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The characters in the work of Nicolás Gómez Dávila are modern man and the progressivist, who are possessed by the superficial spirit of inauthenticity among the topoi of mediocrity, technology as strongly related to the spiritual downfall resulting from a moral-intellectual dementia, literature seen through the eye of the superb connoisseur, language, art, the reactionary, who is a loner in the field of ideas, images and events, proletarians, bourgeois, revolutionaries, socialists and democrats, presented in the masquerade of liberal devastation of personal freedom, the believer and Catholic standing amidst the waves of modernity that advance upon Christianity.
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This text discusses the progressive autonomization of art in the modern era and the treatment of this topic in two short, but significant, papers by Jurgen Habermas dating from the early 1980s, in which he sharply criticized the idea regarding absolute detachment of the aesthetic sphere from the communicative practices of everyday life and the contexts of the life world. Reconstructing the basic views of Habermas on this topic by way of a virtual dialogue with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, this text mutually counterposes two of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century, who belonging to different generations but to the same school of though, in which the theme of art, and its socio-critical functions, has always held a special place, even when it has been approached indirectly, i. e., in the context of other topics.
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This article proceeds from Bulgarian philosopher Bernard Muntyan’s conception of ideological lie and offers an illustration of, and a critical reflection on, the lie through the historical example of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler’s views on truth and lie. With the help of numerous references to original texts and speeches, we argue that Hitler constructs a bi-polar world perception divided by the images of “us”, as bearers of truth, and “them” as advocates of lying. It simultaneously confirms Muntyan’s “single truth theory” regarding extreme ideologies and evokes issues related to subjectivity of viewpoints on lying and the difficulties of defining reliable instruments against false knowledge.
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This text deal s with the relationship between the fall of socialism and the profanation of the world. Its basic thesis is that "real" socialism truly and significantly influenced change in the whole world. It had a cultural purport and effective influence on the repression of religion, similar to the process of secularization in Western societies. This political order, however, was far less successful in the attempt to impose upon the religious-ecclesiastical system a new integrative ("scientific", i.e. ideological) system of viewpoints and morality. This unsuccessful attempt, contrary to possible theoretical expectations' did not bring about a strengthening of religious life, but quite the opposite. What had occurred was a deep disillusionment and the loss of interest for all supernatural, for all that transcends the existing world.
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Thinking about war is accompanied by associated myths. Some of them act as stimulators for the development of war craft, war-related international law and applied ethics. However, there are myths that lead to the escalation of a conflict instead of heading faster towards its end. They do not bring a peaceful message, nor do they contribute to building a ‘better state of peace’ after the war has ended. On the contrary, by glorifying sacrifice, they have been shaping the fate of generations for centuries, who directly and personally (voluntarily or under duress) have been engaging in wars. This article is dedicated to one of these dangerous myths, that is dulce et decorum est pro patria mori [how sweet and honourable it is to die for the homeland].
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The article describes attitudes towards peasants in Polish culture. The starting point is the Peasant Revolt in Galicia and the figure of Jakub Szela. The author believes that this is the Polish inferno of the revolution. The noble class and the post-noble elites, even those democratically minded, could not accept the vision of peasants as an independent (and independent of them) political and cultural power, but their attitudes to the revolt varied. The author shows their views ranging from total condemnation to specific forgiveness. Nevertheless, this does not solve the problem of peasants’ place in Polish society, nor does it respond to the question of accepting or rejecting a foreign culture by various social groups, including peasants. The author also expresses the conviction that a revolution is a positive value.
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In the nineteenth century, the French utopian socialists, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, developed different concepts of the colonisation of Africa. These concepts collided in Algeria. The Saint-Simonians were impressed by the Arab system of the tribal ownership of land. They wanted to preserve it and ultimately bring the two peoples, the Arabs and the French, together in the spirit of a commune. On the other hand, the Fourierists wanted to expropriate Arabs from their land and hand it over to the French colonists so that they could build new economic communities of a phalanstery type. This article presents the theoretical disputes between the two schools and also describes the actual practical consequences of these disputes for the French colonial politics.
