The West Removed. Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization PDF
Preview The West Removed. Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization
MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL POLITICS n. 3 MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL P E aolo rcolani THE WEST REMOVED Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization Foreword by Santiago Zabala MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL © 2016 – MiMEsis intErnational www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: [email protected] Book series: Politics, n. 3 Isbn: 9788869770678 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 02419370305 CONTENTS ForEword 9 by Santiago Zabala 1. Myths to discrEdit 13 2. FroM J.s. Mill to hayEk: thE swinging FrEEdoM 21 3. thE Myth oF FrEE MarkEt and thE riFt oF libEralisM 27 4. F.a. hayEk: a ProPhEt oF our tiME 35 5. two libEralisMs 43 6. thE dEnial oF thE 20th cEntury 51 7. Marx and PoPPEr: why wE can’t but dEFinE oursElvEs as Marxists, too 59 notEs 67 rEFErEncEs 77 “The seeds burgeon once more, and talk is silenced by the solemn recurrences of history“ (G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right: § 324 A) “The problem of the history as a whole is unanswerable within its own perspective […] History as such has not outcome” (K. Löwith, Meaning in History: 191) “Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results“ (G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: § IX) FOREWORD by Santiago Zabala There are few young philosophers in Europe who are also public intellectuals. Paolo Ercolani is one of them. He belongs to a generation of thinkers who be- lieve intellectuals must return to the engagement in social and public matters that they had in the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that today there are fewer think- ers willing to engage in public matters is a product of the specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge that Martin Heidegger predicted. Our re- sponsibility in the twenty-first century is not simply to criticize the discrimination inherent in contemporary institutions and invite others to think differently but also to preserve the right to be a public intellectual. Ercolani is a professor of the history of philoso- phy and the theory of new media at the University of Urbino and the author of several books on Hayek, Tocqueville, and Marx, but he also writes opinion articles for major Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Il Manifesto) and journals (MicroMega, Critica Liberale). In these articles he does not simply engage in political and cultural debates but he also encour- ages them because he believes that we are living in an age dominated by a neoliberal logic that demands that political differences and social alternatives be avoided. This is evident in the EU’s constant rhetoric against the rise of populist parties throughout Europe, as if they were all alike,1 and in the West’s so-called war on terror, which has recently found a new impe- tus with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Against these simple, one-sided, and politically cor- rect accounts of our world, Ercolani believes we must make an effort to question philosophical truths, his- torical myths, and social prejudices, regardless what unpopular territory this might lead to. For example, as he recently pointed out,2 supporters of ISIS are not simple Islamic fundamentalists but the result of social, economic, and cultural degradation created by decades of Western constraints. In line with his former tutor, distinguished historian Domenico Losurdo, Ercolani presents counter-histories of what Simone Weil once called the “Americanization of the world.” The seven chapters of this book cover a variety of concepts (liberalism, freedom, Marxism) and classic thinkers (Mill, Hayek, Marx, Popper) in order to dis- close several myths we have become accustomed to take for granted in the West. He posits that explora- tion of these myths is crucial to understanding the es- sence of the West or, better, to seeing what has been 1 S. Zabala, “In Europe, Not All Populist Parties Are the Same” Al Jazeera America, 2 December 2014, http:// america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/podemos-spain- politicspopulismeurope.html. 2 P. Ercolani, “Isis: guerra mondiale o miopia globale?” Il Manifesto, 22 November 2015, http://ilmanifesto.info/ storia/isis-guerra-mondiale-o-miopia-globale/. 10
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