"Knowing and History" charts the development of Hegelian philosophy of history in France from the 1930s through the postwar period, and critically assesses its significance for an understanding of our cultural present and of the possibilities for making meaning out of change over time. Michael Roth provides detailed analyses of the works of three of the most important Hegelian thinkers: Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojève, and Eric Weil. These philosophers turned to history as the source of truths and criteria of judgment: (...) they forged connections between history and knowing as a means of confronting key modem philosophical problems, and of engaging their contemporary political concerns. According to Roth, the French Hegelians' work illuminates the power and limitations of the philosophical approach to history. Further, he finds in the development of their philosophies one of the crucial transformations in modem intellectual history: the shift from a concern with questions of significance to a concern with questions of use or function. Relevant to a wide variety of disciplines, "Knowing and History" will appeal to those specializing in intellectual history and political theory, as well as philosophers of history, critical theorists, and students of modem French thought and culture. (shrink)

In The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes a "history of the present" by showing the connections between the archaeology of knowledge and criticism. In the first, he is fundamentally concerned with the changes in human perception evident at the end of the eighteenth century and the relation of these changes to the fundamental structures of experience. Underlying the history of medicine is the moral and political attempt to link the development of (...) science with the development of bourgeois freedom. In The Order of Things, he cites archaeology as a method of uncovering the fundamental paradigms of cultures and their systems of thought. Finally, in Discipline and Punish, he considers discourse a domain of power relations and thus establishes a link between knowledge and power. A "history of the present" is a self-conscious field of power relations and political struggle. (shrink)

_On Tyranny_ is Leo Strauss’s classic reading of Xenophon’s dialogue _Hiero_, or _Tyrannicus_, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss’s commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and the complete correspondence between the two. This revised and expanded edition introduces important corrections throughout and expands Strauss’s restatement of his position in light of Kojève’s commentary to (...) bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France. (shrink)

The publication of History and... appears at a critical moment in our efforts to understand the importance of history as it relates to a wide range of scholarly ...

_On Tyranny_ is Leo Strauss's classic reading of Xenophon's dialogue, _Hiero_ or _Tyrannicus,_ in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. This edition includes a translation of the dialogue, a critique of the commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, Strauss's restatement of his position in light of Kojève's comments, and finally, the complete Strauss-Kojève correspondence. "Through [Strauss's] interpretation Xenophon appears to us as no longer the somewhat dull and flat author (...) we know, but as a brilliant and subtle writer, an original and profound thinker. What is more, in interpreting this forgotten dialogue, Strauss lays bare great moral and political problems that are still ours." —Alexandre Kojève, _Critique_ "_On Tyranny_ is a complex and stimulating book with its 'parallel dialogue' made all the more striking since both participants take such unusual, highly provocative positions, and so force readers to face substantial problems in what are often wholly unfamiliar, even shocking ways." —Robert Pippin, _History and Theory_ "Every political scientist who tries to disentangle himself from the contemporary confusion over the problems of tyranny will be much indebted to this study and inevitably use it as a starting point."—Eric Voegelin, _The Review of Politics_ Leo Strauss was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Given the evolution of his thought, Alexandre Kojève can be read as either the source of "engagement" and "existential Marxism" or as an early exponent of the postmodern rejection of the attempt to make meaning out of historical directionality in favor of an analysis of how history or discourse is constructed. Through the mid-1940s, Kojève was willing to accept that historical time is in the process of stopping, making it possible to grasp retrospectively, even anachronistically, the meaning and direction of (...) history. By the late 1940s, Kojève had come to believe that history is definitively over, and there is no substance left to fight about. Whereas the end of history had been a goal worth struggling for, it is now simply a description of reality in which there is nothing else to do, except perhaps to remind others that there is nothing left to do. (shrink)

Remembering forgetting : Maladies de la Mémoire in nineteenth-century France -- Dying of the past : medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France -- Hysterical remembering -- Trauma, representation, and historical consciousness -- Trauma : a dystopia of the spirit -- Falling into history : Freud's case of 'Frau Emmy von N.' -- Why Freud haunts us -- Why Warburg now? -- Classic postmodernism : Keith Jenkins -- Ebb tide : Frank Ankersmit -- The art of losing oneself : Anne (...) Carson and decreation -- Inquiry as hope : Richard Rorty -- Photographic ambivalence -- Why photography matters to the theory of history -- Ordinary film : Péter Forgács's The Maelstrom -- Graves of the insane, decorated -- On a certain blindness in teaching -- Beyond critical thinking -- Good and risky : on the promise of a liberal education. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three topics that arose at the Photography and Historical Interpretation conference: photography’s incapacity to conceive duration; photography and the “rim of ontological uncertainty;” photography’s “anthropological revolution.” In the late nineteenth century, blindness to duration was conceptualized as the cost of photographic precision. Since the late twentieth century, blindness to our own desires, or inauthenticity, has been underlined as the price of photographic ubiquity. These forms of blindness, however, are not so much disabilities to be overcome as (...) they are aspects of modern consciousness to be acknowledged. The engagement with photography’s impact on historical consciousness gives rise to reconsiderations of temporal extension and to the difficulties of acknowledging one’s desires in an increasingly open and fractured social field. Photography’s indexicality combined with its reproducibility gives rise to photographic ambivalence. As with other forms of ambivalence, we should be less concerned with diluting its constitutive tensions than with learning to live with its conflicted possibilities. (shrink)

_From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto on the crises confronting higher education_ In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are (...) empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal—from both liberals and conservatives—of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism. (shrink)

One of the common grounds of neo-conservatism and an increasingly important current in leftist thought has been their shared doubts about the ideologies of progress and modernization These doubts have recently taken the form of a defense of tradition against the total insemination of the spirit of capitalism. In the face of the insatiable lust of modernization, one turns not to the self-conscious, playful impotence of modernists and post-modernists, but rather to the powerful “grip of the past” on communities and (...) families. The forms in which the past is preserved over time should show us the sacred limits that bourgeois capitalism and state socialism are out to mystify with the opiate of development. (shrink)

_From the president of Wesleyan University, an illuminating history of the student, spanning from antiquity to Zoom “[Roth] has a clear vision for what it ought to mean to be a student: Learn what you love to do, get better at it, and then share it with others.”—David Perry, _Washington Post__ In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, (...) from the sixth century BCE to the present. Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom. In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them. (shrink)

Georges Didi-Huberman's study is concerned with epistemological and ethical questions that arise from visual representations of the Shoah, while Michael Fried's is concerned with the ontological possibilities explored by contemporary art photography. The books have two things in common: an argument against postmodern skepticism, and an insistence that photography has become a field in which questions of history, truth, and authenticity are being explored with particular acuity. Rather than reject even the possibility that photographs have something to tell us about (...) the Shoah, Didi-Huberman shows that they can offer important insights into the difficulties and the possibilities of apprehending some aspects of the past.Fried shows that contemporary photographic work has taken on the ambitions of high modernism by accepting the challenge of “to-be-seenness.” Photography as a “historical practice” does not escape from the difficulties of evidence and of the “constructed” nature of historical understanding; photography functions neither as a pure trace of the past, nor as a mere invitation to spectacle. (shrink)

The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the city's architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers.