Radical Thinker Research Articles

Transnational Echoes of Spenceanism: A Text-Mining Exploration in English-Language Newspapers (1790–1850)

AbstractBy tracing mentions of the English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), his revolutionary “Plan”, and his disciples (the “Spencean Philanthropists”) in digitized collections of English-language Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and US-American newspapers in the 1790s–1840s, this article explores the dissemination of the ideas and militancy inspired by Spence (“Spenceanism”) across the British Empire and the United States. By applying Digital Humanities methods to investigate British radical history from a transnational perspective, the global reception of Spenceanism is reconstructed by examining and comparing a corpus of 275 newspaper articles through text-mining methods such as keyword analysis, co-occurrences, and sentiment analysis. These methods enable the identification of key themes in references to Spenceanism and advance hypotheses concerning both their geographical and chronological distribution: not only when and where Spence and the Spenceans were alluded to and commented upon, but also how a newspaper's geographical location may have impacted its rhetoric in a specific year and historical context. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, this article contributes new insights regarding the global circulation of radical ideas across the nineteenth-century English-reading world.

How Erich Fromm Can Help Address the Jordan Peterson Problem in Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT The current political climate is marked by polarization, which presents new difficulties for psychoanalysis. Erich Fromm, as a Freudian theorist and clinician, is uniquely positioned to address these issues. Fromm is a politically radical thinker who can help psychoanalysis think about society and social injustice beyond the clinical context while avoiding the dangers of excessively orthodox left-wing thinking that risks taking the field away from its core mission. Fromm can help psychoanalysis avoid what we are calling the “Peterson problem,” which is partly the result of provocative and extreme ideas in institutions and psychoanalytic publications that create reputational problems for the field. The “Peterson problem” brings new attention to the political bias of left-liberal authoritarians inside the profession, who focus on changing society rather than healing individuals and neglect audiences outside the liberal university and highly educated classes and thus create space for polarizing figures like psychologist Jordan Peterson to fill the gap. Peterson’s fame and influence serves as a lightning rod for the wider critique of left leaning political and cultural currents in psychoanalysis. Fromm can act as a role model as well as provide the intellectual resources for responding to these challenges.

Mark Fisher and reimagining postcapitalist geographies

In this paper, I outline the spatial imaginaries of the late radical thinker Mark Fisher (1968–2017). I begin by explaining Fisher's focus on culture and desire as forces that must be addressed if an effective postcapitalist politics is to be formed and underscoring that so far in postcapitalist geographies, the roles of culture and desire have been relatively overlooked. I then delineate three spatial imaginaries threaded through Fisher's work, which I call 3D hauntology, grotesque stratigraphy, and acid topology, demonstrating how they offer fresh ideas at the nexus of postcapitalist geography and political strategy. To conclude, I argue that postcapitalist geographers must urgently foster cultural and political experiments that wager on latent popular desire for a future characterised by a reimagined communism.

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

Egypt’s Salafi Awakening in the 1970s: Revisiting the History of a Crucial Decade for Egyptian Islamic Activism

This article aims at revisiting the history of Egyptian Islamic activism during the important decade of the 1970s, by reintroducing a crucial element that is absent from the existing academic literature: the role played by Salafi ideas in the religious socialization of 1970s Egyptian Islamic activists. Far from only being the product of Saudi Arabia’s intense petrodollar-funded proselytization efforts, these Salafi ideas had already gained a foothold in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century, when they started being promoted by organizations such as Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya, which saw itself as a rival to the Muslim Brotherhood. Reintroducing this element helps complexify a historiographical narrative of the 1970s that has been mostly centered around the Muslim Brotherhood and the posthumous role played by the ideas of radical thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and it is key to a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the subsequent evolutions of Egyptian Islamic activism.

