1 Introduction
At a time when even ‘liberal’ is often a slur in American culture, it’s easy to forget that ‘socialist’ was once a perfectly respectable political position in the land of the free. None other than Albert Einstein wrote a proud defense of socialism at the height of the Cold War. Like Einstein and so many others, I’m happy to be called leftist and socialist. (Page 1)
What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which undergird the real exercise of political rights. (Page 1)
diferencias derechos cita favorite política izquierda derecha
What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. (Page 2)
I am unwilling to cede the word ‘left,’ or accept the binary suggestion that those who aren’t woke must be reactionary. Instead, I’ll examine how many of today’s self-identified left have abandoned core ideas any leftist should hold. (Page 3)
izquierda woke diferencias política
it’s not small differences that separate me from those who are woke. These are not only matters of style or tone; they go to the very heart of what it means to stand on the left. The right may be more dangerous, but today’s left has deprived itself of the ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the right. (Page 3)
The woke are not a movement in any traditional sense. The first recorded use of the phrase stay woke was in the great bluesman Lead Belly’s 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” dedicated to nine black teenagers whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by years of international protests. Staying woke to injustice, being on the watch for signs of discrimination–what could be wrong with that? Yet in a few short years, woke was transformed from a term of praise to a term of abuse. (Page 4)
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Woke has become a politics of symbols instead of social change. (Page 5)
Lo Woke se ha transformado en una política de símbolos más que de un cambio social efectivo.
favorite cita política izquierda woke
The fact that rightwing politicians spit out the word woke with scorn should not stop us from examining it. (Page 5)
argumento política análisis crítica woke
What’s confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses traditional left-wing emotions: empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions that ultimately undermine them. (Page 5)
What unites very different intellectual movements bound together by the word theory is a rejection of the epistemological frameworks and political assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment. (Page 6)
People are diverse. Neither black nor white nor brown communities are homogenous. We do things for other reasons than being members of a tribe. (Page 7)
Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally it was the right that focused on the first, the left that emphasized the second. That tradition has been turned around when a liberal politician like Hillary Clinton applauds the election of Italy’s first female prime minister as a “break with the past,” ignoring the fact that Giorgia Meloni’s positions are closer to Italy’s fascist past than those of any of its political leaders since the war. (Page 8)
Given the facts, it’s puzzling to see the fascination for studying Schmitt by those who are concerned with colonialism, or to hear philosophers concerned with labor rights speak of reading Heidegger against Heidegger. For in fact, many of the theoretical assumptions that support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they despise. The best tenets of woke, like the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come straight from the Enlightenment. But contemporary rejections of the Enlightenment usually go hand in hand without much knowledge of it. This book is written in the hope that philosophy can untangle the confusions that theory has created–and strengthen our political practice in the process. You cannot hope to make progress by sawing at the branch you don’t know you are sitting on. (Page 9)
Perhaps the most important thing that distinguishes practitioners of theory from Enlightenment thinkers is that the latter had no intention of writing for a small, select audience; they wrote clearly, without jargon, in the interest of reaching the widest number of readers. (Even Kant, the most difficult of Enlightenment philosophers, wrote fifteen perfectly intelligible essays for a general audience.) I work hard to follow their example. (Page 10)
2 Universalism and Tribalism
Let’s begin with the idea of universalism, which once defined the left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. (Page 11)
To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false. (Page 11)
Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive, somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, but now this is only so when it is done by other people. Self-essentializing and self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered empowering. (Page 13)
Otro autor. Benjamin Zachariah
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I’m not the first to point out that diversifying power structures without asking what the power is used for can simply lead to stronger systems of oppression. (Page 14)
At Ian Malcolm’s suggestion, Canadian comedian Ryan Long interviewed a variety of bystanders on the question of whether offshore interrogators, which is CIA-speak for torturers, should become more diverse. The fact that he was taken seriously is not funny at all. (Page 14)
Identity politics embodies a major shift that began in the mid twentieth century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. (Page 15)
historia sujeto héroe identidad cita víctimas política
As an alternative to preceding millennia, when the survivor of a massacre by Roman legions or Mongol invaders could expect no more than a laconic “shit happens,” this was a step toward progress. Yet something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim; the impulse that began in generosity turned downright perverse. (Page 15)
Prevailing over victimhood, as Douglass did, could be a source of pride; victimhood itself was not. (Page 16)
Yet undergoing suffering isn’t a virtue it all, and it rarely creates any. Victimhood should be a source of legitimation for claims to restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether. (Page 16)
Táíwò argues that trauma, at best, is an experience of vulnerability that provides a connection to most of the people on the planet, but “it is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or decide for a group.” (ibid.) He argues that the valorization of trauma leads to a politics of self-expression rather than social change. (Page 18)
I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you. This wouldn’t return the victims to the ash-heap of history. It allows us to honor caring for victims as a virtue without suggesting that being a victim is one as well. (Page 19)
Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialize that component over which we have the least control. (Page 19)
Tribalism is a description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else. (Page 20)
Tribalism is even more paradoxical today, since we know that the idea of race was created by racists. (Page 20)
Through most of the nineteenth century, neither the Jews nor the Irish counted as white. Concepts need not be biological in order to have meaning; social constructs are just as real as social conditions like racism make them. (Page 20)
Even when it takes on a radical temper, identity politics is interest-group politics. It aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place. (Page 21)
Todd Gitlin
the more the consensus grows that racial categories have no place in science, the more tenaciously they play a role in political culture. (Page 21)
every argument against slavery, colonialism, racism, or sexism is embodied in the question “Is she not a human being?” (Page 22)
Appealing to the humanity of those who are being dehumanized is the universal form we use to respond to oppression everywhere. That Jefferson and Kant did not practice what they preached is no argument against the sermon. (Page 23)
Universalism is under fire on the left because it’s conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests. (Page 23)
the idea that one law should apply to Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of their common humanity is a recent achievement, which now shapes our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognize it as an achievement at all. (Page 24)
Schmitt suggests that universalist concepts like humanity are Jewish inventions meant to disguise particular Jewish interests seeking power in a non-Jewish society. The argument is perilously close to the contemporary argument that Enlightenment universalism disguises particular European interests seeking power in an increasingly non-white world. (Page 25)
Schmitt cree que “humanidad” es un concepto judío instrumental para que estos alcancen el poder.
poder judíos política ilustración propósito
In this sense Foucault was right to say that the human is a recent invention. Like other products of the modern, it was not one he valued, and he expected it to disappear. “Our task,” he wrote, “is to emancipate ourselves from humanism”–which requires accepting the death of the human, as he prophesied in his early The Order of Things. (Page 25)
The left-wing turn to tribalism is particularly tragic because the early civil rights and anti-colonialist movements resolutely opposed tribal thinking in all its forms. Their strengths were expressed in songs that claimed: “All men are slaves till their brothers are free.” Tribalism is a dangerous game, as the right realized very early. If the demands of minorities are not seen as human rights but as the rights of particular groups, what prevents a majority from insisting on its own? That question was impossible to overlook after Trump’s election as well as in the identitarian movements that have recently grown in England and France, Holland and Germany. Their members consciously present themselves as part of a harmless trend: if other groups are allowed to fight for their rights, why shouldn’t white Europeans stand up for theirs? (Page 26)
Hannah Arendt thought that Adolf Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, not for crimes against the Jewish people. It’s a distinction that seemed trivial at the time, but its importance is increasingly clear. My support for Black Lives Matter springs neither from tribal membership nor from guilt about wrongs committed by my ancestors, impoverished Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Chicago in the early twentieth century. I support BLM because the killing of unarmed people is a crime against humanity. At the same time, I reject the white countermovement whose members shout “All lives matter,” because it uses a banal general truth to distract attention from an important empirical truth, namely, that African Americans are more likely to be subject to violence than other Americans. It’s an empirical fact, but you need a concept of truth to see it. (Page 27)
None of the protests succeeded in ending police violence, for the problems, we have learned, are structural. As the retired police chief of a major southern city explained to me, the hours of training required to join the police force in his state are fewer than those required to become a hairdresser. You read that right. In some states it is harder to get a license to wash, cut, and dry someone’s hair than it is to get a license to enforce the law with a lethal weapon. Information like this suggests that slogans like “Defund the police” are misguided. What’s needed is better funding: for police training to learn to distinguish problems of crime and problems of mental health, to care for those whose mental health crises may be misinterpreted as criminal; for community programs that provide skills, training, and hope for young people of color whose otherwise hopeless prospects make rage, or at least drug peddling, the most reasonable of available options. (Page 29)
