People Power?
The phrase “liberal democracy” has degenerated into an ideological cliché
Democracy is not an all-knowing and arrogant Ideology. It is its antidote. ...
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Chimpanzee Culture Wars
Cultural primatology in the Anthropocene
Photo Credit: Observing chimpanzee cultures in the wild, Bossou, Guinea / Nicolas Langlitz
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As the culture wars became more heated in the 1980s, significant parts of American cultural anthropology broke ties with evolutionary anthropology. Supposedly, the evolutionists’ Panglossian perspective regarded human life as perfectly adapted and thereby naturalized the status quo ...
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Impeachment and Rousseau’s General Will
Insight from the Past on the Politics of the Present
The article encapsulates many of the debates leading up to the president’s impeachment -- that it is grossly inappropriate for presidents (but presumably any government officials) to prioritize their own personal or private interests above the national interest. In impeaching Trump on this count the House emphasizes that while a ...
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Reviving Humanities Education
A counterintuitive suggestion
A 2017 Pew Research Center poll reveals a majority of Republicans believe American universities have a negative impact on the country. It seems the nation’s system of higher education is falling prey to growing political polarization. Just as Republicans have increasingly come to distrust other seemingly liberal institutions, such as the ...
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Critical Love
Night of Philosophy Love Symposium
Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was ...
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Authenticity, American Style
The meaning of authenticity in the era of “reality show” politics
In her 2012 book The Politics of Authenticity in American Presidential Campaigns, Erica Seifert documents the growing importance over a 25-year period of the voters’ perception of candidates’ authenticity in determining the outcome of presidential elections. In recent years Al Gore, John Kerry and Mitt Romney’s bids for the presidency were all ...
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Rousseau and Critical Theory
An excerpt from Alessandro Ferrara’s latest book
Among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity's potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic.
The idea ...
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The Promise and Logic of Federations, and The Problem of Their Stability
Historians are right to describe the 19th century as the age of nationalism. While many also depict the 20th as the triumph of the nation-state, with more justice it could be called the century of its failure, despite the vast proliferation of the form. If collapsing empires brought us the first World ...
Hannah and Me: Understanding Politics in Dark Times
Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of ...
The Discarded and the Dignified – Part 3
From the Failed Witness to “You are the Eyes of the World”
Failed witnessing: The Drowned and the Saved
The pivotal function of the moral third in relation to collective trauma is constituted by the acknowledgment of violation by the others who serve as witness. At a social level this role is played by the eyes and voice of the world that watches ...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The search for authenticity in consumer culture
Milan Kundera begins his novel Immortality with a description of a gesture made by a woman he is observing at a swimming pool. This woman, who we will come to know as Agnes in the story, smiles and waves at the lifeguard who has just been giving her ...
Democracy and the Spectacle: On Rousseau’s Homeopathic Strategy
Rousseau maintains that the spectacle isolates us at the very same moment when it brings us together. In this talk, delivered as 2013 Cassirer Lecture at the University of Gothenburg, I argue that this striking remark must be understood within the more general framework of a critique of the spectacular ...
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