Istoriografii

Author(s): Mihai-Dan Cîrjan,Domenico Losurdo,Daniel Lazare / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 11-12/2016

On August 16, 2016 died the German historian Ernst Nolte, one of the best-known representatives of what was called "historic revisionism," that perspective on modern history characterized by the rejection of traditional "social" history (liberal and / or Marxist) modernity, and by condemning the revolutionary phenomenon (in its French and Russian versions in particular) as the bearer and trigger, through its ideological radicalism, the germ of totalitarianism. Three months after the disappearance of the German historian, Vatra Literary Magazine hosts a small dossier on historical significance, ideological function and the political legacy of Ernst Nolte's work and historical revisionism in general.

Richard Rorty si liberalismul postfilosofic

Author(s): Cătălin Stănciulescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 14/2007

Rorty's articulation of his post-philosophical liberalism is both critical and utopian. I am giving here a succinct description of his liberalism and reviewing some of its critics. I will also try to show that, given the twofold articulation of it, some of the critics against it seem to be beyond subject.

România - filosofia politica optiunii

Author(s): Radu Petcu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 09+10/2006

The dimensions of choice are always a question of the present time with respect to the future; the past and the particularity of identity open up in potentiality to answer this question in a diverse range of cultural and socialpolitical characteristics. In the Romanian case, the context of transition from a totalitarian to a democratic, politically open regime involves an analysis of the readiness and availability of the Romanian society in view of freedom: free elections, freedom of choice, free initiative, all of which are constituted by a system of options - the psychological structure, the mental template and the intuitive perception of a common reality are closely related to reveal a nation's sense of alternative.

Comunitarianismul constructivist. Pentru o reimaginare a conservatorismului

Author(s): Emanuel COPILAȘ / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 30+31/2011

Today, conservatism seems to be a dead and buried political philosophy. Many would argue that it deserves it, taking into account the centuries of political and economic stagnation, along with the intellectual oppression that defined the Middle Ages. Indeed, modernity’s victory over conservatism seems to be indisputable. However, nostalgic conservatives argue, this victory came with the price of losing the stability of meaning that benefited the premodern world. Without necessarily taking side in this dispute, my paper attempts a conceptual and synoptic synthesis between premodernity (conservatism) and radical modernity (critical theory), called constructivist communitarianism.

Positive Freedom in Europe’s Democracy. Aspects and Dilemmas upon the Liberty’s Approach

Author(s): Ionuț Răduică / Language(s): English Issue: 30+31/2011

In this article we are focus upon positive freedom, analyzing its historical signification and its present perspective. For that, it is necessary first to explore political view of great philosophers such as Rousseau, Hobbes or Locke, and later to pursue the real meaning of a particular understanding of liberty. On the opposite, negative freedom reveals good answers where positive understanding of freedom meets with difficulties.

Libertate şi Constrângere

Author(s): Elena-Cristina Bichir / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 30+31/2011

Human society has undergone during its various stages of development history, political, social and religious, knowing many forms and types of equilibrium freedom-social constraint. We can’t say about any of these steps that has been more successful than other, more efficient, we can only find that each historical and social stage has chose his freedomconstraint type of report, specific to the social issues and the level of cultural development. A brief passage through human and civilization history, civilization reveals that the Greek thinkers, Middle Ages theologians, and Enlightenments, or the liberals, socialists or conservatives have offered different and multiple interpretations of the notion of freedom and hence the forms of social coercion.

Az utópia sose halott

Author(s): András Lánczi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

Both ancient and modern utopias share one feature, i.e. they wish to describe the best political order by bracketing the real regimes, and rely upon what is rational. But there is a major difference between the two forms of utopian thought, namely the judgment of the possibility of the implementation of the best political order. In contrast to the ancient view, the moderns believe that the best order or regime can and should be implemented. Therefore modern utopias discarded the ancient concept of Nature (cf. J. S. Mill’s Nature), and the limited character of knowledge (cf., for instance, August Comte). Modern utopias, which abound in and assume several forms based on alleged technological and managerial development, are radical, and ready to act radically if it needs be. Owing to this special form of radicalism, modern utopias are no longer satisfied with refining ideas, but have created a more direct relationship with political reality than any time earlier in history.

