THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS OF LATE CRITICAL THEORY

Martin Jay's sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self‐destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas's project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay's narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.     

VALIDITY NOW

This review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present-day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth-century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and truth value is integral to intellectual history; however, it is establishing the latter that is the most crucial, and perhaps most difficult, part of our practice. In thirteen separate but related pieces, Jay explores subjects such as the common ground shared by Quentin Skinner and Hayden White, the “styles” of thought represented by Walter Benjamin and Isaiah Berlin, and recent French theories of the historical sublime and the “advent” of ideas. This review essay discusses these pieces and compares Jay's essay on historical truthfulness to ancient rhetorical discussions of the many forms of lying about history. Its final section deals with the ways in which insights from the history of science might help us to connect genesis and validity by examining the practices of idea- or knowledge-making, and it argues that validity is also, and perhaps most importantly, something we need to embrace in our roles as teachers. What makes ideas valid is the next generation of thinkers, and to make wise and well-informed life choices, they need to have a full range of older and newer ideas about the human condition from which to choose.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

This review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.     

A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency

This review article examines in detail the argument in Alfred Gell's posthumously published book Art and Agency: an anthropological theory. The review is divided into two parts. In the first I summarise the main argument of each chapter in turn and comment on some of the author's more questionable assumptions and conclusions. In the second I step back from the individual chapters and comment on three of the more general issues the book raises.     

The Strange Case of Dr. Bucaille: Notes for a Re‐examination

The present essay focuses on the figure of Maurice Bucaille and on his contribution to the discourse on Islam and science. Its purpose is twofold. First of all, it aims to provide the reader with a concise map of the ideas of the French author, reconstructing their core and their interrelations. Furthermore, it aims to question what I define as “the apparent naivety” of Bucaille's work, a reason why he can sometimes be too easily dismissed, by pinpointing a number of original features of his intellectual activity. My argument is that Bucaille deserves more attention for two good reasons: firstly, because of the influence that he de facto exerts on Muslim societies, secondly, because of some highly specific characteristics of his discourse. Such features not only distinguish his contribution from analogous ones, but also give rise to interpretative questions, which have as yet been either overlooked or unsatisfactorily addressed. Closely connected to this thesis is the idea that Bucaille's work constitutes a good starting point for a discussion amongst scholars of different disciplines and from different cultural backgrounds. The first section reconstructs Bucaille's life and works. The second section focuses on his method and ideas regarding science. The third section is devoted to Bucaille's conclusions following his study of the Bible and the Qur'an, and therefore deals more closely with the core of his ideas. The fourth section covers Bucaille's complementary criticism of the theory of evolution. In the fifth section I examine the possible reasons behind the scant scholarly attention concerning Bucaille. In the final section I propose an interpretative model of Bucaille's figure conceived as a system of concentric spheres and I raise, for each one of them, several questions, which have so far been, in my view, insufficiently investigated, thus setting an agenda for further scholarly work.     

BLOOD FOR THE GHOSTS: READING RUIN'S BEING WITH THE DEAD WITH NIETZSCHE

A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer's Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau's Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin's critical focus on Homer scholarship beyond the twentieth century with a return to Nietzsche's nineteenth-century emphasis on the “blood” needed to bring the voices of the past to speak in his own reading of Homer. To do this, I note the dead-silenced (“zombie”) scholarship haunting Nietzsche's voice in his field of classical philology in addition to Nietzsche's source scholarship and his hermeneutic methodology of historiographical research for the sake of ethnography, archaeology, and Nietzsche's lectures on pre-Platonic philosophy.     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth‐century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so‐called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re‐embedded in an alternative set of institutions.     

3. CARL SCHMITT'S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF POLITICAL MYTH

My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt's theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes's Leviathan and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt's interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt's conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.     

Spiritual Warfare in Machiavelli's Prince

Machiavelli uses metaphors to convey meaning beyond the surface of his text. Access to his metaphors often begins via his “mistakes,” such as his calling (in chapter 12 of the Prince) Philip II of Macedon a “mercenary,” when in fact Philip was no such thing. This article focuses on chapters 12–14 of The Prince and explores the metaphoric meanings of Machiavelli's four types of soldiers—mercenary, auxiliary, mixed, and one's own—to explicate Machiavelli's account of how the mind of the West was conquered via “spiritual warfare.” It then explains Machiavelli's strategy for re-conquest by a new spiritual army trained by Machiavelli that will fight to defeat the regnant spiritual power and further Machiavelli's new principles.     

On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: notes from the British case

In 2005, Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired professor of moral philosophy at Princeton University, made it into the best‐sellers chart with his book On Bullshit. Taking his essay as its starting point, this article explores the analysis of bullshit and the prevalence of bullshitting in the contemporary public sphere. Frankfurt’s short essay indeed provides an intellectual framework to interpret and understand contemporary rhetoric and practice in the cultural policy field, as well as recent trends in cultural policy research. Through a discussion of selected New Labour’s cultural policy documents in Britain, the article aims to show that many of the key actors in the cultural policy debate indeed display the ‘indifference to how things really are’ and the cultivation of vested interests which Frankfurt attributes to the activity of bullshitting. The final part of the text discusses the implications of the present status quo for ‘critical’ cultural policy research.     