am not an ally. Convictions play a minor role in alliances, which is why they are often short. If my self-interest happens to align with yours, for a moment, we could form an alliance. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies until the Nazi regime was defeated. When the U.S. decided its interests lay in recruiting former Nazis to defeat communism, the Soviet Union turned from ally to enemy. What interest led millions of white people into plague-threatened streets to shout “Black Lives Matter”? This was no alliance, but a commitment to universal justice. To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what standing left means. (Page 31)
It’s now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views that supported colonialism. When I first heard such claims some fifteen years ago, I thought they were so flimsy they’d soon disappear. For the claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism, on the basis of universalist ideas. To see this, you don’t need the more difficult texts of the Enlightenment; a paperback edition of Candide is enough. For a succinct diatribe against fanaticism, slavery, colonial plunder, and other European evils, you can hardly do better. (Page 31)
The consensus against Enlightenment is now so broad that it was extremely difficult to organize a year devoted to the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant. (Page 32)
Enlightenment is a contested concept which means different things even to those of us who study the subject. Its high point in the eighteenth century had predecessors, but here I use the word to refer to an intellectual and political movement that came to flower in 1698 with the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary and ended in 1804 with the death of Kant. The Enlightenment was committed to a number of ideas, but the focus here will be on those I’ve called fundamental for the left: commitments to universalism, justice, and the possibility of progress. It’s clear the Enlightenment did not realize all the ideals it championed, but that’s what ideals are about. (Page 32)
Into this landscape the Enlightenment introduced the very idea of humanity that its critics, like de Maistre, were unable to recognize. Enlightenment thinkers insisted that everyone, whether Christian or Confucian, Parisian or Persian, is endowed with innate dignity that demands respect. Versions of that idea can be found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts that claim at least some of us were made in God’s image, but the Enlightenment based it on reason not revelation. Whatever you think happened in the Garden of Eden, you can find your way to this. (Page 33)
To claim that someone’s rights have been violated is to understand her suffering as an injustice, not simply a matter for pity. Following Lynn Hunt’s now classic Inventing Human Rights, Keenan argues that the apparently crippling abstraction of human rights and their lack of metaphysical grounding is a source of their power. (Page 34)
There are few charges more bewildering than the claim that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. Perhaps those who make it confuse eighteenth-century realities with the Enlightenment thinkers who fought to change them–often at considerable personal risk. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they’re echoing a tradition that goes back to Montesquieu, who used fictional Persians to criticize European mores in ways he could not have safely done as a Frenchman writing in his own voice. Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters was followed by scores of other writings using the same device. Lahontan’s Dialogue with a Huron and Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage criticized the patriarchal sexual laws of Europe, which criminalized women who bore children out of wedlock, from the perspective of the more egalitarian Hurons and Tahitians. Voltaire’s sharpest attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese emperor, and an indigenous South American priest. (Page 36)
What the debates over The Dawn of Everything underline beyond doubt, however, is that the Enlightenment was pathbreaking in rejecting Eurocentrism and urging Europeans to examine themselves from the perspective of the rest of the world. (Page 37)
Today Christian Wolff’s name is known only to scholars, but in the early eighteenth century he was the most famous philosopher in Germany, and a major influence on the young Immanuel Kant. Yet in 1723 he was given forty-eight hours’ notice to vacate his professorship at Halle, and the territory of Prussia, or face execution. His crime? Wolff had publicly argued that the Chinese were perfectly moral even without Christianity. His experience was no exception: nearly all the canonical Enlightenment texts were banned, burned, or published anonymously. (Page 40)
Emperors who were particularly cruel might be criticized, though brutal practices in colonized lands were rarely attacked by those in the home states. Objections to Nero or Caesar usually focused on their crimes against Romans. The sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomeo de las Casas was an early exception. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies denounced the atrocities that the Spanish conquest visited on indigenous peoples. But Las Casas argued for a kinder, gentler form of colonization, which included substituting African for South American slave labor. He never questioned the imperial project as a whole. The Enlightenment did. Here is Kant’s stinging attack on colonialism: (Page 41)
If the best of Enlightenment thinkers denounced the vast theft of lands that made up European empires, what did they make of the vast theft of peoples? Most were unequivocal in condemning slavery. Kant’s categorical imperative, which expresses the basic moral law, states that people should never be treated as means. This rules out slavery and other forms of oppression. (Page 44)