“The Tragedy of Messianic Politics”: Gustav Landauer’s Hidden Legacy in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin

Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) was a German-Jewish anarchist and radical thinker who was brutally murdered in the Munich Soviet Republic. Paul Mendes-Flohr has contributed enormously to the rediscovery of this long-neglected figure, who nonetheless played a crucial role in the intellectual debates of his time. Mendes-Flohr emphasizes the impact that Landauer’s death had on Martin Buber’s conception of politics at a time when Jewish revolutionaries were attempting to combine messianism and activism. In this essay, as a complement to Mendes-Flohr’s insightful work, I will attempt to show how Landauer’s legacy can be traced in two other German-Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, albeit with important differences. In particular, I want to illustrate how Landauer’s idea of an anarchic diaspora, as well as his idea of revolution as interruption, both based on a unique conception of time, can be seen as two powerful theologico-political devices that he used in order to dismantle a too narrow and too technical idea of politics. I will, therefore, examine how the anarchic diaspora finds its echo in Rosenzweig’s thought, and how the idea of interruption and inversion can be found in Benjamin’s conception of revolution.

Foucault's Concretions

Foucault's Concretions Karen S. Feldman (bio) Care of the Self? As Paul Allen Miller recounts in Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality produced widespread dismay when they appeared in 1986 in English. Foucault's earlier analyses of medical, psychiatric, and penal internment, with their systemic focus and their dialectical strands, exposed productive contradictions. His work generated further study among scholars across disciplines in similar veins, looking at biopower, compulsory discourses, enforcements of norms, and the intersections of institutional and individual practices. Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, along with Discipline and Punish and other earlier works, had made their arguments about impersonal and dispersed agency, on a structural-dynamic level. In all of these respects, I would suggest, they rendered Foucault a "Frankfurt-adjacent" thinker. I use the term "Frankfurt-adjacent" to capture the dialectical, radical, critical force of Foucault's pre-1980s work. Although not a historical materialist by any means, and not a thinker of class distinctions and conflicts, and not a teleological thinker, and not a liberal thinker, Foucault was nonetheless obviously a thoroughly radical thinker, pulling out by the roots our beliefs about our own intellectual categories and illuminating a deracinated power not held by individuals over others. He was a dialectician of power dynamics and institutions, whose genealogies led to revolutionary conceptions of authority, everyday disciplinary practices, and the regimentation of the body for instrumental purposes. Foucault's analyses made for sweeping systemic and epochal critiques, along both synchronic and diachronic axes. And then in the 1980s lectures and publications, he turns to the care of the self—the self? The individualized practices described in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality—including parrhēsia, spiritual practices, and the emphasis on freedom—rendered this late Foucault potentially less a radical than a classical liberal. His 1980s concern for the individual self, seemingly removed from the biopower-institutional-normative constraints, was startling. Criticizing governmentality while extolling individual self-fashioning—these gestures struck [End Page 405] readers as consummately liberal rather than radical. Care of the self, and the use of pleasure, in antiquity? Where was the Foucault of power as a dynamic network, of discursive layers, and of the human sciences in modernity? There is, of course, substantial debate around the continuity or discontinuity between Foucault's later work versus the earlier work on punishment, madness, clinics, and so on. The earlier work's proximity to the Frankfurt School is obvious in the exposure of the micro-control of the body of the soldier and the description of the famous panopticon, for instance. These were indictments and even deconstructions of power insofar as Foucault was showing that power is not a top-down force but a dynamic network. Foucault produced broad phenomenological-political analyses that called into question traditional authorities, ingrained habits, and pillars of conventional social and political thought. After all that exhilarating, eviscerating analysis, how should we find such radicality in care of the self and a focus on individual practices? It was astounding that the thinker of counterintuitive productions of discourse by repression turned to writing about self-care. Miller's book on the 1980s lectures specifically evokes the dismayed reader, even ventriloquizes him lamenting that this Foucault sounds like the stuffy old philosopher Mortimer Adler (Miller 2021, 186). Miller's argument in the book, however, is that we must see not just the later work but indeed Foucault's entire corpus as concerned in different ways with what it means to tell the truth about oneself. Miller's argument insists on a continuity in Foucault's work, but the dimensions of the differences—regarding "what it means," "tell," "truth," and "oneself"—are nonetheless dramatic when we shift from Frankfurt-adjacent dialectical analyses of institutional and normative discourse to individual experiences of truth-telling about a self. I argue that the lectures and the emphasis on telling the truth about oneself are less continuous with the earlier work than Miller suggests. Certainly there are points of continuity: discursive regimes, self-productions, and confession are at issue in both the earlier work and the 1980s lectures...

