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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
Thomas More’s sixteenth century treatise Utopia – literally, “no place” – coined the term “utopia” in its modern parlance: a planned, perfected vision of a possible society in some misty other geography or time. Over the next several centuries, More’s peculiar mix of religious discipline and egalitarian traditionalism increasingly underlined the negative connotation that the concept of “utopia” acquired. In the...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Students in the course will read selections from a number of Adorno’s works, including The Stars Down to Earth, Minima Moralia, and The Authoritarian Personality. We will look at the famous dispute between Adorno and philosopher of science Karl Popper both to understand the grounds of their debate but also to understand their vast areas of agreement between empirical research and critical theory. We will pose a series of questions that emerge from...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 178 Stanton St, New York, NY
In this class, we will read several of Schmitt’s key works in their entirety, including The Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, as well as key selections from later thinkers influenced by Schmitt. We will examine questions such as: what is “the political”? What is sovereignty? What is enmity and what is war? Why do we have a state? What are the boundaries between politics and reason? Students...
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
While for many in the United States liberalism is understood as a loose category of political identification – whose definition has shifted significantly and not always transparently over the past century – fewer people are familiar with liberal political philosophy despite its overwhelming influence on political discourse both left and right. Our public language and discussions are often littered with the ideas, ideals, phrases, and thoughts...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Students of economics are often puzzled to learn that markets are normally treated as self-standing, self-contained systems. But as people experience the increasing effects of global climate change, this form of thinking moves from dubious to deadly. All those unaccounted “inputs” and “externalities” turn out to have a frighteningly high cost. This is a challenge not only for common mainstream economic analyses, but also for many alternative...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
The word “fascism” is used frequently to describe intensely militaristic, racist, xenophobic, or repressive politics. Almost as often, fascism is used as a shorthand for a form of “totalitarian” government—where “jack-booted thugs” from “the state” control social, economic, and political life. With the rise of a dizzying array of far-right figures worldwide—politicians like Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Recep Teyyip Erdogan, ...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
In the Latin edition of Baruch Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, he writes, “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists.” This formula – Deus sive Natura, God or Nature – is the cornerstone of a radical new philosophy that Spinoza fashioned in the wake of Descartes’ mind-body dualism. Rejecting Descartes’ view, Spinoza argued instead for a monistic materialism, claiming...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The Writer, the Executor, and the Critic: The Case of Kafka, Brod, and Benjamin Are artists saints? Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod—a popular critic in his own day—to burn all of his papers after his death. This included the vast majority of Kafka’s work, as he had published only a handful of stories in his own lifetime. Brod did not oblige. Instead, he began the publication of Kafka’s writings and later composed a popular...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
In this class we will explore both sides of this dialectic. How—from the grid of the Go board to the coordinate plane of the strategy role-playing game—is war as a means to control territory and resources played through games? In what ways, from mathematical game theory to the shifting battlefields of the 21st century, is strategic thinking grounded in the logical processes of games? And how are these processes translated into material terms...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Thomas Hobbes’ famous declaration in Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical or Civil that such a life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is often understood as a cynical bon mot, shorthand to a timeless, transcendental truth about human animals and our limitations. But Hobbes’ analysis and understanding of the world and its political structures was both philosophically materialist...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
In recent decades, there has been a surprising resurgence of interest in the work of the Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. From neoconservative doctrines of the “unitary executive” to many strands of non-Marxist leftist thought, Schmitt’s ideas have found new purchase in our contemporary political landscape. Schmitt was a towering figure in the Weimar period. Next to Martin Heidegger, he stands as perhaps the most important and...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
In the second draft of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” he argues: “What is lost in the withering of semblance, or decay of aura, in works of art is matched by a huge gain in room-for-play [Spielraum].” This Spielraum – which plays on the multiple meanings of the German Spiel, “play,” “game,” “performance,” “gamble,” – becomes the grounds for new emancipatory...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
“The specific distinction to which political motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” With this claim, Carl Schmitt outlined one of the most incisive understandings of political thought in modern times, a theory of politics as something distinct from questions of morality (good or evil) or aesthetics (beauty and ugliness). In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of the Nazi jurist and political...
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