Political Evil Research Articles

Toward a Karendtian theory of political evil— connecting Kant and Arendt on politicalwrongdoing

This paper shows ways to develop, integrate, and transform Kant’s and Arendt’s theories on political evil into a unifiedKarendtian theory. Given the deep influence Kant had on Arendt’s thinking, the deep philosophical compatibility between theirprojects is not surprising. But the results of drawing on the resources left by both is exciting and groundbreaking with regard toboth political evil in general and the challenges of modernity and totalitarianism in particular.

Зло как категория современного политического мышления

The article attempts to analyze the understanding of evil both in contemporary political discourse and in everyday word usage. For this purpose, it is proposed to revisit the problem of theodicy, since evil is almost always used in a religious sense. The article distinguishes between the process of secularization, as a result of which the omnipotence of God becomes the property and instrument of political power, and the deconstruction of Christianity, which allows us to move from political theology to secular theodicy, where our ability to think and recognize evil in the world, rather than the problem of God's justification, comes to the fore. The author argues that this is impossible within the framework of political theology, where political evil always conceals and justifies itself. This is the fate of all theodicies, which Kant calls “doctrinal,” in which reason, making a claim against god (or transcendence) is always able to justify it. Kant considers the Book of Job to be the only “authentic” theodicy in which it is suffering itself, or Job's conscience, immanent to the world, that sues god. This is an important step in the direction of secular theodicy, but it is also limited in its desire to be subsumed by deity or authority. The paper suggests that we should pay attention to Job's wife's call to her husband to “curse the Lord and die.” These words become the origin of an alternative theodicy – a theodicy of action, a theodicy of the victim refusing to speak to god. The author finds the beginnings of such a theodicy in Jules Michelet's historical analysis of the religious massacres of witches, where the latter appear as victims, as well as in Jean Amery's analysis of torture and his idea of the rehabilitation of the ressentiment. The line of rebellion leading from the words of Job's wife to the unprecedented forms of violence of power provoked by the fear of this rebellion leads to the understanding of evil not as religious (opposing good), but as a political phenomenon of the modern world, manifested in excessive violence against the powerless victim.

Политическое зло: открытие модерна

Considering evil against the backdrop of the dichotomy of normative-and-evaluative categories in the political space in various historical periods, the author of the article gradually brings us closer to the modern scientific interpretation of political evil.

Political Evil and the Invocation of the Sacred

Political Evil and the Invocation of the Sacred

Making or unmaking the nation? A reflection of president Moi’s regime

ABSTRACT This study explores Kenya’s second President, Daniel Arap Moi’s attempts to establish a sense of a shared national identity. Content analysis of books written about him, his speeches, and newspaper articles reveals how Moi used Nyayo philosophy, national holidays, the Father of the Nation narrative, currency notes and coins, and monuments to foster a Kenyan national identity. Despite efforts to forge a common national identity, the government frequently operated in a way that was at odds with what Moi said in his speeches. Whereas President Moi advocated for peace, love, and unity, his administration was largely characterised by clientelism, patronism, social and regional inequalities, and interethnic violence, among other social, economic and political evils. Because of the disconnect between what Moi claimed and what his administration actually did, his attempts to foster nationhood could alternatively be seen as a way for him to control the state, consolidate power, and legitimize his leadership. Therefore, during Moi’s rule, national identity building lacked a strong collective consciousness, which would have enabled Kenyans to institutionalise a sense of belonging and attachment to the nation.

Kleptocracy and Nigerian politics: A reflection on the fourth republic

Kleptocracy scores high in weakening rule of law and undermining the development of the global south. Despite different anti-corruption measures by nation-states, political evil continuously assumes a political culture. Kleptocracy consists of embezzling and stealing public funds and resources for selfish profits (consumption and glorification). In Nigeria particularly the fourth republic, political offices have turned to channels for unchecking sources of riches to both oneself and family members. Political elites take turn engaging in siphoning, embezzling, stealing, looting, and diverting public funds which create a kind of political culture where feeding fat on the states’ treasuries become the order of the day. This significantly results in an economic mess, underdevelopment, unimaginable sufferings and a thriving environment for penuries, particularly in Nigeria. To achieve the purpose of this study, interpretivism approach was used to analyse previous literature on the meaning, features and consequences of kleptocracy in society. The incidences of embezzlement and looting of public resources of the fourth Nigerian republic were investigated. The study finds that kleptocracy is politically evil because it undermines human dignity by recreating poverty and corruption. It recommends that to eradicate the practice from Nigerian politics, honest yearly assets declarations should form a bedrock for every public officeholder.