Conceiving the Republic of Mankind: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots

During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste “Anacharsis” Cloots (1755–1794) developed a theory of the world state as the means to guarantee perpetual peace for mankind. Though his ideas have largely been misunderstood, Cloots's political writings were in fact an extensive plea for a more cosmopolitan understanding of the French Revolution. His system adapted institutions and concepts of the French revolutionary republic for a world state, the republic of mankind. This essay recovers his political vision and connects it both to the heritage of eighteenth-century political thought, especially Rousseau, and to revolutionary political culture. The goal is to retrieve the meaning of Cloots's universal republic, and with it a chapter in the history of cosmopolitan thought.     

Cropsey on Plato and the Unity of Philosophy

Abstract

Cropsey's book, Plato's World, contains his longest and most sustained reflections on a set of Platonic dialogues, but it is not the first work he published on Plato or the last he intended to write. His last collection of essays, On Humanity's Intensive Introspection, shows that in his writings on Plato Cropsey was attempting to answer a broader question: What is philosophy?     

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSPARENCY,ITS HISTORY,AND THE THEORY OF BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE

In this review essay, I examine the theoretical assumptions required in order to reconstruct an understanding of another historical period. Stefanos Geroulanos has produced a masterful history of mid‐twentieth‐century French thought, and he argues for a significant difference between that period and our own based on the values and ideas associated with the concept of transparency. The book is innovative in both its method and interpretation of the period of 1945–1984. However, despite the suggestive theoretical framework announced at its start, Geroulanos prefers to explore the theoretical content of conceptual history more than to explain how one might go about identifying, understanding, and translating the concepts of a different epoch. In order to contribute to what is already a successful project, I endeavor to extend some of Geroulanos's theoretical sketches through a comparison with Reinhart Koselleck's theory of Begriffsgechichte. Despite some muted criticism of Koselleck from Geroulanos, I argue that the projects share similar commitments, although Geroulanos needs to develop his theoretical premises at greater length, both for a full comparison and in order to complete the critical project that Transparency appears to be undertaking.     

Democracy and political economy: Tocqueville's thoughts on J.-B. Say and T.R. Malthus

This essay examines the intellectual origins of Tocqueville's thoughts on political economy. It argues that Tocqueville believed political economy was crucial to what he called the ‘new science of politics’, and it explores his first forays into the discipline by examining his studies of J.-B. Say and T.R. Malthus. The essay shows how Tocqueville was initially attracted to Say's approach as it provided him with a rigorous analytical framework with which to examine American democracy. Though he incorporated important aspects of Say's work in Democracy in America (1835), he was troubled by elements of it. He was unable to articulate clearly these doubts until he began studying Malthus. What he learned from Malthus caused him to move away from the more formalised approach to political economy advocated by Say and his disciples and move towards an approach advocated by Christian political economists, such as Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont. This shift would have important consequences for the composition of Democracy in America (1840).     

SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THOMAS JACKSON AND THE CONTROVERSY OVER PRODIGIES IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES I

Abstract

This article focuses on Hobbes's use of metaphor, particularly the larger structural metaphor of the artificial man in Leviathan. Hobbes claims to draw his political animal according to the figurative outlines of the natural one, despite the significant differences between these two bodies. In Part I we see the scientifically-minded Hobbes reject the old dualistic imagery of body and soul, act and will; but in Part II the politically-minded Hobbes appeals to exactly these dualistic distinctions in order to lend his radical vision of the state the numinous appeal of the medieval and Tudor formulations. An understanding of Hobbes's rhetorical strategy, and what I call his strategic use of dualism, can show how the recent linguistic turn in Hobbes studies can in fact re-open the much older debate on the overall unity of his philosophical system.     

Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905): A Pioneering Scholar of Modern Nationalism

Abstract. This essay attempts to place the contributions of the sociologist Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905) within the history of the scholarship of nationalism. Though absent from present scholarly literature on the question, Kelles-Krauz's contribution to the study of nationalism was outstanding. The article advances three arguments: that Kelles-Krauz was among the first to treat modem nationalism as an object of serious study, that his approach was more typical of our day than his, and that his arguments anticipated many of the major positions of today's scholars. In order to defend the first claim, the article briefly considers the contributions of scholars who preceded Kelles-Krauz. In order to defend the second and third claims, the article briefly characterises Kelles-Krauz's sociological method and presents his answers to some of the central questions of today's scholarly literature on nationalism.     

Jules Verne's Metaphor of the Iron Cage

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for futuristic technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism.