Podcasts about hegel

The ACFM crew offer a weird-left perspective on the role of the hero (and heroine) in politics and culture. Nadia, Jem and Keir assess theories of Great Men, the myth of the hero's journey and the lure of the anti-hero with ideas from Weber and Hegel and music from Tina Turner and Sonic Youth. Find […]

Die US-amerikanische Philosophin Susan Neiman über Weltpolitik und Philosophie, von Voltaire bis Donald Trump, und warum sich die Linke statt auf Wokeness auf ihre traditionellen Werte besinnen muss. Die amerikanische Philosophin Susan Neiman springt für die Aufklärung in die Bresche. Die europäische Ideenwelt des 18. Und dann 19.Jahrhunderts von Rousseau, Voltaire, Hegel bis Marx muss das Fundament des Engagements der Linken bleiben, argumentiert sie. Susan Neiman ist von Donald Trump empört, bei dem sie Faschismus ortet. Und sie wendet sich bei der Verteidigung der Aufklärung gegen das postkoloniale Denken und ganz allgemein Wokeness in der akademischen Welt. “Links ist nicht Woke” ist der Titel ihrer jüngsten Streitschrift.Was Susan Neiman darunter versteht und wo Wokeness reaktionär wird, bespricht sie in einer Wiener Vorlesung. Im Gespräch mit dem Journalisten Günter Kaindlstorfer bietet sie einen Parforceritt durch Weltpolitik und Philosophie. Es geht um den französischen Philosophen Foucault und Donald Trump, um die Instrumentalisierung von Antisemitismus und die umstrittene Autorin Judith Butler. Hören Sie das Lob der Aufklärung und warum sich die Linke ihrer traditionellen Werte besinnen muss von der Philosophin Susan Neiman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ACFM crew offer a weird-left perspective on the role of the hero (and heroine) in politics and culture. Nadia, Jem and Keir assess theories of Great Men, the myth of the hero's journey and the lure of the anti-hero with ideas from Weber and Hegel and music from Tina Turner and Sonic Youth. Find […]

Die Top-Meldungen am 14. Mai 2025: Teo schraubt die Tegut-Logos ab, Edeka Minden-Hannover wählt neuen Vorstand und Aufsichtsrat, und: Obi verliert CMO Christian von Hegel

Send us a textJoin us for an engaging conversation with Dr. Sebastian Ostritsch as we explore the foundational ideas of Hegel's philosophy. From his dialectical method to his views on history, reason, and absolute knowing, this discussion provides a clear and accessible introduction to one of the most influential thinkers in Western philosophy. Whether you're new to Hegel or looking to deepen your understanding, this interview offers valuable insights into his complex yet profound ideas.The Balance of GrayGod, doubt, and proof walk into a podcast... it goes better than you'd expect!Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show--------------------------If you would want to support the channel and what I am doing, please follow me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/christianityforall Where else to find Josh Yen: Philosophy YT: https://bit.ly/philforallEducation: https://bit.ly/joshyenBuisness: https://bit.ly/logoseduMy Website: https://joshuajwyen.com/

Invitée: Anne-Cécile Robert. "Rien de grand ne se fait sans passion", disait le philosophe Hegel. Mais aujourdʹhui, les émotions semblent avoir pris le dessus sur la réflexion. Comment en sommes-nous arrivés-là? Comment les émotions sont-elles utilisées et dans quel but? Tribu en parle en compagnie dʹAnne-Cécile Robert, journaliste et professeure à lʹInstitut de relations internationales et stratégiques. Elle publie une nouvelle édition de son livre "La stratégie de lʹémotion" aux éditions Lux.

I've been in London this week talking to America watchers about the current situation in the United States. First up is Edmund Fawcett, the longtime Economist correspondent in DC and historian of both liberalism and conservatism. Fawcett argues that Trump's MAGA movement represents a kind of third way between liberalism and conservatism - a version of American populism resurrected for our anti-globalist early 21st century. He talks about how economic inequality fuels Trumpism, with middle-class income shares dropping while the wealthy prosper. He critiques both what he calls right-wing intellectual "kitsch" and the left's lack of strategic vision beyond its dogma of identity politics. Lacking an effective counter-narrative to combat Trumpism, Fawcett argues, liberals require not only sharper messaging but also a reinvention of what it means to be modern in our globalized age of resurrected nationalism. 5 Key Takeaways* European reactions to Trump mix shock with recognition that his politics have deep American roots.* Economic inequality (declining middle-class wealth) provides the foundation for Trump's political appeal.* The American left lacks an effective counter-narrative and strategic vision to combat Trumpism.* Both right-wing intellectualism and left-wing identity politics suffer from forms of "kitsch" and American neurosis.* The perception of America losing its position as the embodiment of modernity creates underlying anxiety. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, we are in London this week, looking westward, looking at the United States, spending some time with some distinguished Englishmen, or half-Englishmen, who have spent a lot of their lives in the United States, and Edmund Fawcett, former Economist correspondent in America, the author of a number of important books, particularly, Histories of Liberalism and Conservatism, is remembering America, Edmund. What's your first memory of America?Edmund Fawcett: My first memory of America is a traffic accident on Park Avenue, looking down as a four-year-old from our apartment. I was there from the age of two to four, then again as a school child in Washington for a few years when my father was working. He was an international lawyer. But then, after that, back in San Francisco, where I was a... I kind of hacked as an editor for Straight Arrow Press, which was the publishing arm of Rolling Stone. This was in the early 70s. These were the, it was the end of the glory days of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, the anti-war movement in Vietnam. It was exciting. A lot was going on, a lot was changing. And then not long after that, I came back to the U.S. for The Economist as their correspondent in Washington. That was in 1976, and I stayed there until 1983. We've always visited. Our son and grandson are American. My wife is or was American. She gave up her citizenship last year, chiefly for practical reasons. She said I would always feel American. But our regular visits have ended, of course. Being with my background, my mother was American, my grandfather was American. It is deeply part of my outlook, it's part of my world and so I am always very interested. I read quite a bit of the American press, not just the elite liberal press, every day. I keep an eye on through Real Clear Politics, which has got a very good sort of gazetteer. It's part of my weather.Andrew Keen: Edmund, I know you can't speak on behalf of Europe, but I'm going to ask a dumb question. Maybe you'll give me a smarter answer than the question. What's the European, the British take on what's happening in America? What's happened in this first quarter of 2025?Edmund Fawcett: I think a large degree of shock and horror, that's just the first reaction. If you'll allow me a little space, I think then there's a second reaction. The first reaction is shock and terror, with good reason, and nobody likes being talked to in the way that Vance talked to them, ignorantly and provocatively about free speech, which he feels he hasn't really thought hard enough about, and besides, it was I mean... Purely commercial, in largely commercial interest. The Europeans are shocked by the American slide from five, six, seven decades of internationalism. Okay, American-led, but still internationalist, cooperative, they're deeply shocked by that. And anybody who cares, as many Europeans do, about the texture, the caliber of American democracy and liberalism, are truly shocked by Trump's attacks on the courts, his attacks on the universities, his attack on the press.Andrew Keen: You remember, of course, Edmund, that famous moment in Casablanca where the policeman said he was shocked, truly shocked when of course he wasn't. Is your shock for real? Your... A good enough scholar of the United States to understand that a lot of the stuff that Trump is bringing to the table isn't new. We've had an ongoing debate in the show about how authentically American Trump is, whether he is the F word fascist or whether he represents some other indigenous strain in US political culture. What's your take?Edmund Fawcett: No, and that's the response to the shock. It's when you look back and see this Trump is actually deeply American. There's very little new here. There's one thing that is new, which I'll come to in a moment, and that returns the shock, but the shock is, is to some extent absorbed when Europeans who know about this do reflect that Trump is deeply American. I mean, there is a, he likes to cite McKinley, good, okay, the Republicans were the tariff party. He likes to say a lot of stuff that, for example, the populist Tom Watson from the South, deeply racist, but very much speaking for the working man, so long as he was a white working man. Trump goes back to that as well. He goes back in the presidential roster. Look at Robert Taft, competitor for the presidency against Eisenhower. He lost, but he was a very big voice in the Republican Party in the 1940s and 50s. Robert Taft, Jr. didn't want to join NATO. He pushed through over Truman's veto, the Taft-Hartley bill that as good as locked the unions out, the trade unions out of much of the part of America that became the burgeoning economic America, the South and the West. Trump is, sorry, forgive me, Taft, was in many ways as a hard-right Republican. Nixon told Kissinger, professors are the enemy. Reagan gave the what was it called? I forget the name of the speech that he gave in endorsing Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican Convention. This in a way launched the new Republican assault on liberal republicanism. Rockefeller was the loser. Reagan, as it were, handed the palm to Rocket Goldwater. He lost to Johnson, but the sermon they were using, the anti-liberal went into vernacular and Trump is merely in a way echoing that. If you were to do a movie called Trump, he would star, of course, but somebody who was Nixon and Reagan's scriptwright, forgive me, somebody who is Nixon and Reagan's Pressman, Pat Buchanan, he would write the script of the Trump movie. Go back and read, look at some of Pat Buchanan's books, some of his articles. He was... He said virtually everything that Trump says. America used to be great, it is no longer great. America has enemies outside that don't like it, that we have nothing to do with, we don't need allies, what we want is friends, and we have very few friends in the world. We're largely on our, by our own. We're basically a huge success, but we're being betrayed. We're being ignored by our allies, we're being betrayed by friends inside, and they are the liberal elite. It's all there in Pat Buchanan. So Trump in that way is indeed very American. He's very part of the history. Now, two things. One is... That Trump, like many people on the hard right in Europe, is to some extent, a neurotic response to very real complaints. If you would offer a one chart explanation of Trumpism, I don't know whether I can hold it up for the camera. It's here. It is actually two charts, but it is the one at the top where you see two lines cross over. You see at the bottom a more or less straight line. What this does is compare the share of income in 1970 with the share of the income more or less now. And what has happened, as we are not at all surprised to learn, is that the poor, who are not quite a majority but close to the actual people in the United States, things haven't changed for them much at all. Their life is static. However, what has changed is the life for what, at least in British terms, is called the middle classes, the middle group. Their share of income and wealth has dropped hugely, whereas the share of the income and wealth of the top has hugely risen. And in economic terms, that is what Trumpism is feeding off. He's feeding off a bewildered sense of rage, disappointment, possibly envy of people who looked forward, whose parents looked forward to a great better life, who they themselves got a better life. They were looking forward to one for their children and grandchildren. And now they're very worried that they're not those children and grandchildren aren't going to get it. So socially speaking, there is genuine concern, indeed anger that Trump is speaking to. Alas, Trump's answers are, I would say, and I think many Europeans would agree, fantasies.Andrew Keen: Your background is also on the left, your first job was at the New Left Reviews, you're all too familiar with Marxist language, Marxist literature, ways of thinking about what we used to call late-stage capitalism, maybe we should rename it post-late-stage-capitalism. Is it any surprise, given your presentation of the current situation in America, which is essentially class envy or class warfare, but the right. The Bannonites and many of the others on the right fringes of the MAGA movement have picked up on Lenin and Gramsci and the old icons of class warfare.Edmund Fawcett: No, I don't think it is. I think that they are these are I mean, we live in a world in which the people in politics and in the press in business, they've been to universities, they've read an awful lot of books, they spend an awful lot of time studying dusty old books like the ones you mentioned, Gramsci and so. So they're, to some extent, forgive me, they are, they're intellectuals or at least they become, they be intellectualized. Lenin called one of his books, What is to be Done. Patrick Deneen, a Catholic right-wing Catholic philosopher. He's one of the leading right-wing Catholic intellectuals of the day, hard right. He named it What is To Be Done. But this is almost kitsch, as it were, for a conservative Catholic intellectual to name a book after Vladimir Lenin, the first Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution. Forgive me, I lost the turn.Andrew Keen: You talk about kitsch, Edmund, is this kitsch leftism or is it real leftism? I mean if Trump was Bernie Sanders and a lot of what Trump says is not that different from Sanders with the intellectuals or the few intellectuals left in. New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, would they be embracing what's happening? Thanks, I've got the third again.Edmund Fawcett: No, you said Kitsch. The publicists and intellectuals who support Trump, there is a Kitsch element to it. They use a lot of long words, they appeal to a lot of authorities. Augustine of Hippo comes into it. This is really kind of intellectual grandstanding. No, what matters? And this comes to the second thing about shock at Trump. The second thing is that there is real social and economic dysfunction here that the United States isn't really coping with. I don't think the Trumpites, I don't think the rather kitschy intellectuals who are his mature leaders. I don't think they so much matter. What I think matters here is, put it this way, is the silence of the left. And this is one of the deep problems. I mean, always with my friends, progressive friends, liberal friends, it's terribly easy to throw rocks at Trump and scorn his cheerleaders but we always have to ask ourselves why are they there and we're here and the left at the moment doesn't really have an answer to that. The Democrats in the United States they're strangely silent. And it's not just, as many people say, because they haven't dared to speak up. It's not that, it's a question of courage. It's an intellectual question of lacking some strategic sense of where the country is and what kinds of policy would help get it to a better place. This is very bleak, and that's part of, underlies the sense of shock, which we come back to with Trump after we tell ourselves, oh, well, it isn't new, and so on. The sense of shock is, well what is the practical available alternative for the moment? Electorally, Trump is quite weak, he wasn't a landslide, he got fewer percentage than Jimmy Carter did. The balance in the in the congress is quite is quite slight but again you could take false comfort there. The problem with liberals and progressives is they don't really have a counter narrative and one of the reasons they don't have a counter-narrative is I don't sense they have any longer a kind of vision of their own. This is a very bleak state of affairs.Andrew Keen: It's a bleak state of affairs in a very kind of surreal way. They're lacking the language. They don't have the words. Do they need to reread the old New Left classics?Edmund Fawcett: I think you've said a good thing. I mean, words matter tremendously. And this is one of Trump's gifts, is that he's able to spin old tropes of the right, the old theme music of the hard right that goes back to late 19th century America, late 19th century Europe. He's brilliant at it. It's often garbled. It's also incoherent. But the intellectuals, particularly liberals and progressives can mishear this. They can miss the point. They say, ah, it doesn't, it's not grammatical. It's incoherent. It is word salad. That's not the point. A paragraph of Trump doesn't make sense. If you were an editor, you'd want to rewrite it, but editors aren't listening. It's people in the crowd who get his main point, and his main point is always expressed verbally. It's very clever. It's hard to reproduce because he's actually a very good actor. However, the left at the moment has nothing. It has neither a vocabulary nor a set of speech makers. And the reason it doesn't have that, it doesn't have the vocabularies, because it doesn't have the strategic vision.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and coming back to the K-word you brought up, kitsch. If anything, the kitsch is on the left with Kamala Harris and her presentation of herself in this kitschification of American immigration. So the left in America, if that's the right word to describe them, are as vulnerable to kitsch as the right.Edmund Fawcett: Yes, and whether it's kitsch or not, I think this is very difficult to talk to on the progressive left. Identity politics does have a lot to answer for. Okay, I'll go for it. I mean, it's an old saying in politics that things begin as a movement, become a campaign, become a lobby, and then end up as a racket. That's putting it much too strongly, but there is an element in identity politics of which that is true. And I think identity politics is a deep problem for liberals, it's a deep problem for progressives because in the end, what identity politics offers is a fragmentation, which is indeed happened on the left, which then the right can just pick off as it chooses. This is, I think, to get back some kind of strategic vision, the left needs to come out of identity politics, it needs to go back to the vision of commonality, the vision of non-discrimination, the mission of true civic equality, which underlay civil rights, great movement, and try to avoid. The way that identity politics is encouraged, a kind of segmentation. There's an interesting parallel between identity politics and Trumpism. I'm thinking of the national element in Trumpism, Make America Great Again. It's rather a shock to see the Secretary of State sitting beside Trump in the room in the White House with a make America it's not a make America great cap but it says Gulf of America this kind of This nationalism is itself neurotic in a way that identity politics has become neurotic.Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's a Linguistic.Edmund Fawcett: Neurosis. Both are neurotic responses to genuine problems.Andrew Keen: Edmund, long-time viewers and listeners to the show know that I often quote you in your wonderful two histories of conservatism and liberalism when you, I'm not sure which of the books, I think it may have been in conservatism. I can't remember myself. You noted that this struggle between the left and the right, between liberalism and conservatives have always be smarter they've always made the first move and it's always been up to the liberals and of course liberalism and the left aren't always the same thing but the left or progressives have always been catching up with conservatives so just to ask this question in terms of this metaphorical chess match has anything changed. It's always been the right that makes the first move, that sets the game up. It has recently.Edmund Fawcett: Let's not fuss too much with the metaphor. I think it was, as it were, the Liberals made the first move for decades, and then, more or less in our lifetimes, it has been the right that has made the weather, and the left has been catching up. Let's look at what happened in the 1970s. In effect. 30-40 years of welfare capitalism in which the state played ever more of a role in providing safety nets for people who were cut short by a capitalistic economy. Politics turned its didn't entirely reject that far from it but it is it was said enough already we've reached an end point we're now going to turn away from that and try to limit the welfare state and that has been happening since the 1970s and the left has never really come up with an alternative if you look at Mitterrand in France you look at Tony Blair new Labor in you look at Clinton in the United States, all of them in effect found an acceptably liberal progressive way of repackaging. What the right was doing and the left has got as yet no alternative. They can throw rocks at Trump, they can resist the hard right in Germany, they can go into coalition with the Christian Democrats in order to resist the hard right much as in France but they don't really have a governing strategy of their own. And until they do, it seems to me, and this is the bleak vision, the hard right will make the running. Either they will be in government as they are in the United States, or they'll be kept just out of government by unstable coalitions of liberal conservatives and the liberal left.Andrew Keen: So to quote Patrick Deneen, what is to be done is the alternative, a technocracy, the best-selling book now on the New York Times bestseller list is Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson's Abundance, which is a progressive. Technocratic manifesto for changing America. It's not very ideological. Is that really the only alternative for the left unless it falls into a Bernie Sanders-style anti-capitalism which often is rather vague and problematic?Edmund Fawcett: Well, technocracy is great, but technocrats never really get to do what they say ought to be done, particularly not in large, messy democracies like Europe and the United States. Look, it's a big question. If I had a Leninist answer to Patrick Deneen's question, what is to be done, I'd be very happy to give it. I feel as somebody on the liberal left that the first thing the liberal left needs to do is to is two things. One is to focus in exposing the intellectual kitschiness, the intellectual incoherence on the one hand of the hard right, and two, hitting back in a popular way, in a vulgar way, if you will, at the lies, misrepresentations, and false appeals that the hard-right coasts on. So that's really a kind of public relations. It's not deep strategy or technocracy. It is not a policy list. It's sharpening up the game. Of basically of democratic politics and they need to liberals on the left need to be much tougher much sharper much more vulgar much more ready to use the kinds of weapons the kinds of mockery and imaginative invention that the Trumpites use that's the first thing the second thing is to take a breath and go back and look at the great achievements of democratic liberalism of the 1950s, 60s, 70s if you will. I mean these were these produced in Europe and the United States societies that by any historical standard are not bad. They have terrible problems, terrible inequities, but by any historical standard and indeed by any comparative standard, they're not bad if you ask yourself why immigration has become such a problem in Western Europe and the United States, it's because these are hugely desirable places to live in, not just because they're rich and make a comfortable living, which is the sort of the rights attitude, because basically they're fairly safe places to live. They're fairly good places for your kids to grow up in. All of these are huge achievements, and it seems to me that the progressives, the liberals, should look back and see how much work was needed to create... The kinds of politics that underpinned that society, and see what was good, boast of what was and focus on how much work was needed.Andrew Keen: Maybe rather than talking about making America great again, it should be making America not bad. I think that's too English for the United States. I don't think that should be for a winner outside Massachusetts and Maine. That's back to front hypocritical Englishism. Let's end where we began on a personal note. Do you think one of the reasons why Trump makes so much news, there's so much bemusement about him around the world, is because most people associate America with modernity, they just take it for granted that America is the most advanced, the most modern, is the quintessential modern project. So when you have a character like Trump, who's anti-modernist, who is a reactionary, It's bewildering.Edmund Fawcett: I think it is bewildering, and I think there's a kind of bewilderment underneath, which we haven't really spoken to as it is an entirely other subject, but is lurking there. Yes, you put your absolutely right, you put your finger on it, a lot of us look to America as modernity, maybe not the society of the future, but certainly the the culture of the future, the innovations of the future. And I think one of the worrying things, which maybe feeds the neurosis of Make America Great Again, feeds the neurosis, of current American unilateralism, is a fear But modernity, talk like Hegel, has now shifted and is now to be seen in China, India and other countries of the world. And I think underlying everything, even below the stuff that we showed in the chart about changing shares of wealth. I think under that... That is much more worrisome in the United States than almost anything else. It's the sense that the United States isn't any longer the great modern world historical country. It's very troubling, but let's face it, you get have to get used to it.Andrew Keen: The other thing that's bewildering and chilling is this seeming coexistence of technological innovation, the Mark Andreessen's, the the Musk's, Elon Musk's of the world, the AI revolution, Silicon Valley, who seem mostly in alliance with Trump and Musk of course are headed out. The Doge campaign to destroy government or undermine government. Is it conceivable that modernity is by definition, you mentioned Hegel and of course lots of people imagine that history had ended in 1989 but the reverse was true. Is it possible that modernity is by-definition reactionary politically?Edmund Fawcett: A tough one. I mean on the technocracy, the technocrats of Silicon Valley, I think one of their problems is that they're brilliant, quite brilliant at making machines. I'm the machinery we're using right here. They're fantastic. They're not terribly good at. Messy human beings and messy politics. So I'm not terribly troubled by that, nor your other question about it is whether looming challenges of technology. I mean, maybe I could just end with the violinist, Fritz Kreisler, who said, I was against the telegraph, I was against the telephone, I was against television. I'm a progressive when it comes to technology. I'm always against the latest thing. I mean, I don't, there've always been new machines. I'm not terribly troubled by that. It seems to me, you know, I want you to worry about more immediate problems. If indeed AI is going to take over the world, my sense is, tell us when we get there.Andrew Keen: And finally, you were half-born in the United States or certainly from an American and British parent. You spent a lot of your life there and you still go, you follow it carefully. Is it like losing a lover or a loved one? Is it a kind of divorce in your mind with what's happening in America in terms of your own relations with America? You noted that your wife gave up her citizenship this year.Edmund Fawcett: Well, it is. And if I could talk about Natalia, my wife, she was much more American than me. Her mother was American from Philadelphia. She lived and worked in America more than I did. She did give up her American citizenship last year, partly for a feeling of, we use a long word, alienation, partly for practical reasons, not because we're anything like rich enough to pay American tax, but simply the business of keeping up with the changing tax code is very wary and troublesome. But she said, as she did it, she will always feel deeply American, and I think it's possible to say that. I mean, it's part of both of us, and I don't think...Andrew Keen: It's loseable. Well, I have to ask this question finally, finally. Maybe I always use that word and it's never final. What does it mean to feel American?Edmund Fawcett: Well, everybody's gonna have their own answer to that. I was just... What does it mean for you? I'm just reading. What it is to feel American. Can I dodge the question by saying, what is it to feel Californian? Or even what is to be Los Angelino? Where my sister-in-law and brother-in-law live. A great friend said, what it is feel Los Angeles you go over those mountains and you put down your rucksack. And I think what that means is for Europeans, America has always meant leaving the past behind.Edmund Fawcett was the Economist‘s Washington, Paris and Berlin correspondent and is a regular reviewer. His Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published by Princeton in 2014. The second in his planned political trilogy – Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition – was published in 2020, also by Princeton University Press. The Economist called it ‘an epic history of conservatism and the Financial Times praised Fawcett for creating a ‘rich and wide-ranging account' that demonstrates how conservatism has repeated managed to renew itself.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

"Por mucho que le pese a Hegel, la historia todavía se está escribiendo y no solo en las ciudades. Cada rincón del mundo sigue garrapateando las páginas de su propia historia y en lo más profundo del Amazonas hay infinidad de volúmenes que desconocemos. Multitud de familias etnolingüísticas con culturas y cosmovisiones en las que apenas reparamos.Para hablar de ello tenemos con nosotros a Fernando Enríquez Almorín, Etnohistoriador, aventurero y doctorando en la Universidad de Sevilla. Desde hace 16 años recorre la Amazonía, donde ha convivido con más de 10 etnias. Sus investigaciones se centran en la agencia de las poblaciones indígenas amazónicas en territorios de frontera. Además de esto dirige Ruta Inti, un proyecto cultural que busca transmitir a los jóvenes el amor por la historia y la importancia de no dejar caer en el olvido el legado de quienes nos precedieron."

