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Keywords: Stanisław Filipowicz; democracy; Enlightenment; political science; interpretation
The article traces the trajectory of Stanisław Filipowicz’s scientific career. Topics covered include his books and articles on Polish and American political thought, dilemmas of Enlightenment and democracy, and the relation between hermeneutics and political inquiry. Rationality, benevolence, and interpretation are acknowledged as the key categories in his entire oeuvre. Filipowicz’s intellectual project can be understood as an attempt to establish interpretative political science inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy.
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Keywords: liberal democracy; liberalism; postmodernism; agonism; multiculturalism
Liberal democracy, founded on the ideas of negative individual rights and connecting democracy with liberal constitutionalism, has today lost its normative ground. The protection of human rights is the distinguishing element of modern Western liberal constitutionalism, although John Locke’s proposition had changed to cram into the language and concept of rights, whatever each of us supposes to be admirable or advantageous. Proposals presented by postmodernists and Chantal Mouffe are confronted with this process.
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Keywords: political liberalism; doctrine of sovereignty; political authority; liberal state
This article explores how liberalism, using several easily identifiable concepts (law of nature, rights of the individual, social contract), obscures the role of politics. Liberal discourse not only indicates the basis of political authority but also posits a relation-ship between the legitimate political order and the emancipation of the individual. The liberal political theory rejects the absolutisation of established power. Nevertheless, it reproduces the relations of domination and legitimises the existing order, as long as it may be presented as a product of rational and peaceful communication. Thus, liberal political theory functions as a discourse of power and domination masked by an act of voluntary submission by which subjects constitute themselves as wanting to be ruled over.
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Keywords: capitalism; democracy; corporations; liberalism; neoliberalism; utopia; populism; state; surveillance; media
The main goal of the text is to consider the relationship between today’s capitalism and democracy. The author indicates the increasingly deeper process of erosion of democracy due to acting free market forces, especially the vast internet corporations. In this context, he identifies technocratic-libertarian utopia (power of technocrats in the economic milieu free from state influences) – typical for the convictions of their owners – as very dangerous for the future of democracy. He also investigates the destructive impact of neoliberal ideology on the different state leaders who, despite political origins, have implemented the same kind of economic decisions giving the reason for a widespread conviction that democratic choices are not in a position to change the actual situation of citizens. In his opinion, one of the elements of this ideology is that democracy is a good thing as long as it does not threaten disorganised capitalism in Milton Freidman’s style. He undermines the broadly represented conviction that there is a natural alliance between capitalism and democracy.
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Keywords: modernity; democratisation of liberal democracy; crisis of neoliberal capitalism; prosperity without (economic) growth
The modernity of Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie has brought about several qualitative changes. In economy, they included: freedom of contract, equality before the law and, separately, within the realm of political life, civic liberties. The objective became to create a society of individuals characterised by freedom, equality and fraternity – and concentrated on financial success. Yet, modernity remains an unfinished project. One thing was omitted as it was being put into life: the role of private ownership of means. The very idea of empowerment of an individual was realised in a capitalist market economy. In such a society, under market conditions, liberty and equality become exploitations and dominations in social relations. The consequence is the replacement of a civic democracy with a market democracy. An interesting switch occurred. A citizen was replaced with an investor; a voter turned into a creditor, usually from another country, elections were replaced with share prices, and public opinion – with interest rates. Consequently, democracy changed its function: it became a sphere for expressing populist discontent rather than a rational debate on the hierarchy of social needs and the strategy for meeting them. The climate crisis amplifies the call for a profound reconfiguration of the current neoliberal form of capitalism. It deprives more and more people of material and cultural conditions for meeting social needs: health, education, reproduction, and free time. Meanwhile, the politics of the common good requires a different type of state than what we know today. Only then could the Greek idea of a good life return – a life of harmony with nature and community.
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Keywords: politics; philosophy of politics; state; pandemic; COVID-19
The article presents the reflections on the search for answers to the questions of what pandemics (once plagues or pestilences) are for politics and the philosophy of politics: a turn of epochs, an accelerator of change, an unveiling of a new reality and new meanings, a chance for a new beginning or just an episode in the history of humankind?
