There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying (...) good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Academic barbarism : practice and transmission -- Academic barbarism, universities and inequality -- Academic barbarism and the literature of concealment : Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald -- Aaron Swartz, new technologies and the myth of open access -- Academic barbarism and the Asian university : the case of Hong Kong.

In order to redefine barbarism, a hermeneutical framework is needed. The contemporary socio-cultural context and the transformations that have occurred during the last decades represent the premises for a new barbarism. In redefining barbarism, its relationship with civilization and culture should be first considered. Cultural mutations, together with the historical and political phenomena involved in contemporary civilizations’ reorganization as set forth in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington), offer the theoretical (...) background for the discourse wherein barbarism could revive and take an appearance other than the common one. The necessity of reinterpreting barbarism is backed up by other variables such as its structural inconsistency and weakness, which most definitely diminish its impact on individuals. Following the 20th century philosophical tendency of harshly critical thinking, all these point to the current weak character of barbarism. Thus so-called “weak barbarism” is reinterpreted evolutionally for a better reception among contemporary cultural philosophy, axiological and ethical studies. (shrink)

In order to redefine barbarism, a hermeneutical framework is needed. The contemporary socio-cultural context and the transformations that have occurred during the last decades represent the premises for a new barbarism. In redefining barbarism, its relationship with civilization and culture should be first considered. Cultural mutations, together with the historical and political phenomena involved in contemporary civilizations’ reorganization as set forth in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington), offer the theoretical (...) background for the discourse wherein barbarism could revive and take an appearance other than the common one. The necessity of reinterpreting barbarism is backed up by other variables such as its structural inconsistency and weakness, which most definitely diminish its impact on individuals. Following the 20th century philosophical tendency of harshly critical thinking, all these point to the current weak character of barbarism. Thus so-called “weak barbarism” is reinterpreted evolutionally for a better reception among contemporary cultural philosophy, axiological and ethical studies. (shrink)

Barbarism and Religion - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the idea of 'The Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. Professor Pocock (...) argues that the English Enlightenment of which Gibbon was part was an ecclesiastical as well as a secular phenomenon, one of several Protestant Enlightenments distinct from that of the Parisian philosophes, and part of the reconstitution of Europe after the wars against Louis XIV. The whole sequence is concerned less with the specific historiography of the Roman Empire than with the cultural history of Europe in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Whether Kant’s late legal theory and his theory of race are contradictory in their account of colonialism has been a much-debated question that is also of highest importance for the evaluation of the Enlightenment’s contribution to Europe’s colonial expansion and the dispossession and enslavement of native and black peoples. This article discusses the problem by introducing the discourse on barbarism. This neglected discourse is the original and traditional European colonial vocabulary and served the justification of colonialism from ancient Greece (...) throughout the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Kant’s explicit rejection of this discourse and its prejudices reveals his early critical stance toward colonial judgements of native peoples even before he developed his legal theory. This development of his critical position can be traced in his writings on race: although he makes racist statements in these texts, his theory of race is not meant to ground moral judgements on ‘races’ or a racial hierarchy but to defend the unity of mankind under the given empirical reality of colonial hierarchies. (shrink)

Recent critics have declaimed against John Stuart Mill's liberalism, arguing that his conception of civilization is inexorably bound to a hierarchal conception of social progress justifying Europeans' moral right to 'civilize' barbarian peoples. Without exonerating him from his undoubtedly problematic views regarding non-European cultures, I would like to argue that Mill in fact has a much subtler view of historical development and of civilization than such critics attribute to him. Central to these critics' charges is an 'aggregative' view of Mill's (...) conceptualization of historical development--suggesting that Mill understood societies to move through discrete stages of social development, characterized by internally-correlated stages of economic, political, cultural and moral development--which fails to be borne out under close examination. I argue that Mill's view of historical development and his liberalism more generally are in fact significantly more capacious than is often recognized and are not inextricably bound to the project of imperialism. (shrink)

