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Vor gut sechzig Jahren, im November 1945, erschien Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde. Konzipiert als »Sozialphilosophie für jedermann«, sollte sie Karl Poppers war effort, sein Beitrag zum Krieg, werden – doch die Nazis wurden auch ohne das fernab des Geschehens in Neuseeland verfasste Traktat besiegt. Der nächste globale Konflikt warf jedoch schon seine Schatten voraus: Der Kalte Krieg trug sicher zum Erfolg eines Buches bei, dessen Verfasser man später als » heimlichen Philosophen der demokratischen Wende in Osteuropa« bezeichnen sollte. Doch war es auch der Kontext des Kalten Krieges, welcher vielen Kritikern Popper als verstockten Konservativen und rabiaten Antimarxisten erscheinen ließ.
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Can Józef Tischner’s reflection on totalitarianism prove helpful in understanding the events which took place in our country in the second half of the 20th century? Does the author, who sees totalitarianism as a specific way of thinking affecting the shape of human relationships, reveal part of the truth about the experiences of the Polish society? By providing positive answers to the above questions, the article presents Tischner’s analytical viewpoint – in order to understand totalitarianism we need to go beyond its conventional meaning, in the categories of a political system, towards an ethical perspective. According to Tischner, totalitarianism is basically the experience of evil. Evil causes the deformation of humanmentality, as people overwhelmed with fear and the desire to survive are guided with the principle of retaliation towards other people. The main source of evil is politics in its communist form, which generates a political way of thinking and negatively transforms the sphere of human relations. A lack of faith in the possibility to do well is the trademark of people shaped by totalitarian experiences. Are changes inflicted in this way deep and irrevocable? On the one hand, the reflection of the philosopher from Cracow concerning the origins of the Independent Selfgoverning Trade Union “Solidarity” (NZZ „Solidarność”) shows that the plan to completely destroy the ethical dimension of human relationships, expressed in the words of the Gospel “Carry one another’s burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ”, did not succeed. On the other hand, by presenting totalitarianism not only as a political system, Tischner provokes us to self-reflect on our condition “here and now” and search for an answer to the question: how many totalitarian traces do we still have, which despite the fall of the communist system continue to affect our actions and attitudes towards other people.
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The morality comprises human actions and ethical values. In accordance to classic understanding of political thoughts which means mean fulfilling common goodness, the aim of power is the concern about each person – a citizen. The question if the ends justify the means in political science accepts the possibility of using effectivness of actions as a criterion, not the ethical values. If the criterion of actions is the effective ness, so is it acceptable to take immoral actions in political activity?
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This article presents the fragment of discussion about Leo Tolstoy’s critic of culture. It is concernedon ideas of some Russian philosophers from the first half of the XXth Century: N.A. Berdyaev,S.N. Bulgakov, S.L. Frank, S.I. Hessen, L. Shestov and P.B. Struve. Author wants to analyze suchproblems as: the origins of Tolstoy’s negation of culture, culture as religious and social problem, culture and Christianity, nihilism and asceticism, domination of ethics in Tolstoy’s life and thoughts, Tolstoy’s idea of “simplification/barbarisation”. These problems, which Tolstoy has formulated with unusual radicalism, would be examined by presentation of the arguments of the Tolstoy’s critical commentators which try to defend a culture against one of the biggest creators of cultural values.
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In the situation of failures of consecutive uprisings and the power of the occupying countries, Edward Abramowski proposed an innovative idea of independence by Polish society. He considered that national liberation should be connected with the social and economic liberation. In his belief it was possible by reference to socialist ideas and idea of cooperatism. Polish society, especially the so-called impaired classes, organized in cooperatives, would create a economic and also the organizational network over the partitioners structure. Cooperatives would also have a goal to cultural and educational activities and also should allow for the formation of political culture. These actions were to prepare the Polish nation to regain a political freedom. В то время, как очередные повстанческие попытки были безуспешными, а страны-завоеватели – сильными, Эдвард Абрамовский выступил с новаторской идеей вернуть независимость польского общества. Он посчитал, что народное освобождение необходимо соединить с освобождением общественным и экономическим. Он был убежден, что это было возможным благодаря социалистическим идеям и идее кооперативизма. Польское общество, особенно т.н. отстающие слои, организованное в кооперативы должно было превратиться в экономическую и одновременно организационную сеть над структурой стран-завоевателей. Цель кооперативов состояла в культурно-образовательной деятельности, в том числе они должны были отвечать за формирование политической культуры. Эта деятельность должна была приготовить польское общество к обретению политической свободы.
