This essay conducts a reading of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Jacques Rancière’s respective theorizations of the image. Using Nancy’s notion of literary communism, I first show how he and Rancière conceive the image as a site of community’s open writing and contestation. My reading then demonstrates how this “communism of the image” exposes Rancière’s repetition of an ontological gesture that he has attempted to dismiss as Heideggerian.

This paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were essential (...) to art at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simply disappear, often without public discussion, and on the other hand, some actors use their political power to build monuments that promote their private political views. (shrink)

Y a-t-il un art communiste? was given as a talk at the Grand Palais in Paris on 10 April 2019 on the occasion of a special exhibition, Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets (Rouge: Art et utopie au pays des Soviets). The exhibition ran from 20 March 2019 to 1 July 2019. Red displayed works produced in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. This covers early experiments (...) by avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayokovsky and Kazimir Malevich, the grand-scale construction of public monuments, and the mass-produced art of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like many of Jacques Rancière’s recent publications on art, this article closely engages the material of its source exhibit, and, in it, he addresses the full range of art staged by the Grand Palais, offering a direct and provocative confrontation with the question of whether there can be a communist art. (shrink)

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher and revolutionary socialist, who developed the socio-political theory of Marxism. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a German industrialist, social scientist, political theorist and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx. Compiled by Institute of Marxism-Leninism, this Soviet-era, English language edition includes "the most important works of Marx and Engels.".

Mihai Ralea was a university professor and prominent representative of the Romanian interwar literary intelligentsia. M. Ralea taught psychology, sociology and aesthetics, and was at the same time the director of a reputed literary magazine (Viaţa românească-Romanian Life). Ralea was also a politician, initially an important member of the National Peasant Party, representing its centre left wing. In his case, one may notice the contradiction between his moral arguments in public and his deeds after he reached positions of power (Minister (...) of Labour under the royal dictatorship, Minister of Arts under the pro-communist Petru Groza government, etc.). Ralea was also called “the moralist without morals”, and the compromises he made – manifested through his adherence to anti-democratic regimes – can be documented by numerous archival documents. Due to strong political connections, Ralea survived in the high ranks of cultural bureaucracy even during cultural Stalinism. He maintained important positions both at the University of Bucharest and with humanities research institutes of the post-1948 Soviet-style Romanian Academy of Sciences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he also gained posi-tions of international cultural representation with the Romanian branch of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNES-CO) and the Romanian Institute for the Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (IRRCS, the Romanian VOKS). His survival (as a professor of psychology after 1948) had a significant price – Ralea’s collaboration with the Stalinist regime. Using open sources and also newly declassified archival documents, the article is an attempt to approach M. Ralea’s case of survival in the high cultural bureaucracy in the East European context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dark Arts of Politics:Aesthetics and Engineering in Nazism and FascismJonathan AllenThe Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 271 pp.Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Architect, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 291 pp.Despite their obvious centrality to the history of the twentieth century, sixty years after the (...) defeat of the Axis powers fascism and Nazism remain elusive phenomena, hard to define with any real clarity. Scholars wrangle not only over the identification of their central characteristics but also over whether the similarities between fascism and Nazism are close enough to justify considering them as parts of a single category. A growing number of studies, however, ranging from general histories such as Norman Davies's Europe: A History and Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, to more specialized works such as Zeev Sternhell's Neither Left Nor Right and Robert Paxton's fine The Anatomy of Fascism, argue the case for treating fascism and Nazism together.1 A mark of all of these books is their willingness to give serious attention to fascist ideologies and to the interactions between these ideologies and fascist practice and culture. This interest, in turn, makes it necessary to examine anew broader questions about the relations between fascism and the circumstances and attitudes of modern life.The two works under consideration here—The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, by Eric Michaud, and Building Fascism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp—share the growing concern to take seriously fascist ideology and culture as essential to an understanding of the movement. Michaud sets out to present an analysis of Nazi myth, which he argues was constructed with reference to two models: art and Christianity (xii). His immensely erudite study relates Nazi conceptions of the leader to Romantic views of genius and Christian doctrines concerning the role of the Savior. This allows him to present a distinctive view of Nazi ideology, one that relates it to themes and debates that have figured prominently in the history of European culture and belief. [End Page 113]Schnapp, on the other hand, focuses on the career of a single man—Gaetano Ciocca. Though Ciocca is now an obscure figure, unlikely to be familiar even to most students of fascism, Schnapp argues that his career deserves attention for several reasons. In the first place, he "strove to translate a fascist politics into the language of modern technics in the domains of architecture, urbanism, theater design, animal husbandry, drainage and transportation systems" (7). What is more, Ciocca was no power-hungry opportunist but rather a committed and reflective intellectual, who spent much of his time writing books and articles aimed at explaining and justifying his various projects to a general audience. Last but not least, though Ciocca's passionate commitment to fascism cooled as World War II wore on, this had no visible effect on his engineering projects. In the aftermath of the war, Ciocca presented himself as a nonpolitical "rebuilder" concerned to provide for popular need. In this guise, he served Italy's postwar liberal democracy as enthusiastically as he had previously devoted his projects to the cause of fascism. Ciocca thus presents us with an intriguing puzzle: a committed and reflective fascist intellectual—no Eichmann, Schnapp insists—who was nevertheless able to function equally effectively after the demise of the fascist regime. Schnapp argues that Ciocca's career forces us to examine with care the complex relations between technologies and political ideologies. In fact, I think it compels us to consider more general questions about the extent to which Ciocca's conception of himself as a modernizing technocrat could be equally at home in the political contexts of fascism and a certain kind of elite-centered liberal democracy. Schnapp hints at this issue at several moments but does not address it in a sustained way.Though there have been some notable exceptions, most studies of Nazism in particular have tended to gravitate toward one of two explanatory options. The first, more common in philosophical circles, has been to view... (shrink)

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular (regressive fascist) type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another (progressive communist) type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and (...) aesthetics also changes. Benjamin analyzes dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology. (shrink)

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. 'Art and Postcapitalism' argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as (...) it merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism. (shrink)

This book reveals how, when, where and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Tauber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of (...) energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby; water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Mohology-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson's theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage's concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson's philosophies, Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship. (shrink)

The Art and Craft of Political Theory provides a critical overview of the discipline's core concepts and concerns and its development of critical thinking and practical judgment. The field's interdisciplinary strengths are deployed to grapple with emerging issues and engage afresh enduring ideals and quandaries. While conventional definitions of key concepts are provided, original and controversial perspectives are also explored, revealing continuity in a tradition of thought while emphasizing its diversity and innovations. The Art and Craft of Political Theory illustrates (...) the analytic and interpretive skills, the moral and philosophic discernment, and the historical knowledge needed to appreciate a tradition of thought, to contest its claims, and to make good use of its insights. Topics include: - Science, Ideology, and Normative Theory - Biology, Culture, Human Nature, Power and Violence - Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Thought - Liberty, Equality, Justice, Reason, and Democracy - Racial, Religious, Gender, and Economic Identities - Liberalism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Anarchism, Feminism, and Environmentalism - Social Media, Automation, Artificial intelligence and other Emerging Technologies This concise, lively, and accessibly written book is essential reading for all students of political theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 493-512 [Access article in PDF] William Morris: Art, Work, and Leisure Ruth Kinna William Morris's most important contribution to British socialist thought is often said to be his elaboration of a plan for the socialist future. E. P. Thompson, for example, argued that Morris was "a pioneer of constructive thought as to the organization of socialist life within Communist society." 1 (...) His vision of socialism, famously captured in his utopian novel News From Nowhere, was inspired by a number of principles, but perhaps its most notable feature was the demand that labor be made attractive. 2 As John Drinkwater noted shortly after Morris's death, Morris passionately believed that an individual who is "overworked, or employed all the while in degrading work... cannot be himself." The message of his socialism, in Drinkwater's view "one of the profoundest and most inspiriting that it has been given to any man to deliver," was that "in bringing back joy to their daily work [men]... would put their feet on the first step towards... true dignity and pride of life." 3Since Drinkwater's comments, Morris's ideas about the organization of labor in socialism have attracted a considerable amount of attention. Most scholars have argued that his ideas were underpinned by two separate concerns: his hostility to the effects of industrialization and his opposition to the division of labor. As Fiona McCarthy notes, Morris not only protested against the pollution, congestion, and "squalid industrial waste" produced by "uncontrolled factory production," he also spoke out against the "rigid organization of the factory [End Page 493] which keeps the operative virtually chained to a single repetitive task." 4 Though both aspects of Morris's work have generated considerable scholarly interest, the first has attracted more attention than the second. A. L. Morton preferred to examine Morris's attacks on the effects of industrialization in order to counter the impression that his complaints were anti-modern or that his socialism required a return to premechanized methods of production. 