In February 2021, the French Minister of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, ordered an inquiry – to be led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research – about the alleged “Islamo-leftism” which, according to her, was corrupting French academia. Vidal's concern was, purportedly, to distinguish “what falls under academic research and what falls under militancy and opinion”. She had in mind, in particular, recent interdisciplinary fields in the social sciences, such as Postcolonial Studies. Her statements caused a (...) controversy in French academia as well as outside. The goal of this paper is to present this controversy and analyse it in light of the philosophical literature on autonomy of, and values in, science. After recalling the political and institutional context of the controversy, I present Vidal’s intervention and various reactions to it, which can roughly be classified pro and contra Vidal's statements. I then provide a philosophical discussion of the controversy, by recalling the philosophical debate to which it is related, and analysing the assumptions, arguments and actions of both camps. I show in particular that a political intervention inside the very production of academic knowledge implies a strong risk of censorship, and that letting academia self-regulate itself with respect to the validation of knowledge remains the best way to go. I conclude with the deeper questions raised by this controversy: the social role of universities, and the institutional aspects of scientific knowledge validation. (shrink)

This article reviews the importance of the French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem. An early theorist of radical homosexuality, Hocquenghem was prescient about the rightward pull on many in the ‘68 generation in France, including those who would go on to media fame in France for liberal critiques of their earlier political incarnations. Hocquenghem would die too soon in 1988, but not before leaving an influential corpus for those thinking non-heterosexist forms of desire and political communities.

On compte, parmi les nombreux ennemis de Kevin Mulligan, une foule de personnes bigarrées et (selon notre professeur) profondément vicieuses : les philosophes continentaux, les pharisiens, les amis de l’Europe, des Droits de l’Homme, du politiquement correct, des lettres, des études genres et bien sûr, les gauchistes. On peut faire remonter le terme "gauchiste" à Lénine (1920) qui en usait pour designer cette gauche (communiste) qui, pour rester fidèle à son idéologie, refusait de participer aux élections et, par conséquent, était (...) condamnée à rester éternellement un groupuscule. Pour Vladimir Illich, le vice des gauchistes est prudentiel : parce qu’ils sont focalisés sur leur idéologie, les gauchistes n’agissent pas pour prendre le pouvoir. Ce vice est doublé d’une faute épistémique : en s’arc-boutant (comme des enfants) sur leurs principes – quitte à ne jamais voir leurs idées aboutir –, les gauchistes sont bêtes. Le reproche de Lénine n’est pas très éloigné de celui que l’on fait habituellement à la gauche : elle a de grands rêves irréalisables qu’elle ne cherche jamais à concrétiser – ou de manière magistralement infantile. Cette vision du gauchiste comme un brave hippie un peu benêt sous-estime largement, à mon sens, les vices instanciés par les personnes atteintes de cette maladie politique. -/- Dans cet article, je vous propose d’explorer avec moi tous les vices du gauchisme en regardant, pour commencer, (I) ce que sont la gauche et la droite, puis en avançant pas à pas, (II) une définition en conditions nécessaires et suffisantes du gauchisme. Il conviendra également de ne pas oublier son opposé, tout aussi dangereux (et trop méconnu), le droitisme. C’est pourquoi, une fois que nous aurons caractérisé le gauchisme, je proposerai (III) une définition du droitisme en détaillant ses vices les plus inavouables. Nous pourrons alors (IV) identifier ce qu’est, en général, cette maladie infantile de la politique, suite à quoi (V) je vous prescrirai un vaccin pour vous en prémunir. Avant de débuter, il convient de préciser que si nous parlons ici de gauchisme et de droitisme, nous ne faisons aucune assomption concernant la gauche et la droite ; une personne de gauche n’est pas nécessairement un gauchiste ; de même, tout homme ou femme de droite qui se respecte cherche à tout prix à éviter les droitistes (et vice versa). (shrink)

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, (...) and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’. (shrink)

Machiavelli can be read as a plebeian thinker supportive of plebeian institutions that, as such, differentiate the few from the many and aim to regulate and burden the few. Yet, like numerous contemporary plebeian thinkers, Machiavelli is mostly silent about the moral transgressiveness required by the advocacy of plebeian institutions and ideas. The theses offered here argue that advocates of plebeianism will need, like the Machiavellian prince, to learn how not to be good. In explaining what this means in practice, (...) the theses also defend the propriety of anachronistic readings, caution again plebeian violence, and explain other dynamics of plebeian leftism. (shrink)