The Red Mist

An influential critique of anger holds that anger comes at an important epistemic cost. In particular, feeling angry typically makes risk less visible to us. This is anger’s ‘red mist.’ These epistemic costs, critics suggest, arguably outweigh the epistemic benefits commonly ascribed to anger. This essay argues that the epistemic critique of anger is importantly misleading. This is not because it underestimates anger’s epistemic benefits, but rather because it overlooks the fact that anger’s red mist performs a crucial moral function. By concealing risk, the red mist helps protect the dignity and self-respect of those who live under severe and unchosen risk. This function is vitally important in non-ideal circumstances, where many are unjustly subjected to dignity-impairing risk. And it is irreplaceable, in that it cannot readily be performed by other political emotions, such as hope. Beyond providing a novel defence of anger, this argument has a broader upshot. Anger’s red mist reveals that ignorance is not always problematic in politics. Accordingly, it should not be treated—as has standardly been the case—as an unmitigated political evil. In the first instance, our efforts are better spent ascertaining when ignorance is a problem, and when, instead, it performs a felicitous function.

WORDSWORTH AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Almost all the Romantic poets, with the possible exception of Byron, have accepted the existence of evil and considered pain and suffering as a part of human life. The sources of evil and suffering are diverse: socio-economic imbalance, political crisis, personal failures and disappoints of the poet, and, above all, a sense of alienation from social, economic, philosophical and religious dimensions. Wordsworth in his poetry has recorded the presence of evil in life and consequent human suffering. The tragic elements in Wordsworth’s poetry demonstrate this inescapable pattern of human destiny. The spirit of Wordsworth’s poetry lies, in the face of all individual, social and political evils, in denouncing warfare, in upholding democratic ideals and in finding a solution to the problems of evil and suffering that mankind has always confronted. He tried to find in his despair a consolation which lies in love for humanity, love for Nature, the transfiguration of vision, and a belief in an afterlife. Wordsworth undertook to reconstitute the grounds of hope for mankind in a world full of pain, sorrow, and despair. From a reading of his poetry, one can be familiar with Wordsworth’s conception of the true end of man, which can be applied to the social, moral and metaphysical issues of our time. The purpose of this paper is to show that although Wordsworth’s approach to the problems of evil and suffering follows theological and philosophical archetypes, his solutions are essentially aesthetic and humanistic.

The plasma of violence: Towards a preventive medicine for political evil

AbstractHow do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchical orders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour's concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural, textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. I conclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.

Managing Our Fears: On Four Poems by Jaswinder Bolina

Managing Our Fears:On Four Poems by Jaswinder Bolina Mark Halliday The 44th of July, by Jaswinder Bolina (Omnidawn, 2019), 88 pp. Jaswinder Bolina's poems in The 44th of July worry constantly about power relations—between rich and poor, native and immigrant, soldier and citizen; between races, between cultures. This kind of focus produces poetry from which I often recoil, since I don't want poems that presume to inform me of obvious inequities in society, or that nag me moralistically about my privileged cooperation in an unfair society. (Everyone who is at all likely to read poetry or an essay on poetry engages in such cooperation.) Those reminders come plentifully every day from the news, which is interesting in its way but not in the emotionally layered, psychologically probing way of poetry. With this view I might not be expected to think highly of The 44th of July (even taking into account that Jaswinder Bolina was one of my doctoral students more than a decade ago), yet I admire the book, and I will try to show how Bolina can make political poems—poems aware of political evils—that are not arrogantly didactic but helpful to all of us who need strategies for managing our fears. The presence of fear underlying each poem about dangerous power is crucial to the success of these poems. Bolina's style—verbose, argumentative, cornucopic with details—expresses the anxiety and resentment a speaker who hopes to control a scary subject may feel by addressing it so abundantly. Bolina as poet is tuned in to the bitterness of anyone robbed or manipulated or ignored by capitalist culture; he knows that outsiders suffer invisibly—someone seethes beneath the exit music at the end of each mainstream cultural narrative of victory and fulfillment. In some poems Bolina finds himself also revealing his own attraction to the kinds of power he critiques or laments, creating a sense of the poem's speaker being more honest than at first he meant to be. One provisional strategy for managing fear is to imagine a world from which it has disappeared. Bolina tries this experiment in "New Adventures in Sci-Fi." The poem's title promises a set of improbable or impossible events or conditions. The speaker summarizes with cheerful complacency the safe life of inhabitants of "a bland planet" where the problems of earthly life have been solved or have never arisen. The poem's critique of earthly follies [End Page 199] comes across through a series of negations—for instance, law enforcement is nonviolent and benign (if necessary at all) on the bland planet: Everybody has a porch swing the beat cops wave to when they pass. They don't protect us bloody.They don't police the teeth out of our heads or thump us as if they are monsters afraidof the dark. A poem proceeding this way could become cheaply polemical; but Bolina avoids that playfully, not advocating changes but assuming the reader shares his sense that the desirable changes have sci-fi unlikeliness. No jingo caucusgums up our galactic congress. No bigot polemic commandeers our election cycle. Our super pacsprotect us, our lobbyists defend us, even our Republicans consider our expertise. The sharing of outlook between poet and expected reader is enjoyable, but the amusement has anxiety behind it, as in the context of The 44th of July we realize that the poem's sci-fi gambit is one strategy for finding fortitude amid dangers; poet and reader share in imagining a better world. The better world is not plagued by repressive divisions between groups of people, such as are caused on earth by nationalism or religion: There's no such thing as Americans. There are only bisexuals,all forty-six of our black presidents, all thirty-seven of them women, all of us infatuatedwith each other, and all our caliphs desire is a pride parade. All our Zions require mutual [End Page 200] consent there is no God, and there is no God so we get on with our hydroponics and barbecueso when the aliens come, they come for our cuisine. The jump from "forty-six...

POLİTİK EPİSTEMOLOJİDE EPİSTEMİK ADALETSİZLİK VE HİBRİT KÖTÜLÜK

This study claims that Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice can be extended in two ways. First, the excess of credibility can be evaluated as an epistemic injustice. Fricker suggests that a deflated level of credibility causes epistemic injustice. However, practices such as forcing false statements result from excess credibility and cause epistemic injustices especially during war and detention processes. In some hierarchical situations, social actors’ hearer and speaker roles may turn into a hegemonic relationship by suggesting that the speaker has knowledge. This kind of relationship motivates exclusion, marginalization and alienation due to identity bias. Then, it can be argued that not only the lack of credibility but also its excess is an epistemic injustice. In this study, the excess of credibility is accepted as the situation faced by “people who are interrogated with the claim of having knowledge.” Second, epistemic injustice can be defined as a hybrid evil. It refers to instances of evil that contain complex motivations such as political evil, since it can neither be reduced only to the character nor to the environmental conditions. Fricker’s proposal for resolving epistemic injustice is hybrid virtues such as intellectual and reflexive critical-social sensitivity. Therefore, while individuals’ situations and context provide reflexive thinking, they also support a normative critical attitude. Fricker offers hybrid virtues for the solution while she does not define the problem as hybrid. Thus this paper proposes to extend Fricker’s concept in two ways: first, including excess of credibility within the scope of the epistemic injustice, and second, defining such injustices as political hybrid evils. Then this expansion will give political epistemology an opportunity to reevaluate given theories of politics, ethics and epistemology and increase its normative contribution to them.

