Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics PDF Author: Michael J. Thompson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137381604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics PDF Author: Michael J. Thompson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137381604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics PDF Author: Michael J. Thompson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137381604
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics PDF Author: Mark Lilla
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371162
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it? In profiles of six leading twentieth-century thinkers—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—Mark Lilla explores the psychology of political commitment. As continental Europe gave birth to two great ideological systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, the philotyrannical intellectual. Lilla shows how these thinkers were not only grappling with enduring philosophical questions, they were also writing out of their own experiences and passions. These profiles demonstrate how intellectuals can be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results. In a new afterword, Lilla traces how the intellectual world has changed since the end of the cold war. The ideological passions of the past have been replaced in the West, he argues, by a dogma of individual autonomy and freedom that both obscures the historical forces at work in the present and sanctions ignorance about them, leaving us ill-equipped to understand those who are inflamed by the new global ideologies of our time.

Civility and Subversion

Civility and Subversion PDF Author: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521627238
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This 1998 book provides a sophisticated alternative to existing accounts of the role of the intellectual in modern democracy. Arguing that society suffers from a systemic deliberation deficit, Jeffrey Goldfarb explores the potential of the intellectual as democratic agent, at once civilizing political contestation and subverting complacent consensus. The sentimental Leftist view of the intellectual as guardian of democracy and the demonising Rightist view of the intellectual as obstructor of progress, are both shown to be flawed. Instead, intellectuals are portrayed as special kinds of 'strangers' who pay careful attention to their critical faculties, equipping them uniquely to address the most pressing issues of today. Professor Goldfarb deploys classical and contemporary social theory to analyse a diverse set of intellectuals in action, from Socrates in fifth-century Athens to Malcolm X and Toni Morrison in twentieth-century America, and, drawing on personal acquaintance, the political dissidents in Communist and post-Communist Central Europe.

Radical Intellectuals and the State in American Political Culture

Radical Intellectuals and the State in American Political Culture PDF Author: Duncan Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description


Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics

Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics PDF Author: Thomas de Zengotita
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319906895
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
This book explores the origins of the academic culture wars of the late 20th century and examines their lasting influence on the humanities and progressive politics. It puts us in a position to ask this question: what to make now of those furious debates over postmodernism, multiculturalism, relativism, critical theory, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and all the rest? In an effort to arrive at a fair judgment on that question, the book reaches for an understanding of postmodern theorists by way of two genres they despised and hopes, for that very reason, to do them justice. It tells a story, and in the telling, advances two basic claims: first, that the phenomenological/hermeneutical tradition is the most suitable source of theory for a humanism that aspires to be universal; and, second, that the ethical and political aspect of the human condition is authentically accessible only through narrative. In conclusion, it argues that the postmodern moment was a necessary one, or will have been if we rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity it offers: a truly universal humanism might yet be realized even in—or perhaps especially in—this atavistic hour of parochial populism.

The Political Thought of African Independence

The Political Thought of African Independence PDF Author: Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 162466542X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Political Thought of African Independence: An Anthology of Sources brilliantly frames the debates that captivated the world as former European colonies in Africa began their transition to sovereign rule in the 1950s and ’60s. Its wealth of key documents are enhanced by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker's General Introduction, part introductions, headnotes, and annotations, providing needed contextual information and supports for readers.

Radical Identity Politics

Radical Identity Politics PDF Author: Torben Bech Dyrberg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527557499
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book outlines significant traits of radical leftist identity politics. In this type of discourse, arguments are organized around global friend/enemy schemes in ways that are at odds with the right/left matrix of democracy. This is shown by combining discourse analysis of how leftist critics argue in public debates centred on their reactions to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 and theoretical discussions on leftist identity politics orbiting around Schmitt, Marcuse and Mouffe. It is argued that the friend/enemy approach sacrifices the egalitarian and libertarian core values of the Left, leading it to adopt positions used to brand the reactionary Right. It also holds that leftist identity politics undermines democracy by moralizing enmity and stigmatizing dissent, and by promoting an elitist and relativist agenda. Against this background, the book looks at the nature of the right/left distinction and its political functions in modern democracy. This is further elaborated in relation to the works of Foucault and Rawls’s analyses of parrhesia (free speech) and public reason, which provide a more fruitful approach to right/left and democracy than those based on enmity. For Foucault and Rawls, a vibrant pluralist democracy relies on the autonomy of politics, which secures a space in which citizens are free and equal, which is crucial for free speech and assembly. They focus on issues related to the autonomy of politics and the freestanding nature of public reason; right/left as lateral political orientation coupled with fairness as political justification and the links between regime form and political community as decisive for democracy.

The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject

The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject PDF Author: Robert Abele
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030795578
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This book argues that the primary function of human thinking in language is to make judgments, which are logical-normative connections of concepts. Robert Abele points out that this presupposes cognitive conditions that cannot be accounted for by empirical-linguistic analyses of language content or social conditions alone. Judgments rather assume both reason and a unified subject, and this requires recognition of a Kantian-type of transcendental dimension to them. Judgments are related to perception in that both are syntheses, defined as the unity of representations according to a rule/form. Perceptual syntheses are simultaneously pre-linguistic and proto-rational, and the understanding (Kant’s Verstand) makes these syntheses conceptually and thus self-consciously explicit. Abele concludes with a transcendental critique of postmodernism and what its deflationary view of ontological categories—such as the unified and reasoning subject—has done to political thinking. He presents an alternative that calls for a return to normativity and a recognition of reason, objectivity, and the universality of principles.

Sociology in Post-Normal Times

Sociology in Post-Normal Times PDF Author: Charles Thorpe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793625980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions of climate change are features of post-normal times. In Sociology in Post-Normal Times, Charles Thorpe contends that the modern project of creating normalcy within the nation state has broken down. Integral to this is sociology, which is the science of social reform. Drawing from the work of seminal theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, Thorpe contends that sociology's “society” is no longer viable because globalization has put an end to social reform, thus the assumptions and goals of sociology must be left behind in order to create a new global humanity. In the face of the pandemic and climate change, Sociology in Post-Normal Times demands no less than the birth of a global humanity beyond nation states as the precondition for human survival.