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Keywords: liberalism; sublimity; metaphysics; democracy
A jubilee essay commemorating Prof. Stanisław Filipowicz as a serious student of political affairs can not be written in a kind of dry disquisitions on a chosen subject. If it depicted a problem in chiaroscuro style, it would quickly diminish the importance and scope of reflection, wherein Prof. Filipowicz took active part during his long and brilliant academic career. Light-and-shade effects are useful in a good rhetorical speech. A general concern dedicated to studying ideas and political ideas, particularly, needs shades. From the very nature of the essay, it is to be written in a tone of sfumato, as Bolesław Miciński once prescribes. The essay focuses upon varied, to say differently, the Protheusian shapes that the contemporary culture took, deeply penetrated by liberal ideas and practices.
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Keywords: technocratism; utopia; end of history; axiological reductionism; naturalism
The text presents the basic assumptions of American technocratic utopianism, an ideology developing in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, including the genealogy of this ideology with its ontological, epistemological, axiological and anthropological assumptions. Technocratic utopianism turns out to be an extreme variant of the vision of the ‘end of history’ – the emergence, based on a radical interpretation of the principle of technical determinism, of ultimately perfect order. Robotic technology is treated here as the final variant of technological development, an entity that makes obsolete the conflict of values known from history, the discretionary nature of human actions and institutions, as well as a factor that guarantees a specifically understood economy of abundance – an order that satisfies all human needs. The premise of this state is the reduction of values to facts and a specific interpretation of the catalogue of natural human needs.
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Keywords: Enlightenment; emancipation; populism; anti-elitism
The philosophy of the Enlightenment tried to reconcile two significant concepts: the idea of rational knowledge, obtained through scientific cognition, and the project of maximal approximation of reflective wisdom to human experience. However, this reconciliation failed, as demonstrated by such thinkers as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Though in conflict with each other, both concepts have nevertheless become important myths stimulating the aspirations of people living in contemporary Western societies. In this perspective, the message of the populist movements should be treated instead as an expression of rebellion of one part of the Enlightenment tradition against another rather than a frontal attack on the message of the Age of Reason.
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Keywords: Hegel; Kant; Hobbes; international relations; political realism; cosmopolitanism
In global justice, Hegel is interpreted chiefly as a communitarian, while in international relations – as a realist. I want to deliver a more nuanced interpretation of his view on international relations in the article. I will try to show that even though Hegel did not know about contemporary changes and could not respond to them, his thought remains instructive and relevant. Hegel criticises the Kantian idea of perpetual peace as a cosmopolitan moral dream, rejecting Kant’s presumptions of transcendental idealism. This shifts Hegel’s theory to Hobbesian realism claiming that relations among states are similar to the relations between individuals in the state of nature. However, I will formulate arguments against this approach to reveal a more cosmopolitan perspective in Hegel’s view. This argumentation refers to the idea of weak or embedded cosmopolitanism that subscribes to the possibility of a world order founded on international customs. Based on Hegel’s dialectic, I will argue that we cannot conclude that states end up at the level of subjectivity in international relations. Thus, logically, there must be some international order. Such an approach does not wholly dismiss the statist view of his conception of international relations; however, it makes it possible to justify the idea of cooperation among nations in the name of "Sittlichkeit".
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Keywords: emancipation; diversity; inclusion; human rights; pluralism
The essay analyses the idea of emancipation and diversity, also presenting their mutual symbolic connections. The axis of analysis is the juxtaposition of understanding of emancipation with the continuum of diversity. This allows us to broaden the universalistic interpretative potential of the idea of emancipation and to relate it to individuals and groups that are marginalised and politically excluded.
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Keywords: political myth; collective identity; republican tradition; political rhetoric
The article’s thesis is that the political myth finds its proper meaning in the republican dictionary. The myth founds a specific political community and its way of self-understanding. It becomes a story about the origins and sources, and thus – a story that shapes the collective identity. Political myths contain symbolic representations of power, justifying present or postulated relations in the realm of politics. Usually, myth is viewed as the opposite of reason. This way of thinking has a very long history. Already the Greeks contrasted logos and mythos. The most famous creator of political myths – Plato – considered the myth a rhetorical tool complementing the rational argument. A similar albeit radicalised approach was continued in the Enlightenment, dismissing myth as the primary consciousness that should give way to true knowledge on the path of progress. In the nineteenth century, interest in the myth returned. However, it was often accompanied by various opinions – from highly negative to positive, becaus eemotions were recognised as an essential element in a political message. At the same time, however, another tradition of political mythology developed, which made reference to the republican dictionary and was related to the narrative approach to identity. The myth pointed to the uniqueness of the political community. It revealed the individual character of the community, and its special features were associated with authority and political tradition.