Paul Levi was leader of the German Communist Party in the vital years 1919 and 1920; he was subsequently expelled for his opposition to the adventurist March Action in 1921. Three recent books cast new light on this complex figure: David Fernbach’s selection of his writings, Frédéric Cyr’s biography and Paul Frölich’s memoirs. Levi was a man of great talent and courage, but his leadership style was defective; he was neither Leninist nor Luxemburgist, and his greatest weakness was his inability (...) to relate to ultra-leftism. His limitations are revealed by a comparison with his comrade Clara Zetkin. (shrink)

Much has been written about Žižek’s critique of ideology and its theoretical boundaries. Beyond the critical aspect of Žižekian philosophy, the desert of Žižekian politics lies in the way subjectivity persists even at the end of great revolutionary mobilizations. In this essay, I deal with the implications of a Žižekian politics based on the theory of subjectivity and the problem of the “morning after”. His rejection of the main currents of leftism opens up the discussion whether Žižekian politics is (...) a call for pragmatism or as a provocation to revolution. To address this issue, this essay proceeds in two ways. First, we study how Vladimir Lenin and Deng Xiaoping gives us two lessons in socialist pragmatism; the lessons we draw from Lenin and Deng allow us to study the problematic faced by the post-revolutionary politics: the need to arrive at a concrete plan to govern the nation and resuscitate the economy. Second, from what we learn as the audacity of Lenin’s strategic retreats and the missed political opportunities in Deng’s economic reforms, I argue that in a politics of militancy, collectivism is complemented by the rigorous study of our present situation. Militancy is an attitude of guarded optimism that complements communist optimism with a critical edge and a level-headed approach to dealing with political problems. (shrink)

This essay forms the introduction for Hocquenghem’s L’après-mai des faunes. Published in January 1974, the essay reflects critically on the legacy of the events of May, 1968, and the abandonment of so-called revolutionary thought soon after. Hocquenghem calls on the left no longer to form itself simply in reaction to the bourgeois class and its values, but to find ways for turning (away) through “volutions” of action from the apathy of leftism as he has found it. Critiquing the air (...) of crisis meant to stop thinking as such, Hocquenghem “Volutions” reads as current today as when it was written. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. He argues that the common strain running through such political developments as the rise of Islamism, modern political ideologies, and contemporary leftism is the fact that, one way or the other, they represent man trying to make himself God. To paraphrase Irving Babbitt and others, as the notion of God (...) goes, so goes philosophy, and society and culture, and politics, and economics—the religious outlook is at the core of all other perspectives. (shrink)

Marxism has been for a long time the reference of the European Worker's Movement. It took the form of a millenarist faith and was embodied in large organizations. Orthodox marxism had no more reason for existence when the working class was integrated in the modern society.Communism gave a new inspiration but at the expense of an intellectual degeneration. When it became a state religion, marxism stopped to be creative and became a Gnosis. The varied forms of leftisms which emerged in (...) the sixties are the last avatar of marxism in the developped countries. But they have only a remote relationship with Marx's doctrine. The same process took place in the Third World where the marxist-leninist vulgate was absorbed by nationalism. (shrink)

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ cannot describe two extremes of a single ideological dimension. Instead, a bi-dimensional model including socio-cultural and socio-economic facets of leftism/rightism is postulated. Several studies conducted in the USA and Western Europe show a relative coherence of left-wing and right-wing orientation regarding both dimensions, whereas very diverse patterns can be found in the countries of Eastern Europe. In Poland cultural and economic leftism-rightism seem to be clearly negatively related. The general hypothesis in this paper (...) claims that such ideological inconsistency is a product of coherence at the level of preferences for values, i.e. covariance within individualistic as well as within collectivist values. Based on a survey study conducted on a representative sample of Poles, it was shown that preferences for values made up two distinct dimensions: Openness to change vs Conservation, and Self-enhancement vs Self-transcendence. They are positively related but have fundamentally different relationships with political self-identification and ideology. (shrink)

Presents a Taylorian critique of the political philosophy in Richard Rorty's book 'Achieving Our Country.' Distinction between the old-guard reformist Left and the new orthodoxy of cultural Leftism; Analysis of pertinent topics and relevant issues; Implications on studies of social and political theory.

