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

Н. Канунников - Секретность — это дорого

О книге Марка Харрисона «Тайный Левиафан»

Задумавшись над тем, почему несвободные политические режимы не демонстрируют устойчивой динамики экономического роста, Марк Харрисон обратил внимание на присущую таким государствам страсть к безопасности, а следовательно к всеобъемлющей секретности. О том, какую нагрузку секретность создает для национальной экономики, он проследил на примере СССР.

https://gorky.media/reviews/sekretnost-eto-dorogo

Майкл Мардер - Растительное мышление. Философия вегетативной жизни

На окраинах окраин философии обитают нечеловеческие (и неживотные) существа, среди которых растения. И если современные философы обычно воздерживаются от постановки онтологических и этических вопросов, связанных с вегетативной жизнью, то Майкл Мардер выдвигает эту жизнь на первый план, деконструируя на страницах своей книги метафизику. Автор выявляет экзистенциальные особенности в поведении растений и вегетативное наследие в человеческой мысли – следы человека в растении и следы растения в человеке,—чтобы отстоять способность растительности к сопротивлению логике тотализации и к выходу за узкие рамки инструментального мышления. Реконструируя жизнь растений «после метафизики», Мардер акцентирует внимание на их уникальной темпоральности, свободе и материально-практическом знании, или мудрости. В его понимании, «растительное мышление» – это некогнитивный, неидеационный и необразный модус мышления, свойственный растениям, а также процесс возвращения человеческой мысли к ее корням и уподобления этой мысли растительной.

Benjamin Balthaser - Antisemitism’s Afterlives

Its increasingly contradictory weaponization exposes how little it has ever had to do with the Jews.

It is this sense of inversion that historian Mark Mazower’s new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, seeks to chronicle and explain. Opening with Victor Klemperer’s account of the way language became “an instrument of power” under the Third Reich, Mazower suggests we are witnessing a similar kind of transformation today: a nationalist and imperialist right in Israel, Europe, and the United States abetted by timid or overtly complicit liberals changing the meaning of words not to capture a new reality but to transform it in the service of holding onto and furthering their power. The term “antisemitism,” coined by a far right eager to couch its own Judeophobia in the modern language of scientific racism and later used as a term of condemnation to name that deadly form of bigotry, is now widely associated with hostility to the state of Israel, especially from Arab and Islamic quarters. How did a word originally intended to justify the exercise of state power over a long-persecuted Jewish minority come to serve as a tool for justifying the power of the Jewish state to persecute vulnerable and stateless Palestinians? That is the story Mazower wants to tell: the way the word tracks the history of state power as much as the history of Jews themselves.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/antisemitisms-afterlives/

R. Buettner, S. Craig - Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters behind the 2018 bombshell New York Times exposé of then-President Trump’s finances, an explosive investigation into the history of Donald Trump’s wealth, revealing how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into the White House.Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.” Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.Drawing on over twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, including the tax returns he tried to conceal, alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump's financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again. For decades, he squanders his fortunes on money losing businesses, only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building, while taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances, while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and cheats the television producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant the public image that will carry him to the White House. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Lucky Loser is a meticulous examination spanning nearly a century, filled with scoops from Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, Atlantic City, and the set of The Apprentice. At a moment when Trump’s tether to success and power is more precarious than ever, here for the first time is the definitive true accounting of Trump and his money what he had, what he lost, and what he has left and the final word on the myth of Trump, the self-made billionaire.

Visions and Practices of Democracy in Socialist and Post-Colonial States

This book explores how socialist and post-colonial states envisioned and practised democracy for themselves after the Second World War. The chapters focus on the period following the Second World War, when beliefs about democracy included the notion that popular sovereignty should extend beyond the nation-state, that social justice should be enhanced, and that working people were the true bearers of sovereignty. The thirteen chapters in this volume, written by an international team of scholars, examine countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and adopt a wide array of methods, ranging from political and social history, social anthropology, and the history of political thought, in order to explore how various meanings and practices of democracy have shaped historical experiences and political order.