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Keywords: Émile Durkheim; Jürgen Habermas; Leszek Kołakowski; religion; secularisation; postsecular society; linguistification of the sacred; Max Weber
The ‘linguistification of the sacred’ belongs to the most overlooked concepts in the whole body of theory by Jürgen Habermas. First introduced in his seminal work Theory of Communicative Action, it reappears in Habermas’s later writings, especially after the so-called ‘post-secular turn’ in his thought. The article aims to trace this concept’s development and shed some light on the shifting functions it seems to perform in Habermas’s theorising. Furthermore, it juxtaposes Habermas’s later understanding of ‘linguistification of the sacred’ with the account of religion and the sacred developed by Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski.
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Keywords: myths; symbols; politics; magical thinking; ideology; legitimacy; idealism
American political mythology is viewed here from a functional perspective – as one of the elements legitimising the political system. In compound societies, the primary function of political mythology and accompanying political rituals, as components of symbolic politics, is to contribute to constructing the political community. The power of political mythology stems from the human preponderance to engage in magical thinking as a product of certain socio-economic circumstances. The text presents a typology of political myths in relation to the character of democracy, shows their relevance to critical political institutions and practices, and explains the role they play in legitimising the American political system.
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Keywords: city upon a hill; New Troy; American Aeneas; Northern States; Southern States; Gnosticism; Southern Agrarians
The figure of a ‘City upon a Hill’ (New Jerusalem) occupies a distinctive position in the system of symbolic images characterising the American republic. It provides a crucial interpretative key for the American political project. The vast literature on this subject leads many scholars to a misperception: they tend to project the Puritan mindset, typical for New England, upon the entire English colonisation in America and, while doing so, overlook the diversity of the American political tradition as well as the fundamental role played by regions in shaping a complex identity of the burgeoning American society. This paper presents an alternative and lesser-known concept of America as a New Troy and captain John Smith as an American Aeneas, which emerged in the Southern colonies soon after the establishment of Jamestown. The figure of New Troy contains a semantic field which implicates the interpretation of American political tradition in the alternative or even antithetic terms to that of New Jerusalem. The teleocratic, highly moralistic and, according to some scholars, even gnostic concept of the ‘republic of saints’ was contrasted by Southerners with the conservative vision of a nomocratic political order, sanctioned by tradition and dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. This paper argues that by discussing and contrasting both visions, we can better understand the cultural roots of specific fundamental differences in the mindsets of Americans living in different regions of the United States, both from a historical and contemporary perspective.
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Keywords: Thomas Hobbes; Leviathan; frontispiece; soul-fishing; political religion
The figure of Leviathan makes the title of the most important political treatise written by Thomas Hobbes. Why then this figure seems to be absent in the famous introductory picture to the philosopher’s work? This essay aims to extricate various meanings of Leviathan hidden in the right flank of this book’s frontispiece.
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Keywords: politics; philosophy; Plato; idea; metaphor
The question of a rational attitude to the world of politics has been with us since the ancient beginnings of philosophy and makes us reflect today. Is the philosopher’s view of the political reality more penetrating, and is his judgment more balanced than the views of ordinary people? It is worth looking at one of the first answers to this question – a metaphorical answer which, due to the complex and labile nature of the political matter, not so much solves the issue but instead gives food for thought and invites thinking. Starting from the image of the cave outlined by Plato in Book 7 of his Politeia, this text tries to shed some light on the role and fate of the philosopher engaged in political thinking.
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Keywords: freedom; truth; science; theory; practice; politics; economics
The paper undertakes the problem of the relationship between academic freedom and the pursuit of cognition of truth. The question of the freedom of science appears for the first time in the writings of Aristotle, who associates the freedom of cognition with its ‘non-utility’, i.e. the absence of goals that treat cognition instrumentally, and with the freedom of the researcher from the influence of non-scientific factors (e.g. pressure of power, economic interests). In Aristotle’s opinion, practical and productive sciences are more necessary but less worthy. In Plato’s understanding, the freedom of science is closely related to the freedom from the obligation to deal with politics. The author analyses to what extent these concepts of academic freedom are valid and realised today. This is done in relation to the way the four classical faculties function and the ‘fifth faculty’, i.e. the natural sciences. The current relationship between science and politics is also examined in more detail.
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