5 Others have argued, more positively, that the proposals Morris made for the reorganization and for the improvement of factory production in particular set him apart from his contemporaries. 6 Recently, eco-socialist writers have developed this line of thought and extolled Morris as a precursor of green theory. 7 By contrast, Morris's views about the division of labor have not been seen as either controversial or distinctive. In some accounts his ideas are straightforwardly compared to Marx's. 8 Others suggest that his understanding of the division of labor was hazy. Paul Meier, for example, argues that Morris was unclear about the problems that the division of labor raised and that he only discussed it in a very general way. 9 Both these approaches mistakenly emphasize the separateness of the two elements in Morris's thought, and the relationship between his critique of industrialization and the division of labor has been neglected. I will argue that it is this relationship, and not the two respective parts, which holds the key to his demand for the realization of attractive labor.Morris integrated his ideas about industrialization and the division of labor into a wider analysis of the relationship between work and leisure. He began to think about this relationship before he committed himself to socialism in 1883, but his mature thought was influenced by Fourier as well as Marx. The two led him to conceptualize the relationship in two distinct ways. In the first he contrasted work with leisure and suggested that attractive labor required the reduction of necessary labor time; in the second he identified work with leisure and defined attractive labor as the exercise and expression of human creativity. As will be seen, these two conceptions were not easily reconciled. The first led Morris to argue that the realization of attractive labor was dependent upon the division of labor and the increase in productivity which it fostered; the second convinced him that attractive labor required a change in working practices and [End Page 494] that its realization... (shrink)

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed (...) to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

This paper discusses the politics of remembering and the representation of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary art referring to the Lego Concentration Camp by Zbigniew Libera. The paper presents the ways in which Libera’s work challenges the traditional ways of representing the Holocaust and how it engages with issues such as the relation between atrocity and aesthetics. The associations brought to this mode of representation by the notions of game and toys and whether theatricality and play are in dialogue with (...) or violate the historical experience of the Holocaust is also discussed. The paper investigates the specificity of the Polish context in the way the Holocaust is approached and the reactions these artistic attempts raise in the public. Do the unconventional and shocking representations help understand the Holocaust or do they create the opposite effect of misguided and trivialised reading of history? (shrink)

An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.

In The Necessity of Art Ernst Fischer develops a Marxist aesthetics in the humanist tradition, arguing art’s necessity as both a vehicle of social criticism and as an essential element of humanity. These twin themes place Fischer’s work, then, at the centre of issues in Marxist aesthetics that have traditionally proved contentious: firstly, about the function of art, both under capitalism and universally; and about the relationship – causal or otherwise – between economic conditions and art. Fischer’s aesthetics overemphasises the (...) humanising possibilities of great works of art to the neglect of an everyday aesthetics that argues the possibilities for aesthetic lives based on good work under communism. But he provides a theoretic start to effectively countering structuralist Marxism, and he was in his lifetime – as John Berger’s Introduction movingly conveys – a powerful opponent of the bureaucratisation of art under Zhdanov’s Socialist-Realist creed. (shrink)

Utopian dreams of a fundamentally different world would seem to have little place in the de-radicalized political arena of the post-communist age. This article challenges this idea by ethnographically examining three cases of electoral politics in the contemporary United States, which can be seen as a “least likely” context for electoral utopianism. Evidence from these cases – the 2008 Obama campaign, 2016 Sanders campaign, and local organizing work of the Green Party – is used to make three claims: utopianism is (...) present in the US electoral arena; utopianism and electoral instrumentalism are not incompatible and may “need” each other; and the relationship between utopianism and instrumentalism varies, resulting in multiple types of utopian politics. The article’s key contribution is to theorize and illustrate three such types. (shrink)

This book offers an original and challenging study of Marx's contact with the visual arts, aesthetic theories, and art policies in nineteenth-century Europe. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory in looking at Marx's views from an art-historical rather than from a literary perspective, and in placing those views in the context of the art practices, theories, and policies of Marx's own time. Dr Rose begins her work by discussing Marx's planned treatise on Romantic art of 1842 against (...) the background of the philosophical debates, cultural policies, and art practices of the 1840s, and looks in particular at the patronage given to the group of German artists known as the 'Nazarenes' in those years, who are discussed in relation to both the English Pre-Raphaelites, popular in the London known to Marx, and to the Russian Social Realists of the 1860s. The author goes on to consider claims of twentieth-century Marxist art theories and practices to have represented Marx's own views on art. The book the conflicting claims made on Marx's views by the Soviet avant-garde Constructivists of the 1920s and of the Socialist Realists who followed them are considered, and are related back to the aesthetic theories and practices discussed in the earlier chapters. (shrink)

It is not well known that in the context of the unofficial artistic and philosophical scene of the ČSSR there was an aesthetically refined and theoretically differentiated reflection on the different degrees and limits of visibility as well as a rethinking of participation – be it aesthetic, epistemic or political. In this paper I first investigate the relation between history and (in)visibility in its broadest sense: questions such as ‘whose history is present’ and ‘what visual memory building strategies are used’ (...) were highly controversial and deeply politicised. For many artists and philosophers such as Zorka Ságlová or Jan Patočka the very act of remembering and the active, critical engagement with (visual) culture and history thus became an act of resistance. I then explore how artists subtly intervened in and transformed the monitored public space, and often tried to undermine given regimes of visibility. I demonstrate that these manifold ‘dissident’ practices engendered new aesthetic experiences and fostered powerful counter-narratives that deconstructed the official propaganda discourse of the communist regime. (shrink)

As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new person who would (...) live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin. (shrink)

Translator's introduction -- Preface -- Part I: The aesthetics of politics -- Ten theses on politics -- Does democracy mean something? -- Who is the subject of the rights of man? -- Communism : from actuality to inactuality -- The people or the multitudes -- Bio-politics or politics -- September 11 and afterwards : a rupture in the symbolic order -- Of war as the supreme form of advanced plutocratic consensus -- Part II: The politics of aesthetics -- The (...) aesthetic revolution and its outcomes -- The paradoxes of political art -- The politics of literature -- The monument and its confidences or Deleuze and Art's capacity for resistance -- The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics -- Part III: Response to critics -- The usage of distinctions. (shrink)

This study proposes a philosophical analysis of the public discourse that accompanies the cultural policy in Romania: justifications and finalities of State intervention in the cultural field, as well as representations of the roles that the public authorities attribute to culture/art. The objective is to bring into light the philosophical, political and aesthetical values that found and legitimise the cultural policies and shape the relationship between State and artists/art. It is basically about understanding the nature of representations on culture and (...) art that underlie the State intervention in the cultural field and, consequently, to determinate the ethos of the cultural policy in post-communist Romania and to expose the constraints that are still limiting its exercise. (shrink)

