The Longing for Total Revolution Reconsidered

Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-35651-8
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 134 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 312 g

In The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (1986), the eminent intellectual historian and political theorist Bernard Yack offered a sweeping reinterpretation of modern thought. Yack argued that Rousseau prompted a line of philosophy that continued through Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, which viewed the essential spirit of modernity as dehumanizing, and therefore implied, in a matter that became increasingly clear over time, that a total revolution against modernity is necessary.

In this volume, seven political theorists and historians, including Yack himself, reconsider the book’s substantive and methodological innovations, its limitations, and its current relevance. Contributors to the volume discuss, inter alia, left Kantianism in historical context, the theological origins of the longing for total revolution, the question of whether the tradition identified by Yack is connected to twentieth-century totalitarianism, and the unique form of critical genealogy pioneered by Yack’s book. The volume concludes with Yack’s response to the other contributors’ chapters.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Review.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Friedman, Jeffrey

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The Longing for Total Revolution as Critical but Ideational Genealogy 1. The Theological Origins and Underpinning of the Longing for Total Revolution 2. Is Marx's Thought on Freedom Contradictory? 3. Left-Kantian Perfectionism 4. Reading Yack While Pondering the Origins of Totalitarianism 5. Longing for Total Dichotomies 6. Revisiting The Longing for Total Revolution

Über Autor(innen)

Jeffrey Friedman, the Editor of Critical Review, is Visiting Scholar in the Social Studies program at Harvard University, USA. He has taught political theory at Barnard College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and Yale University, and is the author of Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (2019).