Clare Carlisle's biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question, is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot's narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch, and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare's answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare! Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot's narrative ideas.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question. I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome.Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here.Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist?Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy.Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on.Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch. No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot.Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling?Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her.Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light.The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them?Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money.He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship.I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things.Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples.Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were.Clare: Yes, absolutely.Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way.Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity…Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression.Clare: Yes.Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah.Clare: Oh, that's good.Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza?Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics, which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics, but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision.Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being.Henry: Sure.Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected.We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web.Henry: The web. Right.Clare: In Middlemarch, where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with.In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that.Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes.Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men. These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men. Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months.Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb.She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon?Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks.He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself.I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is.Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.Henry: There's a good book by Debra Gettelman about the way that novelists like Eliot knew what readers expected because they were all reading so many cheap romance novels and circulating library novels. There are a lot of negations and arguments with the reader to say, "I know what you want this story to do and I know how you want this character to turn out, but I'm not going to do that. You must go with me with what I'm doing.Clare: Yes. You mean this new book that's come out called Imagining Otherwise?Henry: That's right, yes.Clare: I've actually not read it yet, I've ordered it, but funnily enough, as you said at the beginning, I'm a philosopher so I'm not trained at all as a reader of literary texts or as a literary scholar by any means, and so I perhaps foolishly embarked on this book on George Eliot thinking, "Oh, next I'm going to write a book about George Eliot." Anyway, I ended up going to a couple of conferences on George Eliot, which was interestingly like stepping into a different world. The academic world of literary studies is really different from the world of academic philosophy, interestingly.It's run by women for a start. You go to a conference and it's very female-dominated. There's all these very eminent senior women or at least at this conference I went to there was these distinguished women who were running the show. Then there were a few men in that mix, which is the inverse of often what it can be like in a philosophy conference, which is still quite a male-dominated discipline. The etiquette is different. Philosophers like to criticize each other's arguments. That's the way we show love is to criticize and take down another philosopher's argument.Whereas the academics at this George Eliot conference were much more into acknowledging what they'd learned from other people's work and referencing. Anyway, it's really interestingly different. Debra Gettelman was at this conference.Henry: Oh, great.Clare: She had a book on Middlemarch. I think it was 2019 because it was the bicentenary of Eliot's birth, that's why there was this big conference. Debra, who I'd never met before or heard of, as I just didn't really know this world, gave this amazing talk on Middlemarch and on these negations in Middlemarch. It really influenced me, it really inspired me. The way she did these close readings of the sentences, this is what literary scholars are trained to do, but I haven't had that training and the close reading of the sentences, which didn't just yield interesting insights into the way George Eliot uses language but yielded this really interesting philosophical work where Eliot is using forms of the sentence to explore ontological questions about negation and possibility and modality.This was just so fascinating and really, it was a small paper in one of those parallel sessions. It wasn't one of the big presentations at the conference, but it was that talk that most inspired me at the conference. It's a lot of the insights that I got from Debra Gettelman I ended up drawing on in my own chapter on Middlemarch. I situated it a bit more in the history of philosophy and thinking about negation as a theme.Henry: This is where you link it to Hegel.Clare: Yes, to Hegel, exactly. I was so pleased to see that the book is out because I think I must have gone up to her after the talk and said, "Oh, it's really amazing." Was like, "Oh, thank you." I was like, "Is it published? Can I cite it?" She said, "No. I'm working on this project." It seemed like she felt like it was going to be a long time in the making. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a review of the book in the TLS. I thought, "Oh, amazing, the book is out. It just sounds brilliant." I can't wait to read that book. Yes, she talks about Eliot alongside, I think, Dickens and another.Henry: And Jane Austen.Clare: Jane Austen, amazing. Yes. I think it's to do with, as you say, writing in response to readerly expectation and forming readerly expectations. Partly thanks to Debra Gettelman, I can see how Eliot does that. It'd be really interesting to learn how she sees Jane Austen and Dickens also doing that.Henry: It's a brilliant book. You're in for a treat.Clare: Yes, I'm sure it is. That doesn't surprise me at all.Henry: Now, you say more than once in your book, that Eliot anticipates some of the insights of psychotherapy.Clare: Psychoanalysis.Henry: Yes. What do you think she would have made of Freud or of our general therapy culture? I think you're right, but she has very different aims and understandings of these things. What would she make of it now?Clare: It seems that Freud was probably influenced by Eliot. That's a historical question. He certainly read and admired Eliot. I suspect, yes, was influenced by some of her insights, which in turn, she's drawing on other stuff. What do you have in mind? Your question suggests that you think she might have disapproved of therapy culture.Henry: I think novelists in general are quite ambivalent about psychoanalysis and therapy. Yes.Clare: For what reason?Henry: If you read someone like Iris Murdoch, who's quite Eliotic in many ways, she would say, "Do these therapists ever actually help anyone?"Clare: Ah.Henry: A lot of her characters are sent on these slightly dizzying journeys. They're often given advice from therapists or priests or philosophers, and obviously, Murdoch Is a philosopher. The advice from the therapists and the philosophers always ends these characters up in appalling situations. It's art and literature. As you were saying before, a more diffusive understanding and a way of integrating yourself with other things rather than looking back into your head and dwelling on it.Clare: Of course. Yes.Henry: I see more continuity between Eliot and that kind of thinking. I wonder if you felt that the talking cure that you identified at the end of Middlemarch is quite sound common sense and no-nonsense. It's not lie on the couch and tell me how you feel, is it?Clare: I don't know. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it would be to see Eliot and Freud is located in this broadly Socratic tradition of one, the idea that if you understand yourself better, then that is a route to a certain qualified kind of happiness or fulfillment or liberation. The best kind of human life there could be is one where we gain insight into our own natures. We bring to light what is hidden from us, whether those are desires that are hidden away in the shadows and they're actually motivating our behavior, but we don't realize it, and so we are therefore enslaved to them.That's a very old idea that you find in ancient philosophy. Then the question is, by what methods do we bring these things to light? Is it through Socratic questioning? Is it through art? Eliot's art is an art that I think encourages us to see ourselves in the characters. As we come to understand the characters, and in particular to go back to what I said before about Spinozism, to see their embeddedness and their interconnectedness in these wider webs, but also in a sense of that embeddedness in psychic forces that they're not fully aware of. Part of what you could argue is being exposed there, and this would be a Spinozist insight, is the delusion of free will.The idea that we act freely with these autonomous agents who have access to and control over our desires, and we pick the thing that's in our interest and we act on that. That's a view that I think Spinoza is very critical. He famously denies free will. He says we're determined, we just don't understand how we're determined. When we understand better how we're determined, then perhaps paradoxically we actually do become relatively empowered through our understanding. I think there's something of that in Eliot too, and arguably there's something of that in Freud as well. I know you weren't actually so much asking about Freud's theory and practice, and more about a therapy culture.Henry: All of it.Clare: You're also asking about that. As I say, the difference would be the method for accomplishing this process of a kind of enlightenment. Of course, Freud's techniques medicalizes that project basically. It's the patient and the doctor in dialogue, and depends a lot on the skills of the doctor, doesn't it? How successful, and who is also a human being, who is also another human being, who isn't of course outside of the web, but is themselves in it, and ideally has themselves already undergone this process of making themselves more transparent to their own understanding, but of course, is going to be liable to their own blind spots, and so on.Henry: Which of her novels do you love the most? Just on a personal level, it doesn't have to be which one you think is the most impressive or whatever.Clare: I'm trying to think how to answer that question. I was thinking if I had to reread one of them next week, which one would I choose? If I was going on holiday and I wanted a beach read for pure enjoyment, which of the novels would I pick up? Probably Middlemarch. I think it's probably the most enjoyable, the most fun to read of her novels, basically.Henry: Sure.Clare: There'd be other reasons for picking other books. I really think Daniel Deronda is amazing because of what she's trying to do in that book. Its ambition, it doesn't always succeed in giving us the reading experience that is the most enjoyable. In terms of just the staggering philosophical and artistic achievement, what she's attempting to do, and what she does to a large extent achieve in that book, I think is just incredible. As a friend of Eliot, I have a real love for Daniel Deronda because I just think that what an amazing thing she did in writing that book. Then I've got a soft spot for Silas Marner, which is short and sweet.Henry: I think I'd take The Mill on the Floss. That's my favorite.Clare: Oh, would you?Henry: I love that book.Clare: That also did pop into my mind as another contender. Yes, because it's so personal in a way, The Mill on the Floss. It's personal to her, it's also personal to me in that, it's the first book by Eliot I read because I studied it for A-Level. I remember thinking when we were at the beginning of that two-year period when I'd chosen my English literature A-Level and we got the list of texts we were going to read, I remember seeing The Mill on the Floss and thinking, "Oh God, that sounds so boring." The title, something about the title, it just sounded awful. I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Jane Austen or something more fun.I thought, "Oh, The Mill on the Floss." Then I don't have a very strong memory of the book, but I remember thinking, actually, it was better than I expected. I did think, actually, it wasn't as awful and boring as I thought it would be. It's a personal book to Eliot. I think that exploring the life of a mind of a young woman who has no access to proper education, very limited access to art and culture, she's stuck in this little village near a provincial town full of narrow-minded conservative people. That's Eliot's experience herself. It was a bit my experience, too, as, again, not that I even would have seen it this way at the time, but a girl with intellectual appetites and not finding those appetites very easily satisfied in, again, a provincial, ordinary family and the world and so on.Henry: What sort of reader were you at school?Clare: What sort of reader?Henry: Were you reading lots of Plato, lots of novels?Clare: No. I'm always really surprised when I meet people who say things like they were reading Kierkegaard and Plato when they were 15 or 16. No, not at all. No, I loved reading, so I just read lots and lots of novels. I loved Jane Eyre. That was probably one of the first proper novels, as with many people, that I remember reading that when I was about 12 and partly feeling quite proud of myself for having read this grown-up book, but also really loving the book. I reread that probably several times before I was 25. Jane Austen and just reading.Then also I used to go to the library, just completely gripped by some boredom and restlessness and finding something to read. I read a lot and scanning the shelves and picking things out. That way I read more contemporary fiction. Just things like, I don't know, Julian Barnes or, Armistead Maupin, or just finding stuff on the shelves of the library that looked interesting, or Anita Brookner or Somerset Maugham. I really love Somerset Maugham.Henry: Which ones do you like?Clare: I remember reading, I think I read The Razor's Edge first.Henry: That's a great book.Clare: Yes, and just knowing nothing about it, just picking it off the shelf and thinking, "Oh, this looks interesting." I've always liked a nice short, small paperback. That would always appeal. Then once I found a book I liked, I'd then obviously read other stuff by that writer. I then read, so The Razor's Edge and-- Oh, I can't remember.Henry: The Moon and Sixpence, maybe?Clare: Yes, The Moon and Sixpence, and-Henry: Painted Veils?Clare: -Human Bondage.Henry: Of Human Bondage, right.Clare: Human Bondage, which is, actually, he took the title from Spinoza's Ethics. That's the title. Cluelessly, as a teenager, I was like, "Ooh, this book is interesting." Actually, when I look back, I can see that those writers, like Maugham, for example, he was really interested in philosophy. He was really interested in art and philosophy, and travel, and culture, and religion, all the things I am actually interested in. I wouldn't have known that that was why I loved the book. I just liked the book and found it gripping. It spoke to me, and I wanted to just read more other stuff like that.I was the first person in my family to go to university, so we didn't have a lot of books in the house. We had one bookcase. There were a few decent things in there along with the Jeffrey Archers in there. I read everything on that bookshelf. I read the Jeffrey Archers, I read the True Crime, I read the In Cold Blood, just this somewhat random-- I think there was probably a couple of George Eliots on there. A few classics, I would, again, grip by boredom on a Sunday afternoon, just stare at this shelf and think, "Oh, is there anything?" Maybe I'll end up with a Thomas Hardy or something. It was quite limited. I didn't really know anything about philosophy. I didn't think of doing philosophy at university, for example. I actually decided to do history.I went to Cambridge to do history. Then, after a couple of weeks, just happened to meet someone who was doing philosophy. I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to do." I only recognized it when I saw it. I hadn't really seen it because I went to the local state school, it wasn't full of teachers who knew about philosophy and stuff like that.Henry: You graduated in theology and philosophy, is that right?Clare: Yes. Cambridge, the degrees are in two parts. I did Part 1, theology, and then I did Part 2, philosophy. I graduated in philosophy, but I studied theology in my first year at Cambridge.Henry: What are your favorite Victorian biographies?Clare: You mean biographies of Victorians?Henry: Of Victorians, by Victorians, whatever.Clare: I don't really read many biographies.Henry: Oh, really?Clare: [laughs] The first biography I wrote was a biography of Kierkegaard. I remember thinking, when I started to write the book, "I'd better read some biographies." I always tend to read fiction. I'm not a big reader of history, which is so ironic. I don't know what possessed me to go and study history at university. These are not books I read for pleasure. I suppose I am quite hedonistic in my choice of reading, I like to read for pleasure.Henry: Sure. Of course.Clare: I don't tend to read nonfiction. Obviously, I do sometimes read nonfiction for pleasure, but it's not the thing I'm most drawn to. Anyway. I remember asking my editor, I probably didn't mention that I didn't know very much about biography, but I did ask him to recommend some. I'd already got the book contract. I said, "What do you think is a really good biography that I should read?" He recommended, I think, who is it who wrote The Life of Gibbon? Really famous biography of Gibbon.Henry: I don't know.Clare: That one. I read it. It is really good. My mind is going blank. I read many biographies of George Eliot before I wrote mine.Henry: They're not all wonderful, are they?Clare: I really liked Catherine Hughes's book because it brought her down from her pedestal.Henry: Exactly. Yes.Clare: Talking about hedonism, I would read anything that Catherine Hughes writes just for enjoyment because she's such a good writer. She's a very intellectual woman, but she's also very entertaining. She writes to entertain, which I like and appreciate as a reader. There's a couple of big archival biographies of George Eliot by Gordon Haight and by Rosemary Ashton, for example, which are both just invaluable. One of the great things about that kind of book is that it frees you to write a different kind of biography that can be more interpretive and more selective. Once those kinds of books have been published, there's no point doing another one. You can do something more creative, potentially, or more partial.I really like Catherine Hughes's. She was good at seeing through Eliot sometimes, and making fun of her, even though it's still a very respectful book. There's also this brilliant book about Eliot by Rosemary Bodenheimer called The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. It's a biographical book, but it's written through the letters. She sees Eliot's life through her letters. Again, it's really good at seeing through Eliot. What Eliot says is not always what she means. She can be quite defensive and boastful. These are things that really come out in her letters. Anyway, that's a brilliant book, which again, really helped me to read Eliot critically. Not unsympathetically, but critically, because I tend to fall in love with thinkers that I'm reading. I'm not instinctively critical. I want to just show how amazing they are, but of course, you also need to be critical. Those books were--Henry: Or realistic.Clare: Yes, realistic and just like, "This is a human being," and having a sense of humor about it as well. That's what's great about Catherine Hughes's book, is that she's got a really good sense of humor. That makes for a fun reading experience.Henry: Why do you think more philosophers don't write biographies? It's an unphilosophical activity, isn't it?Clare: That's a very interesting question. Just a week or so ago, I was talking to Clare Mac Cumhaill I'm not quite sure how you pronounce her name, but anyway, so there's--Henry: Oh, who did the four women in Oxford?Clare: Yes. Exactly.Henry: That was a great book.Clare: Yes. Clare MacCumhaill co-wrote this book with Rachael Wiseman. They're both philosophers. They wrote this group biography of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. I