Marcuse emphasizes a dialectical relationship between aesthetics and politics. Art promotes liberation through the education of sensibility and critique of reality—the Great Refusal—while still embodying elements of the ideological system of domination. Thus, although art itself cannot change the world, it can move people to social change. In this respect, the Great Refusal serves an important political role in challenging the Establishment. This paper argues for the continued theoretical relevance of the Great Refusal and for its practical possibilities in transforming (...) society. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar y problematizar la influencia de Rousseau en Robespierre y, desde este ejemplo, examinar la cuestión de las influencias en general. Este artículo se propone rebatir esas interpretaciones en las que Robespierre es descrito básicamente como una especie de mera aplicación o extensión práctica del pensamiento de Rousseau. Para ello, se examinan las diferentes problemáticas relativas a su “gran influencia”: entre otras cosas, las contradicciones de este pensador con lo que se dijo (...) en su nombre, cómo fue reivindicado prácticamente por todos los bandos (incluso contrarrevolucionarios) o cómo hubo otras influencias muy importantes entre los principales actores revolucionarios (como la Antigüedad grecorromana). También se destaca que, aunque fuese de manera elogiosa, Rousseau fue poco citado explícitamente por Robespierre, razón por la que discursos son analizados en detalle, y se combinan este tipo de análisis internalistas con otros externalistas o contextuales. Con todo ello no se pretende negar la influencia, sino matizarla y mostrar cómo la recepción de Rousseau durante la Revolución Francesa fue productiva, compleja, coyuntural, cambiante y públicamente competida. De hecho, a menudo fue más importante la dimensión simbólica que la propiamente discursiva. (shrink)

Bu yazıda Fransız Devrimi'nin Eylül 1793’ten Temmuz 1794’e kadar süren Terör Dönemi ve devrimin önderlerinden Robespierre’in bu dönemdeki rolü incelenmektedir. Bu amaçla öncelikle Terör Dönemi’nde neler yaşandığından kısaca söz edilecek, sonrasında ise Robespierre kendini nasıl bu dönemin merkezinde bulduğu araştırılacaktır. Son olarak Robepierre’in terör tartışmalarında gündeme getirdiği “erdemli terör” kavramının ne anlama geldiği tartışılacaktır.

On 5 Nivôse of the Year II, addressing the National Assembly on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre declared: “The theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution that has brought it about. It should not be sought in the books of political writers, who have not foreseen this revolution, nor in the laws of tyrants, who content to abuse their power, are little concerned to investigate its legitimacy.” It is tempting to suppose Robespierre (...) is exaggerating. Whatever the relation of revolutionary government to “the laws of tyrants,” Robespierre's ties to the republican tradition in political philosophy, and especially to Rousseau, are striking and nearly everywhere acknowledged, not least by Robespierre himself. However, I am not concerned here with the question of Rousseau's influence upon Robespierre, but with the rather different question of conceptual affinity. Even if Robespierre's intent were just to put The Social Contract into practice, it is still appropriate to ask whether Robespierre is a Rousseauean. (shrink)

One of the most important debates in the field of eighteenth?century French intellectual history concerns the ideological significance of the rise of the cult of the Great Frenchmen. Taking this debate as a frame of reference, the paper attempts a close reading of Robespierre's Éloge de Gresset (written in 1784, published in 1785). Usually dismissed by Robespierre scholars, this text is, in fact, a very important document offering clues not only to Robespierre's intellectual formation, but also his (...) appropriation of what he regarded as the official and conventional rhetoric of his age. These questions engage the larger debate regarding the origins of the French Revolution, in particular its ?cultural origins?, and its intellectual origins, defined as the distillation of and interactions between competing representations of society and its relation to the public sphere. The thesis proposed is that Robespierre's eulogy of Gresset indicates that his anti?philosophical ideas came from a much broader array of sources than previously believed. Among these sources, Gresset's 1740s?1750s polemics against the philosophes pointed the way towards the type of criticism of the Enlightenment that underpinned Robespierre's cultural revolutionary politics. (shrink)

David A. Bell and Hugo Drochon’s foreword prepares us well for Gauchet’s Robespierre. We are not to expect a biography, any form of preamble, nor footnotes, archival discoveries, nor wrestling with...

