This volume provides theoretical construction to the extraordinary events that resulted in the collapse of communism worldwide. The authors attribute a great deal of the problems of totalitarianism to its blind acceptance of a Marxist philosophy of practice. With the failure of communist practice, the collapse of the Marxist paradigm was quick to follow. At its roots, this volume is a critique of the idea that we can have "scientific knowledge" of the social and political future.

Two methodological remarks are needed at the outset. First, while I am going to treat the redemptive paradigm in full, I will — for obvious reasons of length — analyze the democratic paradigm only insofar as it is related to the alternative under discussion. Second, under the heading of “redemptive paradigm in radical politics,” I will address both left and right political theories. It is, however, only to the degree that conservatives embrace the redemptive paradigm that I speak of “conservative (...) political radicalism.” Redemptive politics was born at the end of the 18th century. It entered the theater mundi in the person of the hero whom Hegel appropriately called Weltgeist zu Pferde and on whom Weber modeled his principle of “charismatic legitimation.”. (shrink)

The most important systematic analysis of social movements to date has been Touraine's The Voice and the Eye. Here, one can almost paraphrase Marx's famous dictum: for the French sociologist, the history of all societies is a history of movements. In identifying movements with social classes, Touraine negotiates a radical turn from system theories to a strong version of action theory and breaks with the Procrustean framework of an Althusserian-Poulantzasian structuralism in which everything is accounted for once the economically based (...) class equivalent has been found. For Touraine, movements emerge and diversify in the process of their challenging “historicity” — a key concept derived from Castoriadis’ central category, the imaginary institution. (shrink)

Attentive readers of Bakhtin are familiar with the importance he attributed to “semiliterary” or folkloristic genres and art works. Bakhtin came to the interesting conclusion that emerging and historically representative, types of literary works often build from semi-literary blocks. These blocks may be fragmented and incomplete, purely raw materials from the aesthetic viewpoint. Nonetheless, they are harbingers of the emergence of a significant literary form. This is the case with Red Square, apparently a thriller written by two Soviet defectors, Edward (...) Topol and Fridrikh Neznasky, in reality a significant, albeit semi-literary, historical novel in the style of Walter Scott. All constituents analyzed by Lukács in his famous description of Scott's historical novels are present. (shrink)

This book presents the psychological basis, methodology, and application of Marton's phenomenographic approach to the theory of learning.

Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science.

Various approaches have been taken recently to a reinterpretation of the European reception of China and the sinophilia-sinophobia dichotomy (Hung 2003, Millar 2010, Jacobsen 2013). In the present article, a nineteenth-century approach to China is examined using Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) as examples. It will be argued that this approach differs from earlier attitudes. First, the central currents will be surveyed in the European reception of China between the Jesuit missionaries and early nineteenth-century philosophies of (...) history, introducing an interpretational framework that differentiates between various approaches to China, namely a _universalistic_ and a _progression-based approach_. Then, first Tocqueville's and then Mill's depictions of China in comparison with the concepts of preceding centuries will be analyzed. It will be argued that Tocqueville and Mill's understanding of China represents a third view that I will call _relation-based_. (shrink)

Marxist philosophers have always given great attention to theoretical questions concerning the historical role and significance of the state and to the processes by which the types and political forms of states have changed. As we know, historical materialism demands both concrete analysis of the political organization of the society of a given socioeconomic system and the discovery of certain general patterns that manifest themselves in the course of world history. Marx's thesis that reality can truly be understood only on (...) the basis of a theoretical study of history retains its full significance to this day for philosophical analysis of the complex and diverse problems of the theory of the state. (shrink)