happened to be having dinner with a group of philosophers and sitting opposite her. Had never met her before. It was just a delight to talk to another philosopher who'd written biography. We both felt that there was a real philosophical potential in biography, that thinking about a shape of a human life, what it is to know another person, the connection between a person's life and their philosophy. Even to put it that way implies that philosophy is something that isn't part of life, that you've got philosophy over here and you've got life over there. Then you think about the connection between them.That, when you think about it, is quite a questionable way of looking at philosophy as if it's somehow separate from life or detachment life. We had a really interesting conversation about this. There's Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. He's another philosopher who's written biography, and then went on to reflect, interestingly, on the relationship between philosophy and biography.I think on the one hand, I'd want to question the idea that biography and philosophy are two different things or that a person's life and their thought are two separate questions. On the other hand, we've got these two different literary forms. One of them is a narrative form of writing, and one of them- I don't know what the technical term for it would be- but a more systematic writing where with systematic writing, it's not pinned to a location or a time, and the structure of the text is conceptual rather than narrative. It's not ordered according to events and chronology, and things happening, you've just got a more analytic style of writing.Those two styles of writing are very, very different ways of writing. They're two different literary forms. Contemporary academic philosophers tend to write, almost always-- probably are pretty much forced to write in the systematic analytic style because as soon as you would write a narrative, the critique will be, "Well, that's not philosophy. That's history," or "That's biography," or, "That's anecdote." You might get little bits of narrative in some thought experiment, but by definition, the thought experiment is never pinned to a particular time, place, or context. "Let's imagine a man standing on a bridge. There's a fat man tied to the railway line [crosstalk]." Those are like little narratives, but they're not pinned. There is a sequencing, so I suppose they are narratives. Anyway, as you can tell, they're quite abstracted little narratives.That interests me. Why is it that narrative is seen as unphilosophical? Particularly when you think about the history of philosophy, and we think about Plato's dialogues, which tend to have a narrative form, and the philosophical conversation is often situated within a narrative. The Phaedo, for example, at the beginning of the book, Socrates is sitting in prison, and he's about to drink his poisoned hemlock. He's awaiting execution. His friends, students, and disciples are gathered around him. They're talking about death and how Socrates feels about dying. Then, at the end of the book, he dies, and his friends are upset about it.Think about, I know, Descartes' Meditations, where we begin in the philosopher's study, and he's describing--Henry: With the fire.Clare: He's by the fire, but he's also saying, "I've reached a point in my life where I thought, actually, it's time to question some assumptions." He's sitting by the fire, but he's also locating the scene in his own life trajectory. He's reached a certain point in life. Of course, that may be a rhetorical device. Some readers might want to say, "Well, that's mere ornamentation. We extract the arguments from that. That's where the philosophy is." I think it's interesting to think about why philosophers might choose narrative as a form.Spinoza, certainly not in the Ethics, which is about as un-narrative as you can get, but in some of his other, he experimented with an earlier version of the Ethics, which is actually like Descartes' meditation. He begins by saying, "After experience had taught me to question all the values I'd been taught to pursue, I started to wonder whether there was some other genuine good that was eternal," and so on. He then goes on to narrate his experiments with a different kind of life, giving up certain things and pursuing other things.Then you come to George Eliot. I think these are philosophical books.Henry: Yes.Clare: The challenge lies in saying, "Well, how are they philosophical?" Are they philosophical because there are certain ideas in the books that you could pick out and say, "Oh, here, she's critiquing utilitarianism. These are her claims." You can do that with Eliot's books. There are arguments embedded in the books. I wouldn't want to say that that's where their philosophical interest is exhausted by the fact that you can extract non-narrative arguments from them, but rather there's also something philosophical in her exploration of what a human life is like and how choices get made and how those choices, whether they're free or unfree, shape a life, shape other lives. What human happiness can we realistically hope for? What does a good life look like? What does a bad life look like? Why is the virtue of humility important?These are also, I think, philosophical themes that can perhaps only be treated in a long-form, i.e., in a narrative that doesn't just set a particular scene from a person's life, but that follows the trajectory of a life. That was a very long answer to your question.Henry: No, it was a good answer. I like it.Clare: Just to come back to what you said about biography. When I wrote my first biography on Kierkegaard, I really enjoyed working in this medium of narrative for the first time. I like writing. I'd enjoyed writing my earlier books which were in that more analytic conceptual style where the structure was determined by themes and by concepts rather than by any chronology. I happily worked in that way. I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how to write. How do you write a narrative?To come back to the Metaphysical Animals, the group biography, writing a narrative about one person's life is complicated enough, but writing a narrative of four lives, it's a real-- from a technical point of view-- Even if you only have one life, lives are not linear. If you think about a particular period in your subject's life, people have lots of different things going on at once that have different timeframes. You're going through a certain period in your relationship, you're working on a book, someone close to you dies, you're reading Hegel. All that stuff is going on. The narrative is not going to be, "Well, on Tuesday this happened, and then on Wednesday--" You can't use pure chronology to structure a narrative. It's not just one thing following another.It's not like, "Well, first I'll talk about the relationship," which is an issue that was maybe stretching over a three-month period. Then in this one week, she was reading Hegel and making these notes that were really important. Then, in the background to this is Carlisle's view of history. You've got these different temporal periods that are all bearing on a single narrative. The challenge to create a narrative from all that, that's difficult, as any biographer knows. To do that with four subjects at once is-- Anyway, they did an amazing job in that book.Henry: It never gets boring, that book.Clare: No. I guess the problem with a biography is often you're stuck with this one person through the whole--Henry: I think the problem with a biography of philosophers is that it can get very boring. They kept the interest for four thinkers. I thought that was very impressive, really.Clare: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There's a really nice balance between the philosophy and the-- I like to hear about Philippa Foot's taste in cushions. Maybe some readers would say, "Oh, no, that's frivolous." It's not the view I would take. For me, it's those apparently frivolous details that really help you to connect with a person. They will deliver a sense of the person that nothing else will. There's no substitute for that.In my book about Kierkegaard, it was reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. It was generally quite a positive review. He was a bit sneering about the fact that it had what he calls "domestic flourishes" in the book. I'd mentioned that Kierkegaard's favorite flower was the lily of the valley. He's like, "Huh." He saw these as frivolities, whereas for me, the fact that Kierkegaard had a favorite flower tells us something about the kind of man he was.Henry: Absolutely.Clare: Actually, his favorite flower had all sorts of symbolism attached to it, Kierkegaard, it had 10 different layers of meaning. It's never straightforward. There's interesting value judgments that get made. There's partly the view that anything biographical is not philosophical. It is in some way frivolous or incidental. That would be perhaps a very austere, purest philosophical on a certain conception of philosophy view.Then you might also have views about what is and isn't interesting, what is and isn't significant. Actually, that's a really interesting question. What is significant about a person's life, and what isn't? Actually, to come back to Eliot, that's a question she is, I think, absolutely preoccupied with, most of all in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda. This question about what is trivial and what is significant. Dorothea is frustrated because she feels that her life is trivial. She thinks that Casaubon is preoccupied with really significant questions, the key to all mythologies, and so on.Henry: [chuckles]Clare: There's really a deep irony there because that view of what's significant is really challenged in the novel. Casaubon's project comes to seem really futile, petty, and insignificant. In Daniel Deronda, you've got this amazing question where she shows her heroine, Gwendolyn, who's this selfish 20-year-old girl who's pursuing her own self-interest in a pretty narrow way, about flirting and thinking about her own romantic prospects.Henry: Her income.Clare: She's got this inner world, which is the average preoccupation of a silly 20-year-old girl.Henry: Yes. [laughs]Clare: Then Eliot's narrator asks, "Is there a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl who's preoccupied with how to make her own life pleasant?" The question she's asking is-- Well, I think she wants to tell us that slender thread of the girl's consciousness is part of the universe, basically. It's integral. It belongs to a great drama of the struggle between good and evil, which is this mythical, cosmic, religious, archetypal drama that gets played out on the scale of the universe, but also, in this silly girl's consciousness.I think she's got to a point where she was very explicitly thematizing that distinction between the significant and the insignificant and playing with that distinction. It comes back to Dorothea's unhistoric life. It's unhistoric, it's insignificant. Yet, by the end of Middlemarch, by the time we get to that description of Dorothea's unhistoric life, this life has become important to us. We care about Dorothea and how her life turned out. It has this grandeur to it that I think Eliot exposes. It's not the grandeur of historic importance, it's some other human grandeur that I think she wants to find in the silly girls as much as in the great men.Henry: I always find remarks like that quite extraordinary. One of the things I want a biography to tell me is, "How did they come to believe these things?" and, "How did they get the work done?" The flowers that he likes, that's part of that, right? It's like Bertrand Russell going off on his bicycle all the time. That's part of how it all happened. I remember Elizabeth Anscombe in the book about the four philosophers, this question of, "How does she do it all when she's got these six children?" There's this wonderful image of her standing in the doorway to her house smoking. The six children are tumbling around everywhere. The whole place is filthy. I think they don't own a Hoover or she doesn't use it. You just get this wonderful sense of, "This is how she gets it done."Clare: That's how you do it.Henry: Yes. The idea that this is some minor domestic trivial; no, this is very important to understanding Elizabeth Anscombe, right?Clare: Yes, of course.Henry: I want all of this.Clare: Yes. One of the things I really like about her is that she unashamedly brings that domesticity into her philosophical work. She'll use examples like, "I go to buy some potatoes from the grocer's." She'll use that example, whereas that's not the thing that-- Oxford dons don't need to buy any potatoes because they have these quasi-monastic lives where they get cooked for and cleaned for. I like the way she chooses those. Of course, she's not a housewife, but she chooses these housewifely examples to illustrate her philosophy.I don't know enough about Anscombe, but I can imagine that that's a deliberate choice. That's a choice she's making. There's so many different examples she could have thought of. She's choosing that example, which is an example, it shows a woman doing philosophy, basically. Of course, men can buy potatoes too, but in that culture, the buying of the potatoes would be the woman's work.Henry: Yes. She wasn't going to run into AJ Ayre at the grocer's.Clare: Probably not, no.Henry: No. Are you religious in any sense?Clare: I think I am in some sense. Yes, "religious," I think it's a really problematic concept. I've written a bit about this concept of religion and what it might mean. I wrote a book on Spinoza called Spinoza's Religion. Part of what I learned through writing the book was that in order to decide whether or not Spinoza was religious, we have to rethink the very concept of religion, or we have to see that that's what Spinoza was doing.I don't know. Some people are straightforwardly religious and I guess could answer that question, say, "Oh yes, I've always been a Christian," or whatever. My answer is a yes and no answer, where I didn't have a religious upbringing, and I don't have a strong religious affiliation. Sorry, I'm being very evasive.Henry: What do you think of the idea that we're about to live through or we are living through a religious revival? More people going to church, more young people interested in it. Do you see that, or do you think that's a blip?Clare: That's probably a question for the social scientists, isn't it? It just totally depends where you are and what community you're--Henry: Your students, you are not seeing students who are suddenly more religious?Clare: Well, no, but my students are students who've chosen to do philosophy. Some of them are religious and some of them are not. It will be too small a sample to be able to diagnose. I can say that my students are much more likely to be questioning. Many of them are questioning their gender, thinking about how to inhabit gender roles differently.That's something I perceive as a change from 20 years ago, just in the way that my students will dress and present themselves. That's a discernible difference. I can remark on that, but I can't remark on whether they're more religious.Just actually just been teaching a course on philosophy of religion at King's. Some students in the course of having discussions would mention that they were Muslim, Christian, or really into contemplative practices and meditation. Some of the students shared those interests. Others would say, "Oh, well, I'm an atheist, so this is--" There's just a range-Henry: A full range.Clare: -of different religious backgrounds and different interests. There's always been that range. I don't know whether there's an increased interest in religion among those students in particular, but I guess, yes, maybe on a national or global level, statistically-- I don't know. You tell me.Henry: What do you think about all these reports that undergraduates today-- "They have no attention span, they can't read a book, everything is TikTok," do you see this or are you just seeing like, "No, my students are fine actually. This is obviously happening somewhere else"?Clare: Again, it's difficult to say because I see them when they're in their classes, I see them in their seminars, I see them in the lectures. I don't know what their attention spans are like in their--Henry: Some of the other people I've interviewed will say things like, "I'll set reading, and they won't do it, even though it's just not very much reading,"-Clare: Oh, I see. Oh, yes.Henry: -or, "They're on the phone in the--" You know what I mean?Clare: Yes.Henry: The whole experience from 10, 20 years ago, these are just different.Clare: I'm also more distracted by my phone than I was 20 years ago. I didn't have a phone 20 years ago.Henry: Sure.Clare: Having a phone and being on the internet is constantly disrupting my reading and my writing. That's something that I think many of us battle with a bit. I'm sure most of us are addicted to our phones. I wouldn't draw a distinction between myself and my students in that respect. I've been really impressed by my students, pleasantly surprised by the fact they've done their reading because it can be difficult to do reading, I think.Henry: You're not one of these people who says, "Oh students today, it's really very different than it was 20 years ago. You can't get them to do anything. The whole thing is--" Some people are apocalyptic about-- Actually, you're saying no, your students are good?Clare: I like my students. Whether they do the reading or not, I'm not going to sit here and complain about them.Henry: No, sure, sure. I think that's good. What are you working on next?Clare: I've just written a book. It came out of a series of lectures I gave on life writing and philosophy, actually. Connected to what we were talking about earlier. Having written the biographies, I started to reflect a bit more on biography and how it may or may not be a philosophical enterprise, and questions about the shape of a life and what one life can transmit to another life. Something about the devotional labor of the biographer when you're living with this person and you're-- It's devotional, but it's also potentially exploitative because often you're using your subjects, of course, without their consent because they're dead. You're presenting their life to public view and you're selling books, so it's devotional and exploitative. I think that's an interesting pairing.Anyway, so I gave these lectures last year in St Andrews and they're going to be published in September.Henry: Great.Clare: I've finished those really.Henry: That's what's coming.Clare: That's what's coming. Then I've just been writing again about Kierkegaard, actually. I haven't really worked on Kierkegaard for quite a few years. As often happens with these things, I got invited to speak on Kierkegaard and death at a conference in New York in November. My initial thought was like, "Oh, I wish it was Spinoza, I don't want to--" I think I got to the point where I'd worked a lot on Kierkegaard and wanted to do other things. I was a bit like, "Oh, if only I was doing Spinoza, that would be more up my street." I wanted to go to the conference, so I said yes to this invitation. I was really glad I did because I went back and read what Kierkegaard has written about death, which is very interesting because Kierkegaard's this quintessentially death-fixated philosopher, that's his reputation. It's his reputation, he's really about death. His name means churchyard. He's doomy and gloomy. There's the caricature.Then, to actually look at what he says about death and how he approaches the subject, which I'd forgotten or hadn't even read closely in the first place, those particular texts. That turned out to be really interesting, so I'm writing-- It's not a book or anything, it's just an article.Henry: You're not going to do a George Eliot and produce a novel?Clare: No. I'm not a novelist or a writer of fiction. I don't think I have enough imagination to create characters. What I love about biography is that you get given the characters and you get given the plots. Then, of course, it is a creative task to then turn that into a narrative, as I said before. The kinds of biography I like to write are quite creative, they're not just purely about facts. I think facts can be quite boring. Well, they become interesting in the context of questions about meaning interpretations by themselves. Again, probably why I was right to give up on the history degree. For me, facts are not where my heart is.That amount of creativity I think suits me well, but to create a world as you do when you're a novelist and create characters and plots, and so, that doesn't come naturally to me. I guess I like thinking about philosophical questions through real-life stories. It's one way for philosophy to be connected to real life. Philosophy can also be connected to life through fiction, of course, but it's not my own thing. I like to read other people's fiction. I'm not so bothered about reading other biographies.Henry: No. No, no.[laughter]Clare: I'll write the biographies, and I'll read the fiction.Henry: That's probably the best way. Clare Carlisle, author of The Marriage Question, thank you very much.Clare: Oh, thanks, Henry. It's been very fun to talk to you.Henry: Yes. It was a real pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Paul Axton preaches: Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Moltmann unite in describing the resurrection as opening up the life of Christ as the story of God, and the central interpretive key of faith. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