In “Modern Abstract Sacrifice in Robespierre’s Terror and Hitler’s Holocaust,” I use Hegel’s analysis of Robespierre’s Terror in the Phenomenology and Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the Nazi Holocaust in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to identify what I term “modern abstract sacrifice” as the dominant kind of instrumental destruction that took place during these nation-building mass-sacrifices. As I show, these events relied upon a justificatory instrumental logic—a sacrificial story—even if that sacrificial story broke down or was abandoned in (...) practice, in which case the destruction became indiscriminate rather than targeted. First, I analyze Hegel’s critique of the Reign of Terror, which he sees as a product of the immediate identity of the general will and the individual will: the revolutionaries collapsed the will of all and the will of each, rendering individuality as such logically impossible. As a result, all individuals became objects of suspicion worthy of sacrifice by guillotine, for the sake of guaranteeing the triumph of the state based on reason. Next, I analyze Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the fascist sacrifice of the Jewish people using their political-economic and pathological theories of antisemitism. Adorno and Horkheimer see fascist antisemitism as a manifestation of the logic of substitution, operative in both liberal capitalist ideology—in which the Jewish people represent the forces of capital, obsolete pre-modern tradition, and statelessness—as well as fascist ideology—in which the Jewish people represent the metaphysical forces of evil and “negativity as such.” Finally, I assert that the principal commonality between modern abstract sacrifice in the Terror and the Holocaust is the fact that the victims were all reduced to exchangeable representatives of an abstract category, in spite of the fact that their unique identities were indispensable for the ideological justification of these mass-sacrifices. (shrink)

C’est par le prisme du courant révolutionnaire des Enragés que l’essayiste Claude Guillon s’est emparé des questions de genre dans la Révolution française (Notre patience est à bout. 1792‑1793 Les écrits des Enragé(e)s, Éditions IMHO, 2017) et sa réflexion se poursuit depuis dans les pages très documentées de son blog historien (La Révolution & nous, https://unsansculotte.wordpress.com). Avec ce nouvel ouvrage, Robespierre, les femmes et la Révolution, l’auteur veut explorer la « politique de...

Durante la Revolución Francesa, el trabajo político del "lado izquierdo", del cual Robespierre fue uno de los portavoces, consistió en implementar los principios de la Declaración de los Derechos del Hombre y del Ciudadano. Esto implica que el pueblo soberano puede controlar el ejercicio del poder de sus agentes. Su función es garantizar el derecho natural del hombre a la existencia, que es la condición principal de la libertad y la razón de ser de la república. During the French (...) Revolution, the political work of the "left side", of which Robespierre was one of the spokespersons, consisted in implementing the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. These imply that the sovereign people can control the exercise of the power of their agents. Their function is to guarantee the natural right of man to existence which is the main condition of freedom and the raison d'être of the republic. (shrink)

En su discurso del 10 de mayo de 1793 sobre la Constitución, Robespierre combina una concepción fiduciaria de los representantes públicos con una defensa de las virtudes de la democracia, el único sistema político en el que los gobernantes, al ser parte del pueblo, tienen los mismos intereses que este. Es esta defensa de la soberanía popular, así como de la primacía del poder legislativo, lo que constituye la esencia de su “economía política popular”, una expresión que toma de (...) Rousseau. Para Robespierre, solamente esta clase de economía es compatible con una República cuyo primer objetivo sea la garantía de los derechos naturales del hombre. In his 10th May 1793 speech on the Constitution, Robespierre combines a fiduciary conception of public representatives with a defence of the virtues of democracy, the only political system in which the rulers, being part of the people, have the same interests as the latter. It is this defence of popular sovereignty, as well as of the primacy of the legislative power, what constitutes the essence of his “popular political economy”, an expression he takes from Rousseau. For Robespierre, only this kind of economy is compatible with a Republic whose first objective is to guarantee the natural rights of man. (shrink)