Utópia és utópizmus: egy irodalmi és politikai fogalompár nyomában

Author(s): Zsolt Czigányik / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

The phenomena of utopia lie at the crossroads of literary studies and the social sciences, and their interpretation requires expertise in both these fields. This article, which is based on the introduction and afterword of the volume Utopian Horizons (CEU Press, Budapest and New York, 2018), maps the most important issues arising from the interdisciplinary nature of the investigation. The problems of fictionality require surpassing the traditional binary opposition of fact and fiction. Fictions are a part of everyday life and may offer an insight into political reality. The narrative structure of literary works is presented in parallel with the requirement of coherence in the social sciences. The role of the author is a fairly unproblematic concept in the social sciences, but implies a number of difficulties in a literary context – the author is often seen more as a function of the text than a biological person writing books. In addition to these conceptual issues, the understanding of utopias depends on whether they are considered to be unrealistic dreams or feasible options for a society. Utopias are not only present on the page (and screen), but also in political ideologies and intentional communities. Utopianism is experiencing a revival in the 21st century; yet in popular culture it usually and quite often appears in its negative form, as a dystopia. The genres of utopia and dystopia, however, are presented not as opposing, but rather complementing each other.

Rend a neve mindennek

Author(s): Zoltán Balázs / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

The essay discusses the importance of name-giving in political thinking and political theory. It argues that name-giving is more than a ceremonial and symbolic act. Ever since the Biblical times and ancient politics, naming the polis or the community has been an act of power; and knowing its name has been tantamount to possessing power over the object. Significantly, the founder of political theory, Thomas Hobbes, also acted as a magician when he announced in a solemn way the name of ‘his’ Commonwealth, the Leviathan. The essay seeks to demonstrate how the failure of naming the Austro-Hungarian Empire is analyzed by Robert Musil in his The Man Without Qualities. Musils chief protagonist in this respect is General S. von Bordwehr, practically, the representative of the soldier-Emperor, who discovers that his Empire has no other name but Order. However, Order is an utterly unpolitical name, or, worse, it is the most absolutist and utopian political name conceivable. Hence the General’s foreboding that all order ends in death. In this way, the old Monarchy, notwithstanding her many charms, historical and cultural amenities, rich and colorful traditions, ushered in the greatest catastrophe in modern Europe, and proved to be the womb of totalitarian thinking and practice.

Sehol világ

Author(s): Barna Kovács / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

In recent times, the world of the year list is dominated by concepts as fake news, post-truth, justice. The presupposition of my essay is that there is a crepuscule of the idea in the social imaginary. For a better understanding of this phenomenon, I sketched a matrix of ideology, utopia, conspiracy theory and dystopia. Those forms can be described both on positive and negative terms, but the main accent is on the disproportion between them. The (political) system needs an ideology to legitimate himself, and the ideology requests the utopia in order to contemplate the consequences of his action. The theory of conspiracy seems to be a complex form of popular fallacy, which has the origins in the lack of well elaborated and consensually well-based ideologies. In this sense, the utopia turns to be dystopic. Dystopia could be an expression form, which makes us aware of the fallacies of conspiracy theories, about the weaknesses of ideologies and strength of utopia.

Ökotópia: az ökocentrikus szocializmus elmélete

Author(s): Bence Péter Marosán / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

LIBERALISM, COMMUNITARIANISM AND THE ECONOMY OF TOLERANCE

Author(s): Marko Zlomislić / Language(s): English Issue: 38/1998

In this text a number of different conceptions of tolerance are disentangled. A failure to distinguish them has meant a serious incompleteness in the arguments of those who have claimed that tolerance is either a liberal or communitarian virtue. The author proceeds to examine whether or not the liberal and communitarian proponents violate the imperative of tolerance, after which he argues that liberals must have a better defence of tolerance if they wish to retain the concept. Drawing on insights from French philosopher Jacques Derrida, a model is developed for a postmodern liberalism which shares an affinity with Rawls’ conception of political liberalism.

MODELUL MAJORITARIST. O ANALIZĂ DIN PERSPECTIVA EFICIENŢEI SOCIALE

Author(s): Dorina Pătrunsu / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian Issue: 4/2016

In this paper I will try to show the difficulties of the majoritarian modelfrom the efficacy perspective. Precisely, I want to put in evidence the fact that themajoritarian rule applied to the collective decision is scanty if there are taking inaccount either the results we are expected from the democracy as desirable politicalform or the principles the democracy is supposed to implement (or assure by) themajoritarian procedure. The assumption here is that a legitimate democratic modelinvolves not only legitimate procedures by which some collective decisions are madebut also justified results meaning how effectively or successfully the decisions are madeby the democratic procedure in the implementation of democratic values. In other words,how could we make a real democracy starting from a hypothetical or idealistic one?