Extrait de l'épisode SARTRE - On a la vie qu'on mériteCet épisode sera publié sur YouTube et en podcast vendredi prochain le 2 maiIl est d'ores et déjà disponible en intégralité sur ma page Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/posts/127269685Distribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

First-time GTAA guest Borna Radnik and frequent GTAA guest Matt McManus join Ben Burgis to chat about Borna's book "Freedom, in Context:Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel." Before that, in lieu of an Opening Argument and for the first time on YouTube, we'll play a talk Ben gave a while back called "Karl Marx Deserves Better Critics."...and, last but not least, Jason Myles hangs out in the postgame for patrons!Check out Borna's book:https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Context-History-Necessity-Hegel/dp/1350430048Follow Borna on Twitter: @BornaRadnikFollow Matt on Twitter: @MattPolProfFollow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgisFollow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_ShowBecome a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:patreon.com/benburgisRead the weekly philosophy Substack:benburgis.substack.com

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The boys (featuring the return of Mir) return to the slaughter-bench to finish discussing Terry Pinkard's article "The Spirit of History."The Spirit of History by Terry Pinkardhttps://aeon.co/essays/what-is-history-nobody-gave-a-deeper-answer-than-hegelSend us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social.

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel's philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas, especially more recent thinking, tracing not only the ideas themselves, but the ways in which they were adapted by different theorists and cultural approaches. Gallo provides the reader with deep historical insights alongside the explication of complex theoretical understandings, noting how ideas travel across language, time, geography, and cultures. Gallo's project here is to weave together history, politics, and ideas more fully to understand ideas in different spaces, providing a transnational perspective of Hegel's thinking and how it evolved in other places, with other thinkers. Italy often finds itself the “forgotten stepchild” in political theory, even though it sits at the intersection of the global North and South, as well as the global East and global West, where ideas from different parts of the world intertwine with each other. The physical space where Italy is located provides this connectivity not only between geographical regions and ideas, but it is also where goods are exchanged alongside intellectual ideas. One of the key lines of interrogation in Hegel and Italian Political Thought is how Hegelian ideas were put into practice in different parts of Italy and what those ideas looked like in practice. For Italy, given the regional distinctions and the seven different states within the peninsula in the early 1800s, Hegel's ideas contributed to a variety of paths towards nation and state building. Gallo examines the ways in which many of the Italian intellectuals during this period were also politicians involved in their respective states, and many of them looked towards Hegel's considerations, mixing them with Italian culture, to rethink how Italy should be structured to function as a modern nation-state, or an array of states within the nation. Gallo and I have a great conversation about the interweaving of Hegel with Italian political thought. We also discuss the rise of the mafia in southern Italy during this period, and how this is connected to these broader ideas of the state's monopoly on violence, issues of freedom and liberty, and how power and power vacuums contribute to the form of the state. This is a lively discussion of the history of ideas, the particular dimensions of Italy and Italian political thought and praxis, Hegel's concepts that apply to the state, and what we can learn from how all of these components were woven together during the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or find her at Bluesky @gorenlj.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/italian-studies

The episode explores Hegel's complex understanding of freedom as self-determination and its historical evolution through time, juxtaposed with Kant and Rousseau's perspectives. It emphasizes that freedom is a relational and collective struggle that necessitates recognition and social action, questioning the practical implications of Hegel's thought in contemporary movements for change. - Examining Hegel's definition of freedom as self-determination- Historical context: freedom's evolution through societies- The importance of temporality in understanding freedom- Comparing Hegel with Kant and Rousseau on freedom- Duns Scotus' radical contingency vs. Hegel's causal necessity- Practical implications: social struggles for freedom today - Connecting Hegelian philosophy to contemporary movementsSend us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan

Friends, happy Easter! Many of you probably know that I've spent much of my life reading philosophers and spiritual writers—Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel. What all those figures have in common is a kind of calm, musing detachment as they talk about high ideas. Well, there's all of that—and then there's the Gospel, the “Good News.” Yes, the Gospels have inspired philosophers and spiritual teachers, but at their heart, they're not abstracted philosophical musing; they're the urgent conveying of news. Something happened—and I need you to know about it!

Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today. Ray Brassier influenced a generation of philosophers not only with his outstanding and highly rigorous writing, but also his absolutely stunning translations of Quentin Meillassoux and François Laruelle, and in so doing is subcutaneously responsible for literally a decade of earthquakes in the discourse. Ray joins us to evaluate the status of Marx in the 21st century.Ray traces the long arc from Nihil Unbound through Marx, Sellars, and the inferentialist tradition, opening up an unapologetically rationalist framework for understanding both science and emancipation, without reducing either to liberal platitudes or metaphysical fantasies. We discuss the seductive dangers of naive anti-humanism, the legacy of German idealism, the automation of reason, and why political theory today needs to be deeply embedded in materialist accounts of scale, finance, and abstraction. Ray shares a trenchant critique of both the empiricist and idealist strands of Enlightenment thought, offering instead a dialectical, normatively grounded, socially embedded concept of rationality that returns to Kant and Hegel by way of Wilfrid Sellars. We strongly recommend:Ray's book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction His essay “The View from Nowhere”His exceptional piece "Politics of the Rift" on Théorie Communiste in e-fluxWork from the journal Endnotes (https://endnotes.org.uk/)In the episode, we also discuss theorists such as Badiou, Larouelle, Meillassoux, and Marxist reinterpretations by Moishe Postone, Théorie Communiste, and the German “New Reading” school. Ray elaborates on how capital's increasing abstraction—especially in financialized regimes where labor is decoupled from value—is not the end of Marx, but a reason to read Marx more seriously and materially than ever.

Welcome to the Psychedelic Conversations Podcast!Episode 156:In this episode, we explore the powerful concept of "Endarkenment" with philosopher Alexander Bard and artist Owen Cox. Together, we dive deep into the cultural, historical, and spiritual forces shaping modern psychedelic and artistic movements, including the emergence of a "Dark Renaissance." We unpack Britain's unique relationship with psychedelics, reflect on the decline of urban centers, and question conventional spirituality through the lens of shadow, myth, and radical transformation. From cybernetics to Celtic paganism, from Zoroastrian insights to gender dynamics in spiritual practice—this is a rich, unfiltered dialogue about embracing the darkness as a necessary path toward true integration and awakening. Join us for this provocative and inspiring conversation that challenges mainstream narratives and opens new portals of thought.About Alex:Alexander Bard is a philosopher, artist, songwriter and music producer, author of six books with Jan Söderqvist, living in Stockholm, Sweden. Bard built his career as a philosopher in parallel with a highly successful 25-years-plus career in the international music industry. Bard & Söderqvist's philosophy concentrates on the relationship between human beings and technology, using human beings as the constant throughout civilization, with technology as the ever faster changing variable. Their work takes inspiration from thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Eastern philosophy and spirituality, in the latter case adding Persia to the well known triad of India, China and Japan. They are convinced philosophy will be the last human activity to ever be affected by AI.About Owen:Owen Cox is a British artist and one of the creative leaders of the Dark Renaissance. He works primarily with text, music and more recently theatre, weaving themes of body horror, esotericism, classical culture and electronic media. Connect with Alex:Website: http://syntheism.com/Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/alexander.bard?_rdc=1&_rdr#Speakersnet: https://speakersnet.se/speakers/alexander-bard/Thank you so much for joining us! Psychedelic Conversations Podcast is designed to educate, inform, and expand awareness.For more information, please head over to https://www.psychedelicconversations.comPlease share with your friends or leave a review so that we can reach more people and feel free to join us in our private Facebook group to keep the conversation going. https://www.facebook.com/groups/psychedelicconversationsThis show is for information purposes only, and is not intended to provide mental health or medical advice.About Susan Guner:Susan Guner is a holistic psychotherapist with a mindfulness-based approach grounded in Transpersonal Psychology, focusing on trauma-informed, community-centric processes that offer a broader understanding of human potential and well-being.Connect with Susan:Website: https://www.psychedelicconversations.com/Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/susan.gunerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-guner/Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/susangunerTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/susangunerBlog: https://susanguner.medium.com/Podcast: https://anchor.fm/susan-guner#PsychedelicConversations #OwenCox #AlexanderBard

Agon Hamzaand Frank Ruda sit with the Canadian philosopher Rebecca Comay to discuss abouther forthcoming books, (death) drive, dialectics, Hegel, dramaturgy, art andpoetry, Marx.. and a lot of other things.  You can listen to our podcasthere: https://anchor.fm/crisisandcritique   If you like this and otherepisodes, please consider subscribing and supporting us at our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=71723553

I'm joined by professor Gary Cziko, author of Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution, to discuss the universal learning process driving adaptive complexification across cosmic scales. We get into the issue of "puzzles of fit" and how they've tended to be accounted for, the scope and power of selectionist theories for understanding evolution and knowledge generation, and relationships of the theory to a number of important topics, including how we make meaning in life. 0:00 Introduction2:22 Puzzles of Fit and Universal Selection Theory8:55 A Metatheory for Meaningful Knowledge Generation16:23 The Universe Learning, & Learning How It Learns23:02 Transcending Constraints of Knowledge Structures31:22 History of the Theory40:31 Adjusting Experience for Meaning47:17 Piaget and Universal Selection Theory55:52 Hegel?57:08 The Miracle 'Without Miracles'59:44 The Existential Basis of Purpose1:06:27 Conclusion To hear more, visit brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com

O idealismo alemão é um dos períodos mais ricos e complexos da história da filosofia, e seus quatro grandes representantes são Kant, Fichte, Schelling e Hegel. Este é também o contexto filosófico imediato do qual surgiu Karl Marx, pensador que desenvolve várias discussões abordadas por estes pensadores. Alguns idealistas alemães estão entre os filósofos mais complexos que podemos estudar na história da filosofia, como Kant e Hegel, por exemplo. Não tentaremos, por isso, abordar todos em apenas um episódio, mas faremos um recorte em Fichte e Hegel a fim de oferecer uma introdução acessível a alguns de seus principais temas políticos e sociais.- Curso "Filosofia para a vida: refletir para viver melhor": https://www.udemy.com/course/filosofia-para-a-vida-refletir-para-viver-melhor/?couponCode=2CF8DF1A6BC4492EE55F- Curso "Introdução à filosofia - dos pré-socráticos a Sartre": https://www.udemy.com/course/introducao-a-filosofia-dos-pre-socraticos-a-sartre/?couponCode=09119858437DF09EE684- Curso "Crítica da religião: Feuerbach, Nietzsche e Freud": https://www.udemy.com/course/critica-da-religiao-feuerbach-nietzsche-e-freud/?couponCode=66DD7D9B385722D0170B- Curso "A filosofia de Karl Marx - uma introdução": https://www.udemy.com/course/a-filosofia-de-karl-marx-uma-introducao/?couponCode=60AA3786461A5A581E44- Inscreva-se gratuitamente em nossa newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://filosofiavermelha.org/index.php/newsletter/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Apoia.se: seja um de nossos apoiadores e mantenha este trabalho no ar: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://apoia.se/filosofiavermelha⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Nossa chave PIX: filosofiavermelha@gmail.com- Adquira meu livro: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.almarevolucionaria.com/product-page/pr%C3%A9-venda-duvidar-de-tudo-ensaios-sobre-filosofia-e-psican%C3%A1lise⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Meu site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.filosofiaepsicanalise.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- Clube de leitura: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWEjNgKjqqI⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Um dos objetivos deste episódio é desfazer uma enorme incompreensão sobre o idealismo alemão. Ao ouvir a palavra “idealismo”, muitos pensam se tratar de uma postura ingênua e distante do mundo, preocupada apenas com “ideias”, o que é um erro grosseiro. Mostraremos que principalmente Fichte e Hegel são a fonte de várias ideias de Marx, e que o idealismo alemão, de certo modo, não está muito distante do materialismo. Não é verdade que até Marx, os filósofos se limitaram apenas a interpretar o mundo, sem se preocupar com sua transformação.

The right-wing ideologies we see most active in the world right now aren't intellectual by any stretch of the imagination. But there is a rich tradition of conservative political and social philosophy and, as liberals, it's important to understand what its objections to liberalism look like.ReImagining Liberty stalwart Matthew McManus, a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an article for Liberal Currents not too long ago about the philosopher Roger Scruton's criticism of liberalism from a conservative perspective. Scruton's work is perfect—because of its erudition, accessibility, and exemplariness—for understanding the philosophical conservative perspective.Today Matt and I use Scruton's ideas as a way to interrogate the conservative intellectual tradition and to argue that conservative philosophy aims less at a society organized around truth than it does a society where certainty rarely faces challenge.Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/ If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠. Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

On critical theory and autonomy. [For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast] Jensen Suther, a junior fellow at Harvard working in philosophy and literature, talks to Alex H and contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about art, culture, and socialism. He also offers a riposte to previous guest Anna Kornbluh's discussion of immediacy, and its cultural forms such as autoficition. What does Suther think Kornbluh gets wrong – and right – in her critique of contemporary culture? How autonomous is art from society and the economy? To what extent can we tie cultural forms to deep changes in the economy? What is the right response to the historical defeat of the working class? What does it mean for critical theory? What is the difference between immanent critique and critique from the outside – and how dow this relate to freedom? And what does it matter if you read Hegel right? Links: The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?, Jensen Suther, Nonsite.org /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh /473/ Make Alienation Great Again ft. Todd McGowan (features a different response to the question about critical theory after the defeat of the working class) Jensen's thread on X on capitalist totality and the end of the working class Jensen's thread on X on the return to Hegel, against economic determinism

The boys (featuring the return of Mir) kick back on the slaughter-bench to discuss Hegel's philosophy of history by discussing Terry Pinkard's article "The Spirit of History." The Spirit of History by Terry Pinkardhttps://aeon.co/essays/what-is-history-nobody-gave-a-deeper-answer-than-hegel Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show

Anselm's deployment of the ontological argument leads directly to the closed whole of his atonement theory in divine satisfaction, all of which depends upon the reification of language resisted and corrected in Hegel, and noted by Paul. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Become a Patron!