Modern conservatism was born in the crisis of the French Revolution that sought to overturn Christianity, monarchy, tradition, and a trust in experience rather than reason. In the name of reason and progress, the French Revolution led to the guillotine, the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a decade of continental war. Today Western Civilization is again in crisis, with an ever-widening progressive campaign against religion, tradition, and ordered liberty; Francesco Giubilei's cogent reassessment of some of conservatism's greatest thinkers could not (...) be timelier. Within these pages, English-speaking readers will come across some familiar names: Burke, Disraeli, Chesterton, and Scruton. Americans get their own chapter too, including penetrating examinations of John Adams, Richard Weaver, Henry Regnery, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Barry Goldwater. But perhaps most interesting is Giubilei's coverage of the continental European tradition–largely Catholic, monarchical, traditionalist, and anti-Jacobin, anti-Communist, and anti-Fascist. Giubilei offers insightful intellectual portraits of statesmen and philosophers like Count Klemens von Metternich, the man who restored Europe after the Napoleonic Wars; Eric Voegelin, the German political philosopher who made his career in America and traced recurrent strains of leftism to an early Christian heresy; Joseph de Maistre, the leading French counterrevolutionary philosopher; George Santayana, a Spaniard who became an American philosopher and conservative pragmatist; Jose Ortega y Gasset, who warned of the "revolt of the masses"; and a wide variety of Italian thinkers whose conservatism was forged against a Fascist ideology that presented itself as a force for stability and respect for the past, but that was fundamentally modernist and opposed to conservatism. Unique and written by one of Italy's youngest and brightest conservative thinkers, Francesco Giubilei's History of European Conservative Thought is sure to enlighten and inform. (shrink)

Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or deconstructionism as “authoritarian” or “subversive” are committing a fallacy of overspecificity. To call Hirsch’s theory authoritarian is to assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the present in order to recall that today’s authoritarian ideology is often yesterday’s progressive one, and vice versa. (...) Indeed, there’s considerable historical irony in the fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth reflected a totalitarian mentality. “Totalitarianism,” he wrote, “in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the existence of objective truth.” He added that “the friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar philistinism.”10It’s not that it hadn’t occurred to Orwell that the notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell’s experience of Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various historical reasons, Orwell’s insight is easily lost today. His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could operate, in quite other ways.11 10. George orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. , 4: 63-64.11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, “it is certainly the case that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a critical charge again”. (shrink)

The moral and political arguments, judgements and commitments of Britain's outstanding radical philosopher.What society ought we to have, and what can we do to try to get it? This book sets out to answer these questions beginning with a new essay on the foundation of a liberalism of means and ends, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. It goes on to consider the culmination of liberal thinking in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. It argues that liberalism is good intentions not (...) carried forward into rational commitment. Conservatism, in its past and its present guises, is also made clear in its reality. So too is the leftism of the past, including G. A. Cohen's attempt to save Karl Marx's theory of history. Both are discarded. The book argues for another political and social morality - the generosity and fellow-feeling of the Principle of Humanity. It is a consequentialist rather than a mysterious morality, and its essential idea is that we should take rational steps to rescue the badly-off from lives of wretchedness and other distress. This is the commitment that led to Ted Honderich's human and passionate response to 9/11, After the Terror - the most controversial book of serious philosophy published in Britain since A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. A further chapter considers hierarchic democracy - the democracy we have as distinct from the democracy we think we have - and the necessity of mass civil disobedience. The book ends with an essay that adds to the thinking of After the Terror, particularly on the moral right of the Palestinians to their resistance. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