DESPRE CONCEPTELE DE UTOPIE ŞI SUVERANITATE. O SCURTĂ PRIVIRE

Author(s): Mihail M. Ungheanu / Language(s): Romanian,Moldavian Issue: 4/2016

The contention ofthis paper is to try to show that concepts like utopia and sovereignity should be seen asbeing linked. Both are important concepts for modernity and both have some strongimaginary and symbolic backgrounds. And both of them ascribe to man a kind of godlystatus. Today we are still in the grip of utopia. Utopia implies sovereignty and that mancan do almost whatever he likes with nature, society, and himself. Sovereignty has thesame underpinning as utopia, and it is rooted, as the French philosopher Jean JacquesWunenburger has shown in the case of utopia, in the deep structures of humanimagination. Both sovereignity and utopia are also rooted in the structure or in thatparticular condition of man, which Arnold Gehlen named Mängelwesen andHandlungswesen. Despite its perceived desirability utopia is a manifestation of atotalitarian and disfunctional imagination, which works in alliance with the selfdivinizationof man implied by the concept of sovereignity.

Protiv individue: deindividualizirani politički subjekt

Author(s): Adriana Zaharijević / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 03/151/2018

The text is based on two premises. The first is that we live in the times of neoliberalism, and the second is that the political subject of neoliberalism is the individual, the “one” qualified as indivisible, independent, sole owner of one’s self. To define what an individual is, I will revisit several 19th-century claims which at the same time posit individual as an empty universal – anyone qualifies for entitlement of an individual – and reveal it as profoundly exclusionary – as the holder of entitlements. I will claim that the indivisibility of an individual is also the basis for its understanding as sovereign and self-actualized. Liberal politicization of a sovereign possessor of interests introduces not only homo oeconomicus, but it also integrates economic mode of governmentality into the sphere of the political, it becoming a space of incessant play of exclusions and inclusions. If another kind of political imaginary is to be developed, I argue we need to distance ourselves from the figure of the individual, bearing in mind that homo oeconomicus triumphs today as the exhaustive figure of the human, amidst the patently unequal distribution not only of precarity but also of vulnerability. Critical engagement with neoliberalism assumes engaging with the political centrality of a figure of an agentic individual.

Sovereign Destruction: On Life and Death in Politics

Author(s): Viki Mladenova / Language(s): English Issue: 18/2019

Achille Mbembe and Adriana Cavarero offer two very profound neologisms –necropoliticsand horrorism – that can equip one with a better understanding of life and death in themodern political community or sovereign unit (as in the case of the nation-state). If one goesthrough the rupture of thinking modern sovereignty following the Foucaultian inversion ofwar as the continuation of politics by other means, the place of violence is inevitable. What isconsidered as sovereign order in the same time is the place that was violently occupied, uponwhich was decided that will represent the constitution of power and the rule of a figure that inmodern perspective is the rule of body politic i.e. of the sovereign. Thus, what was emphasizedas a concern regarding modern sovereign rule opting towards material destruction of humanbodies and populations, most certainly helps to explain contemporary political violence. Alsowhat else is recognized are all other forms of war, all its extensions in every political community,since what war bears is not always and only terror, it is horror above all as an even moreprofound and at the same time excessive violence that spreads over war scenes.

Мислити свободу: основні орієнтири політичної філософії Клода Лєфора

Author(s): Tetiana Drozdova / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 03/2019

In the western philosophical and political thinking C. Léfor is considered not only as a famous thinker, but as a key political philosopher of the end of the 20th - early 21st century, the author of the well-known and hotly debated thesis about the emptiness of state power in democracy, democracy as the acquisition of democracy, totalitarianism as a mutation of democracy. In Ukraine, in its return, he remains barely unknown: there are neither translations of his texts, nor any serious reception of his theoretical heritage. At the same time, our state has certain problems on the way of democratic progress, due to its totalitarian past, the rudiments of which can be observed up to this day. So Claude Lefort’s ideas, moving from Marxism to democracy and dedicated to defining the conditions of its occurrence and the peculiarities of functioning, which proceed from the absolute denial of any forms of totalitarianism, are very useful for understanding the main benchmarks of democratic growth in Ukraine. The study examines the main aspects of the formation of Claude Lefort’s philosophical and political views, beginning with his interest in Marxism and Trotskyism, followed by the phenomenology of M. Merlot-Ponty and the study of N. Machiavelli, J. Michele, A. de Tocqueville, the debate with J.-P. Sartre and K. Castriadis, the result of which was formulating his own political conception and understanding of democracy as political modality of finding the truth. The main focus is also directed at the analysis of the decisive guidelines of C. Lefort’s political theory - the concepts of power, conflict, political action, wild democracy, the study of ontological conditions for the existence of a society, which, as shown in the article, were shaped, to a large extent, under the influence of M. Merlot-Ponty and N. Machiavelli. The phenomenological, M. Merlot-Ponty-like interpretation of Machiavelli’s works allows C. Léfor to formulate a negative and positive definition of the social, negative in that sense, that social is not conditioned by absolutely productive relations, positive, since the main characteristic of the social is its controversial nature, the conflict that is the source of political power, where people assert themselves as the subject of politics, and the power is an empty space, and a symbolic institution of the social at the same time.