On this livestream, Courtenay Turner explores the world of AI precision in the arenas of medicine, agriculture, education and finance. Does it offer all the personalization and decentralization it promises? Or is it just another conduit to achieve the Chardinian Noosphere & HG Wellian World Brain? Listen weekly as Courtenay broadcasts deeper dives into truth, globally via the WWCR airwaves. Catch the Courtenay Turner Show, LIVE every Monday at 3pm CST. Tune in LIVE via Shortwave Radio on 9.350mHz, or via MP3 stream at: https://bit.ly/CourtenayTurnerShow ▶ GET a sneak peek of Courtenay's book: Hegel's Dialectic, a Gnostic Jacob's Ladder & the Machinery of Control:  ____________________________________________________________________ ▶ GET On-Demand Access for Courtenay's Cognitive Liberty Conference: https://cognitivelibertyconference.com ----------------------------------------- ▶ Follow & Connect with Courtenay: https://www.courtenayturner.com ✩ Linktree ▶ Support my work & Affiliate links: ✩Buy Me A Coffee! ✩GiveSendGo ✩Venmo ✩Cash App ✩ Richardson Nutritional Center: (B-17!) ✩ Relax Far Infrared Saunas: (Warm Up!) Discount Code: COURTZ ✩ LifeWave Stem Cell Activation Patches​: (Activate your master cells!) ✩ Gold Gate Capital (Secure Your Wealth!) ✩ SatPhone123 (Claim Your Free Satellite Phone!) Promo Code: COURTZ ✩Discover The Magic of MagicDichol: ✩Defy The Grid With Real Currency.....Goldbacks!: Promo Code: COURTZ ✩Honey Colony "Where The Hive Decides What's Healthy": Promo Code: COURTZ ▶ Follow Courtenay on Social Media: ✩Twitter ✩TruthSocial ✩Instagram ✩Telegram ————————————————— ▶ Disclaimer: this is intended to be inspiration & entertainment. We aim to inform, inspire & empower. Guest opinions/ statements are not a reflection of the host or podcast. Please note these are conversational dialogues. All statements and opinions are not necessarily meant to be taken as fact. Please do your own research. Thanks for watching! ————————————————— ©2025 All Rights Reserved Courtenay's Substack Bringing breadth and depth of context to inform, inspire and empower cognitive liberty! By Courtenay Turner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Friday's Mark Levin Show, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Sen Bernie Sanders are staunch Marxists, even though AOC shows she has never deeply read the texts of Marx or Hegel. Marxism is all about slogans, skills Sanders excels at while AOC is still developing. There isn't one place where Marxism has worked, yet this is what they push. Later, there is this fusion between Marxism and Islamism. The People's Forum, a pro-Communist Chinese Party (CCP) Marxist group, is orchestrating protests to free Mahmoud Khalil. The group has ties to radical left-wing organizations like Code Pink and has a history of supporting anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian causes, including celebrating Hamas attacks. Also, the mainstream media is downplaying the fact that Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University student facing deportation by the Trump administration, is the son-in-law of a senior Hamas official, Yousef Saleh. The media portray Suri as merely a researcher or student caught in a legal dispute, ignoring his alleged ties to Hamas and his promotion of antisemitic propaganda on social media. Afterward, Jim Trusty calls in to discuss the Trump administration facing an unprecedented number of legal injunctions, far surpassing those of any previous president. This is the continuing of lawfare. In addition, leftwing conflicted Obama judge, James Boasberg, is looking to hold the Trump administration in contempt. That's what he's doing, and he wants to make a big splash, get lots of media headlines, and try to sabotage the Trump administration. He wants to create the impression that Trump is lawless when, in fact, Boasberg is lawless. He wants to play into the Democrat Party narrative that Trump is a dictator, when it is Boasberg who is the autocrat. Finally, Jim Simpson joins the conversation to talk about his new book, Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America. https://www.amazon.com/Manufactured-Crisis-War-End-America/dp/B0DGD854FS/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm back, baby. I've been away traveling for podcasts and am excited to bring you new ones with Michael Levin, William Hahn, Robin Hanson, and Emily Riehl, coming up shortly. They're already recorded. I've been recovering from a terrible flu but pushed through it to bring you today's episode with Urs Schreiber. This one is quite mind-blowing. It's quite hairy mathematics, something called higher category theory, and how using this math (which examines the structure of structure) allows one manner of finding "something" from "nothing." Here, "nothing" means the empty set, and "something" is defined as fermions and even 11D supergravity. It's the first time this material has been presented in this manner. Enjoy. NOTE: Link to technical details are here from Urs Schreiber: https://ncatlab.org/schreiber/show/Peri+Pantheorias As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Links Mentioned: - nLab website: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage - Paper on category theory: https://people.math.osu.edu/cogdell.1/6112-Eilenberg&MacLane-www.pdf - “Higher Topos Theory for Physics” (Urs's talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD20W6vxMI4 - “Higher Topos Theory for Physics” (Urs's paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.11026 - Stephen Wolfram on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YRlQQw0d-4 - Feynman's thesis: https://faculty.washington.edu/seattle/physics541/2012-path-integrals/thesis.pdf - Differential cohomology in a cohesive ∞-topos (Urs's paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.7930 - M-Theory from the Superpoint (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01774 - Character Map in Non-Abelian Cohomology, The: Twisted, Differential, and Generalized (textbook): https://amzn.to/4bFuz7H - TOE's String Theory Iceberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4PdPnQuwjY Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:27 The Creation of nLab 04:36 Philosophy Meets Physics 07:55 The Role of Mathematical Language 09:32 Emergence from Nothing 16:25 Towards a Theory of Everything 22:21 The Problem with Modern Physics 25:31 Diving into Category Theory 35:30 Understanding Adjunctions 41:46 The Significance of Duality 52:54 Exploring Toposes 1:14:20 The UNEDA Lemma and Generalized Spaces 1:16:37 Charts in Physics 1:20:55 Introduction to Infinitesimal Disks 1:23:56 The Emergence of Supergeometry 1:27:33 Transitioning to Gauge Theories 1:28:11 Exploring Singularities in Physics 1:32:50 The Role of Superformal Spaces 1:36:44 Functors and Their Implications 1:40:51 From Nothing to Emergent Structures 1:43:04 Hegel's Influence on Modern Physics 1:54:07 Discovering Higher-Dimensional Structures 1:56:30 The Path to 11-Dimensional Supergravity 1:57:21 Universal Central Extensions 2:03:21 The Journey to M-Theory 2:11:19 Globalizing the Structure of Supergravity 2:15:36 Understanding Global Charges in Physics 2:23:31 Dirac's Insights into Gauge Potentials 2:30:21 The Quest for Non-Perturbative Physics 2:39:04 Conclusion Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #theoreticalphysics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hour One:Thank you for joining the David Knight Show! Today, Gardner Goldsmith of Liberty Conspiracy Live (M-F 6PM on Rumble, his X @gardgoldsmith) and of the Gardner Goldsmith Substack and MRCTV, fills in for David, starting the program with a recap of breaking news stories, including the Trump claim that he will rescind Joe Biden's pardons, the Constitution-flouting Trump Adminitration attack on Yemeni civilians, Tulsi Gabbard's flip on US-backed aggression there, and the US-backed attack on Gaza. Hour Two:In the second hour of the David Knight Show, Gardner Goldsmith takes on the myth of the "Just War" concept, noting that since all political institutions are predicated on government aggression to extract revenue from peaceful people, all governments, therefore, are guilty of engaging in aggression in order to provide for the military. That is not defense, it is offense, against the taxpayer, and the heads of state today use virtually any rationale to create monsters to fight, to define their new seizure of your money as "for your protection." It all is fallacious and a giant fraud. Gard also discusses the Separation of Powers and immigration, with a special focus on free speech on campus and "Green Cards." What does the Constitution say? What does the Constitution say about federal control over immigration? (The word "immigration" is not in the US Constitution, it is a state matter) and what does the "Alien Enemies Act" actually say? Gard digs in to offer scholarly information to carry with you.Hour Three:In this hour of the David Knight Show, Gardner Goldsmith explores the political philosophy of Hegel, by joining in a conversation with guest Courtenay Turner. Courtenay's new book is on the way, and in it, she explores what the title describes so well: "Hegel's Dialectic, a Gnostic Jacob's Ladder & the Machinery of Control". Following in the footsteps of researchers such as Charlotte Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto, and Samuel Blumenfeld, Courtenay investigates Hegel's thoughts on "progress" and shows that his worldview is a mystical Gnostic one, a line of thinking stemming from alchemical ideologies of the Egyptians and running forward to today's Technocratic collectivist movement. See what you think, and share the interview!Thank you for watching, and visit www.TheDavidKnightShow.com to find more and help support the program!If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTFor 10% off supplements and books, go to RNCstore.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Hour One:Thank you for joining the David Knight Show! Today, Gardner Goldsmith of Liberty Conspiracy Live (M-F 6PM on Rumble, his X @gardgoldsmith) and of the Gardner Goldsmith Substack and MRCTV, fills in for David, starting the program with a recap of breaking news stories, including the Trump claim that he will rescind Joe Biden's pardons, the Constitution-flouting Trump Adminitration attack on Yemeni civilians, Tulsi Gabbard's flip on US-backed aggression there, and the US-backed attack on Gaza. Hour Two:In the second hour of the David Knight Show, Gardner Goldsmith takes on the myth of the "Just War" concept, noting that since all political institutions are predicated on government aggression to extract revenue from peaceful people, all governments, therefore, are guilty of engaging in aggression in order to provide for the military. That is not defense, it is offense, against the taxpayer, and the heads of state today use virtually any rationale to create monsters to fight, to define their new seizure of your money as "for your protection." It all is fallacious and a giant fraud. Gard also discusses the Separation of Powers and immigration, with a special focus on free speech on campus and "Green Cards." What does the Constitution say? What does the Constitution say about federal control over immigration? (The word "immigration" is not in the US Constitution, it is a state matter) and what does the "Alien Enemies Act" actually say? Gard digs in to offer scholarly information to carry with you.Hour Three:In this hour of the David Knight Show, Gardner Goldsmith explores the political philosophy of Hegel, by joining in a conversation with guest Courtenay Turner. Courtenay's new book is on the way, and in it, she explores what the title describes so well: "Hegel's Dialectic, a Gnostic Jacob's Ladder & the Machinery of Control". Following in the footsteps of researchers such as Charlotte Iserbyt, John Taylor Gatto, and Samuel Blumenfeld, Courtenay investigates Hegel's thoughts on "progress" and shows that his worldview is a mystical Gnostic one, a line of thinking stemming from alchemical ideologies of the Egyptians and running forward to today's Technocratic collectivist movement. See what you think, and share the interview!Thank you for watching, and visit www.TheDavidKnightShow.com to find more and help support the program!If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTFor 10% off supplements and books, go to RNCstore.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-david-knight-show--5282736/support.

Heraclitus (c. 500 BC), a pre-Socratic philosopher from Ephesus, is renowned for his doctrine of perpetual change and the unity of opposites, encapsulated in the phrase “Everything flows” and “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” His concept of logos as the rational order of the universe influenced ancient and modern philosophy, including thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Known as “the dark” philosopher for his cryptic style and paradoxical ideas, Heraclitus viewed strife as fundamental to justice and saw fire as the primal element of existence. His legacy endures in the study of cosmology, metaphysics, and dialectics.

Rejoignez-moi sur Patreon pour accéder à mon contenu exclusif : https://www.patreon.com/leprecepteurpodcastAu XXe siècle, un nouveau courant philosophique fait son apparition : la phénoménologie. Fondée par Edmund Husserl, la phénoménologie entend "revenir aux choses mêmes". Qu'est-ce que cela signifie ? C'est ce que nous allons tenter de comprendre dans cet épisode.