During the late 60s and the beginning of the 1970s, the changes within the Communist Party which followed the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the former Secretary General, led to a certain openness for culture and arts, from an ideological point of view. The so-called ideological “thaw” would not last more than 6 years, but it was needed all along in order for the new nomenklatura system of Ceauşescu’s generation to take over the rule of the state and of the party. (...) This is the broader context in which the relationship between the theatre repertories, the audience and the politics would develop further in a very insidious way. Facing a massive “peasantization of the working class” due to the regime’s investments in the industrial sector, the configuration of the urban population in Romanian cities had changed significantly. The inflow of poorly educated persons had a strong negative impact on the efforts to educate the urban population in the working-class socialist ethics. In this study we are profiling the beneficiaries of the cultural policies of the regime: What were their cultural background and their expectations regarding theatre and why did the authorities intervene in regulating the theatre market? (shrink)

Oakeshott sets out philosophical and historical views of the state. They are distinct, and their distinctiveness harmonizes with his notion of the exclusivity of philosophical and historical perspectives. The modal distinctness of philosophy, history, and practice is established in Experience and Its Modes and is then rehearsed in subsequent publications, notably in essays in Rationalism and Politics. History is a way of seeing the past that is at odds with practical thought and philosophy. It is the sign of ideology, and (...) its misperceptions of the relations between philosophy and practice that ideologists such as Lenin and Thatcher invoke abstractions of communism and the market to frame practical political decision-making. However, in considering art in the essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Oakeshott imagines art to be independent of other activities and yet to maintain a conversational relationship between the modes of experience. What is meant by a conversation? For Oakeshott, a conversation does not preclude the independence of modes of experience from one another. The closeness between philosophy, practice, and history is also assumed and yet underplayed by the argument of On Human Conduct, which imagines theory to be separate from history and practice. In this paper, it is argued that the connections between practical, historical, and philosophical modes of understanding the state in Oakeshott’s work are closer than is suggested by the metaphor of conversation and at odds with the separation that is maintained in Experience and its Modes. (shrink)

Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal (...) slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in _A Brief History of the Masses_, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989. (shrink)

How do you keep up in the age of information when there's so much to know and so little time? Here's the ideal solution: a practical book of knowledge offering in-depth analysis, detailed interpretation, and penetrating insight into the key concepts, the most influential minds, and the major intellectual movements in history. A World of Ideas is an essential tool for anyone who wants to be fully informed and stay ahead of the curve in today's world. Now you can get (...) to the bottom of the big bang theory; find out where Freud's ideas were coming from, and where Einstein's may ultimately take us; demystify surrealism and survivalism, nature and nurture, communism and capitalism. With hundreds of in-depth entries, drawn from a wide range of fields--including religion, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, history, art, literature, and science--A World of Ideas enables you to turn immediately to the term in question for a comprehensive description of its history, meaning, and context. - Hundreds of entries, alphabetically arranged, with key words and concepts highlighted and cross-referenced - Reviewed and approved by an academic board of leading scholars - A unique emphasis on multicultural influences and the long-neglected impact of women on the history of ideas - An extensive bibliography of further readings and resources Here are the concepts that shaped civilization . . . the minds that made history . . . the thinkers, the thoughts, and the theories--everything you need to know to fully understand the world we live in. Concise and authoritative, meticulously researched and lucidly written, this invaluable resource is sure to become a standard reference for years to come. (shrink)

This paper offers a memoir of living with Zygmunt Bauman. It begins with the early encounter of Bauman and Aleksandra Kania in Warsaw in 1954, where both were Masters students working with the humanist Marxist Adam Schaff. Kania and Bauman followed their separate life paths for decades, though they were both postwar communists and reconstructionists. Much later, the loss of their partners led to union, in Leeds and across the globe in travel. This is a story of friendship and mutual (...) enthusiasms, then intimacy between two working sociologists. There are also some apparent differences, as between the Lark and the Owl, or between Phosphorous and Hesperus. Life together leads especially to Italy, and to Pope Francis. This is a reflection on what Bauman called the art of life. (shrink)