Like progressive intellectuals everywhere, radical Enlightenment thinkers were only partially successful. While they changed the thinking of their contemporaries on many questions, they did not stop the great European rush for empire that gathered full force in the nineteenth century. This strand of thought went out of favor as the new century continued, and even liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill championed moderate versions of imperialism. Yet if they did not stop colonialism, they succeeded in giving it a bad conscience. (Page 45)
The Romans felt no remorse or need to justify their empire. Nor did they tell their subjects that being colonized was good for them. In addition to better ships and weapons, nineteenth-century colonizers had something earlier imperialists lacked: a need for legitimacy. (Page 45)
This, sadly, must be the source of the legend that the Enlightenment sanctioned colonialism. Enlightenment thinkers blasted colonialism and argued that justice was on the side of those non-European nations who killed or closed their doors to would-be invaders. A half century later, when faced with a powerful critique in the name of ideals they wanted for themselves, European imperialists sought ways to uphold ideals of liberty and self-determination at home while continuing to violate them abroad. Their solution was to claim they were bringing those ideals to those unable to realize them on their own. Empire, they argued, was a burden undertaken for the sake of the natives. Far from being in tension with the goods they cherished for their own folk–an end to famine and sickness and inequality before the law–all the colonialists sought to do was to bring those goods, plus Christianity, to benighted peoples who hadn’t yet discovered them. Rousseau and Diderot and Kant would have seen through the scam–and wept to watch their own ideals turned into ideology. But the plunder was tempting, and its critics were dead. (Page 45)
Kant never noticed the contradictions between his occasional racist comments and his systematic theory. But it’s fatal to forget that thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant were not only the first to condemn Eurocentrism and colonialism. They also laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand, together with a robust assurance that cultural pluralism is not an alternative to universalism but an enhancement of it. I like to think their belief in the possibility of progress would have led them to cheer our steps forward to insights they didn’t attain. They were champions of reason, and anything else would be inconsistent. (Page 46)
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What once was called ad hominem is now called positionality. You may question epistemological standpoints that reduce thinking to by-products of lived experience. (Page 47)
The valorization of the victim is widespread in contemporary Germany, the first nation in the world to begin a thoroughgoing reckoning with its historical crimes. That reckoning was slow, fitful, and often unwilling, but by the twenty-first century it produced a national consensus: guilt for the Holocaust is central to any narrative of German history. There’s no doubt that this progressive move was an improvement on all the possible alternatives. Yet, by making the relationship between Jewish victims and German perpetrators central to Germany’s self-image, Germans became unable to view Jews as anything but victims. (Page 49)
Cries of pain deserve a hearing and a response, but they are no more privileged a source of authority than careful arguments. (Page 51)
Centering the history of Africa on the history of its colonization makes that history a narrative of Africa’s invaders. This leads to a denial of African agency, which was present even in the variety of complex responses to colonization itself. Táíwò points out that the Moorish colonization of Spain and Portugal is viewed as merely an episode in Iberian history, though it lasted much longer than European colonization of Africa. He urges Africans to consider colonization as one chapter of their history rather than the center of it, “… unless we grant that white supremacists are right and we are permanent children whose will is forever at the mercy of our erstwhile colonizers.” (Page 52)
What are needed, Fanon argued, are new concepts of humanity, and the related concept of universalism, to remove the taint of imperialist, fraudulent versions of those ideas. But, to reject universalism altogether because it has been abused, is to give Europe “the last word of the imperial act.” (Page 53)
política universalismo humanidad tribalismo
We may learn to extinguish the recognition for others, but it can be reignited. Nothing expresses pain, or the longing for freedom, more immediately than art in all its forms; this is one reason why the current suggestion that cultures belong to tribes is so misguided. Proscriptions on cultural appropriation assume a kind of cultural purity few objects ever have. Even in ancient times, art was traded and influences were blended until it was often impossible to tell which tribe was the object’s owner–if ownership is the right model for culture at all. (Page 54)
The arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold. (Page 54)
Of course cultural appropriation should not be confused with cultural exploitation. Attempts to underpay artists for the work they create should be resisted like any other form of profiteering. But woke insistence on a tribal understanding of culture is not far enough from a Nazi insistence that German music should only be played by Aryans, or Samuel Huntington’s insistence on defending what he calls Western culture against the threat of destruction by other civilizations. To censure cultural appropriation is to sabotage cultural force. (Page 55)
La crítica a actos de apropiación cultural se sostiene en la misma lógica que el nazismo.
