Contributions by:

Dick Howard

From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Invention of Democracy

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Introduction I adopt the basic outline of this essay from Miguel Abensour’s distinction of “two interpretations of totalitarianism” in Lefort’s work. In a word, his first critique was directed at defining, denouncing, and overcoming the practices of Soviet totalitarianism (and its influence on the politics of western Communist parties and their intellectual camp-followers). Step-by-step, beginning…

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Obama’s Challenges: How to Govern the U.S.

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Two months after taking office—but after two years of campaigning—it is possible to begin to outline some elements of future policy by the new government. Perhaps the first thing to say is that it will indeed be a “government” rather than what Americans typically call the “administration” in Washington. Simple administration is all that is…

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André Gorz & the Philosophical Foundation of the Political

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Although André Gorz (1923-2007) was known during the past two decades as one of the leading proponents and innovators of left-wing ecological politics, I will try to show here that the basis of all of his political thought, as it evolved with the times and the circumstances, was philosophical. There are biographical grounds for this claim. …

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How to Think About the Great War

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The historical rupture marked by the Great War of 1914-1918 and its traces throughout the twentieth century have been more controversial in Germany than elsewhere. At the beginning of the century the German nation, recently unified under Bismarck, had rapidly adapted to modernity in every arena. Material progress underpinned by scientific creativity was quickly translated…

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The New Left and the Marxian Legacy:  Encounters in the U.S., France and Germany

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In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a “New Left” began to emerge in the West. Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator…

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