Knox Peden

The politics of disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet and the French struggle with secularization

ABSTRACT This article looks at Marcel Gauchet’s major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet’s work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that could serve to support a broadly republican realignment of French politics in the 1980s. Revisionist historiography concerning the French Revolution likewise played a role in this development, and served as a prerequisite of sorts to Gauchet’s broader historical project. The article also considers Gauchet’s work in light of postmodern skepticism of the utility of historical metanarratives.

Donald Davidson’s “Spinozistic Extravagance”

ABSTRACT This article suggests reasons why Donald Davidson’s work in philosophy of mind and metaphysics can be identified as Spinozist and also explores the significance of using proper names from the history of philosophy to describe contemporary projects. It argues that what makes Davidson’s work Spinozist is not just its internal features, but the role it occupies in relation to other positions identified as Kantian and Hegelian in today’s philosophical terrain. Finally, it suggests that the core animus at the heart of Davidson’s Spinozism is its indifference to autonomy as a concept in need of metaphysical grounding or essential to normative commitment.

Response to My Critics – On Seeming Right

Reading these perceptive responses to Spinoza Contra Phenomenology (SCP) has been gratifying, but also bracing. Our ambivalences are typically discomfiting enough without our being confronted with ...

Althusser’s Spinozism and the Problem of Theology

Theology is a problem for Louis Althusser’s philosophy in multiple ways. In the first instance, there is the common vision of Marxism as a kind of secular theology. In this view, Althusser’s vain attempts to grant Marxism its status as a science are perhaps more revelatory than their author intended. What they reveal is Althusser’s commitment to Lenin’s pronunciamento that ‘the teaching ofMarx is all-powerful because it is true’. The quest for the fundamental theory, the ‘Theory of theoretical practice’, has something theological about it, to the extent that it seeks comprehensiveness, a set of grounding principles that are ultimately indistinguishable from grounding convictions of a theological sort. Sartre famously echoed Lenin’s sentiment when he remarked that Marxism is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’. Despite Althusser’s half-hearted objections to the contrary, it is hard to shake the notion that, for Althusser, this was a guiding presupposition of his thought.1 This caricature is complicated by the fact that central to Althusser’s contribution to Marxist theory – and a main source of scandal in his intervention – was his recusal of the most religious element of Marx’s vision of history: its eschatology. Indeed, the best way to understand Althusser’s insistence on Marxist science is not apologetically, but literally. For Althusser, Marxism errs to the extent that it harbours theological vestiges, which are most pronounced in a vision of history committed to overcoming alienation rather than simply ending exploitation. Readers of Althusser and his critics know that Althusser undertook to establish the bona fides ofMarxist science via an extended critique of the ‘early Marx’ and the resurgence of sympathy these writings garnered in the wake of Stalinism.2 As I have argued elsewhere, the reaction to Althusser’s science as somehow complicit with a Stalinist conception of dialectical materialism is confused, but understandable.3 It is confused because it

The Aesthetics of Scale

Today, leading historians are calling on colleagues to look up from their specialized agendas to write and think on a much grander scale. Such is the bracing message of Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s The History Manifesto (2014), a work that has generated no small amount of controversy and which insists that historians have a world to win.1 They will win it, evidently, by writing histories that will draw on the historian’s special skills and knowledge to inform public policy. But that knowledge set needs to be increased, and directed at broad and important questions that span centuries. Most urgently, it should not be primarily employed in pursuit of the antiquarian micro-histories that have come to define the discipline in the last half century. In a less polemical vein, Daniel Lord Smail has similarly lamented the narrow nature of historical research and has argued that the era of written records can no longer be the historian’s primary area of expertise, which must now extend into the terrain typically occupied by the historical sciences.2 David Christian pushes this logic further still in his grand anthropocentric narrative, Maps of Time (2004), arguing that historians need to stop being so modest and embrace their true calling by providing the kind of grand secular origin story that modern society so desperately needs.3 And both Christian’s “Big History” and Smail’s “deep history” were founded under the premise that we need to understand that the

Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive

Hayden White’s contention that “moral and aesthetic” preferences are primary in shaping a historian’s vision of the past seems to play in to various contemporary efforts to consider history at a scale conducive to insight into climate change and global political dilemmas. Nevertheless, his critique of the archive as a repository of truth acquires new resonance as the naturalist and technological reconfiguration of the archive accompanying these developments gets underway. The signal value of White’s polemical intervention in historical theory was to divorce claims of moral right and political justice from truth claims about the objective reality of the past. It remains so today.

The burden of intelligibility

Summary Ian Hunters career as an intellectual historian has been grounded in a commitment to regionalism and the refinement of a methodology devoted to conceiving thought in terms of various modes of comportment. This essay suggests that Hunters recent work on ‘The History of Theory’ downplays the first principle in its development of the second, and consequently risks abandoning the commitment to historical pluralism that has been a distinguishing feature of his singular contribution to intellectual history.

The wind from the east: French intellectuals, the cultural revolution, and the legacy of the 1960s

Certainly the picture of modernity and fascism in Japan, as elsewhere, is complex and diverse, and reminding us of the critical role of people such as these reform bureaucrats helps to flesh out what has often been a two-dimensional depiction of this period. Nonetheless, in Mimura’s attempt to bring a sense of order and deliberate and measured decision making into the conventional picture of Japan gone astray, there are points where she could have more fully examined the implications of these technocrats’ idealistic “techno-fascism.” Despite their claims to being rational and pragmatic, and therefore transcending the ideological conflicts of the left and right, their adamant adherence to their vision seems just as ideological, and their naïve acceptance of rational scientific prescriptions for society as a panacea, just as insidious as the extreme ideologies more commonly associated with the 1930s. That they viewed themselves as rational and modern, as she demonstrates, is beyond debate. But by describing them as “rational,” “conscientious,” and “pragmatists, not ideologues,” or even asserting that their “critique of liberalism was not a rejection of modernity . . . but rather a quintessentially modernist act” (p. 39), Mimura occasionally seems to resort to a circular logic, where she uses these bureaucrats’ characterizations of themselves in her own discussions of them. emily anderson Washington State University

Descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy: Ferdinand alquie versus martial gueroult

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquie, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the College de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquie and Gueroults polemic, however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the “theological turn” of French phenomenology.