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

Nancy is a Thinker of Radical Emancipation

Nancy has been criticised for rejecting the politics of emancipation that characterises the thought of some of his more militant contemporaries. To be sure, he does distance himself from the rhetoric of emancipation. He considers that the grand modern emancipation narrative of the Enlightenment, and of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, expired with the end of the Cold War, and that the ideal of emancipation carried by this narrative is dangerous insofar as it imposes “ultimate sense” on history and assumes an “essence of humanity” that is to be liberated. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Nancy’s rejection of the modern, linear account of emancipatory politics is a refusal of emancipation per se. Indeed, his reason for rejecting modernity’s simple narrative of emancipatory progress is that this framing of history is by a long chalk not emancipatory enough, and that it has far too much in common with the identitarian politics against which it seeks to set itself. So it should come as no surprise that Nancy uses emancipatory language in his very rejection of the politics of emancipation, arguing for example that we need “emancipation from a certain thinking of emancipation.” This article makes the case for Nancy as a rich and radical thinker of emancipation whose thought, far from being apolitical when it comes to liberation, offers us a broad, robust and practical account of the emancipatory. This case is made by weaving together two important strands of Nancy’s thought. First, his deconstruction of Christianity is examined in the light of the claim that Christianity is “in itself and by itself in a state of surpassing” and that Christianity’s self-surpassing is “perhaps its deepest tradition.” This leads, secondly, to a consideration of Nancy’s frequent meditations on Pascal’s statement that “man infinitely exceeds/surpasses man.” When they are taken together, what emerges from these two strands of Nancy’s thought is a pattern of emancipation that goes beyond simple historical ruptures to operate across multiple temporalities at once, each populated by plural vectors of continuity and change. Nancy seeks emancipation from a double slavery: the slavery of absolutising a continuity with the past, and that born of the ideological fantasy of a simple rupture with the past. Instead, he offers us an account of emancipation that is capable of navigating a subtler course through multiple dynamics of continuity and change. The article concludes by briefly examining Nancy’s use of the term ressourcement to characterise this radical account of emancipation, evoking the importance of the gesture described by this term for the biblical prophets, for the magisterial reformers and for Vatican II. Far from being weak in its emancipatory potential, Nancy’s thought takes the modern emancipatory imperative and returns it to us with greater depth, breadth and potency.

Feminism in Radical Democracy and Japanese Political Theory: Mouffe, Pateman, Young, and “Essentialism”

Abstract This paper examines feminist arguments in radical democracy and Japanese responses to them. Although feminist insights are significant intellectual sources of radical democracy, recent political theorists have tended to exclusively consider radical democracy as agonistic pluralism. The radical democratic thinker Chantal Mouffe, who is very popular among Japanese political theorists and philosophers, criticizes the “essentialist” tendency of two feminist political theorists, namely Carole Pateman and Iris Marion Young. First this paper examines Mouffe’s critique of the two theorists. Second, it evaluates the relevance of Mouffe’s criticism of Pateman and Young by reconsidering their ideas on democracy and citizenship. Third, it engages the works of a few Japanese political theorists who respond to the issue of essentialism and points out the problems involved in the introduction of radical democracy in Japan and in Japanese feminist political theory. Finally, this paper concludes that we are still in the early stages of introducing and absorbing foreign feminist political theories into Japan as opposed to developing original Japanese feminist political theory to share with the world.

Rethinking James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) through John Toland’s Edition (1700): A New Perspective on the Origin of Anti-Unionism