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The following text is a translation of fragment of Jonathan Flatley’s book Affective Mapping Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. The suprising claim of Affective Mapping is that dwelling on loss and melancholia is not necessarily depressing. Flatley argues that melancholy can lead people and writers to productively re-map their relationship to the world. Modernism is an accurate portrait of these processes and related consequences.
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This essay seeks to evaluate the methodological and theoretical relevance of Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics. In particular, it explores what is meant by the “theological genealogy of the economy and government” announced by the book’s subtitle. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben’s reliance on a certain understanding of secularisation, of the kind that permits him to declare that modernity merely brings to completion the Christian “economy” of providence, or indeed that Marx’s notion of praxis “basically is only the secularisation of the theological conception of the being of creatures as divine operation.” The paper tries to show that Agamben’s work relies on a type of historical substantialism that clashes with his claim to be engaging in a genealogy. It also investigates the blindspots in Agamben’s treatments of the crucial themes of money and administration.
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Many critics accuse Giorgio Agamben of an ahistoricism inherent to his thought. Recently, such criticism was put forward by Alberto Toscano, who formulated it referring to Hans Blumenberg’s refusal of the secularisation thesis and his theory of epochal shifts. According to Toscano, due to the acceptance of the Schmittian notion of secularisation, based on a historical substantialism, Agamben is not only unfaithful to the Foucaultian methodology which he declaratively assumes, but he also tends to acknowledge the domination of theological notions as a source of the whole Western philosophical tradition and political institutions up until now. I am going to demonstrate that even somewhat superficial claims made by Agamben about secularisation find their compensation in his double effort. Firstly, even if he concedes the gravity of the theological legacy, at the same time he rebuts the primacy of religion as an indispensable grounding of ethics and politics. What is more, through his meticulous and condense studies on Christian theology he has already placed himself in the position of the most incisive contemporary critic of the Catholic church and any theological-political hybrids established on the abuse of power.
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In this essay, I examine Michel Foucault’s political contrast between the theological domains of the pastoral and the mystical, in order to note his focus on how necessity and providence are founding and legitimizing concepts of the State. Through this process I develop an analysis of how Foucault, in his critique of the historical uses of theology as a tool of pastoral power, actually points toward another form of political theology than Carl Schmitt’s. My contention is that we begin to see another “type” of political theology appear in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, who follows Christian traditions much more closely than Foucault. The re-formulation of political theology within Agamben’s work, I argue, has tremendous significance for the field as a whole and is much in need of further elaboration, a task toward which this essay only points.
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This paper clarifies some of the contested ideas put forward by John Stuart Mill by analyzing the reasons and arguments Mill used to support them and demonstrating how these ideas and arguments supporting them are connected into a coherent system. Mill’s theory is placed in wider explanatory framework of democratic legitimacy developed by Thomas Christiano, and is portrayed as a typical example of democratic instrumentalism—a monistic position that focuses on the outcomes and results of a decision-making process. Following this move, the focus is shifted on the understanding of political equality in Mill’s political thought. I claim that, contrary to some contemporary interpretations, Mill’s theory is based on a few fundamentally inegalitarian ideas. Finally, Mill’s view on the role of experts in democratic decision-making is analyzed and compared with contemporary theories advocating democratic expertism—Mill’s view is again portrayed as inegalitarian, both to the extent of setting political aims and creating methods for achieving these aims.
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Ideology as a production of the living conditions of a social group is assumed not only as Marx says as an imagined relationship to the material relations reproducing living conditions but also as imagining a specific 'living space' with affirmative ideological concepts within which are found the figures and ideas of 'moral and immoral geography', geo-determinism and 'our place'. Ideological de-re-naming of space is one of the basic mechanisms by which an ideology seeks to 'naturalize' its existence through reproduction of awareness of events related to a specific topos whose name carries a certain ideological derivative. Even the postmodern condition is deeply interpellated with the ideological pre-formulation of place which remains the holder of identity habitus of human beings. It follows from this that the contemporary role of space in international relations is not marginalized, but re-positioned to fit the post-modern condition.
