Books

An examination of Mann's literary works and his personality reveals a complex attitude to fews. Literary antisemitism was common in his novels and stories but during his lifetime he denounced antisemitism and joined forces with Jewish organizations to fight Nazism.     

Habit,Sittlichkeit and Second Nature

Abstract

Discussions of habit in Hegel’s thought usually focus on his subjective spirit since this is where the most extended discussion of this issue takes place. This paper argues that habit is also important for understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The discussion of habit and second nature occur at a critical juncture in the text. This discussion is important for understanding his notion of ethical life and his account of freedom.     

Elof Eriksson (1883-1965): A Case-study of Antisemitism in Sweden

Abstract

Berggren discusses the Swedish antisemitic propagandist Elof Eriksson and his works, and asks when, how and in what context his antisemitism emerged, how it developed and how it was connected to his other concerns. She also discusses how, to whom and to what extent his antisemitism was disseminated. Her main focus is the years 1925-41, when Eriksson published the antisemitic paper Nationen (The Nation) and when his antisemitism developed from being one of the many important strands of his thought to being the foundation of his world-view. Along the way, she suggests that antisemitism in Sweden in the first decades of the twentieth century was the result of a mixture of domestic traditions and international influences, and not necessarily connected to Nazism at that time.     

German neo‐Nazis

Stephen Miller feared persecution in his own country, South Africa, but because he could go to Israel, he was denied asylum in the UK.     

A Response to Giorgios Kallis’ Notions of Socialism and Growth

ABSTRACT

Kallis’ discussion of degrowth in a transition to socialism is misleading and substantially detached from the current context, especially with recurring cataclysms due to climate change and the requirements to implement a programme to prevent even worse outcomes while there is a narrowing window of opportunity to do so. The fallacies of Kallis’ arguments originate in his misinformed account of economic and physical growth relative to thermodynamics and ecological processes, his feeble grasp of capitalist relations, and his gross misrepresentation of socialist, and specifically ecosocialist, thought.     

The Ethical Irrationality of the World: Weber and Hindu Ethics

Abstract

This paper argues that Weber ought to be read as a comparative ethicist who brings his German intellectual inheritance, especially Schopenauer and Nietzsche, to a dialogue with ethical traditions in India and China. It shows that Weber not only had a supple understanding of the tensions within Hindu ethics, his own account of value often closely corresponds to Hindu axiology and was enriched by an encounter with it.     

Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind

ABSTRACT

Kuryla maps a metaphorical American island of the colour blind—in law, public rhetoric and culture—in the process locating the first black president of the United States on it, evaluating the claim that his presidency represents a colour-blind or post-racial politics. Barack Obama rejects colour blindness as a fact in the present yet gestures to its ‘better history’ (his modern transposing of Lincoln's ‘better angels’) while refusing any theoretical resolution of the idea. Obama, in public pronouncements and by sheer fact of his being and his biography, reveals the epistemic irony of the colour-blind idea, its persistence amid the conditions of its impossibility.     

Becoming Who We Are: Democracy and the Political Problem of Hope

Abstract

In this article I argue that hope is rightly numbered by Hesiod among the evils, as hope cannot be separated from an awareness of the inadequacy of one's current state. Political hope for democrats in particular is tied to the awareness that we have not yet realized ourselves, that, to paraphrase Pindar, we have not yet become who we are. I argue that, although Rorty comes close to articulating this in his book Achieving Our Country, his emphasis on pride ultimately obscures more than it reveals. I conclude that Thoreau's anguished reflection in Walden on the failures of his fellow citizens is a better place to look for instruction on the question of political hope.     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Whitewashing Hitler: ‘Revisionist’ history‐distorters at work

In April 1983 Canadians were shocked to learn of a politically active school teacher in Alberta who taught his students an antisemitic view of history. The teacher was dismissed but he had expressed antisemitic views in the classroom for years.     