This article contains the preface, introduction, and epilogue of Zhu Xueqin’s influential book The Demise of the Republic of Virtue: From Rousseau to Robespierre. In the preface, Zhu describes Chinese and international scholarship on Rousseau, his own intellectual formation as a member of the Cultural Revolution generation, and the overall purpose of the book. In the introduction, Zhu briefly outlines the transformation of medieval “theological politics” into modern “political theology,” or his central concern of the merger between moral idealism (...) and the political state. Finally, in the epilogue, Zhu nevertheless still seeks to rescue Rousseau by arguing that history is created by both a priori and empirical forces and that a dialogue between deconstruction and construction is required. However, for “political theology” to end, boundaries have to be set to moral idealism and it needs to be disconnected from the political state. (shrink)

Patriotism is not commonly associated with freedom. Even less so when Hegel is evoked. By reading Hegel’s concept of patriotism through the lens of revolutionary France, I present a notion of patriotism that is tied to the realization of freedom. This paper demonstrates what happens when Hegel’s philosophy of law is re-read through the political philosophy of the French Revolution itself. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and its lectures are marked by tensions. The legacy it leaves traces it leaves behind can (...) be re-appropriated to explore the inconclusive hints left by the philosopher. The idea of patriotism is one of them, simply defined as an intersubjective link between the concrete individual and the state or as particular and general interests coinciding. This paper expands this analysis by introducing two elements: Hegel’s discussion on the character of the law and how it comes to be law; and the revolutionary phenomenon itself. The revolutionaries’ views on patriotism and its functions within a revolutionary moment can help us transform the mere traces left by Hegel into a wider vision that incorporates and promotes freedom. (shrink)

Republicanism is increasingly attracting more attention from political philosophy. However, a mere hermeneutical approach it is usually used, which tends to neglect the political, social and economic circumstances that shaped this tradition of thought. This article addresses the modern conception of republican freedom with the North American and the French case through the work of two of their most representative figures, Thomas Jefferson and Maximilien Robespierre. The article defends that the political, juridical and economic government – the republican political (...) economy– devised by both, keeps important similarities that the current political philosophy cannot ignore. To illustrate this relationship, it is shown that both thinkers received a deep and similar influence of natural law philosophy and of fiduciary theory when thinking and trying to implement their models of government and their idea of ownership. (shrink)

Since representation and democracy were reconciled and combined, there has been constant tension and debate over whether representation enables, limits or prevents democracy. If one leaves aside questions over principles and turns to history, the democratic credentials of representation immediately become much clearer. Until democracy was reformulated to mean a representative system of government, it was dismissed as an antiquarian form of rule, inappropriate, if not impossible, for modern states. This article seeks to demonstrate the `democratic-ness' of representation through historical (...) argument. This focus leads to the revisions and challenges to `democracy' that occurred during the French Revolution, where crucial developments can be seen in the bringing together of the two previously antithetical concepts of democracy and representation. It is argued that this is when the conceptual and theoretical framework for modern democracy starts to be built in earnest. This is shown through a close reading of two key revisions in how democracy is understood in relation to representative rule, provided by a pair of political actors at the very heart of the Revolution: Thomas Paine and Maximilen Robespierre. What makes these two protagonists so important is that they offer bold and particularly modern revaluations of democracy, which simultaneously challenge both the `evaluative' and the `descriptive' sides of the concept. In so doing, Paine and Robespierre conceive of democracy as including representation and, at the same time, paint democracy as something positive and valuable. The reflections and innovations of democracy found in these two central and polarizing figures are exemplary in the unique combination of reconfiguring of democracy and representation — a pairing that may now seem very normal, but in the 18th century was nothing short of oxymoronic. (shrink)