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This scientific article treats of libertarianism. Its fundamental premises are: conceptionof self-ownership, non-aggression axiom, proprietorship, free market, ‘no victim, no crime’ rule, aversion to the state institutions. The existence of libertarianism itselfis the most prominent subject of dispute between its two currents: minarchism andanarcho-capitalism. The adherents of the doctrine of minimal statism were FriedrichA. von Hayek and Milton Friedman, while Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe were the followers of the free-market anarchy. The traditional, one-dimensional division into the left and right wing is not sufficient for the libertarianism to find its place on the political scene. It is multidimensionality that characterises the libertarian thought.
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The paper is dedicated to replies to Christiano’s criticism of Rawlsian public reason. Although Christiano’s criticism is successful in relation to one possible interpretation of the public reason view, a better and more fructuous interpretation of the public reason view is at the disposition of the Rawlsian project. This view of public reason is deliberately an idealization. It shows how public justification would function in a well-ordered society where citizens are committed to liberal values. The shared reasons relevant for public justification are represented by the ideal of society as a fair system of cooperation between free and equal citizens, as well as by the three features of the liberal conceptions of justice (basic rights and liberties, their priority, and the means to use them). In virtue of this view of public reason, it avoids Christiano’s objection of the utopianism of shared reasons, and it replies to the inequality argument, as well as to the generality and vagueness objection, and the inconsistency argument. The advantages of the proposal in the view of public reason, in comparison to Christiano’s proceduralist democratic proposal, are shown in the reply to the inequality argument.
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In his The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and its Limits Christiano defends an idea that democracy has authority because it realizes public equality. According to Christiano, for realization of public equality there is no need for any restriction on the content of reasons we offer each other to justify laws and policies. In this paper I try to show that there are good reasons to think that boundaries of public reason can more deeply realize public equality in plural society and I also try to defend this view from some criticisms given by Christiano in his book.
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Thomas Christiano claims that one of the fundamental challenges democracy is faced with is the appropriate division of epistemic labor between citizens and experts. In this article I try to present and analyze Christiano’s solution from the perspective of social epistemology while utilizing the concepts and tools provided by this discipline. Despite fundamentally agreeing with his position, I attempt to propose a certain addition which might enrich this solution with additional epistemic and political responsibility. In the first part, I briefly elaborate on the relevance of social epistemology in discussions regarding the epistemic justification of deliberative democracy. In the second part, I contextualize Christiano’s view within discourses regarding social epistemology and identify his approach as reliability democracy due to his belief that truth-sensitive decision-making processes are ensured through the usage of reliable mechanisms (which allow for expertise to generate the epistemically best decisions possible). In the third part I attempt to provide arguments that support further elaboration of Christiano’s proposals in the direction of ensuring additional epistemic and democratic quality of decisions.
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The article explores Thomas Christiano’s account of the moral division of labor in democracy. Christiano’s incorporation of experts serves the purpose of alleviating the epistemic burdens of ordinary citizens in the decision-making process and decreasing the amount of work they would otherwise be required to take on in a modern democracy. The gist of my contribution to the debate is assessing whether Christiano’s account successfully tackles the issues brought about by cognitive biases that people suffer from in communicating their values in decision-making. I argue that Christiano’s notion of experts needs to be extended to choice architects, who possess the knowledge on methods for influencing choice. I also claim that choice architecture is a social fact that an informed deliberative democratic theory needs to deal with.
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I am deeply honored by the papers in this symposium. The authors have all devoted an enormous amount of energy and care to thinking about many of the ideas I have written about over the last twenty or so years. I am extremely grateful and humbled by their attention to my work. I have also found every paper to be deeply illuminating; in some cases, I have found myself rethinking my positions; in other cases, I see areas which demand more attention than I have given up to now; in yet other cases I have acquired a deeper appreciation for the challenges that my views and arguments face. In each case, I learned a great deal both from the papers and the discussions about earlier drafts of these papers that took place at a conference on Equality and Citizenship at the University of Rijeka on July 1 and 2, 2014.
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