Providing an innovative conceptualization of extremist political movements founded upon “world-historic” populations and vanguard party organizations, Vanguardism sets out a new path in investigating the intellectual and historical influences that created extremist politics, the totalitarian movements and regimes of the twentieth century, and a framework for interpreting extremism in the present. Expanding its view across the turbulent intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, Phillip W. Gray illustrates how these ideas shaped the shared ideational and organizational structures that would develop into Leninism, Fascism, and Nazism in the early twentieth century. Moving beyond the Second World War, the book explicates how vanguardism did not vanish with the war’s conclusion, but was modified throughout the period of national liberation movements and Western extremist groups over the ensuing decades. Concluding in the present with an eye to the future, Gray presents a framework for comprehending the extremist movements of today, and how organizational shifts can give us clues to the forms of totalitarian politics of tomorrow. Original and provocative, Vanguardism will become essential reading for everyone looking to understand totalitarianism and extremist politics of our time.

Vanguardism : Ideology and Organization in Totalitarian Politics

As the previous chapters have attempted to show, affectivity is not just an element of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies—affectivity as such plays a crucial orientating role. Now the details of this role have been outlined, three interrelated factors behind this ‘affective turn’ or orientation can be drawn out. Firstly, they are both committed to the ineluctable transience of living experience—experience that is always-already significant and felt as moving from and towards various relations. Seeing, as Nietzsche puts it, is always seeing-something and never a pure, immaculate gaze upon an external world, while the transience of this seeing is always-already carried well or badly in terms of euphoric or dysphoric transitions—joy and sadness in Spinoza’s terms, good or bad translations in Nietzsche’s. Their philosophical commitment to the immanence of affectivity means that the image of philosophy as a search for knowledge that can provide ultimate answers as to what is good, evil, right or wrong is thus dispensed with, for these are ultimately signs that bear witness to certain affective relations, and it is this that is important for philosophy.

Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect

What Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic Really Means

Taking the writings of Thomas Jefferson and David Walker as a starting point, this essay extrapolates a rhetorical theory of naming the enemy. In democracies, especially those built on Judeo-Christian traditions, bad character makes enemies enemies. However, as character is easily masked, the process of naming enemies is necessarily one of reading the signs. Thus, Jefferson focuses on his enemies' appearances, whereas Walker focuses on how his enemies talk. Because both means of naming the enemy are deeply flawed, democratic culture is perpetually in the process of negotiating its enemies as they are rhetorically named and unnamed.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rhetoric_and_public_affairs/v012/12.1.engels.pdf

Friend or Foe?: Naming the Enemy

In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.

Heidegger and His Jewish Reception

Of the numerous legacies bequeathed by Leo Strauss, his influence on the study of German philosophy frequently goes least mentioned. Apart from some early reviews and other occasional pieces, Strauss left no major work on any German thinker.(1) With the exception of the chapter on Max Weber in Natural Right and History and a short essay on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil written near the end of his life, there are no works on such giants of the German Aufklarung as Mendelssohn, Kant, and Hegel to rival his studies of other seminal figures in the history of political thought.(2) Why, for example, did Strauss not write a Thoughts on Kant to parallel his study of Machiavelli, or The Argument and Action of Hegel's `Philosophy of Right' to complement his commentary on the Laws of Plato, or The Literary Character of Nietzsche's `Zarathustra' modeled after his essay on Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed? In any case, for a thinker like Strauss who has emphasized that what a person does not say is almost as important as what he does, such a startling omission calls for comment. The one partial exception to Strauss's generally curt treatment of German philosophy is, of course, Martin Heidegger.(3) One could almost say that Heidegger is the unnamed presence to whom or against whom all of Strauss's writings are in large part directed. Strauss's acquaintance with Heidegger went back to the early twenties. He described how upon hearing Heidegger in 1922, it slowly became evident that Heidegger was preparing a "revolution" in thought the likes of which had not been experienced since Hegel.(4) Heidegger brought to the study of philosophy a "passion" to the problems which showed up the "lostness" and emptiness of the then regnant academic orthodoxies, including that of his erstwhile dissertation adviser, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. The famous confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in 1929 confirmed this fact for anyone with "sensitivity to greatness."(5) At the same time that Heidegger commanded Strauss's highest respect, he also elicited many of his sharpest criticisms. Heidegger accepted Nietzsche's proposition that human life and thought is radically historical. The meaning of Heidegger's "radical historicism" was not void of political consequences.(6) Heidegger was not the only thinker of note but he was the greatest thinker to embrace Hitler's revolution of 1933. Since the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism in 1989 the now infamous "Heidegger problem" has become something of a public scandal.(7) Strauss pointed to this scandal long ago. "One is bound to misunderstand Heidegger's thought radically," he wrote, if one does not see its "intimate connection" to the events of 1933.(8) Heidegger may have surpassed all his contemporaries in terms of "speculative intelligence," yet he was "at the same time intellectually the counterpart of what Hitler was politically."(9) Indeed, Strauss notes that Heidegger, who had never praised any other contemporary political movement or leader, even refused to repudiate National Socialism long after Hitler had been "muted."(10) It is one thing to trace the influence of Heidegger on Strauss, quite another to evaluate it. Does Strauss's alleged "Heideggerianism" provide the reader with a critical perspective on some of the problems of modernity not available to those operating within a more standard liberal democratic framework? Or does Strauss's appropriation of certain Heideggerian tropes lead to dangerous antiliberal doctrines crucially at odds with the spirit of individualistic modernity? This latter possibility has been developed at considerable length by the French critic Luc Ferry in his book Rights--The New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.(11) Here we find the most impressive case to date alleging Strauss's indebtedness to Heidegger and bemoaning the political consequences of that indebtedness. The core of The New Quarrel is that Strauss took over Heidegger's wholesale critique of modernity, but turned it away from first philosophy or "fundamental ontology" and gave it a more directly political meaning. …

Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger

G. W. F. Hegel's account of slavery is unique in the annals of thought in its attempt to derive slavery neither from nature, nor providence, nor chance, but from the very structure of self-consciousness. Hegel's account of the resolution of the struggle of master and slave reads almost like a burlesque on Aristotle's account of slavery in the Politics. The basis for slavery is the need of one self-conscious mind to be recognized by another. Marx's entire critique of political economy, and therewith his analysis of slavery, could well have developed out of an internal analysis of the paragraphs on civil society in the Philosophy of Right. The core of Marx's critique is that civil society is not an emancipatory institution but the creator of new forms of domination and servitude, which he characterizes by the term "alienation." Nietzsche was less concerned with the economic aspects of domination than he was with the political.

Hegel on Slavery and Domination

AMONG STUDENTS OF SPINOZA it is generally acknowledged that chapter 16 represents a new beginning in the Theologico-Political Treatise. There is, however, considerably less agreement as to what this new beginning signifies. For some it marks a radical new teaching about the state of nature and natural law, while for others it is regarded as derivative of the more fundamental and pathbreaking work initiated by Hobbes.(1) Less often, though, is chapter 16 regarded as the birth place of modern democratic theory. Yet a century before Rousseau, Spinoza embraced democracy as the form of government most consistent with the natural law and in agreement with human liberty.(2) There are several reasons that have contributed to the neglect of the Treatise as a classic of modem democratic theory. In the first place, Spinoza's political theory is buried three quarters of the way through the Treatise and comes to light only after the reader has slogged through a long and painstaking discussion of biblical philology and criticism. Second, Spinoza's defense of democracy is undergirded by a naturalistic metaphysics that is more immoralist than Hobbes and scarcely to the taste of most modem readers.(3) And third, Spinoza remained wedded to certain premodern notions about the difference between the intellectuals and the vulgar which, it is believed, undercut his democratic commitments.(4) Here I want to propose a reconsideration of the Treatise as a neglected source of democratic theory. My contention is that Spinoza's support of democracy is twofold: first as the regime most consistent with the modem "scientific" interpretation of natural law and justice and second as the regime most likely to foster the intellectual and rational capacities of its citizens. At the same time that Spinoza advocated democracy as the most rational regime, I want to show that he was keenly aware of the limitations of democratic rule. While he regarded democracy as the best regime (optima Republica), he did not regard it as the highest good (ens perfectissimum) for the individual. In the end there will always be a disproportion between the democratic citizen and the intensely personal, even solitary, character of the philosophical life. Before examining the arguments of chapter 16, it is necessary to say something about its place in the architecture of the Treatise as a whole. Beginning with a treatment of prophets and prophecy in the first three chapters, Spinoza takes up in succession the themes of the divine and ceremonial law (4-5), miracles (6), and the proper method of scriptural interpretation (7). He proceeds, then, to a lengthy discussion of the order and composition of the books of the Torah (8-11), the status of the Gospels (11-13), and the proper relation of faith and philosophy (14-15). This section of the Treatise culminates in Spinoza's announcement of a new "catholic" or universal religion (fidei universalis) that is said to be nothing more than a distillation of the moral teachings of the prophets and apostles culled from both Testaments. The essence of the Treatise's new moral theology is an unprecedented doctrine of charity and justice interpreted to mean toleration and non-interference with the beliefs of others. Basing this religion on precepts allegedly common to both Judaism and Christianity, this religion is intended to serve as a civil theology for the new democratic state with Spinoza himself as its secular messiah.(5) Chapter 16 begins with the following announcement. "Hitherto [Huc]," Spinoza remarks, "our care has been to separate philosophy from theology, and to show the freedom of thought which such separation insures to both" but "it is now time [quare tempus est] to determine the limits to which freedom of thought and discussion may extend itself in the ideal state [optima Republica: best regime]."(6) Having spent fifteen chapters defending the necessity of freedom of opinion and belief, Spinoza proposes spending the next five showing what, if any, are the limits of that freedom. …

