I think I've found a new favorite thinker!

Published in 2001, this book seems perfectly timed for the 2016 election cycle (here in the US.) Having also just finished [b:The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction|24783916|The Shipwrecked Mind On Political Reaction|Mark Lilla|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1469413158s/24783916.jpg|44301227], and having read a bit of e.g. Isaiah Berlin and his intellectual followers like John Gray, I'm now beginning to see some of these issues of intellectual history, development, and application (politics) from something like a rounded-ish perspective.

Think I need to go back and re-read some past books now... (oh, for more hours in the day!) ( )

This one is quite a bit outside my normal realm. I believe I was interested by a one-sentence review: “Lilla [the author] investigates why 20th-century intellectuals embraced totalitarian regimes”. It was mostly disappointing; “intellectuals”, to the author, only means “philosophers”, and it doesn’t really answer the question of why the people involved were enamored of fascism and communism but rather how fascism and communism fit with their philosophical positions.

Philosophy is something I’ve never been much interested in. I was run through the obligatory courses in college and read Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hobbes, Hume and that whole crowd, but it always struck me as a whole lot of time and thought without very much practical use. This book unintentionally confirms that feeling; the impression I get is that the intellectuals discussed thought they were much more important to society than they actually were; therefore when democratic societies did not recognize their self-proclaimed importance they turned to totalitarian ones.

I had never heard of half the people discussed here - this may admittedly be a failure in my education rather than their obscurity. I knew the name “Martin Heidigger” but that was it; I may actually have a book by Hannah Arendt in my library, but Karl Jaspers, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Alexander Kojeve were all terra incognita to me. (First four fascists, although Hannah Arendt is kind of a weird case; next two commies). Lilla’s last two subjects, Michel Foucault (not the pendulum guy) and Jacques Derrida I had heard of, though.

Foucault was strange big time; he was first a Maoist, then a libertarian, then a supporter of the Iranian revolution (which he described as “political spirituality”) and an fan of drugs and BDSM sex regardless of his current political position (He eventually died of AIDS in San Francisco). I suspect his philosophy had a lot more to do with his lifestyle than his politics. Lilla is not very charitable to him; he says “the lifeless mummy of Foucault is still dragged out on American campuses”.

Derrida is also somebody I had heard of, usually unfavorably and generally third hand. I may have to rethink my position a little. Derrida was the apostle of Deconstruction, and Deconstruction as a philosophy leaves a foul taste in the mouth of anyone interested in science. We’ve all heard of the Sokal hoax and the various posings of deconstructionist “philosophers of science”; my two favorites are Sandra Harding describing Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” and Luce Irigaray’s claim that E=mc**2 is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges” the speed of light over “other speeds that are vitally important to us.” Derrida’s own writings are apparently just a little bit short of totally incomprehensible, and they are frequently excerpted to provide humorous examples of what Deconstructionism is about. Lilla, though generally unsympathetic to Derrida, does suggest that this was the whole point; Derrida claims that our thinking is prisoner of our language - “logocentrism” - and he therefore tried to “neutralize communication” by being deliberately obscure, thus trying to force readers or listeners to think outside their own language structure. Perhaps though this be madness, yet there’s method in it. Derrida did not seem to be particularly antiscience himself, and was apparently somewhat amused by the way Deconstruction was interpreted on the other side of the Atlantic. I may have to bite the bullet and do a little more reading here.

Unfortunately, I can’t really recommend this book unless you are a specialist. It’s a slim volume with large type, wide margins, and a dubious price tag. Get it from the library if necessary. ( )

An examination of the role played by European thinkers in endorsing authoritarianism both of left and right.

Nicholas Lezard (Guardian) really rates this. Covers Heidegger, Arendt & Jaspers; Schmitt; Benjamin; Kojeve; and Derrida.