A long and scholarly piece by Eva Kitt WahMan covers the history of Chinese conventionsgoverning female “beauty” from Confuciusthrough Maoism to the present day. Classicalmanuals provide highly specific requirements forcourtesans and concubines. The shrunken, pulpyappendages produced by foot-binding practiceswere regarded as the most sexually stimulatingfeatures of the female body. In 1949, following theinauguration of the Communist regime, womenwere expected to shun ornament and make-up, tohave short hair, wear party uniforms, and to lookas much like men as possible. The ideal for (...) thecontemporary Chinese woman is quite a lot likethe ideal for the courtesan of tradition, but the de-tails are drawn from western fashion magazines.Wah believes that such liberation, although it hasits advantages, is mainly nominal and fosters con-fusion. She writes: “Although Chinese womentoday are developing new self-confidence, they donot seem to be aware of the fact that one can be-come a slave of the fashion industry, which merelyrepeats the bodily constraints of past times in anew form” (p. 194). [review by Mary Mothersill, 2001 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2):211-214.]. (shrink)

Realism and Russia? Realism is a notion with multiple meanings, so options abound as to how the two might connect with one another. An old Russian proverb conveys a realist message about social properties: "An individual in Rssia was composed of three parts: a body, a soul, and a passport." (Ruben 1985, 83) Having a passport signals the possession of a complex set of social properties, and if these are taken to be real in some appropriate sense, one is inplying (...) a realist view in social ontology. In another sense of the word, realism is a live issues in the study of international relations. Political realism considers the behaviour of states by emphasizing the importance of national interests and the drive for power on the one hand, and the suppression of moral concerns on the other (e.g. Donnelly 2000). Russian realists hold diverse views about the newly emerged unipolar global power structure and Russia's proper strategy for adjusting to this structure (e.g. Shakleyina and Bogaturov 2004). Realism is a family of viewpoints also in the arts (including painting, music and literature) and their study. Socialist realism is a version that used to be an official doctrine in Russia, gently requesting artists to optimistically represent society's march towards communism, glorifying the heroic role of the proletariat in driving the process. Socialist realism was also well known elsewhere. So much so that in the 1970s, a philosophy professor at the University of Helsinki announced to give a lecture course on "scientific realism" but on its way to the university catalogue through the university administration, the title of the course was transformed into "socialist realism". In the spirit of rectifying that old administrative mistake, the remards to follow deal with scientifit realism as a philosophy of science. The general issue to be addressed is how the social sciences relate to the social world, in both directions. (shrink)

After the hell of the Nazis and the terror of Communism, it is possible that a new catastrophe has appeared on the horizon: this time it is neoliberalism that wants to create its own 'new man'. For two centuries, Kant's critical subject and Freud's neurotic subject provided us with philosophical templates for modernity, but today modern capitalism is systematically destroying these two subjects and replacing them with something new. The two subjects of modernity both presupposed some reference to a (...) higher value or power which provided a symbolic guarantor, but neoliberalism, by emphasizing the exchange of commodities in the marketplace, destroys all transcendental references of this kind. Now human beings no longer look beyond themselves and no longer have to agree about symbolic values: they only have to get on with the circulation and consumption of goods. Deprived of his faculty of judgement and urged to enjoy himself without restraint, the 'new man' of neoliberalism takes centre stage in the era of global capitalism. In this biting critique of our contemporary condition Dufour shows that the radical transformation of the subject brought about by neoliberalism - what he calls 'the art of shrinking heads' - contains a new kind of violence which has far-reaching consequences for our ways of living together. (shrink)

This argument explores the pivotal role of cinema in shaping and reflecting the sociopolitical landscape of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Under Stalin, Soviet cinema evolved into a state-controlled instrument of socialist realism, influencing cultural production throughout the Eastern Bloc. While some countries with established cinematic traditions adapted to or resisted the Soviet model, others adopted it wholesale, leading to varying degrees of creative expression and control. Through interdisciplinary contribu­tions, the latest issue of HCE highlights the duality of cinema as (...) both a tool for ideological control and a medium for dissent and creative resistance, revealing the complex interplay between art and politics in communist societies. (shrink)

