[This entry provides Ukrainian and Russian translations of a recent post on totalitarian evil offered as a gesture of support for potential Ukrainian readers. The translation is based on Google Translate. If you are in Ukraine or Russia, please comment if you can...] Очевидно, що люди створюють зло; але людьми часто керують тоталітарні ідеології, які роблять можливим …
Evil consequences of totalitarian ideologies
It is evident that human beings create evil; but human beings are often driven and dominated by totalitarian ideologies that make great evils possible. One of those ideologies of the last century was Stalinism — the view that the success of Soviet Communism is the highest good; any sacrifice is justified; those who stand in …
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Tolstoy’s characterization of Napoleon as lawless brigand (Putin)
One of Leo Tolstoy's characteristic beliefs about history in War and Peace is the idiocy of the notion of "great men" who make history. In this light his characterization of Napoleon as a lawless, aimless, and murderous brigand is revealing. And his description is oddly striking when we consider the current world's tinpot Napoleon seeking dominion over …
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Tolstoy’s philosophy of history
Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox is a particularly interesting combination of philosophical analysis and literary criticism. Berlin is a brilliant interpreter of nineteenth-century Russian thought, and Tolstoy's War and Peace is one of the most important novels of that period. In "The Hedgehog and the Fox" Berlin provides a close study of the philosophy of history …
Can Nietzsche support a decent political philosophy?
Nietzsche's anti-moralism is a key theme in his philosophy and civilizational criticism. He regarded traditional European morality as "herd morality", the deplorable consequence of Christian values of subordination and ressentiment. It is hard enough to find in Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals a basis for criticizing even the most grotesque examples of interpersonal brutality and violence, and …
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Realism about social entities
Critical realism depends on the key notion that sociologists are justified in construing their statements about social entities as real, objective features of the social world — “intransitive” objects, in Bhaskar’s somewhat idiosyncratic vocabulary. But does a realist ontology actually require this assumption? Or are there realist interpretations of sociological theory that do not “reify” …
Machiavelli and the totalitarian state
Isaiah Berlin's essay on Machiavelli in Against the Current is penetrating and detailed, valuable both for the specialist and the general philosophical reader. Berlin demonstrates an uncanny knowledge of the range of interpretations and criticisms that have been offered for the ideas presented in The Prince and the many wildly contradictory interpretations that have arisen. Was Machiavelli an amoral …
The open texture of the social world
What is involved in arriving at scientific knowledge about the social world? The position I have consistently taken emphasizes contingency and heterogeneity of the social: the social world is a mixture of diverse processes and structures; it is constituted by socially constituted and socially situated actors, leading to ineliminable features of contingency and heterogeneity; and …
Philosophies of the far right
image: Joseph de Maistre The ideologies of the far right have a particularly strong grip on a segment of democratic society in the current epoch. This is evident in the extremism of the current leadership of the GOP, and it is evident as well in the growth of hate-based groups in the United States (link). …
Classification of political systems and theories
Graph of political systems (click image for full resolution) It is possible to analyze much of the history of modern political philosophy -- political theory since Hobbes and Locke -- in terms of answers to a few primary questions. (This post expands upon a discussion of the "topology" of the space of political theories; link.) The …
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Understanding Society 