Political Philosophy

John Rawls gilt als einer der bedeutendsten politischen Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts, obwohl sich die meisten Leser wohl nur mit einiger Mühe durch seine monumentale und überlange Theorie der Gerechtigkeit 1 hin-durcharbeiten werden. Bereits Rüdiger Bubner hat in seinem Buch über die politische Philosophie nicht ohne Grund darauf verwiesen, daß die breite Rezeption in der amerikanischen Philosophie mit spezifischen Bedingungen der dortigen Traditionen zu tun gehabt haben muß, während sich in Europa die Lage anders darstelle, so daß die breite Rezeption Rawls' in Europa doch etwas verwunderlich scheint. 2 Nun scheint aber das Bedürfnis nach Gerechtigkeit eines der zentralen menschlichen Bedürfnisse zu sein, der also auch philosophisch Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt werden muß, wie es ja auch schon in den Philosophien Platons und Aristoteles' erkennbar ist. Inso-fern dies die herrschenden Strömungen der Philosophie des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts nicht in angemessener Weise taten, mußte eine Lücke gefüllt werden. In diese Lücke stieß Rawls mit seinem elaborierten Theorieentwurf. Dieser ist in der Folge sowohl scharfer Kritik ausgesetzt worden als auch von Rawls und seinen Schülern in verschiedene Richtungen weiterentwik-kelt worden. Der stark systematische Charakter von Rawls theoretischem Hauptwerk läßt allerdings in den Hintergrund treten, daß er auch immer die

Self-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalised by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of 'what happened' and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community's political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualisation of political memory-making and proposes the concepts of 'hermeneutical dissidence' and 'hermeneutical seduction' to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlight the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of 'affair' formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally-anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two 'memory affairs', both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance.

Key words: political memory, hermeneutical dissidence, hermeneutical seduction, affair, masculinist resistance, Louis Malle, Herta Müller

This article discusses the work of the Navdanya Biodiversity Farm and Seed Bank in the Doon Valley, Uttarakhand, India, in the context of ecofeminism, Shakti Energy, and Vandana Shiva's theory of Earth Democracy. It appeared in Fifth Estate #403 (Spring 2019).

En el presente trabajo se realiza una consideración sobre la violencia en las corrientes revolucionarias del marxismo y el sindicalismo revolucionario de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Se tematiza la violencia para poder ser comprendida en cada una de las corrientes teóricas al no ser un aspecto que aborden los autores analizados directamente en sus obras. Ello permite entender las similitudes y/o diferencias entre ambas, así como un acercamiento a la complejidad de la obra de George Sorel y su posición a caballo entre varias corrientes teóricas como elemento de conexión entre el marxismo y el sindicalismo revolucionario.

This paper is an attempt to investigate the historical trajectory of Ashrafia hegemony in Sindh, the province of Pakistan. I begin with the analysis of biopolitics of caste, class and religion organised around Hindu–Muslim binarism and unity as it unfolded during and after the partition of the Indian subcontinent. I particularly analyse the demographic shifts, the official categorisation of populations, and the communal and ethnonationalist claims that led to the specific kind of interpretation of religion, caste and class. Informed by the Ambedkarian subaltern perspective and based on the analysis of ethnographic data and vernacular literature, I explain that nationalist ideologies framed in the narratives of political Islam and Sufism tend to organise politics around Hindu–Muslim otherness, as in case of Pakistani nationalism, and Hindu–Muslim harmony, as in case of Sindhi nationalism. Based on that understanding, I argue that Ashrafia advantage, by and large, is the product of pre-existing historical hegemonic relations than any conscious strategy, and or directly imposed domination. Since both the Ashrafia narratives primarily imagine people through religious binaries, they lack the counter-hegemonic elements that could confront casteism that lies at the intersection of class and religion. None of the narratives, being performative projections of the ideal religious society, brought casteism in their focus while dealing with the structural inequalities, social hierarchies and the issues of political representation of the Dalit class. It resulted in the unwarranted legitimacy for Ashrafia hegemony, Jati Hindu domination and Dalit subordination. This re-hierarchised caste groups and continue to (re)distribute the caste capital by (re)producing Sayedism, Dalit exclusion and caste-class oligarchies.