During the Communist regime, after Poland was officially proclaimed the People’s Republic of Poland, the aim of the Polish Communist government was to control all aspects of society. Communist ideals were enforced in books and other publications; censorship was introduced on all published materials. This paper aims to present the situation of media in People’s Poland, as well as to provide a background and description of Polish censorship. Additionally, this paper will exposit and examine the socio-political role of Tygodnik Powszechny (...) in Polish society. As TP is a Catholic weekly, an outline of the unique socio-political role of the Polish Roman Catholic Church in communist Poland will accompany the above analysis. This paper is based on the research conducted by the author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree written and defended at the Central European University in Budapest in 2012. (shrink)

The book focuses on three interrelated issues: the relationship between modernism and postmodernism; visuality and visual culture; and the relation between the East (former European socialist countries) and the West as regards aesthetics, globalization, culture, and the mechanisms of the presentation and representation of contemporary visual art. In the first part the author reflects upon some of the less noticed issues of modernism and its dominant theoretical narratives regarding art: its privileging of truth and its obfuscation of some segments of (...) European art. One of his central tenets is that recent postsocialist politicized postmodern visual art contradicts Peter Bürger's canonical theory about the avant-garde art of the previous century. The art and culture discussed throughout this volume predominantly concern the visual. For this reason, in the second part visual culture and its uneasy relationship with art and art history are an object of reflection, a topic which is then complemented with that of the embodied eye in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Photography, its relation to truth, and the problematic expectation that an ontology of photography is possible or necessary is the theme of the closing chapter of this part of the book. In the third part the author offers a global view on philosophy of art, visual culture, and the institutions that disseminate them. (shrink)

The genesis of this decolonial study begins with an essay that discussed Exu and black diasporic culture. Its developments were responsible for the emergence of two other studies: one on Candomblé in Bahia and religious syncretism, and another on the decolonial concept of language-language as a crossroads. The article on Exu, written in English, was also responsible for the invitation to write a book chapter, also in English, on human rights, religious freedom and anti-racist struggles in black diasporic Latin America. (...) In turn, this text made possible the emergence of much of the discussion that took place in a chapter on the frontline of Jorge Amado's political struggles in the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of Brazil, when the theme of Bahianness gained momentum. Now, in this new study, which I now present, the discussion seeks to answer the questions: “What is Bahianity?” and “How does literature decode it throughout history?” To this end, I use pragmatic discourse analysis as a methodology, which is a tributary of discursive-deconstructive analysis, taking literary discourse as an observable object, since, in this approach, all discourse is the result of the historical conditions of production (cf. ARAÚJO, 2020). In other words, I resort to poetic works by Bahian authors (texts, songs), taken as discourse to answer such questions about Bahianity. (shrink)

Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development seeks to explore and develop Leon Trotsky's concept of uneven and combined development. In particular, it aims to adapt the political and historical analysis which originated in Trotsky's Russia for use within the contemporary field of world literature. As such, it draws together the work of scholars from both the field of international relations and the field of literature and the arts. This collection will therefore be of particular interest to anyone who is interested (...) in new ways of understanding world literary texts, or interested in new ways of applying Trotsky's revolutionary politics to the contemporary world order. (shrink)

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (...) (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history. (shrink)

This book offers an assessment of Sartre as an exemplary figure in the evolving political and cultural landscape of post-1945 France. Sartre's originality is located in the tense relationship that he maintained between deeply held revolutionary beliefs and a residual yet critical attachment to traditional forms of cultural expression. A series of case-studies centered on Gaullism, communism, Maoism, the theatre, art criticism, and the media, illustrates the continuing relevance and appeal of Sartre to the contemporary world.