Those who make the effort to enter another language or culture do, however, gain something invaluable: illumination of the world from another perspective: insight that their own perspective is inevitably partial; and visceral awareness of our common humanity. But if culture is particular, politics needs a universal core. Cultural differences can be treasured without being reified. A world without cultural difference would be as grim as an assembly of skeletons. But when we think and act politically, cultural categories should not take center stage. (Page 56)
cultura reificación política diferencias
3 Justice and Power
Although both proclaim the primacy of power, Foucault’s account of power’s mechanisms is very different from that of Thrasymachus. The Greek sophist lived at a time when the powerful and the powerless were two clear and distinct subjects, a time that lasted, according to Foucault, through the eighteenth century. In principle, if seldom in practice, something like liberation was still possible: cut off the sovereign’s head and his subjects might, for a moment, escape subjugation. In the modern era, said Foucault, power is hidden and diffuse, expressed through a network of structures we rarely perceive. There is no point we can locate and challenge, especially since we are implicated in the very networks that constrain us. (Page 61)
No one is entirely free from these new forms of social control. It has to be added, however, that subjection to these new forms is not the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends systematically to underestimate the difference. (Page 62)
Edward Said was but one of many who saw him as “an apostle of radicalism and intellectual insurgency.” Everything in his performance screamed rebel. He wrote books that glorified those on society’s margins: the outlaw, the madman. He often took political stands that supported the oppressed, be they convicts in French prisons or victims of the military dictatorship in Chile. And decades before anyone began to imagine marriage equality, he was openly, transgressively gay. Why shouldn’t Foucault become the bedrock of left-wing thought, or at least the one philosopher read by anyone who isn’t a philosopher, as Sartre was for an earlier generation? (Page 62)
Foucault era un transgresor en todo ámbito de su vida, posicionándose como un pensador fundamental para la izquierda.
But, while reading Foucault on the particular, students are absorbing a philosophical lesson that’s very general: power, only vaguely tied to the actions of particular humans in particular institutions, is the driving force of everything. “Power is everywhere,” he wrote. “Power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” For the late Foucault, power was embedded in every feature of modern life. Power was woven into the very fabric of our language, thoughts, and desires. Power even enfolds resistance, which reinforces power. It’s power all the way down. (Page 63)
As Foucault does in this passage, they tend to avoid declarative sentences; the metaphysics of suspicion is better served by asking questions. And though they are usually fond of Nietzsche, their writing is sufficiently obscure to merit one of his better put-downs: “They muddy the waters to make them seem deep.” (Page 64)
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Asked about his engagement in prison reform, Foucault replied that he was not interested in the banalities of prison conditions but wanted to “question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty.” This is not a distinction that prisoners themselves would question; rather, they insist on it. Anyone who denies the moral distinction between innocence and guilt denies the possibility of moral distinctions at all. (Page 65)
The insistence that power is the only driving force goes hand in hand with contempt for reason. It’s impossible to say which came first, the demotion of reason or the promotion of power; they form two sides of an argument. Twentieth-century thinkers as different as Foucault, Heidegger, and Adorno were united in viewing what they called “Enlightenment reason” not merely as a self-serving fraud but even more as a domineering, calculating, rapacious sort of monster committed to subjugating nature–and with it, indigenous peoples considered to be natural. On this picture, reason is merely instrument and expression of power. Williams’ distinction between being persuaded by someone and being beaten by them becomes spurious; reason is a more polite but more manipulative way of hitting someone over the head. (Améry would say that those who find the distinction meaningless have never been beaten.) (Page 66)
In an era of drastic censorship and widespread illiteracy, the claim that anyone of any station had a right to think was explosive, and church authorities used their considerable power to suppress it with force. Authorities today look different: economic experts proclaim there is no alternative to neoliberalism and support the alleged naturalness of their ideology with evolutionary theory. Enlightenment thinkers never thought reason was unlimited; they just refused to let authorities set the limits on what we can think. (Page 68)
ilustración libertad autoridad pensamiento
Of course the ideas of reasons conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas do. Ideals are not measured by how well they fit reality; reality is judged by how well it lives up to ideals. Reason’s job is to deny that claims of experience are final–and to move us to widen the horizon of experience by providing ideals that experience ought to obey. If enough of us do so, it will. (Page 69)
Los ideales no se deben medir en función de su calce con la realidad.
the distinction between reason and violence undergirds the distinction between democracy and fascism, and any hope of resisting the slide toward fascism depends on remembering the difference. (Page 70)
Where Foucault was flamboyant, courting outrage, Schmitt performed the persona of a conservative lawyer. His main transgression against the world in which he found himself was to reject any form of regret for the Nazi regime he’d loyally served. In writing, Foucault meandered, while Schmitt preferred short oracular pronouncements. Yet they shared rejections of the idea of universal humanity and the distinction between power and justice, along with a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress. What makes them both interesting to progressive thinkers today is their shared hostility toward liberalism and their commitment to unmasking liberal hypocrisies. It’s not clear whether Foucault’s unmasking had a purpose other than subversion as an art form. What’s certain is that Schmitt’s demasking of liberal institutions was undertaken for the greater glory of the Third Reich, both before and after the war. (Page 70)
política progreso poder justicia liberalismo crítica
What makes such a noxious worldview appealing? (He couldn’t even write as well as Nietzsche.) Readers who situate themselves to the left of liberalism can only be attracted by Schmitt’s stinging critiques of liberal failure and hypocrisy. He described liberal democratic parliaments as institutions that do nothing but endlessly talk, while real questions are decided elsewhere–a description that fits the twenty-first-century U.S. Congress as well as the Weimar Republic’s Reichstag. (Page 75)
Schmitt avoided answering the simple question Do two wrongs make a right? by arguing that in a world history saturated with violence, concepts like right and wrong disappear. Both are merely rhetoric used to disguise the only force there is: power. (Page 76)
The concept of ‘natural rights’ is contested but, whatever else they may be, human rights are claims meant to curb naked assertions of power. They insist that power is not merely the privilege of the strongest person in the neighborhood; it demands justification. (Page 77)
While Foucault may have added to our understanding of power in the modern world, I’ve argued that neither he nor Schmitt promoted a new view about the relations between justice and power. In simplest form their views go back to the Sophists: claims to justice are developed to disguise power-driven interests. It’s a throwback to a world in which might–call it power–makes right, which amounts to no concept of right at all. (Page 78)
Para Foucault y Schmitt, la justicia es tan sólo un barniz para la legitimar el acceso al poder.
They offered what was known as the killer ape theory. It claimed that humans are distinguished from other primates by a greater tendency to aggression, and that this aggression is the driving force behind human evolution. (Page 79)
The real question, Wilson argued, was how we learned to cooperate at all when cooperation sacrificed our own genetic best interests. Sociobiologists were deeply puzzled by the undeniable fact that individuals sometimes sacrifice their own well-being to protect others. By asking how such altruism had evolved, Milam explains, sociobiologists naturalized violence as essential to human nature. (Page 80)
Los sociobiólogos utilizaron el hecho del altruismo para justificar que la violencia es parte de la naturaleza humana más esencial.
homo_sapiens altruismo violencia naturaleza argumento sociobiología evolución