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Running through some of the most beloved texts in Western political philosophy. They are loved for their ingenuity and beauty. But they are respected and believed for their screeching authoritarianism. You might see episodes on...Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau. Hegel, Nietzsche, Zizek, Pettit, etc.
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Trying to summarize the vast terrain we traversed on this podcast. Final episode.
A vast and wild oeuvre it is, but the non-stop flirtation with extreme authoritarianism, even "terrorism" and "war communism," is hard to miss. Plato, Hegel, Marx: so much of what we've talked about runs together here, in revival. SZ seeks to inspire whole newish or newesque totalitarian movements. "One of the mantras of the postmodern left is that one should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist' paradigm of centralized and dictatorial power. Perhaps, the time has come to turn this mant...
Summing up many of the developments seen in this podcast, we can say that Western political philosophy consists primarily of mere fictions. It's romantasy. from Plato to Rawls. It's cute! It's sweet! If you deleted the fiction, you'd have deleted political philosophy.
Pettit's astonishingly evil and entirely fictional political philosophy, which might be termed "classical liberal totalitarianism". Previous attacks on Pettit: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUz6jqVz4W1LUHFMNemTIGVcPECivNvYC
The spectrum of positions from left to right is not much of anything. The spectrum of positions from authoritarianism to anti-authoritarianism is real, man. +! the case of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
I have some misgivings about including Bourdieu's On the State, but it shows the extension of the Hegelian total state toward the 21st century.
Jameson's An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited and endorsed by Žižek constitutes a casual, whimsical, half-assed and utterly disgusting totalitarianism, greeted as a beautiful expression of hope. This should make you wonder about all of Jameson's work. Which is later: capitalism or Jameson? And which is less plausible, Frederic Jameson or Frederic Jameson as such? https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/nostalgic-futurism
in all its pernicious forms, and (according to Merleau), advocates "ultra-Bolshevism." The grotesque contradiction between Sartre's existentialist and his Stalinist conceptions of freedom makes me want to sob.
It takes 10 minutes to destroy classical liberalism, as it turns out. Wait! 11. Resorting again to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Brandom and the conception of freedom as being "the author of the laws" or "the lawgiver of onerself."
'You are free when you are the lawgiver of yourself". That's Rousseau, but then it's also Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Brandom etc. By an amazing coincidence, the laws you give yourself are word-for-word the laws we've given you. This approach amounts to a disingenuous disinformation program. videos on conceptions of freedom in western philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUz6jqVz4W1LtmhTkTejFtyTMn9ZRMGx_
(One of) the most disturbing book(s) I've ever read is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror. "To tell the truth and act out of conscience are nothing but alibis of a false morality." (Humanism and Terror, chapter 4)
He was [one of] the most influential philosopher[s] of the 20th century (the golden age of totalitarianism) and a real, genuine, bona fide Nazi. Somehow I blanked on the fact that the letters I'm quoting are to his brother Fritz Heidegger. The defense of Hegel I refer to here is by Susanna Lindberg in the volume *On Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (Heidegger's lecture notes from 1934-35). https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/reviews/980503.03rortyt.html
I love Nietzsche the writer and thinker. That is a dark and dangerous politics in various ways, however. Let's talk about Nietzsche and the Nazis.
of what we've done so far (namely Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx) and where we might go from here (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jameson). 'But what about the collective?' These people think we should all be foodprocessed together into kind of human borscht.
I talk about my own history here a bit: I come from Marxist folks. Here we swing into reality in a different way.
You'll be relieved to hear that Hegel's amazing political philosophy of the Prussian state as freedom and God is here to annihilate your individuality once and for all.
Rousseau, with his concept of the 'general will,' moves us fundamentally toward the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, which depend on collective identities: on the left, classes, on the right, nations; on both, from time to time, races. He states amazingly clearly the very worst idea in the history of philosophy: total submission to authority is the very definition of freedom: a thought furnished by Rousseau to Kant and Habermas. At one point I attribute the turn to romanticism to 'F...
Hobbes (1588-1679) was the origin of social contract theory and classical liberalism as well as a totalitarian, which should get you worried about the whole subsequent history of sct and cl. Hobbes calls the state "a god" and "the god." That is traditional ever since. Hegel says the same. And people just informally believe it in their hearts. I just read Pierre Bourdieu in On the State, experimenting with governmental divinity as well.
Some passages mentioned: definition of 'justice' as staying in your place: marginal pages 433-435 ruling by lies ('noble' lies): 414-15 marriage lottery: eugenics and endorsement of infanticide: around 459 total censorship: Book X, especially around 605
Is it different than authoritarianism, despotism, absolutism? Rough clarification of central concepts, before we launch on specific texts.
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