This article questions the current vogue of Carl Schmitt among political theorists who read him as an antidote to the depoliticizing force of economics and technology in the age of neoliberalism and its algorithmic rationalities. It takes Schmitt’s sparse reflections about cybernetics and game theory as paradigmatic of the theoretical and political problems raised by any theory positing the autonomy of the political. It suggests that this ultimately misunderstands the role of cybernetic representations of political decision-making in shoring up in (...) the 1960s and 1970s the autonomy of the political that Schmitt so vehemently defended. (shrink)

Popularized by Richard Hofstadter, the notion of "paranoid style" is the most influential attempt at applying the category of paranoia to the study of politics. Yet, the success of this elegant formula conceals a complex history and a set of unarticulated assumptions about the connections between symbolic phenomena, psychopathological states, and politics. The article proceeds to recover these assumptions and suggests that the notion of "paranoid style" is ultimately indeterminate, making its application arbitrary and ideological.

Whether to a `liberal' or a `people's' democracy, the evolution of modern political systems has been consistently theorized as a `transition'. Elaborated within Marxism as the `transition to communism' and later recycled by modernization theory and comparative politics, this concept has been tightly connected to the development of macro-societal analysis. This paper argues that any attempt at writing its history should be sensitive to the deep-seated ambivalence of this concept, which has alternatively lent itself to either teleological or non-teleological interpretations. (...) But far from matching the ready-made division between Marxist and non-Marxist political sociology, this ambivalence has always been internal to these different social scientific traditions. As a result, the same conceptual issues and tensions can be identified within the Marxist and, later, Soviet doctrine on the one hand, and Western social sciences on the other hand, from the sociology of development of the 1950s to comparative democratization in the 1980s. (shrink)

For 34 years, the Fondation pour une entraide intellectuelle européenne was involved in promoting cultural dialogue across the Iron Curtain. This article looks at its relations with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its agenda, and its impact on intellectual debates. It also analyses the ideological evolution of this organization after the 1960s and its transformation as it merged into the Open Society Foundation created by philanthropist George Soros.