Book synopsis: In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek looks for the kernel of truth in the totalitarian politics of the past. Examining Heidegger's seduction by fascism and Foucault's flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the 'right steps in the wrong direction.' On the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and horror, there was a valuable core of idealism lost beneath (...) the bloodshed. A redemptive vision has been obscured by the soft, decentralized politics of the liberal-democratic consensus. Faced with the coming ecological crisis, Zizekk argues the case for revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A return to past ideals is needed despite the risks. In the words of Samuel Beckett: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about society, culture, and government are pivotal in the history of political thought. His works are as controversial as they are relevant today. This volume brings together three of Rousseau’s most important political writings—_The Social Contract and The First Discourse _and_ The Second Discourse _—and_ _presents essays by major scholars that shed light on the dimensions and implications of these texts. Susan Dunn’s introductory essay underlines the unity of Rousseau’s political thought and explains why his ideas influenced (...) Jacobin revolutionaries in France but repelled American revolutionaries across the ocean. Gita May’s essay discusses Rousseau as cultural critic. Robert N. Bellah explores Rousseau’s attempt to resolve the tension between the individual’s desire for freedom and the obligations that society imposes. David Bromwich analyzes Rousseau as a psychologist of the human self. And Conor Cruise O’Brien takes on the “noxious,” “deranged” Rousseau, excoriated by Edmund Burke but admired by Robespierre and Thomas Jefferson. Written from different, even opposing perspectives, these lucid essays convey a sense of the vital and contentious debate surrounding Rousseau and his legacy. For this edition Susan Dunn has provided a new translation of the _Discourse on the Sciences and Arts _and_ _has revised a previously published translation of _The Social Contract._. (shrink)

Moderation and liberalism are different and in some cases antagonistic concepts. In recent years, the view that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is a moderate and liberal rendering of sovereignty has gained acceptance in intellectual history and constitutional theory literature. This claim is based on the premise that radical and illiberal readers of Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, such as Robespierre and the Jacobins, were opposed to representing the general will (volonté générale). Thus, constituent power as the exercise of power (...) by extraordinary representatives to draft a constitution would be a liberal attempt at political moderation in the French revolution. In contrast to this liberal reading, my analysis shows that Sieyès’s idea of constituent power is an illiberal attempt at political moderation. Against moderate liberal theories, constituent power demands that the extraordinary representatives of the constituent assembly must will, deliberate, and act as if they were the people themselves. These representatives have absolute powers and the mandate to create a constitution but also the imperative to perceive and mirror the sovereign will. From a political theory approach, I conclude that constituent power is not a liberal idea but a key notion of moderate illiberalism that prevailed during the French Revolution. (shrink)

no conjunto imenso e nada sistematizado da filosofia de Slavoj Žižek, a noção benjaminiana de “violência divina” é recorrentemente articulada. Para os propósitos do presente artigo, que é pensar a introdução de um terceiro elemento destituinte da dialética da violência que põe e mantém o direito, nos valeremos três textos do filósofo esloveno: Robespierre, ou a “divina violência” do terror (2007), Violência divina (2008) e Da democracia à violência divina (2009). Nesse sentido, reconstruiremos o que está no centro da (...) sua argumentação em que Žižek se apropria do conceito benjaminiano, para em seguida, mostrarmos a inadequação de sua interpretação para pensarmos uma teoria do poder destituinte. Corremos o risco de afirmar uma inadequação, não pelos resultados que Žižek alcançou, mas porque ele arroga para si uma interpretação do conceito de Benjamin que em nosso entendimento não está próximo de sua argumentação. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about society, culture, and government are pivotal in the history of political thought. His works are as controversial as they are relevant today. This volume brings together three of Rousseau’s most important political writings—_The Social Contract and The First Discourse (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) _and_ The Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality)_—and_ _presents essays by major scholars that shed light on the dimensions and implications of these texts. Susan Dunn’s introductory essay (...) underlines the unity of Rousseau’s political thought and explains why his ideas influenced Jacobin revolutionaries in France but repelled American revolutionaries across the ocean. Gita May’s essay discusses Rousseau as cultural critic. Robert N. Bellah explores Rousseau’s attempt to resolve the tension between the individual’s desire for freedom and the obligations that society imposes. David Bromwich analyzes Rousseau as a psychologist of the human self. And Conor Cruise O’Brien takes on the “noxious,” “deranged” Rousseau, excoriated by Edmund Burke but admired by Robespierre and Thomas Jefferson. Written from different, even opposing perspectives, these lucid essays convey a sense of the vital and contentious debate surrounding Rousseau and his legacy. For this edition Susan Dunn has provided a new translation of the _Discourse on the Sciences and Arts _and_ _has revised a previously published translation of _The Social Contract._. (shrink)

