Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Emmanuel Faye - A strategy of exoneration? Armin Mohler, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin on the “conservative revolution”, National Socialism, and the SS

The myth of a German “Conservative Revolution” distinct from and opposed to National Socialism deserves to be re-examined. The correspondence of Swiss journalist Armin Mohler, the author of a 1950 thesis on the “Conservative Revolution”, shows how his work tried to exonerate certain Nazi authors, most notably Carl Schmitt. Mohler, who had tried to join the Waffen SS in 1942, also owed important positions over the course of his career to the influence of former Waffen SS leaders, such as the Swiss Franz Riedweg. This strategy of exoneration had an international impact. In France, Alain de Benoist, one of the leaders of the New Right, published the French translation of Mohler’s book in 1983. De Benoist himself uses the myth of the “Conservative Revolution” to promote the cultural hegemony of the European New Right. In Russia, the reception of this myth by the nationalist ideologist Aleksandr Dugin has contradictory features. In the early 1990s, Dugin had connected the “Conservative Revolution” with National Socialism and praised the SS. In 2009, he advocated the “fourth political theory,” supposedly distinct from fascism and Nazism, and used the thesis of a supposed “Conservative Revolution” to exonerate Nazi authors like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Nevertheless, he agreed in 2023 to the republication in France of his earlier text on the “Conservative Revolution” and the SS, revealing how he varies his strategy depending on the historical and political context. This article concludes by arguing that the writings of Mohler, de Benoist and Dugin show the myth of the “Conservative Revolution” is more a reflection of a metapolitical worldview than a genuine philosophy of history.

Fawaz A. Gerges - What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East

What Really Went Wrong offers a fresh and incisive assessment of American foreign policy’s impact on the history and politics of the modern Middle East. Looking at flashpoints in Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese history, Fawaz A. Gerges shows how postwar U.S. leaders made a devil’s pact with potentates, autocrats, and strongmen around the world. Washington sought to tame assertive nationalists and to protect repressive Middle Eastern regimes in return for compliance with American hegemonic designs and uninterrupted flows of cheap oil. The book takes a counterfactual approach, asking readers to consider how the political trajectories of these countries and, by extension, the entire region may have differed had U.S. foreign policy privileged the nationalist aspirations of patriotic and independent Middle Eastern leaders and people. Gerges argues that rather than focusing on rolling back communism, extracting oil, and pursuing interventionist and imperial policies in Iran, Egypt, and beyond, postwar U.S. leaders should have allowed the Middle East greater autonomy in charting its own political and economic development. In so doing, the contemporary Middle East may have had better prospects for stability, prosperity, peace, and democracy.

Thomas Waller - The long farewell

Review of T.J. Clark, Those Passions: On Art and Politics(2025)

In the introduction to Farewell to an Idea (1999), T.J. Clark imagined modernism as a vast historical ruin, one whose forms of representation seem unreadable to us now, but only because we have come to inhabit the future they prophesied. On this model, the critic of modernist art would be a kind of intrepid archaeologist, rummaging through the ciphered remains of some forgotten civilisation, suffused with ways of living alien to their own. Those Passions is Clark’s latest attempt to decipher that ruin, to excavate those lost signs. Divided into three parts ‘Precursors’, ‘Moderns’, ‘Modernities’ it anthologises material written over the past twenty-five years for exhibition catalogues, essay collections, academic journals and the London Review of Books. The anthological form of the book mirrors the fragmentary character of many of its objects, imitating the dialectic that its final chapter finds in Picasso’s Guernica: a disconnectedness held in unity. By revisiting some of the most important names in the painting of modern life from Bosch to Malevich, Ensor to Richter, Delacroix to Pollock Clark’s tour de force interpretations mount a firm but chary defence of art’s ability to register political realities in ways that refuse transcendence yet surpass mere reflection. A quarter of a century since his fin-de-siècle masterwork Farewell to an Idea, Clark has returned once more to the modernist dig, unearthing an art-critical history of the present to make the stones speak.

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rp220_waller_clark.pdf

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy - Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians

Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud and the violence of the Capitol riot have made it unavoidably clear that the future of American democracy is in peril. Unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence our elections, while anti-democratic rhetoric threatens a tilt towards authoritarianism. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy reveals the role corporations play in this dire state of political affairs, and explains why and how they should be held accountable by the courts, their shareholders, and citizens themselves. Drawing on key Supreme Court cases, Torres-Spelliscy explores how corporations have, more often than not, been on the wrong side of history by working to undermine democratic norms, practices, and laws.