Рецепция Аввакума в творчестве Марка Алданова

What attracted Aldanov to the heritage of Archpriest Avvakum? The brilliant personality of a man who was involved in events in the history of Russia and was instrumental in transforming the Russian literary tradition. Features of a number of Avvakum’s works are to be found in Aldanov’s journalistic publications — “Armageddon,” “Fire and Smoke” — in his literary works — “Soviet People (in Cinematography)”, “Punch Vodka”, “A Tale of Death” — and in his philosophical treatises — “A Night in Ulm”. Aldanov sees the archpriest as a writer of genius, while simultaneously recognizing him as one who destroyed the traditions of history’s natural course. In Aldanov’s works one observes a dichotomy of opposing worldviews. While he rejects Avvakum’s ideological struggle to preserve the traditions, he is also opposed to Lenin, whose ideology stresses extirpating past traditions. In Aldanov’s view, these two historical personages are linked by their passion for destruction. They are distinctive the one from the other, however, in that Avvakum, steeped in delusions, is a mild-mannered, persecuted martyr, while Lenin, who lives by hatred, is the fountainhead of social and political evil. Aldanov recognizes Avvakum as a writer of genius but also considers him dangerous as a force for influencing the minds of men. His negative perception of Avvakum consists in his rejection of the latter’s stance; recognizing the “primordial” nature of his rebellion, he points up the absence of enlightenment. Avvakum’s less than intelligent energy, his influence, obstinacy, and his deliberate attempt to fracture his society are features that recur and are intensified in the character and behavior of Vladimir Lenin. If one compares the approach to Avvakum of D. P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky and A. M. Remizov with that of Aldanov, the ambivalent stance of Aldanov’s representation of the archpriest is clarified. Another consideration involves the delight of Avvakum’s style, how Aldanov uses leitmotifs of the archpriest’s works in his own prose. In the novella “Punch vodka”, while summing up the life of M. V. Lomonosov, Aldanov cites Avvakum’s works, by way of expressing his idea about the unique happiness of a genius, unattainable by ordinary people. In the novel “A Tale of Death”, Aldanov uses a leitmotif from “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, As Written By Himself”: the image of the wife of Leyden. She suffers as a result of her husband’s actions, while unaware of the paramount calamity of his life, on analogy with the situation in which the wife of the archpriest finds herself. As early as his first published articles Aldanov formulates his approach to the image of Avvakum, but that image is not static. Over the years his attitude toward the archpriest changes. Aldanov does not create Avvakum as a literary personage; rather, he invokes the personality of a writer, with whom a continuous dialogue is carried on. As his literary prose develops we see less of the Avvakum as hatemongering schismatic and precursor of the Bolsheviks, and more of the man who aids us in understanding the meaning of life (“Punch vodka”). His words and images also help Aldanov to display the development of Russian literature (“A Night in Ulm”) and to create literary characters in his novels (“A Tale of Death”, “Delirium”).

Features of the historical memory of students of Russian megacities

In the course of sociological analysis, linguistic models of students’ historical memory, events and historical figures were identified, that represent, in the opinion of young people, the “political evil” and the “political good” in Russian history. The students identified serfdom, “Stalinist repressions”, the famine of the 1920s and 1940s and the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya as “political evil”. The “political good” – the victories in the Patriotic War of 1812, the Great Patriotic War, the flight to space, the 1980 and 2014 Olympics. The author’s sociological studies of the largest Russian megalopolises have revealed the complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of student youth. The study established the adherence of student youth to liberal ideology, a shallow awareness of the life of their family, their kin in earlier periods of Russian history, from pre-revolutionary times to the lives of their relatives in the 20-40s of the XX century, the association of “political good” with the achievements of our country and the association of “political evil” with defeats and reforms.

«Не как цари, но как служители и глашатаи истины…»: философский дискурс о пастыре в раннее Новое время

Early Modern philosophy pays some attention to the image of minister of reli­gion. While its anticlericalism is well known, the positive program of pastor seems to be neglected. This article considers the structure and grounds of this positive image, concentrating on the texts of Hobbes, Spinoza and Pufendorf. It argues that the universal and yet subjective natural light turns out to be the key element for the image of pastor. The method of mathematical demonstration al­lows early Modern philosophers to establish the clear and distinct grounds of morality. They demand the same basis for the pastoral care that should consist of teaching and preaching. The same universal and subjective grounds underlie the division of power and authority between sovereign and individual. Conse­quently, pastor is deprived of any form of power except for the power of demon­stration. The doctrine preached by the pastor should be coherent to the natural light. The use of eloquence or any (other) form of coercion is not allowed for him. Otherwise this doctrine is designated as superstition, i.e. political, moral and epistemic evil. This kind of reasoning brings the pastor under control of in­stances of the reason (represented e.g. by the philosophers) and the sovereign. Finally, the assumption is made that the structure of this ideal Early Modern pas­tor sets the limits of rational-legal order of authority of the religious leader.