Accounts of terrorism, which locate the emergence of the concept in the French Revolution, tend to accept two premises. First, they assume that the concept of terrorism names a particular form of violence. Second, they regard Robespierre as the first practitioner of terrorism, thus suggesting an understanding of the term as state violence. While this article substantiates the second premise by way of a discussion of the first systematic articulation of terrorism by Tallien in 1794, it problematises the first (...) premise through an examination of archival evidence from the period between 1794 and 1797. By identifying a variety of conceptual uses of terrorism as a form of government, political philosophy and political identity, I argue for an expansion of the conceptual space within which terrorism is primarily understood as a form of violent action. (shrink)

Este es un libro sobre la libertad y sobre la verdad. Y ahora ya podéis reír. Pero no os protejáis en la risa sarcástica, permitíos una risa impertinente. La libertad y la verdad son dos formas de impertinencia necesaria, cuando hemos comprendido que no somos realmente libres ni escaparemos nunca del error ni del engaño. De esto hablan estos textos, y lo hacen de la mano de diversos autores y personajes que han hecho de su impertinencia una forma de pensamiento. (...) Georg Büchner nos presenta a Danton y a Robespierre conversando ante la guillotina. Diderot y Sophie Volland escriben su amor en una eternidad sin Cielo. Joaquim Jordà filma a sus amigos mientras colectivizan la fábrica Numax y Teresa de Ávila corta cebollas en la cocina mientras charla con su inquisidor... El 'Torete' de Perros callejeros, Christa Leem, Ixiar Rozas o Santiago López Petit desafían la noche. Se añaden a ellos Albert Camus, conjurando la mentira, y los muertos de las comedias de Eduardo de Filippo, porque todo está lleno de muertos. Entre ellos y muchos más que recorren estas páginas, destaca la voz de mi abuela, Concepció Rubiés i Trias, quien vuelve directamente a nosotros a través de las cartas que escribió cuando tenía dieciocho años y se marchó al exilio. Todas estas voces organizan una cacofonía que es, para mí, una fiesta de la inteligencia, en un tiempo en el que se ha hecho muy difícil sentir la alegría de pensar. Las malas compañías no se escogen, pero se puede decidir seguirlas o no. A mí, siempre me han llevado por buen camino. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The King and the Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French Revolution Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or literature without remembering that all this— politics, philosophy, literature—began, in the modem world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was committed in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was the incarnation of (...) legitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was horrible... When we speak about writing, the accent is on what is necessarily criminal in writing. (Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussion Lyotard-Rorty" 583; quoted in Dunn 165) The condemnation ofthe king is at the crux ofour contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. (Albert Camus, The Rebel 120; quoted in Dunn 140) Susan Dunn makes a well-documented case that the death of Louis XVI was unconsciously understood, especially by the Jacobins, as a human sacrifice that was necessary for the founding of the republic. "Louis must die because the patrie must live," said Robespierre at the king's trial, and the representative Carra considered Louis "the source of corruption and servitude... the fatal talisman ofall our ills" whose death would cause the people to be "regenerated in morality and virtue" (Dunn 15-37). The king was a monster and the source ofall the ills, and his death 68Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly had the power to alleviate those ills and regenerate the nation. This image of the king as sacrificial victim persisted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in French literature and politics, sometimes assimilating itself to the image of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world. Legitimist writers like Joseph de Maistre saw his death precisely in this light as a great Christian sacrifice that would do France and the world good (Dunn 28-37). The king as a sacred monster whose