Arendt, Koselleck, and Begreifen: Rethinking Politics and Concepts in Times of Crisis

Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen (understanding). Despite the impression that each of them focused on the one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts (Begreifen) are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere.

Childhood

This chapter argues that it is impossible to understand the Kenneys’ politics without understanding their home life. It suggests that we need to see the Kenneys as a product of two related cultures: the tradition of autodidactism and the ‘religion of socialism’. Reading, Christianity, and socialism underpinned these cultures and help explain the sisters’ political trajectory. Though many women were drawn to feminist activism from particular strands of the labour movement, particularly the Independent Labour Party and the trade unions, these were not the only currents of thought which influenced women’s politics. The Kenneys’ childhoods not only give us access to working-class women’s political development outside the workplace but also begin to connect feminist militancy with a different political tradition.

The (Un-)Importance of Generational Dialogue in Georgian Political Tradition

The aim of this paper is to examine the importance of generational dialogue in the Georgian political tradition. The research statement of this paper is that the generational dialogue in Georgia, which is not particularly rooted in the political tradition, is currently flat and unconstant. In addition, due to the current situation of Georgia related to the democratization of the state, a new chapter for Georgian generational dialogue can be opened. To analyze this research problem, I have used a number of research methods based partly on secondary and primary sources, i.e. expert interviews were conducted online with Georgian researchers from the Ivane Javakhivshvili Tbilisi State University and Ilia State University. The paper is a snapshot of the theory of generational dialogue, and it presents the work of Polish scientists. Moreover, it examines the generational dialogue in the post-Soviet area, and this analysis can be developed in further scientific publications. The study of generational dialogue is essential for analyzing the perception of democracy and democratization among the generations in Georgia.

Interpretative Frames, Phenomenology, and the Question of the Republican Character of Polish and Czech Dissident Movements of the 1970s and 1980s

The Polish Solidarity movement of 1980–1981 and the Czechoslovak dissident movement both developed an original model of democracy. The dissidents sought to reconcile the tensions between the individual and the community—personal independence and engagement with public affairs—by building a pluralist, debating civic community entrenched in objective values. Calling upon on the phenomenological tradition and the interpretative frames perspective used in social movement studies, the author seeks to interrogate the intellectual roots of the dissident vision of democracy and the reasons behind one of its future interpretations, which viewed it through the lens of the republican political tradition. Drawing on the popularity and the character of the phenomenological tradition, the author explains the differences in the understanding of community in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Carbon Ruins: Engaging with Post-Fossil Transitions through Participatory World-Building

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative “Carbon Ruins—An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently.

Epilogue

This Epilogue sets the waning of British socialist anti-political aspiration in the context of the literary career of H. G. Wells, on the one hand, and the coalescence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, on the other. In their respective spheres, both Wells and the Labour Party represent a decisive turn toward a statist—and forthrightly political—conception of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Wells, the new century’s most prolific and influential socialist writing in English, shares with his antecedents an abiding preoccupation with the aesthetic dimension of socialism. In stark contrast to his predecessors, however, he self-consciously subordinates this aesthetic impulse to his overmastering vision of an emerging socialist world state. Concurrently, the fledgling Labour Party became a locus for the longstanding debates about how socialism was to be made and what posture the socialist movement should adopt to Britain’s existing political institutions and traditions. These debates were foreclosed by the party’s adoption of a new constitution and party program in 1918, which were drafted by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The constitution includes the famous Clause IV, which affirms the party’s commitment to the collective ownership of the means of production. Labour’s reorganization effectively confirmed that in Britain, socialism would be pursued via the parliamentary road—and that state socialism would be its ultimate institutional goal. Consequently, 1918 provides a symbolic end to the anti-political tradition Imagining Socialism delineates—and of the socialist century that it surveys.

“What Is to Come After This?”

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Performing Political Ideologies

This chapter shows the importance of performance studies to the theory and analysis of political ideas and ideologies. Reviewing ways in which these have been studied in political science it argues that there is a need to understand more about how ideologies are manifested in and through their public performance. In particular, drawing on Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA), it argues that rhetorical performances of ethos—of character in various dimensions—are fundamental to the manifestation of ideologies. Using examples from British and American political rhetoric the chapter demonstrates how political leaders perform fidelity to a political tradition, draw rhetorical authority from it, and promote, perform, and embody a particular sort of ideological ethos. The chapter further discusses how performances of ethos may draw on very general archetypes, the playing of parts in larger ideological social dramas, and the ways in which polities governs and sets limits to the range of performances possible.

Russian Khranitel’stvo as Russian Understanding of Conservative Tradition

“Russia, Russia! Keep yourself, keep yourself!..” – these very lines of the epigraph, taken from the poem by N.M. Rubtsov, reveal the main idea of the book by S.V. Perevezentsev and A.A. Shirinyants “Essays on the History of the Russian Khranitel’stvo”. The monograph of the two professors of Moscow University, who are well-known experts in the field of the history of Russian socio-political thought, in a sense sums up the preliminary results of their scientific research of the recent years devoted to the development and justification of the concept of “Russian Khranitel’stvo”. According to the authors “Khranitel’stvo” played an important role in the formation of the “national ideological and political tradition”, which was reflected in the works of Russian thinkers and political figures of the 11th–19th centuries. Therefore, the ideas of the Russian Khraniteli, – supporters of the unity of the historical and spiritual-political principles of Russian society and the state, run through the entire book, as well as through the entire history of Russia.