A New Political Evil and the Crisis of the European Integration Project

A New Political Evil and the Crisis of the European Integration Project

The departed militant: A portrait of joy, violence and political evil

This is an essay about the personhood of militant violence, the phenomenological underpinnings of political evil and the friendship between two men. It begins by recounting the author’s street-side meeting with several Islamist militants in Tripoli, Lebanon, one of whom later described his preparations to become a ‘martyr’ in Syria. The essay takes my conversations with this man and his friends as a means of exploring the becoming of violent militancy as a fundamentally creative and essentially joyful series of encounters that lead to the emergence of extreme violence. To do so, I read the narrative account at the centre of the essay through the concept of social and political ‘fracturing’, which is described as the process through which individuals or groups are able to transcend traditional limits on knowledge, action and belief. This discussion of social and political fracturing is then brought into conversation with the question of what constitutes social or political evil in order to demonstrate that debates over what produces violent militant mobilization have generally missed the crucial relevance of a set of small, intimate and embodied rituals that suffuse evil, violence and war-fighting more generally with a fundamentally positive (yet eventually destructive) phenomenology.

Fictional Utopias, Dystopias, and the Problem of Evil

Fictional utopias of the early modern time, as an alternative and an opposite to classical social contract theories, and fictional dystopias of the 20th century, as the opposite of the democratic and liberal rule of law, remain a major reference or for our contemporary political debates when it comes to characterize warn against considerable dangers entailed in political options, regimes, opinions etc. Today, classical utopias are mostly overwhelmingly considered in a negative way, although there were initially designed to be a more comprehensive solution for the problem of political evil than the social contract theories. From the beginning, dystopias were designed as the greatest political evil ever. Yet, both are not only fictional, but also radically impossible to ever b realized, for reasons that have not been really analyzed yet. In the following, I enquire into these reasons.

The discourse of the Holocaust: political evil and the historical memory

The discourse of the Holocaust: political evil and the historical memory

The affective grounding of post-truth: pedagogical risks and transformative possibilities in countering post-truth claims

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to map a line of theorizing affect and its entanglement with post-truth, and use this theorization to think about what it could mean for the role of educators—that is, what can be done in education to respond critically to the affective infrastructures of post-truth politics? This question arises at a historical juncture of widespread views that post-truth politics create an urgency for reframing post-truth experiences as productive pedagogical engagements. The paper draws on affect theory to show how the affective grounding of post-truth claims works to govern our subjectivities and how emotions matter in constructing certain truths that reproduce social and political evils such as racism, sexism and xenophobia. The analysis shows how this nuanced understanding of affect, governmentality and post-truth can be helpful in educational settings to respond critically to post-truth politics, while paying attention to risks emerging from moralization or indoctrination.

GAS Political public space in the satire theatre case study on the performance eyayu fenges” Ethiopian satire theater

Abstract፡ This article aims to describe about the techniques of make understanding for the space of audience or target group in the satire drama in the stage. The researcher would watch the theater in YouTube and in the stage and also read the script which written by Bereket Belayneh in the type of satire drama, its function in terms of political and social issues. In the addition to the above mentioned these script and play must show the use of satire for political and social criticism for the audience clearly with easy understanding. The other thing that plays show transmitted of the message to the higher officials in the comic entertaining way to the audience of the satire drama. Besides techniques, purpose and different features of satire has investigated from the relevant references. Its researcher mainly has shown the technique of making understand for the audience that have been watched the satire theater on the stage. Bereket Belayneh and Girum Zenebe Eyayu fenges Ethiopian Satire Theater focusing on political satire to find the satire and comic elements used in the humor in order to ridicule the political evils and suggest solutions with in artistically color. The primary sources of this article are Bereket Belayneh and Girum zenebe Eyayu fenges Ethiopian Satire Theater. It’s have used as methodology a qualitative descriptive analysis and have use the document study which is that in library, research digital media sites and the relative relevant materials.