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The purpose of the article is to show how the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies formulated by lawyer Edmund Plowden influenced political practice and its artistic representation. It is worth emphasising that the image of the king as a one-man corporation includes an immanent conflict resulting not only from the coexistence of conflicting identities in one person, but also from the need to constantly negotiate relations between them. Therefore, the concept of two bodies could simultaneously serve as a tool for legitimising and contesting power. This paradox is well illustrated by Queen Elizabeth I’s famous declaration “Richard II is Me”, which has been intriguing researchers for decades and receiving extensive comments. So far it has not been placed in the context of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, in which it sounds probably most fully. The perspective of abolished temporality inscribed in it sheds a new light on the queen’s identification with Richard II: both the historical ruler and the hero of the Shakespearean chronicle.
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How could we rethink and organize memories of the Left in an operational and active way? How could one openly confront the Left-Wing culture of defeat? The paper considers some dimensions of the Left-Wing defeat after 1989, the nature of the linear and the contingent time, various defeat experiences of fascism and liberalism and the dialectic of hope and disappointment. One should reject the language of psychoanalysis (longing, nostalgia, sorrow, melancholy) and the teleological vision of the neoliberal winner. The Left Wing and Right Wing should be understood in new dimensions of time within a new relationship between Cairos and Chronos in the digital age. The Left needs self-reflective review of its own mistakes, if it wants to learn lessons for the future. Theory can awake practical ambition. A desirable multilayered Left-Wing memory has been damaged by dominance of one type of memory. The Left needs self-control and a balanced memory of both badly missing socialist welfare state and its own violence.
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In Strpić’s book on Marx’s critique of political economy, the analysis of political and economic reception of Marx serves as starting point for the author’s assignment of contemporary position and relevance of Marx’s analysis. Both actualization and return to Marx always occur in the times of crisis, therefore his intellectual fate depends on changes within contemporary capitalism and its alternatives. In Marx’s analysis, the paradox of theoretical incompleteness stems from his aim for ideal epistemology of capitalism, which is also present in later Marxist interpretations, even Strpić’s. The contemporary problem of Marx lies in the metaphysics of theory of value and in the whole structure of commodity production, which prevents ontological transition of value, capital and capitalism. His approach is physiocratic more than it is pecuniary, and more economic than it is political. This is why Jacques Bidet’s reconstruction of Marx in the terms of modernity is based on “metastructure”, which is a universal politically legal point that is not present within Marx’s critique of political economy. Such a different approach presupposes understanding capitalism as inherently a political project. As it is proven by the author, political capitalism is not a special form of capitalism, nor it is historically connected with contemporary capitalism of the 21st century (in China and elsewhere), but is moreover its universal historical form. Marx’s critique of political economy turns out to be contemporary precisely at this overlooked point of his analysis. Political capitalism as “capitalism in general” demonstrates its relevance in the analysis of contemporary crises, which are not just politicaleconomic, but also ecological and even pandemic. In a series of crises of political capitalism we are faced with a choice between real autocratic “barbaric capitalism” and more utopic “cosmopolitan” eco-socialism.
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The review of: Todor Kuljić: Prognani pojmovi: neoliberalna pojmovna revizija misli o društvu, Clio, Beograd, 2018, 387 str.
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The main intention of this paper is to reconstruct the conceptual and historical genesis of the idea and value of political peace from the point of view of political philosophy at the intersection between late scholasticism and early modernity. The paper consists of three related parts. The first part highlights methodological and contextual reasons why the idea of political peace has been overshadowed throughout history by dominant discourses on war. The second part deals with conceptual clarifications. The nature of war is distinguished from other types of conflict and three interpretative approaches to war are analyzed: political realism, fundamentalist-moralistic view of the holy war, and the many theories of natural law that give rise to conceptions of just war, but also the first abolitionist perspective or idea of ending all wars. Early theoretical articulations of the notion of peace indicated modern-day emancipation of politics from the tutelage of metaphysics and classical ethics, thus separating the value of political peace from its original oneness with cosmic and psychological peace. The third part of the paper highlights key moments in the historical genesis of the value of political peace in the works of Aurelius Augustine, Marsilius of Padua, and William of Ockham.