James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) was republished posthumously in 1700, along with his other treatises, by the Irish-born radical thinker John Toland. He inserted in this edition, however, a non-original treatise by John Hall related to the history of the Scottish dynasty. While the reason for its inclusion has not been illumined in current literature, a close examination of its content and Toland’s editorship engaged in it more specifically reveals that it was selected primarily for its anti-Stuart drift. If more aptly contextualized in 1700, however, anti-Stuartism was, for Toland, translatable into anti-Unionism. An awareness of this hidden thrust of the 1700 edition helps to rethink the original edition of Oceana beyond its usual association with the seventeenth-century English republican debate; it was rather a precursor of anti-unionist discourse as Harrington attempted to set forth a work of national historiography after the regal union of England and Scotland had been severed with the head of Charles Stuart in 1649. The breadth and scope of the historical narrative he constructed in Oceana substantiate this view. In it, Harrington laid out the strongest anti-unionist argument; Toland must have found its illocutionary forces particularly useful for the purpose of preventing Anglo-Scottish unionism from garnering popular support in the changed circumstances of Restoration England. By re-contextualizing the two texts―original and edited―within the longer-term framework of early modern English history, the present article seeks to explain how and why questions about English nationhood played a vital role in the formation of both texts and in the attraction of Harrington for Toland.

The Moral Meaning of Babel: Kafka, Ahad Ha’am, Borges

The moral meaning of the Tower of Babel is diaspora, but there are many thoughts of diaspora. A comparative evaluation of disapora thoughts is needed. I compare two esoteric ones, that of Ahad Ha’am and Jorge Luis Borges, with some reference to Franz Kafka, in order to evaluates the effects of a pattern of dispersal on a human community. In the battle between Borges’s and Ha’am’s diaspora thoughts, the more radical and morally better pattern belongs to the less radical thinker. Both commit to a negative concept of diaspora. Borges commits, however, to an absolute diaspora, in which a person or a people can only get lost. Ha’am commits to a relative diaspora, in which a people takes its orientation continually from multiple vectors of distance and foreignness.

Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

<i>Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic</i>. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

Politics in the Conflicts of Modernity: Aristotelian and Marxist

ABSTRACTAlasdair MacIntyre's latest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, confirms his interest in Marxism as a form of critique. MacIntyre's debt to Marx has been central to recent scholarship, strengthening his reception as a radical thinker. This article examines the relationship between politics and ethics in MacIntyre and Marx. Following Aristotle, MacIntyre sees ethics as part of political inquiry. Marx features in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity to help confront the “ethics-of-the-market” and the “ethics-of-the-state.” This renewed engagement demands a reassessment of his critique of Marx. MacIntyre argues Marx lacks a sufficient account of the human good. However, MacIntyre fails to consider the implications of his own characterisation of Marx's Aristotelianism. Marx develops an ethical understanding derived from an Aristotelian social ontology, elaborated first in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” with the concept of “species-being,” and, then, in the value-form theory in Capital. Marx's teleological concept of labour supplies his social theory with an ethical structure. I argue MacIntyre's critique of Marx, and in turn C. L. R. James, underplays the importance of this concept of labour in founding a collective politics of resistance, and instead, retreats to the politics of the local community.

“The Agitator’s Wife” (1894): the story behind James Connolly’s lost play?

ABSTRACTThe centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 and the 150th anniversary of James Connolly’s birth in 2018 afford an ideal opportunity to reappraise this unique figure. Rightly renowned for his polemical journalism and political theory, Connolly is less celebrated for his creative writing. His 1916 play, Under Which Flag?, long considered lost, resurfaced fifty years ago without causing significant ripples in Irish literary circles, but interest in Connolly’s role in the struggle for Irish independence continues to grow, and critics are becoming increasingly aware of the fusion of feminist and socialist thought that shaped his particular anti-imperialist agenda. In this context his creative writing takes on new significance. A second lost play of Connolly’s, The Agitator’s Wife, has never been found, but its discovery would surely deepen our understanding of this gifted radical thinker. In this essay we suggest that an anonymous short story bearing that very title, published in a short-lived Christian socialist journal of the 1890s, may be a crucial missing piece in solving the puzzle of Connolly’s forgotten drama.

