three introductions, three prefaces, and a long epilogue. This alone should alert the unaware reader that the impenetrability of the text is due not to any conceptual profundity — as epigones would (...) have it — but to an unimaginable theoretical confusion. The publisher's PR frontwoman seeks to market Negri as a “Eurocommunist theoretician” jailed for his explosive revolutionary views. (shrink)

A comprehensive history of the Frankfurt School was long overdue. When did the "School” start? Who financed it? Who ran it? What was its program? How did it develop? Who collaborated in it? What was its theoretical orientation? How was it that it moved to New York during the war, practically relocated the majority of leading German intellectuals in the U.S., only to disappear back to the Old World in the 50s? Martin Jay tries to answer all these queries (with (...) the exception of the last one), and he has come up with a brilliant piece of intellectual history that no one interested in these questions can afford to overlook. (shrink)