Keywords Sayedism, Dalit exclusion, hegemony, Ashrafia, biopolitics, political Sufism, political Islam

13 Aprile, ore 11.00 - Macro Asilo, Via Nizza 138, Roma - Nel capitolo 24 del I libro del Capitale, dedicato alla "cosiddetta accumulazione originaria", Marx introduce la figura del "proletariato eslege", che trae con sé una "duplice libertà": quella concreta, conquistata emancipandosi dal dominio feudale e corporativo, e quella solo formale, prodotta dalla cattura nel dispositivo capitalistico del lavoro salariato. Tale figura, per lungo tempo dimenticata nel cassetto della storia, oggi si manifesta nuovamente, soprattutto nei paesi postcoloniali, nell'emergenza di una costellazione di "dannati della terra", sottoposta ai processi di governamentalità neoliberale che tendono a sostituire le politiche sviluppiste e post-sviluppiste degli ultimi decenni. Si tratta della riattivazione di nuovi processi di accumulazione originaria, che mutano profondamente la soggettività del povero messo al lavoro, sfruttando però la flessibilità e informalità delle pratiche storicamente associate alla sua figura. È infatti in quella "makeshift economy" dei poveri, attiva al di là dei regolamenti formali del mercato del lavoro, che il nuovo capitalismo delle piattaforme sembra trovare il suo terreno di coltura. È allora possibile partire proprio dalla figura della "povertà" per ripensare un futuro soggetto dell'emancipazione?

The University of QueenslandQ -IIT Delhi Academy of Research (UQIDAR) Call for Applications to PhD programme:
This project proposes to explore the relation between force, violence, non-violence, and resistance at two levels. From an ontological perspective, the task is to consider “the being of force” to ask how and whether violence (and non-violence) and resistance are located in the categories through which we determine politics and our world. This requires investigating the concepts of force and resistance in the history of thought and discovering the historical limits of their use vis-a-vis the political and institutional conditions. At the political and legal levels, and the domains where ethical judgements are made, the task is to examine the relations and effects of the different concepts of violence, non-violence and resistance proposed by key thinkers of politics and ethics. The clarification of ontological issues will deepen understanding of the politics of the acts and concepts named by violence, non-violence and resistance, terms that name different configurations of forces in history.

This chapter lays out the main intellectual motivations for a philosophical inquiry into the moral significance of inherited wealth. It is argued that the problem of how to regulate inheritance should be approached as an open and difficult question. Yet it is one that must be answered if we are to reach any determinate view about how to regulate inequality and private property over time (as opposed to within single generations). The chapter also seeks to highlight and account for the relative scarcity of sustained discussions of inherited wealth in political philosophy since the mid-twentieth century. Further motivation for the project is taken from a brief review of recent empirical studies that highlight an apparent growth in large inheritance flows that are concentrated into a relatively small portion of the population. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the main arguments to come in the remainder of the book.

This research paper tries to clarify the relationships between the notions of opinion, reason and emotion from the prospective of a democratic renewal of critical theories. This is done in several stages from Platon's Republic, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Jacques Rancière's democratic philosophy, Gabriel Tarde's social science of opinion and various other sources which explore a humble and sensitive reason (Charles Péguy, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Geneviève Fraisse, the care theorists and Sophie Wahnich).

The historical link in significant sectors of social sciences between social criticism and emancipation seems at risk, in the academic and political fields, quite particularly in France today. It is from these stakes that takes shape the perspective of a comprehensive-pragmatic reconfiguration of a critical theory with emancipators supports in social sciences. For that purpose, are alternately envisaged certain current academic misadventures of relationships between sociological criticism and emancipation, and then the tensions between Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology and Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of emancipation. Alfredo Errandonea’s sociology, drawing from an anarchistic inspiration, is used as a resource in this case.

Rapport au VIème Congrès de l'Association Française de Science Politique (28 septembre-1er octobre 1999), Séance plénière animée par Jean Leca : "Intelligibilités de l'action politique. Quand la science politique rencontre la philosophie", 1er octobre 1999, Rennes, France

The past half century has witnessed major socio-political transformations across the globe. The end of formal European colonialism, basically achieved except for small pockets in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, was followed by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 in parallel to the one of Keynesian organized capitalism in the Northwest and of "state-led development" in much of the South, but also the rise of Asian economies, starting with Japan and now featuring China. The subsequent era of globalization and individualization was short-lived and has given way to the notion of a "multi-polar" globe marked by the at best half-intended withdrawal of the US from hegemony and the loose association of Brazil,