A collection of essays that traces the contemporary significance of Weber's work for the tradition of Enlightenment political thought and its critiques. It takes up the problems Weber inherited from Enlightenment political discourse, his attempts to face the disintegration of the Enlightenment political project, and engages and advances the debates over Weber's ideas that have helped shape political thought up to the present debates over postmodernism. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This chapter maps out some of the views of Scottish thinkers concerning human progress. It briefly considers Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who was the first to promote the language of republicanism in Scotland and to conceptualize the ‘militia issue’. It then examines Adam Ferguson’s debate with David Hume and Adam Smith. Whereas the former reasserted civic tradition and played a role in the cause of a Scottish national militia, Hume and Smith, by supporting commercial societies, pointed Scotland in a quite (...) different direction. The chapter moves on to the gender ambivalence of civilization in which women were seen as the vectors of the new values of modernity, but also as responsible for the loss of the ancient virtue of male citizens in arms. Finally, the chapter considers some of the historical alternatives to modernity, which found their models in the past: Stuart’s gothic feudalism, and the world of Ossian. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo se analizan las ideas contrapuestas de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento y José Martí sobre el binomio "civilización-barbarie", categoría medular de los discursos políticos e intelectuales del siglo XIX, con el fin de explorar sus concepciones sobre el nuevo sujeto político. Se exploran los "contextos de enunciación" desde los cuales desarrollaron sus posiciones ético-políticas; la opción por el hombre natural (Martí) frente al sujeto político ideal (Sarmiento); y la apelación y desmontaje de las categorías raciales en ambos autores. (...) El estudio de estas categorías revela una dialéctica de persistencia y abandono de imaginarios coloniales. ABSTRACT This article analyzes the conflicting ideas of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and José Martí about the binomial "civilization-barbarism", a core category of political and intellectual discourses of the 19th century, to explore their conceptions of the new political subject. The "enunciation contexts" from which they developed their ethical-political positions; the option for the "natural man" (Martí) versus the ideal political subject (Sarmiento); and the appeal and dismantling of racial categories in both authors. The study of these categories reveals a dialectic of persistence and abandonment of colonial imaginaries. (shrink)

By way of an engagement with the thought of Stuart Hampshire and his account of the ‘normality of conflict’, this article articulates a novel distinction between two models of value pluralism. The first model identifies social and political conflict as the consequence of pluralism, whereas the second identifies pluralism as the consequence of social and political conflict. Failure to recognise this distinction leads to confusion about the implications of value pluralism for contemporary public ethics. The article illustrates this by considering (...) the case of toleration. It contends that Hampshire’s model of pluralism offers a new perspective on the problem of toleration and illuminates a new way of thinking about the accommodation of diversity as ‘civility within conflict’. (shrink)

This article discusses the 2022 war from the point of view of its well-documented savagery. It addresses philosophical discussions of barbarism and gives a dialectical explanation of this phenomenon through the gradual polarization between the forces of Enlightenment and the obstinacy of the subject. This clash has a double shape: formality versus materiality and morality versus happiness.

The notion of ‘gentle barbarism’ was developed during our critical analysis of the discourses and mechanisms of ‘modernisation’ that emerged in the context of the movement for permanent reform (in education, the public services and business management), in which public bodies and businesses have been engaged since the 1980s. These discourses and mechanisms of modernisation seem to us to represent a blind spot where sociological analysis is concerned.

Lévy was a left-wing student leader during the events of May 1968; Barbarism With A Human Face is a fiercely polemical transvaluation of his former values, proclaiming that what seemed to be the hope of the world is really its destruction and that what seemed to be progress is really the approaching and inevitable triumph of all the forces of darkness. This is a book of iconoclastic prophecy, whose central intention is to show that behind the mask of revolutionary (...) benevolence hums the motor of absolute evil. (shrink)

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of (...) consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty. The publication of additional manuscript material in this revised edition demonstrates in more detail how Collingwood was determined to show that right and duty occupy different levels of rational practical consciousness. The additional material also contains Collingwood's unequivocal rejection of relativism. (shrink)

This book of political theory reflects on how cultures imagine their barbarians in the form of essentialized others, focusing specifically on the kinds of barbarism associated with a civilization devoted to technological progress.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Our Original Barbarism":Man vs. Nature in Thomas Jefferson's Moral ExperienceMaurizio ValsaniaJefferson, perhaps more than any other early democratic theorist, recognized that the development of social institutions and government could not be left to chance or to the "Laws of Nature."1One of the most fundamental fact about Thomas Jefferson—maybe the fundamental fact about Thomas Jefferson—is that he was a white man, and a landholding white man at that. Scholars (...) of ethnicity in the last thirty years have spent an enormous amount of time analyzing what it has meant to be Indian, or African American, or Mexican American, or Asian American, but scholars of "mainstream" history have spent almost no time analyzing what it means to be "white"; whiteness, on the contrary, simply remains the norm by which the difference of the non whites is gauged. We are just beginning our exploration of whiteness, as a culturally and politically constructed phenomenon.2This paper presents Thomas Jefferson's moral attitudes from a particular point of view.3 The thesis I defend can be stated in a very schematic way. (1) In order to secure the new-born Republic the American "leader," according to [End Page 627] Jefferson, must struggle against enemies, against circumstances but mainly against nature. Nature is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the disorder white Americans have to conquer. (2) This struggle against nature reveals a deep ethical commitment. White men are praiseworthy to the extent that they keep fighting against disorder, nature, and circumstances. (3) Jefferson's optimism, or better, "meliorism," was aimed at promoting moral behavior, i.e., to incite his alter egos to struggle against adverse conditions. As to whether or not he was confident about the course of American history, I have staked no claims in this paper.4 (4) Jefferson's case for the struggle against nature is ethically coherent and leads to some interesting reflections on Jefferson's ideas about human nature and white Americans in particular.The notion of "human nature" in this paper refers to white Americans, namely, to the moral character, temperament, and ambitions of those leaders whose main burden, in Jefferson's opinion, should be to construct nineteenth-century America. This examination takes for granted that Jefferson neither worked out a systematic theory of human nature nor elaborated a specific theory of the essence of white Americans.5 Nevertheless, it is too much to say that Jefferson "did not work out his ideas in a logical way."6 His anthropological views were fairly coherent even though very difficult to disentangle. Jefferson, for instance, was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Furthermore, he was not satisfied with a philosophical, simply "general," and a priori definition of a universal human nature. Jefferson placed human beings outside a metaphysical frame of reference. He placed them "within the sphere of nature, and in so doing [he] was a true exponent of the Enlightenment."7 Humans are merged into geographical, social, religious, economic, in short positive contexts and conditions. They appear as conditioned beings. On the other hand Jefferson was not exclusively involved in the examination of a physical or a posteriori anthropology in which humans are considered solely in the unique particularity of their races and habits.8Thomas Jefferson stood in the middle between the quest for a philosophical theory of human nature and a scientific examination of it. One thing is clear: he was not content with sweeping statements. Merle Curti noted, for example, "Jefferson's feelings about human nature's plasticity."9 This sense of "plasticity" suggests Jefferson's realism and complexity of vision. A philosopher and an [End Page 628] anthropologist, Jefferson was neither satisfied by a general definition nor by an optimistic portrait of human nature. He was against idealization, in particular when white Americans are at stake. Thus, this paper considers the terms in which Jefferson "questioned the cheery view of human nature that some enlightened thinkers celebrated."10 Must white Americans be celebrated? Must nature be celebrated?I. Thomas Jefferson was a strong supporter of social improvement. His involvement in educational, agrarian, commercial, scientific, geographic, and political projects shows several instances of his being an Enlightenment modernizer who... (shrink)

This paper tries to show that the insights of Ancient Greek wisdom are still relevant today and can provide guidance, as we move toward what seems to be a historically unique, complex network of interrelationships between human beings all over the world and between human society and the natural world. The paper focuses on only two of the deities of the Olympian pantheon: Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and Ares, god of war, the extreme attraction they feel toward each other, and (...) their relationships to the other de-ities and to human beings. Like all the deities, each of them can be either sacred and motivate human beings to noble achievements or they can drive individuals and societies to self-destruction. The lessons implied in the Iliad and myths apply to international development today. We seem to be creating a world of consumers who seek material comfort and wealth, worshipping Aphrodite without noticing she will always bring Ares with her: faction and conflict within and between nations. We are making the mistakes the Greeks thought most obvious and dangerous. (shrink)