Spinoza's Democratic Turn: Chapter 16 of the 'Theologico-Political Treatise.'

I IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT Rene Descartes is the founder of modern philosophy. (1) There is far less consensus on the question of what his modernity means. The majority of Descartes's readers have focused on the cogito, the "I think" that is the fons et origo of all knowledge. The method of doubt and the famous rules of evidence have played a crucial role in the formation of a distinctively modern search for foundations of truth. (2) Political theorists have frequently treated Descartes as the harbinger of a new age, but there is widespread disagreement over precisely what this means. Tocqueville regarded the Cartesian method as ideally suited to the new democratic age. "The philosophical method established by Descartes," he wrote, "is not only French but democratic, which explains why it was so easily accepted in all of Europe, whose face it has contributed so much to changing." (3) For Michael Oakeshott, Descartes, along with Bacon, created a new aggressive form of rationalism summarized in his expression "the sovereignty of technique." (4) For Sheldon Wolin, Descartes inaugurated a new form of "methodism" in the study of politics that became the forerunner of modern behavioral social science. (5) More recently, feminist theorists have chastised Cartesian epistemology with its mind-body distinction for contributing to the myth of the "Man of Reason." (6) Even more prominently, Descartes has become the universal whipping boy for postmodernists who regard his thought as being at the core of two distinctively modern pathologies: subjectivity and aggressiveness. The Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker, it is alleged, was said to make the monadic subject the sole basis for truth. Likewise, it was the very rootlessness of the Cartesian subject, unmoored from the restraining bonds of tradition, custom, and history, that has authorized a domineering and controlling posture toward nature and the environment. According to no less an authority than Martin Heidegger, Cartesianism carries the seed of totalitarianism characterized by the techniques of mastering nature and the full-scale domination of society. He has become a virtual poster child for every evil from genetic engineering to environmental devastation. (7) It is not just that the postmodern reading of Descartes borders on caricature (of course it does). Rather, the caricature depends on a specific misreading of Descartes as a thinker concerned with purely metaphysical and epistemological problems (what can I know?) at the expense of moral and ethical ones (what should I do?). A close reading of the Discourse on Method shows that the book is not about the creation of some anonymous epistemological subject called ego cogitans but is the autobiography of one real, historical individual, Rene Descartes. (8) The Discourse was published in 1637, when Descartes was 41 years of age. Here he tells the story of his background and education at the Jesuit college of La Fleche ("one of the most famous schools in Europe"); his disillusionment with his teachers and the books of ancient and modern philosophy on which he had been brought up; his discovery of his famous rules of method during a daylong confinement in a stove-heated room after having been called by the war then raging in Germany (the Thirty Years War); his elucidation of a "provisional moral code" by which to conduct himself during this period of intellectual experimentation; and his continued wanderings that led him finally to settle in Holland ("amidst this great mass of busy people who are more concerned with their own affairs than curious about those of others"). (9) The Discourse was not published as a stand-alone text but as an introduction to three essays on physical subjects including his treatise on optics. It has become common to view the work as a response to the crisis of skepticism provoked by the rehabilitation of ancient Pyrrhonism. Descartes was but the best known of the figures who were attached to the group around Marin Mersenne that included not only Gassendi but Hobbes. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20130344

Steven B. Smith

Papers

Destruktion or Recovery?: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger

Hegel on Slavery and Domination

Spinoza's Democratic Turn: Chapter 16 of the 'Theologico-Political Treatise.'

An Exemplary Life: The Case of Rene Descartes