Political freedom as an open question

Author(s): Karol Chrobak / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

This essay diagnoses the condition of contemporary liberal democracies. It assumes that the current crisis of democracy is not the result of an external ideological threat, but it is the result of the lack of a coherent vision of democracy itself. The author recognises that the key symptom of the contemporary crisis is the decreasing involvement of citizens in public life and their growing reluctance to participate in public debate. He claims that the reason for this is the increasing social polarisation. The article considers two forms of polarisation: vertical (on the line: politicians–voters) and horizontal (on the line of ideo- logical social divisions). The first form is illustrated by Colin Crouch’s considerations, while the second one by Fareed Zakaria’s thoughts. What finds its manifestation in both cases is the phenomenon of citizens’ resignation from participation in the public debate; in the first case it is because of the lack of faith in the effectiveness of this type of opinion- giving mechanism, while in the second case it is because of the lack of recognition of other political and ideological options in society. These reflections are concluded in the postu- late that the basic task facing democracy today is to maintain the public sphere as open as possible, i.e. not excluding any ideological position in advance. This kind of conclusion is illustrated with the concepts of Chantal Mouffe (political perspective) and Helmuth Pless- ner (philosophical-anthropological perspective).

Preventing the Atrophy of the Deliberative Stance. Considering Non-Decisional Participation as a Prerequisite to Political Freedom

Author(s): Michał Zabdyr-Jamróz / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

In order to be exercised meaningfully, political freedom requires the capacity to actually identify available policy options. To ensure this, society ought to engage in deliberation as a discussion oriented towards mutual learning. In order to highlight this issue, I define deliberation in terms of the participants’ openness to preference change, i.e. the delibera- tive stance. In the context of the systemic approach to deliberative theory, I find several factors causing the atrophy of such a deliberative stance. I note that this state can occur not only when debaters are representatives or are in the presence of an audience, but also when they face the prospect of a binding decision. It is the latter effect that is a serious challenge to the micro-deliberative strategy, one that strives towards decisional powers being granted to deliberative minipublics. Presenting my findings, I propose—as an alter- native to the power-oriented ‘ladder of participation’—a distinction between traditional co-decision and deliberative consultation, the latter one being (in certain systemic con- texts) an environment that is more conducive to deliberative stance. This new typology highlights factors that lead to preference petrification and allows for the appreciation of the non-decisional character of micro-deliberation. All of it leads to the conclusion that, in order to preserve their deliberative character in the systemic context, deliberative min- ipublics should not always be required to have decision-making powers.

Edmund Burke és a magyarországi rendszerváltás

Author(s): Ferenc Horkay-Hörcher / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 08/2019

“Habent sua fata libelli.” This essay takes as its task to introduce to Hungarian readers the conservative thought of Edmund Burke via the political history of Hungary and the history of Hungarian conservative political thought in the last 30 years. Its starting point is Burke’s Reflections, originally published in 1790, only translated into Hungarian in 1990. Why could this work find its translator and publisher in that year, 200 years after its original publication? According to the hypothesis of the essay, the generation of young humanities scholars found conceptual tools to interpret the outgoing Communist regime in Burke’s text. The essay focuses on the notion of prescription in Burke, and shows with the help of it the problems Burke had with the French revolutionaries. He confronted the customary law of the ancient constitution with the brutal voluntarism of the French. The shocking vision presented by Burke of the radical social changes taking place was interpreted as an excellent introduction to the nature of totalitarian power, no matter when and where. But late 18th century imperial Britain was unlike late 20th century colonized Hungary. Therefore the essay needs to discuss revolutionary conservatism, as a solution of the conservative paradox, which in the second phase of the two stages process of political transition in Hungary (1989/90, 2010/2012) could push to the back of the stage the figure and conclusions of Burke. Finally, the essay calls attention to another important Burkean teaching hidden into the text of the 2012 Basic Law’s National Avowal.