Bernard Yack

Community and Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy

In this article a widespread misperception of Aristotles political thought is challenged, a misperception shared even by his champions among recent political theorists: that his concept of political community is derived from an image of organic growth and identity, and thus does not account for political conflict. Familiarity with liberal political thought and institutions has led most of Aristotles contemporary interpreters to look for counterimages to liberal images of political society in his work. As a result, they tend to ignore or underplay the connections which Aristotle draws between political community and political conflict. By interpreting Aristotles concepts of political community and political friendship in light of his analysis of political argument in Book 3 of the Politics , the article tries to uncover these connections and their implications.

The significance of Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge.

The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche

This book seeks to identify and account for the development of a form of discontent held in common by a large number of European philosophers and social critics, including Rousseau, Schiller, the young Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. Yack contends that these individuals, despite their profound disagreements, shared new perspectives on human freedom and history and that these perspectives gave their discontent its peculiar breadth and intensity.