“All shall be happy by land and by sea”: Thomas Spence as an Atlantic thinker

ABSTRACTEnglish radical thinker and activist Thomas Spence (1750–1814) has traditionally been considered a minor figure in the history of political thought. Spence was renowned for his “Plan,” the proposal to abolish the private property of the land and promote a common management of it. His claims for the commons as England underwent industrialization sounded anachronistic at home, but made him relevant from an Atlantic perspective. By insisting on the connection between privatization of land and oppression, Spence linked his agrarian radicalism to the struggles against slavery and the dispossession of the natives in colonial contexts. Experimenting the methodological approach of Atlantic intellectual history from below, this article surveys the Atlantic dimension of Spence’s Plan. It discusses Spence’s practical and theoretical political education, showing his acquaintance with the landed and maritime struggles of his time and how he translated them into radical political theory. Spence also engaged with modern political thinkers and challenged the modern liberal conceptions of state and empire, assigning a crucial role to the sea as a reservoir of revolutionary ideas and practice. Seen from an Atlantic perspective, Spence’s Plan can be interpreted as a project of decolonization of the world. The article traces also Spence’s enduring influence, both in England and the Americas. The Atlantic relevance of the Plan is proved by Spence’s legacy in the British Caribbean: the connection between land and freedom theorized by Spence was to African slaves a glaring matter of common sense.

Simondon: investigating the pre-organizational

ABSTRACTGilbert Simondon (1924–1989) was a radical process thinker; forms of relatedness and not objects were his focus. This is all the more remarkable as he was not a vitalist prioritizing Gaia or autopoesis. He based his thought on analyses of technology/technics and communication/cybernetics, and in both cases rejected the perspective of the machine or message as in itself objectifiable. Life objects, machines and societies, according to Simondon, individuate; that is, they are self-evolving, self-generating and self-differentiating in what he calls processes of ‘transduction’. Simondon, in fact, is more a thinker of transindividuation than of individuation. His is a theory of how the pre-individual leads to the transindividual, without the individual ever really playing much of a role. The motor of change and activity is ‘transduction’ – or a force of form-taking that operates on the pre-individual level. Transduction is, thus, the life-force of Simondon’s becoming. It is the energy that propels action, change, event and occurrence. No one in particular is the subject of transduction; transduction is the pre-individual manifestation of an all-encompassing process of genesis. Simondon attends to the genesis of the person, society, information, collective, technology, organization, whatever. We will see that his descriptions of becoming are powerful and theoretically important, but that his ontology (or philosophy) needs to be debated. Transduction is very problematic; how or whether it is knowable (epistemology) remains unclear; and transduction would seem to escape the individual and/or collective will – becoming an all-important life-force outside political or ethical control. Sub-processes of transduction, such as in the development of machines or even social technologies, have been rigorously documented and examined. Simondon studies genesis or how things come to be as they are. Currently, there is renewed interest in his thought, we think because he challenges unreflective functionalism – things are not just as they are: they evolve and become, oppose and break down, signify and deny, reveal and hide. Simondon provides a window on a world of complexification and change; he is a thinker of instability and dynamics; a thinker who matches our contemporary circumstances. This introduction will discuss possible contributions of Simondon to organizational studies, where his process perspective challenges many usual approaches. The emphasis on the pre-individual triggers reflection of what could be called the ‘pre-organizational’ and poses a whole series of theoretical and practical questions.

Dr. William Drennan and the Political, Social and Religious Aspects of Irish Education, 1785-1820

This paper examines the thinking on education of Irish Presbyterian radical thinker, and founder of United Irishmen, William Drennan. Drennan advocated for education for all as a means of social advancement.

A Materialistic Rationalist? Urban Gottfried Bucher’s Defense of Innate Ideas and Mechanism, Added by his Denial of Free Will

Urban Gottfried Bucher is one of the most surprising authors in early German enlightenment and has been rightly celebrated as a materialist and therefore radical thinker. But he did not teach the same kind of materialism as his contemporary Andreas Rudiger who leaned toward Locke’s empiricism. Bucher is much closer to Hobbes’ mechanical materialism, to Spinoza’s criticism of free will, and to Tschirnhaus’ extending of the mathematical method to natural science. His explanation of the working of the human soul, while materialistic, is rationalistic and mechanical. The difference between the two kinds of materialism becomes crystal-clear in Bucher’s and Rudiger’s approach to the Copernican system they both embrace. For Rudiger, the Copernican hypothesis is seen as a probable truth we can hold on to as long as we don’t obtain competing empirical sensiones and ideas, even if our globe should not really move around the sun. For Bucher though, it is a demonstrated truth that gains additional support by a machin...