Struggles over the rights of foreign domestic workers in Malaysia: the possibilities and limitations of ‘rights talk’

Abstract

The publication of Max Weber's early lecture notes on economic theory as Volume III/1 of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG) reveals for the first time how much his teaching in Freiburg and Heidelberg from 1894 to 1898 was influenced by the ‘modern economics’ of Carl Menger and his students, Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. This review essay examines the significance of this volume, and also presents a brief history and assessment of the ongoing Gesamtausgabe project.     

Biopolitics for philosophers

Abstract

Roberto Esposito is an influential Italian political philosopher engaged in a renewal of the Foucauldian project of an ontology of the present. In his recent book Bíos, he rereads biopolitics through the lens of his paradigm of immunization (Esposito, 1998, 2002) and tries to explain how, in modernity, a politics of life ‘continually threatens to be reversed’ into a politics of death. His philosophical analysis is profound, and his genealogical reconstruction of the modern superimposition of politics and life innovative. However, his claims are weakened by his usage of a very abstract notion of biopolitics, which fails to take note of the current impact of scientific programmes on the human condition and the emergence of new biopolitical figures. The review suggests that lack of any interest toward the history of science as well as toward more empirically-oriented analyses remains a serious shortcoming of influential political philosophers.     

Towards a Critical Theory of Cultural Pragmatics: The Márkus Road

ABSTRACT

At the time of his death in 2016 György Márkus’s magnum opus on the culture of modernity that he laboured on throughout his post-Budapest period remained unfinished. This paper attempts to reconstruct the theory of Cultural Pragmatics that lay at the core of this immense project. The intention is to retrieve the key ideas of Márkus’s understanding of modern cultural relations by reviewing the terms of his critique of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on the issue of authorship. A distinctive Márkus road in the study of cultural modernity offers itself as a rich contemporary research programme for the future.     

Subversion down under

Avriel Butovsky received his MPhil from Oxford University in 1984. He is now a Research Assistant at the Institute of Jewish Affairs.

The trial and conviction of Ernst Zundel has fuelled demands for a tightening of the relevant articles of the Canadian Criminal Code which deal with hate propaganda.     

JISB Interview: The European Union and Statebuilding in the Western Balkans

Christopher Bickerton and David Chandler interviewed Paddy Ashdown, international High Representative and EU Special Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, May 2002–January 2006, at the House of Lords, 5 July 2006. He is currently working on a book distilling the lessons of his experience of statebuilding in the region.     

Václav Havel's Absurd Route to Democracy

Abstract

This article examines Václav Havel's unconventional route to democracy. At the core of the enquiry is an analysis of the role his Absurdism played in the development of his thought and activism. The essay illustrates how a typically literary, non-democratic intellectual orientation sustained Havel in his struggle for democratic political change against the abuses of really existing socialism. Yet, Havel's thought did not stop there; he eyed Western liberal ism critically as well. Springing from his Absurdist sensibility was a vision of democracy that was neither wholly liberal nor socialist, yet quite practical. By making a case for reconsidering ideas that typically fall outside the purview of democratic theory, this article also suggests the possibility of critically rethinking democracy itself.     

Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

Abstract

This paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his The great transformation. However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons's concept of debt into Polanyi's framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi's unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money.     

A psychiatrist's view of disturbed relationships

Orwell's writings and the testimony of people who knew him confirm that the author of 1984 was touched by the antisemitic milieu in which he grew up. His struggle to come to terms with this important part of his background was not always successful.     

The Accursed Share: Bataille as Historical Thinker

Abstract

This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his master-work. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading. The aim of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole.     

After Michael Banton: some reflections on his contributions to the study of race

ABSTRACT

A year after the death of Michael Banton, Solomos focuses on his contributions to the study of race and ethnic relations. Over a period that began in the 1950s and continued until his death on 22 May 2018, Banton continued to make important contributions to a number of scholarly areas, including the study of race relations in urban communities, the history of racial thought, policing and community relations, and the understanding of race equality policies. His work in all of these areas has helped to shape a field of scholarship and research, and is likely to remain a point of reference for future generations of researchers. In reflecting on Banton’s varied contributions Solomos argues that there is much to be gained from engaging with his work. He concludes by exploring some of the critiques of his key contributions.