In this episode, Megan and Frank discuss the philosophical dimensions of prehistory. What and when is the “prehistoric”? How was prehistory "discovered", and what explains our fascination with it? Is ancient archeology safe from our biases? And how did archaic man's meaning-making differ from our own? Thinkers discussed include: Colin Renfrew, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Mircea Eliade, and Wittgenstein.-----------------------Hosts' Websites:Megan J Fritts (google.com)Frank J. Cabrera (google.com)Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com-----------------------Bibliography:Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind - Colin RenfrewHegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of HistoryCave of Forgotten Dreams - Official Trailer | HD | IFC FilmsBewitched by an Elf Dart: Fairy Archaeology, Folk Magic and Traditional Medicine in Ireland - DowdA Secular Age — Harvard University PressTheory and Observation in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology - Currie & KillinCognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem - Killin & Pain An Ape's View of the Oldowan - Wynn & McGrewNeuroscience, evolution and the sapient paradox - Colin RenfrewSapient paradox: Why humans got stuck in prehistory -Gossip Trap- Big ThinkThe Myth of the Eternal Return | Princeton University PressEliade_Mircea_The_Sacred_and_The_profane_1963Wittgenstein - Notebooks, 1914 - 1916, 2nd Edition | Wiley-----------------------Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts-------------------------Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signsLicense code: AAO0Q7IZMGVTLFJH

This episode of The Arts Salon is an exploration of the philosophical tensions between historical inevitability and artistic freedom. We delve into the ideas of Hegel and Hume, questioning whether art follows a predetermined arc of progress or exists on a more fluid and open-ended plane. Through the lens of Picasso's insights on artistic creation, the episode challenges the notion that innovation requires rejection of the past. Instead, it argues that framing art within rigid historical narratives distorts its purpose and limits its potential. In a world where artistic movements often define themselves in opposition to what came before, this episode asks: Does pursuing progress in art sometimes do more harm than good?

Join our Patreon! Get the full discussion here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/jung-freud-and-122995561?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link Bob on Jung and Spinoza on LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/posts/jung-and-spinoza-118447298?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_shareJung and Spinoza: Pass age Through the Blessed Self: https://www.routledge.com/Jung-and-Spinoza-Passage-Through-The-Blessed-Self/Langan/p/book/9781032851853https://www.roberthlangan.com/In this session of the Anti-Oedipus Files, Dr. Bob Langan joins the reading group to explore Carl Jung's theory of libido, particularly as it appears in Symbols of Transformation, where Jung challenges Freud's strictly sexual definition of libido. The conversation examines how Jung's model of psychic energy may have influenced Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of desire in Anti-Oedipus, particularly in the shift from a repressed, Oedipal unconscious to a dynamic model of desiring-production. Jung's tensions with Freud, his engagement with myth, and the role of archetypes as energetic processes rather than static typologies are central to the discussion, as is the way his work has been co-opted and misrepresented by figures like Jordan Peterson. The group also unpacks Jung's connections to Spinoza, his late-career interest in synchronicity, and how his Red Book offers a more radical and experiential engagement with the unconscious than his later, more systematized theories suggest. If you want access to the full discussion and more in-depth reading groups on thinkers like Foucault, Hegel, and the politics of friendship, head to our Patreon and support the show!Support the showSupport the podcast:https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastJoin The Schizoanalysis Project: https://discord.gg/4WtaXG3QxnSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438Merch: http://www.crit-drip.comSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438 LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHANDHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Revolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

We are excited to have Carl Trueman on the podcast today. Carl discusses his some of his recent books, including To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, which provides an introductory intellectual history of Critical Theory, primarily non-polemically. In this episode, Carl walks us through the key figures and orienting ideas of Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. What is the connection between Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory? How can pastors steward the church's confession as they help congregations navigate their contexts which may be influenced by these ideas? This and more on today's episode. Exiles in Babylon

Jacob Blumenfeld returns to the show to discuss his new book, The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel: Freedom, Right, and Recognition Jacob is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and member of the DFG collaborative research centre, “Structural Change of Property”. Last time, we discussed his previous book All Things are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner. Jacob's Links: -first appearance on the podcast: https://soundcloud.com/podcast-co-coopercherry/jacob-blumenfeld-all-things-are-nothing?si=bd84d2a0f47a42e981095899200dde42&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing -https://philpeople.org/profiles/jacob-blumenfeld -https://www.routledge.com/The-Concept-of-Property-in-Kant-Fichte-and-Hegel-Freedom-Right-and/Blumenfeld/p/book/9781032575186 Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/muhh Twitter: @unconscioushh

In this interview, philosopher and psychoanalyst Monique David-Ménard shares her investigation of negation as a phenomenon with a specific function under transference in her clinical practice, and also as a concept in the writings of Freud, Lacan, Hyppolite, Hegel, and Kant. David-Ménard shows the  articulations of the two disciplines she engages, as well as their differences and limits when faced with questions of negativity. The conversation emphasizes the creative, transformative potential of negativity in the scene of analysis, when the unconscious is conceived in ethical rather than ontological terms. Many thanks to Kellen Corrallo for his editorial assistance with the audio file.

Current political events got you down? Maybe the things that are happening fill you with joy. According to Hegel's Pendulum Theory, one or the other must be true. Here at Long in the Boot, we are riding the pendulum right at the middle of the swing. G. Long and Deb take a look at Hegel's Pendulum Theory, Musk's "Cultural Christianity", and a host of other topics on this episode of the Long in the Boot Podcast! Always remember: In the end, The Universe Tends to Unfold as it Should.Thanks For Listening! Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Facebook!Email: longintheboot@gmail.comCall Us: 337-502-9011

Dear Loyal Readers,You and me, I'd venture to say, we like to read. This is why I put together this newsletter week after week. And this is why you generously subscribe to it. After all, this is Article Club, right? We're here to read.But we also know (though I don't like to admit it): Reading isn't for everyone. This month's article of the month, “Is This the End of Reading?” follows the downward trend of reading, especially among Gen Z college students. In her piece, writer Beth McMurtrie looks at the problem straight on: listening to professors, considering causes, and most importantly, thinking of ways to respond.There's still room to join our discussion on Feb. 23, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. For more information and to sign up, click the button below.Leading this week's issue is a conversation I had last week with Ms. McMurtrie. Especially if you're an educator or a parent, I highly recommend that you listen. In the interview, Ms. McMurtrie shares the feelings of professors dealing with the abrupt shifts they're witnessing in the classroom. Reading stamina has significantly declined, and so have critical reading skills. Gone are the days when students could read a book or an article on their own. Now, according to one professor, reading has become a “scavenger hunt,” in which students search for discrete answers to discrete questions, dipping in and out of short excerpts, rather than taking in a whole text.If that interview does not catch your interest, never fear. I urge you to read one of the other three articles in this week's issue. They are about:* how we shouldn't blame phones and the pandemic on the decline of reading* how a woman visiting an abortion clinic finds Christianity confusing* how a college in Texas espouses free speech, unless they don't like itIf you like what we're doing here at Article Club, and want to support this venture with a paid subscription, I would be very grateful. It's $5 a month or $36 a year.An interview with Beth McMurtrie, author of “Is This the End of Reading?”I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Beth McMurtrie this week. Senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. McMurtrie knows what she's talking about when it comes to the status of reading among college students. It was a delight to talk to her. I encourage you to listen to our entire conversation. Here's an excerpt:If you think of teaching as a vocation, a calling, which a lot of academics do, [the decline of reading] is really an existential crisis because you're seeing harm come to your students. I didn't find many professors who were angry at their students; they were sad for their students. They were certainly frustrated and sometimes wanted to beat their head against the walls, but they were sad for their students because they could see the anxiety that the students felt when they couldn't do the work.[The professors] would often say to me, These students have no idea how much less I'm asking of them than I asked of students 10 or 15 years ago. It changes what you can do in the classroom and how you can teach. You can't get through as much material, which means students just simply aren't as learning as much content. If you can't get through as much content, you may end up having to teach the skills that you thought students had learned in high school. So then your teaching becomes a different kind of teaching.And if you don't do those things, then you kind of have a dead classroom, or you might have a discussion that goes off the rails because the students are not interpreting kind of what they're learning in a useful way.2️⃣ The Loss Of Things I Took For GrantedI included this fair, well-written piece last year when it was published, but I'm sharing it again, especially since Ms. McMurtrie highlighted it in our interview. Focusing on the decline of reading among college students, it's a great companion piece to hers.Prof. Adam Kotsko writes: “For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation — sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument — skills I used to be able to take for granted.”By Adam Kotsko • Slate • 7 min • Gift Link3️⃣ Two Days Before Abortion Stopped In KentuckySavannah Sipple: “I grew up in a conservative, religious part of eastern Kentucky where fundamental Christianity rules. For most of my upbringing, I recognized the pastors, choir leaders, and Sunday school teachers as the folks who lived the kindness they preached. When someone's family member died they cooked food, cleaned house, and prayed with the grieving. They regularly took up offerings and gave food to those struggling.“What I didn't recognize at the time were the microaggressions. They'd say slight comments about Catholicism, which confused me as a kid because part of my family was Catholic. They'd make jokes about gays. Preachers pronounced lesbians the scourge of the nation because they dared to live without men. I was closeted, but I was both the butt of the joke and then the monster. Still, I was devout. This kind of confusing Christianity where hate is enmeshed with love was the only kind of sacred available to me. Even when my personal beliefs stood in contrast to what I was taught, I remained silent. I heard church folks disparage women who sought abortions. I heard their judgments, the way words like abomination, backslider, and sin always carried a tone of disgust and dismissal. And I stood by.”By Savannah Sipple • The Arkansas International • 8 min • gift link unavailable4️⃣ An American EducationNoah Rawlings: “A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country's southern reaches — in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was a ‘hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.' Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX.“UATX is a ‘genuinely safe space,' in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place.”➡️ Big thanks to loyal reader Tim for recommending this article. Want to nominate an article to appear in the newsletter? Click here.By Noah Rawlings • The New Inquiry • 26 min • Gift Link✅ It's time for a quick poll. I'd love to hear from you.Last week, we confirmed that most of you read Article Club via email. That's what I suspected. (But no problem if you use the app!)This week, let's solve a mystery.Thank you for reading this week's issue. Hope you liked it.

Professor of philosophy Colin Bodayle joins Breht to dive into the profound, unique, and almost mystical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Together, they discuss the value of philosophy for all of us, Spinoza as a "philosopher's philosopher", his life and death in 17th century western Europe, his complex geometrical structure of writing, God as Nature as Substance, his forward thinking politics, Atheism and Pantheism, what Spinoza thinks a good life is, Stoicism and Buddhism, Marx and Engels connection to Spinoza, dialectical materialism, the underlying interconnectedness of all being, Breht's wild metaphysical speculation, the nature of consciousness, and much more. Outro Song: "Between Two Mysteries" by Mount Eerie Follow Colin on X ---------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio

Todd is pretty excited to have today's guest on “his podcast,” who is none other than his Mortification of Spin co-host, Carl Trueman. Together, they discuss Carl's latest book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, where Carl examines the historical roots of critical theory, its evolution, and its impact on contemporary culture.  I wanted to produce a book that was not a kind of “goodies” and “baddies” book…Everybody coming to critical theory has their opinion on whether the critical theorists are good guys or bad guys. I didn't really want to address that. What I wanted to do was look at critical theory through the historical lens and say, okay, why did this group of men start thinking this way? What was going on? What sources are they using? What problems are they trying to address or questions are they asking in order to get below the surface? – Carl Trueman Todd and Carl discuss some key figures of critical theory, such as Marx, Hegel, and Freud, and how they and other early critical theorists shaped modern thought. What are the implications for Christians today? Tune in to find out! Thanks to the generosity of B&H Academics, we are pleased to offer a copy of Carl's book to our listeners. Enter here for the opportunity to win one.   Show Notes: To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse https://reformedresources.org/to-change-all-worlds-critical-theory-from-marx-to-marcuse-hardcover/