Dangerous minds in dangerous times

Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don’t simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-oriented project to demolish the post-1789 moral-political dispensation that we tend to take for granted and replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation. The task of reconsidering the perils of going too easy on these thinkers, or giving them the benefit of the doubt, is made more urgent by the apparent return of fascist or ‘fascoid’ modes of politics, and in particular, the emergence of a far-right intelligentsia all too keen to appropriate these thinkers for far-right purposes.

Conclusion

This study has explored how Barth and Bonhoeffer provide resources for a chastened defense of the politics of liberal modernity. This chastened defense acknowledges the tensions inherent in modern politics, including the potential for violence and terror in the utopian strand of modern thought. For Barth and Bonhoeffer, a theological account of history liberates politics from salvation history. These theologians saw the hopes of the modern age shipwrecked during their lifetimes. Yet even in the midst of this crisis, they sought neither the retrieval of a premodern synthesis, nor the supersession of modern politics by some postmodern alternative. The goal of this study has been to show how Barth and Bonhoeffer responded to the crisis of modernity in their own historical context, avoiding despair as well as the temptations of political utopia.

Illiberal and irrational? Trump and the challenge of liberal modernity in US foreign policy

Building on a growing body of literature on the application of Morgenthau’s ethics to post-Cold War US foreign policy, this article applies Morgenthau’s concept of irrationality to Trump’s foreign policy. Based on this application, the article highlights the limit of rationality in Morgenthau’s theoretical analysis. Specifically, the article argues, pace neo-realist critiques of ‘liberal hegemony’, that Trump reveals an empirical puzzle: US foreign policy can be both irrational and illiberal simultaneously in the pursuit of nationalistic universalism. This is the case, the article argues, because nationalistic universalism in Morgenthau’s analysis is not rooted in liberalism per se but the dynamics of liberal modernity. The Trump puzzle thus reveals an on-going tension between rationality and liberal modernity in Morgenthau’s theoretical analysis: rationality offers an insufficient tool to take upon the challenge of liberal modernity from which Trump’s nationalistic universalism stems. This, the article concludes, leaves Morgenthau’s concept of interest ‘defined in terms of power’ open to misappropriation to ends contrary to their original aim: furthering nationalistic universalism, rather than limiting power.

White Extinction: Metaphysical Elements of Contemporary Western Fascism

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These include new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence.

Ownership's Shadow

This article theorizes contemporary authoritarian mobilization and its continuities with liberal modernity. It draws on the genealogy of modern property to systematically integrate two registers that often compete in explanations of authoritarianism: materialist analyses of the political economy, and accounts of racism and sexism. Following intersectional feminist and race scholarship, it argues that liberal capitalist societies rely on inbuilt entitlements to group-based oppression, and that these oppressive relations historically took on a form analogous to property. This analogy is not accidental. Propertized oppression supplements the promise of self-ownership that liberalism rests upon; and it compensates parts of the population for the material dispossession on which capitalism thrives. At the present historical conjuncture of formal legal equality and neoliberal material dispossession, the logic of property is replicated in a new key. Neoauthoritarianism seeks to protect embodied entitlements to appropriate for select groups, and to designate others as disposable.

The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society

Representatives of all nations gather for the utility of mankind; there, the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian behave towards each other as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the word “infidel” for those who go bankrupt.—Voltaire, letter VI, Lettres Philosophiques (1734)Voltaire's words about the London Royal Exchange, quoted by Francesca Trivellato in her important new book The Promise and Peril of Credit, represent pars pro toto a view of finance and trade—as peaceful, tolerant, antagonistic to the old segregations and brutalities of religion, and ultimately emancipatory—that entered the philosophical mainstream in the eighteenth century, that seems to at least partly form the foundations of liberal modernity, and that continues to shape the way we think about business and capitalism today (p. 139). Yet Voltaire himself was an anti-Semite who obsessed about the Jews and trafficked in old clichés about cunning Jewish merchants precisely in order to make his case for commerce as a vehicle of toleration. This and similar ironies or contradictions lie at the heart of Promise and Peril, which traces from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century what Trivellato calls a “legend,” because it is both patently false (we now know), and was once widespread, that Jews in the Middle Ages or Renaissance invented the bill of exchange (and sometimes also marine insurance).

Establishment: Some Theological Considerations

Liberal modernity and its associated individualism have created conditions in which a case for an established Church appears to contradict all the principles of social diversity. But the characteristic mechanisms of liberal modernity for managing difference – the ballot and the market – have proved inadequate to prevent social divisions from deepening, as the national argument about Brexit demonstrates. Despite the Church of England's lack of a confident narrative of establishment and the tendency to evaluate establishment on pragmatic grounds, this article proposes that a robust theological defence of establishment can be made in terms of both Anglican ecclesiology and a theology of power and authority in which the highest sources of authority are those with the least power. Whether the Church of England is able to regain confidence in such a theology of establishment and rise to the challenge of generating a unifying national narrative of identity post-Brexit, is left as an open question.