What could be the motives for producing a Popperian half‐life such as the present volume? This work, which takes Karl Popper right up to his debut on the world stage with the assumption of his position at the London School of Economics, displays no inclination to follow up with the complementary second half of Popper's life sometime in the future. Indeed, the author admits that the omitted subsequent “public Popper” was frequently an embarrassment. Here is truncation with a purpose: this (...) book is written to recommend the work of the early Popper to the “academic left” and to “historiciz[e] the postmodern predicament [as] an antidote to current false consciousness” . Since this is a work in social/political theory masquerading as biography, I shall respond in kind.There have recently been a spate of attempts to revisit the major figures of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, primarily for the purpose of explaining to ourselves what it was that provoked such an efflorescence of ingenuity, only to result in the subsequent letdown we now confront or enjoy: Cartwright et al. on Neurath, Fuller on Kuhn, and Kadvany on Lakatos. Malachi Hacohen admits that this constitutes his motive as well: he is impressed with the early Popper's political leftism and anti‐foundationalism, regarding the later Cold Warrior as a sad retrogression. It seems to me, however, that he has missed the major lesson of all these retrospectives. Crudely, what emerges from these exercises, as a group, is the thesis that the looming significance in general intellectual discourse of philosophers of science in the mid‐twentieth century was due to the fact that they were doing social theory all along under the guise of describing Science. Furthermore, their question of the true nature of legitimate Science was seen as a crucial preliminary to understanding which politico‐economic system would come to dominate in the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.From this perspective, I strongly doubt that Popper's social significance ever derived from his durable “solution” of any pressing philosophical problems: Did he really proffer a usable “demarcation criterion” for science, or rectify the problem of induction, or adequately describe probabilities as propensities, or banish “subjectivism” from physics, or even really demonstrate that Marxism was untestable? No, during the Cold War it turned out that the very best apologists for Western society were leftists and anti‐foundationalists; and one can observe this in the history of postwar social sciences like economics and psychology, as well as the philosophy of science. Kuhn et al. then took the next logical step in the sequence: something like “critical rationalism” was widely deemed a thoroughly implausible account of social organization in an anti‐foundationalist context . Social order had to be reconceptualized and reimposed, be it through “normal science,” “progressive research programs,” or whatever.Hence, banishing the half‐life of the Cold Warrior from the biographical account is to parade a pointless Popper in a plotless Punch‐and‐Judy show. Hacohen rightly cautions the reader about the unreliability of Popper's autobiography Unended Quest, but he should have taken more to heart Popper's assertions therein that although he knew almost no social theory, that didn't prevent him from seeking to dictate good “scientific method” to the social sciences ; and furthermore, that his vaunted method of “situational analysis” was little more than a repackaging of neoclassical economics as a general methodology for the social sciences . Thus when Hacohen proposes “situational logic” as a template for his historiography, is he sufficiently aware that he is merely participating in the general movement to extend neoclassical economics as a Theory of Everything for our contemporary globalized situation? If the purpose really was to demonstrate that Popper was situatedly rational, there would be no pressing need to write a biography; one could just as well fit his data to a generic maximization model. History should make us rather more self‐conscious about our scholarly and political options, not less. (shrink)

This paper revisits some of the arguments in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, twenty years after the book first appeared. Not only are many of Rorty’s diagnoses and predictions eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency, but there is also perceptive political advice in Rorty’s book that I argue the contemporary American Left would do well to heed. While many post-election commentators have tended to read Achieving Our Country as an admonishment of (...) so-called “identity politics” in favor of an “old Left” politics of redistribution and economic justice, I argue that the main distinction on which the analysis in Achieving Our Country hangs is between what Rorty calls “real politics” and “cultural politics”, a conclusion that is confirmed, I argue, by examining the three concrete suggestions for the American Left that together form the core positive argument in Rorty’s book. (shrink)

De nos jours, les partis politiques et les syndicats communiquent avant tout de jour, afin de se faire entendre du plus grand nombre. Il n’en a pas toujours été ainsi. En pleine Guerre froide, les militants devaient bien souvent agir la nuit pour promouvoir et défendre leurs idées – quitte à s’exposer physiquement à des représailles de leurs adversaires. La communication politique après-guerre privilégiait bien souvent les meetings nocturnes (non-)contradictoires, parfois émaillés d’incidents. Ce n’est que progressivement avec la technicisation de (...) la communication et la mise à distance des corps que la violence physique va reculer pour perdurer dans les marges politiques. Profondément liés à des organisations politiques, les syndicats répondaient en partie au même schéma, bien que le déclin de la violence physique nocturne se soit enclenché plus rapidement au profit d’une violence diurne maîtrisée. Cet article contribue à l’étude de l’évolution de la violence militante politique et... (shrink)