Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 09:55:14 -0700
Subject: Re: AUT: Negri/Hardt and Carl Schmitt (Alan Wolfe)
From: Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net>


   Wolfe's neo-marxist books of the 70's, " The Seamy Side of Democracy, " 
on political repression and, "The Limits of Legitimacy, " (marxist state 
theorizing) are quite good.
   Holly Sklar, btw, is chagrinned that her book on the Trilats is 
continually misinterpreted by far rightists like the John Birch Society. 
Another author on power structure research, Larry Shoup who co-wrote a 
Monthly Review Press book on the Council on Foreign Relations, has declined 
requests by the Birchers to reprint the book.
   Paul Buhle chapter (the final one in his edited collection w/ John 
McMillon, from Temple Univ. Press, "The New Left Revisited, " is full of 
editing and factual errors which John admitted to me. Such as mixing up 
Irving Kristol and Irving Howe.
    Alan Wolfe on 'Ideology and Interest in Postwar American Foreign 
Policy'
http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/miliband94.html
    From the Inside Flap
"Paul Lyons is one of the most sensible writers dealing with that most 
unsensible of subjects: the legacy of the Sixties. Ethnographically acute, 
politically balanced, eloquently engaged, Lyons gets at the complexities of 
generational conflict in ways discomforting to ideologies of the Left and 
the Right. New Left, New Right, and the Legacy of the Sixties ought to be a 
book for the Nineties." —Alan Wolfe, Boston University --This text refers 
to the Hardcover edition. http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0472098659
An Intellectual in Public by Alan Wolfe
   http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8361.html
Rebecca E. Klatch
A Generation Divided
The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8361/8361.ch05.html
A Generation Divided: Chapter Five
The Counterculture: Left Meets Right
> ..."Rebecca Klatch writes about the sixties, neither to praise nor to 
> condemn, but to understand. Her decision to compare SDSers and YAFers was 
> inspired, and we can all learn much from her wonderfully sympathetic 
> sociological skills."--Alan Wolfe, author of Whose Keeper? Social Science 
> and Moral Obligation.







Click Here to tell a friend about this book


Browse


Return to Previous Page


 Related Subjects

Political Science/Sociology


by Alan Wolfe

University of Michigan Press

Due/Published September 2003, 336 pages, cloth

ISBN 0472098659


On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:18:21 -0700 (PDT), Michael Handelman 
<mhandelman1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> Isn't the author of this (Alan Wolfe) piece someone
> who has veered to the Right since the 70s (I think it
> was Paul Buhle who referred to him as ex-New Leftist
> moving towards the "neo-liberal centre" or something
> like that)?
>
> In n fact in this article he says specifically that he
> is a liberal:
>
> "Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for
> why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly
> fight for their ideas with much more aggressive
> self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan
> Wolfe."
>
> Which would probably have surprise the Alan Wolfe who
> wrote the fascinating article on the Trilateral
> Commission in that book edited by Holly Sklair....
>
>
> --- Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net>
> wrote:
>> <URL: http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm
>> >
>> > ...Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and
>> unambiguous Nazi > commitments, the left's continuing fascination
>> with him is difficult to > comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a 
>> fellow at
>> All Soul's College, > Oxford, points out in his recently published A
>> Dangerous Mind, that > attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that
>> Schmitt's spirit pervades > Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of 
>> the
>> antiglobalization > movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio
>> Negri, as well as the > writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio
>> Agamben, recently much in the > news because of his decision to turn 
>> down a
>> position at New York > University as a protest against America's 
>> decision
>> to fingerprint > overseas visitors (although not those from Italy).
>>
>> When I served as the dean of the graduate faculty of
>> political and social science at the New School for Social Research in 
>> the
>> 1990s, the efforts of the decidedly left-wing faculty to play host to a
>> conference on Schmitt's thought brought into my office an elderly Jewish
>> donor who informed me that he was not going to give any more of his 
>> money to an
>> institution sympathetic, as he angrily put it, to "that
>> fascist." I was tempted to tell him, not that it would have helped, that 
>> Schmitt had
>> become the rage in leftist circles. Telos, a journal founded in 1968
>> dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences, 
>> had
>> started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed
>> by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian
>> idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings,
>> Gopal Balakrishnan's The Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of 
>> Verso in
>> 2000, finds Schmitt's conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a
>> crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left hope that its present
>> stalemate will not last indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers 
>> as
>> Slavoj Ziûek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been
>> preoccupied with Schmitt's ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's
>> political views. But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much 
>> like
>> themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of
>> power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a
>> poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such 
>> as John
>> Rawls.
>>
>> Schmitt's admirers on the left have been right to
>> realize that after the collapse of communism, Marxism needed 
>> considerable
>> rethinking. Yet in turning to Schmitt rather than to liberalism, they
>> have clung fast to an authoritarian strain in Marxism represented by 
>> such
>> 20th-century thinkers as V.I. Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. And it hasn't
>> just been Schmitt. Telos, in particular, developed a fascination with
>> neofascist thinkers and movements in Italy, as if to proclaim that 
>> anything
>> would be better than Marx's contemporary, John Stuart Mill, and his
>> legacy.
>>
>> Schmitt's influence on the contemporary right has
>> taken a different course. In Europe, new-right thinkers such as 
>> Gianfranco
>> Miglio in Italy, Alain de Benoist in France, and the German writers
>> contributing to the magazine Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom) have built 
>> on
>> Schmitt's ideas. Right-wing Schmittians in the United States are not as
>> numerous, but they include intellectuals -- often described as
>> paleoconservative -- who expend considerable energy attacking 
>> neoconservatism from
>> the right. One of them, Paul Edward Gottfried, a humanities professor at
>> Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, is especially prolific. Himself 
>> an
>> occasional contributor to Junge Freiheit, Gottfried defends the magazine 
>> for
>> rejecting "the view that every German patriot should be evermore 
>> browbeaten
>> by self-appointed victims of the Holocaust." No wonder he has a soft
>> spot for Carl Schmitt. Gottfried is the kind of writer who puts the term
>> "fascism" in quotation marks, as if its existence in the European past 
>> is
>> somehow open to question.
>>
>> But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on
>> Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any
>> important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which 
>> is
>> unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian
>> sympathies. Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades
>> the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has
>> flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, 
>> his
>> analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals 
>> and
>> liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.
>> <SNIP>
>> -- Michael Pugliese
>>
>>
>> -- Michael Pugliese
>>
>>
>> --- from list
>> aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>
> ====> "Economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy - from being 
> controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily 
> struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would 
> mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no 
> control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of 
> individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, 
> abolition of "public opinion" together with its makers." Herbert Marcuse
>
>
> 	
> 		
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
>
>
> --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>



-- 
Michael Pugliese


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---