life causes all ill and whose death brings healing is the classic figure of the scapegoat or sacrificial victim identified by René Girard. Susan Dunn recognizes this but because she does not know Girard's mimetic theory she is not able to explain the significance of the scapegoat king. Her work is, indeed, as Conor Cruise O'Brien says in the foreword, a work ofdemonstration rather than argument, of evidence rather than interpretation. I offer a mimetic interpretation ofthe Jacobin claim that the death ofthe king was the human sacrifice that founded the republic, and an argument that a universally operative generative mechanism forged the historical events of the revolution.1 There is no essential difference between the sovereignty ofthe king and the sovereignty of the people. In both cases sovereignty arises from a metaphorical contract that threatens death to anyone who violates it. The royal metaphors are organic while the revolutionary metaphors are legal and rational, but they all express the sacrificial structure ofpolitical power. Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction ofrationality to obscure its sacrificial structure. The desire ofthe general will for contractual equality is a transformation of mimetic desire in search of a victim around which the bad violence ofmimetic rivalry can coalesce into the good violence of sacred order. Sovereignty, therefore, is structurally single and simple; it is violence transformed through the sacred into the powers oforder. Max Weber understood this in general ifnot in its particulars when he defined sovereignty as the monopoly of the means of violence within a single territory.2 1 Mimetic theory was discovered by René Girard. I have given an account of my understanding of it in 7Ae Gospel and the Sacred 129-52. The idea of a mechanism universally operative in human history isjustified in the emerging discipline ofevolutionary psychology. Such mechanisms are the result ofthe interaction ofgenetic and environmental factors in the process of evolution (see Robert Wright). 2 The precise quotation from Weber is as follows: "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a The King and the Crowd69 The transition from royal to popular sovereignty is a transformation of the basic pattern of victim and group. The... (shrink)

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a “violent tone” that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s attempt to retrieve Robespierre’s notion of “Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida’s and Žižek’s respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (...) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida’s attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek’s alternative construal of a purified violence and self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida’s writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of ‘becoming other’ in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference. (shrink)

On this note we review the attempts by Fernández Liria and Alegre to diagnose modernity and its outcome in populism as a phenomenon which condenses some of its aporias. basing on Robespierre, Hegel or Schmitt we discuss the authors’ theses and propose an answer to the questions of Law, nation or State we point out an approach to the problems of universality, identity and multipolarity.

La desigualdad entre ricos y pobres no decrece. Frente a esta realidad, el autor realza que detrás de la desigualdad hay un problema más hondo de falta de libertad, pues: “hay muchas cosas que los hombres, si llevan la capa remendada, no se atreven a decir”. Por ello –señala- el republicanismo democrático, de Jefferson a Robespierre, y de Rousseau a Marx, no ha dejado de plantear la necesidad de repolitizar la vida social, e incluir en la agenda política los (...) graves problemas de dominación que sufren los más desfavorecidos. Este propósito tendría un camino eficaz seg{un el autor a través de la creación de mecanismos institucionales que doten de seguridad material y económica a toda la ciudadanía, haciendo reales las libertades formales y que permita a los individuos hacer frente eficazmente a situaciones de dominación. Uno de esos mecanismos institucionales es la Renta Básica, propuesta sobre desarrollada por el autor en el presente artículo. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)