This is a diverse, carefully assembled collection of scholarly writing on Max Weber's thought. Included are an introduction by the editors, endnotes for each essay, and notes on the contributors. Nine of the twelve essays appear here originally. The essays are grouped under three major sections.

In Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” there is a philosophical and interpretive puzzle surrounding the translation of a key concept: Gewalt. Should we translate it as “force,” “power,” or “violence”? This raises both general questions in Kant’s legal-political philosophy as well as puzzles regarding Kant’s definitions of “barbarism,” “anarchy,” “despotism,” and “republic” as the four possible political conditions. First, I argue that we have good textual reasons for translating Gewalt as “violence”—a translation which has the advantage that it answers these (...) questions and puzzles convincingly. Translating Gewalt as “violence” has two further, somewhat surprising advantages. It allows us to explain how human beings can be caught in situations with no morally good ways out, and it gives us an ideal Kantian refutation of the death penalty. I then explore Kant’s account of the establishment of public authorities by means of an analogy between the birth and development of a natural person (a human being) and an artificial one (a state). This analogy helps to clarify the difference between the necessary coercive element involved in ideally establishing a state and the likely violence involved in actually establishing one. The third and final section uses the ideas of barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic to identify four different types of political forces operating at any given time in actual historical societies. Once we use Kant’s theory to improve our understanding of the various challenges our historical societies present, we also realize the importance and usefulness of philosophical precision when we translate Gewalt as “violence” and correctly define barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic. (shrink)

The article researches the historical transformation of the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, which originally in ancient Greece did not have a pejorative connotation. This dichotomy has become relevant today to justify the classification of states according to their degree of acceptance of “civilization standards,” which are understood as the standards of the European model of development. The main features of the stereotype of the divide between civilization and barbarism, which took shape in the Roman era, have survived (...) to the present. The premise of “civilizational superiority” of European culture is accompanied by a moral depreciation of other civilizations, turning a barbarian into an enemy of civilization with an explicit racist connotation. Civilization itself is seen as a “vaccination” in the process of missionary work. There emerges the concept of “Eastern barbarism,” coupled with the concepts of terra nullis and the innate irrational behavior of the population of these countries, which justify the seizing of territories for a “more rational” resource management. This activity is historically accompanied by colonization and, in the modern world, by forceful forms of “promoting democracy.” According to the logic of the divide between civilization and barbarism, non-Western countries are doomed to imitate and perpetually fall behind, which causes the disunity of society and internal hostility of “second-rate Europeanized” nations. The Western mentoring has transformed from protectorate to the creation of governance structures that are headed by Western-educated local elites and are designed to change the cultural patterns of society. There was a conception that the world is divided into spheres, in the first circle of which there is a progressive civilized European world, followed by a number of countries similar in structure and values to the European model, and then there is a sphere of barbarism and backwardness. In the contemporary version, this theory presumes the division of states into “pre-modern,” modern, and post-modern states. It the conclusion, it is noted that this divide contradicts to the humane essence of culture and civilization process. (shrink)

ArgumentThe border in turn-of-the-century Argentina was a place of heightened anxiety. State officials ignored the nation's vast land borders and focused on the port, located in the capital city of Buenos Aires, which attracted nearly six million European immigrants in the decades after 1870. Federal authorities were seeking to attract new immigrants and yet they were terrified that opening their gates would allow entry among the potential citizenry a new category of “toxins” dangerous to the national body. The authorities hired (...) physicians as gatekeepers to identify desirable and undesirable traits that went beyond the definition of communicable disease. Science and medicine appeared to provide a means of legitimating a variety of attempts by the state to control the makeup of the population; in reality, the state's power to inspect immigrants for disease, racial toxins, social upheaval, and political instability was minimized by realistic decisions to open borders and by a weak and limited ability to control the influx of people. Alongside calls for immigrant selection there coexisted a strong trend in political discourse that sought to build a unified, homogenous national culture by accepting and assimilating the foreign masses. Both approaches, however, had similar goals – the material progress of the nation, the advancement of Argentina's “civilization,” and the erasure of traces of “foreignness” among the new population. (shrink)

In Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), Nietzsche wrote: “For there is a kind of misused and exploited culture – just take a look around you! And precisely those powers that today most actively promote culture have ulterior motives, and they do not engage in intercourse with it for pure and unselfish reasons.” (The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 2, (Trans. Richard T. Gray), SUP, California, 1995, p. 218, 16; hereafter CW). And he listed these powers, indicating the reason why they (...) were enemies of a true culture: “I have not yet enumerated all those powers that promote culture without, however, being able to realize its goal, the production of genius. I already named three: the selfishness of the moneymakers, the selfishness of the state, and the selfishness of all those who have reason to disguise and conceal themselves behind form. I cite, fourth, the selfishness of scholarship (Wissenschaft) and the peculiar nature of its servants, the scholars (Gelehrten).” (CW 2, p. 224, 11). This exploitation of culture, pressed into the service of these four powers, resulted in a pseudoculture (Afterkultur). In this paper, I will first deal with the goal of a true culture as Nietzsche formulated it in Schopenhauer as Educator. Then, I will focus on one of these enemies of a true culture: the selfishness of scholarship, or rather, science. Nietzsche’s critique is still pertinent nowadays, even more so in my view. Finally, I will briefly discuss,starting from a Nietzsche’s text on the philosopher of the future, one of the tasks of the philosopher in our increasing technological world. (shrink)

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of (...) consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty. The publication of additional manuscript material in this revised edition demonstrates in more detail how Collingwood was determined to show that right and duty occupy different levels of rational practical consciousness. The additional material also contains Collingwood's unequivocal rejection of relativism. David Boucher's introduction shows that The New Leviathan and The Idea of History are integrally related and that neither can be properly understood independently of the other. He is also concerned to show how many of Collingwood's ideas have a contemporary relevance, and that his ideas on barbarism are not so unusual as they might at first appear. (shrink)

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of (...) consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty. The publication of additional manuscript material in this revised edition demonstrates in more detail how Collingwood was determined to show that right and duty occupy different levels of rational practical consciousness. The additional material also contains Collingwood's unequivocal rejection of relativism. David Boucher's introduction shows that The New Leviathan and The Idea of History are integrally related and that neither can be properly understood independently of the other. He is also concerned to show how many of Collingwood's ideas have a contemporary relevance, and that his ideas on barbarism are not so unusual as they might at first appear. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty. In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. This was an extraordinarily pessimistic claim in view of Britain's global dominance at the time and one that has been insufficiently investigated in the secondary literature. The wanting model was that of China, a once advanced civilization that had apparently ossified. To understand how Mill came to this conclusion requires one to investigate his notion of the stages (...) from barbarism to civilization, and also his belief in imperialism as part of the civilizing process. Here India plays a central role, as both Mill and his father worked for the East India Company. This study, then, investigates the relationship between Mill's liberalism and his justification of imperialism. It takes us into the Utilitarianism of his family background, and such other influences as Romanticism, Scottish political economy and such key French thinkers as Saint- Simon, Guizot, Comte and Tocqueville. Mill, then, provides the focus of a debate on the origins, meaning, and consequences of Western civilization. It encompasses discourses on colonialism and orientalism, on Enlightenment optimism and conservative despair, on the need for leadership and the advance of democracy; in short, on the blessings, curses and dangers of modernization from approximately the time of the American and French revolutions to that of the so-called mid-Victorian calm in which On Liberty was written. Furthermore, current political issues concerning the West and Islamic countries have heightened interest in just the kind of question that this book discusses: that of how the West relates to, and assesses, the rest of the world. (shrink)