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Max Weber passed away on 14 June 1920 at the early age of 56, from consequences of the last pandemic – the Spanish Flu (Kaesler 2014, 15-16). During the last 100 years, Weber’s position as one of the world’s great economists, sociologists, social science theorists, and public administration scholars has been secure (see Whimster 2004), if with ups and downs. Weber’s eminence is probably the least contested in the last field – not uncontested, for sure, as eminence must attract criticism. Ups and downs yes, but Weber remains central. At a minimum, we may say that he is the most important public administration thinker of his time, even of modern public administration. One can think with or against Weber in public administration, but by and large, not really without him. We therefore decided that it was not only fitting, but even necessary, to include a short tribute to him in a Halduskultuur issue this year, a fortiori seeing that this journal has carried several studies of Max Weber, Weberianism, and the Neo-Weberian State (e.g. Samier 2005; Drechsler 2005; 2009; Kostakis 2011), and indeed, that the concept of Administrative Culture is particularly Weberian. [...]
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Although it is common to associate the thought of A. Jokubaitis with political philosophy, this article argues that his texts also allow us to talk about a specific moral philosophy of A. Jokubaitis. At the center of it we find an attempt to articulate and discuss the grounding ideas of morality. The article argues that the first two ideas – an idea of unconditional character of morality and an idea of ontological grounding – are related to Kant’s influence on A. Jokubaitis philosophy. These two ideas allow us to explain morality as an autonomous part of reality, which is different from the empirical one but nonetheless real. This part of reality is grounded in the first-person perspective of a moral subject and can be characterized by implicit normativity and unconditionality. The first-person perspective structures a radically different relation to our reality, which allows us to be agents, not simply spectators. Such an interpretation of Kant allows to associate A. Jokubaitis with his contemporary Kantians, such as Ch. Korsgaard, B. Herman, O. O’Neill, and A. Reath. However, the third idea, the one of a person, which becomes more visible in his book Politinis idiotas, transcends the Kantian conception of practical reason and encourages to perceive morality and its grounding in a much wider context. The concept of a person allows A. Jokubaitis to distance himself from Kantian rationalism and integrate social and mystical aspects of morality, which he has always found important.
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Inspired by the work of Eric Santner (1996, 2011) on political theology and the king’s two bodies, in this paper, I question the political theology of film. I analyze how the carnal dimension of sovereignty (or king’s second body, the body of his power), migrates into a new body, the body of the people, and in various traces appears in the filmic mode of production that marked the twentieth century. I analyse or instead bring into imaginary connection two characters (one real, the other fictional) who in a way embody this migration: (1) Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (whose autobiographical record of mental illness, from the moment it was published (in 1903), occupied the attention not only of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but also of various theorists) and (2) Dr. Caligari, a hypnotist in the film The Office of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920), one of the most famous characters of German expressionist film.
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The coronavirus pandemic throws a bright light on the unfair inequalities that undergird our society. In the United States, the pandemic disproportionately impacts the poor, the elderly, prisoners, native Americans, and black Americans. Workers risk their lives, their own as well as their families, without sick leave or health insurance, for the benefit of the affluent. More than twenty million Americans are now unemployed with no wages or savings to live on. The Navajo Nation has the worst coronavirus cases per capita in the United States. In the State of Georgia, eighty percent of the deaths due to the coronavirus are black Americans, when black Americans constitute less than a third of the State of Georgia’s population. The coronavirus pandemic lays bare the classism and the racism that inhabits and structures the society of the United States, which privileged Americans prefer to deny. Will the pandemic’s light lead to progressive actions on the part of the government that protect and respect the needs and rights of all people? Will the pandemic mean that social, educational, moral, and spiritual responsibilities take precedence vis-á-vis financial responsibilities, barbarically conceived in a capitalist economy (Banerjee and Duflo 2019)? Will the present reality in all its concreteness be persuasive in ways that moral arguments have not been?
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Published in 2020 at Editura Universității din București (University of Bucharest Publishing House), the book ”2400 Years of Thinking with Aristotle” gathers together the contributions of participants at the International Conference 2400 Aristotle, hosted by Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 2016, celebrating ”Aristotle Anniversary Year”, announced by UNESCO. This volume represents a generous contribution to the western philosophical cultural, its horizon opening opportunities for a more precisely form of Stagirite’s discourse, covering theories and concepts of political philosophy, ontology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, anthropology and cosmology.
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