This article offers a feminist reworking of Adriana Cavarero’s conceptualization of horrorism as a form of extreme violence that targets and dehumanizes its victims through dismemberment and an ontological assault on human uniqueness. While Cavarero’s intervention is motivated by a commitment to resisting patriarchal logics of war and reorienting political thought toward care, we argue that her framework depends on an overly fixed opposition between the monstrous perpetrator and the defenseless victim, exemplified in her reading of Medusa in contrast with the Christian Madonna. The binary risks reproducing the very logics of exclusion and moral absolutism it seeks to disrupt. Demonstrating the point, we engage in a critical rereading of Medusa across classical and later interpretive traditions that demonstrates how she cannot be reduced to an emblem of absolute monstrosity, but instead appears as a plural figure: victim, goddess, protector, and generative presence—as well as a destructive monster. This reading destabilizes Cavarero’s conceptualization of both horrorism and victimhood, revealing the political and narrative instability of these categories. In reaction, we develop a feminist framework for responding to contemporary violence that shifts analysis away from moralized typologies toward a relational and narratively mediated understanding of violence. This approach retains Cavarero’s commitments to relationality and uniqueness, but rejects the closure produced by the neologism “horrorism,” instead foregrounding the entanglement of care and violence and the contested processes through which both are recognized and named.
The defense of gay rights and other liberal values by some right-wing populists is often perceived as an opportunistic strategy to justify anti-Muslim policies. But this explanation for co-optation of liberal values by parties that are considered to be in conflict with liberalism circumvents a proper analysis of the phenomenon. I will therefore investigate this element within populist politics as a problem of liberalism, rather than of populism. Doing so, this paper holds that co-optation of liberal values by right-wing populists follows from a distinctly liberal dialectic and, genealogically, represents a distinct strand of liberalism. Firstly, I will discuss the origins of populism in the Netherlands and present them as an exemplary case of what Adam Tebble calls “identity liberalism.” Secondly, I will analyze two foundational texts of the Dutch Party for Freedom to demonstrate its indebtedness to liberalism, and the correspondence of its argumentation to the philosophical problem known as the Böckenförde dilemma. Finally, I will show how identity liberalism is a conceivable, although not necessary, response to this dilemma. The politicization of liberal values by right-wing populists proves to be an attempt to solve the Böckenförde dilemma by turning these values into a marker of identity. This results in a type of liberalism that turns the initially inclusive liberalism into a politically exclusive doctrine.
The "vanguard perspective" in Marxist revolutionary theory has long been a focal point of debate within leftist political thought, and it also represents an alternative path of social transformation beyond capitalist democracy and authoritarian rule. However, even in certain strands of contemporary leftist political thought, especially within post-Marxist thought, this perspective has essentially been misread as "vanguardism," in which the binary opposition between the vanguard and the masses implies authoritarianism and is therefore to be thoroughly rejected. Among these critiques, Ranci & egrave;re, with his egalitarian thought, argues that vanguardism diminishes the subjectivity and agency of proletarians, thus creating an unequal power structure within. Despite Ranci & egrave;re's profound critique of vanguardism, the fundamental issue lies in the fact that Marxist revolutionary theory upholds the "vanguard perspective," not "vanguardism." When returning to the thoughts of classical Marxist revolutionary theorists, one can see that the wisdom of Marxist vanguard stems from the proletariat and reflects its interests, with the connection between the two being grounded in democracy. Therefore, by reinterpreting the vanguard perspective, a form of substantive democracy and equality can be envisioned.
How to address the grief that attends the inevitable loss in war of those we love? How to turn victims of war into heroes? How to resolve the agonizing choices that war imposes on us? Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis , the tale of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, and Pericles’s Funeral Oration as imagined by Thucydides were both written during the Peloponnesian War, and each points to the creation of stories told to assuage the grief that follows the loss of loved ones and to obscure the challenging moral choices that wars demand. Euripides’s characters are trapped by the moral ambiguities that plague our political decision-making and, through a startling conclusion to the play that recalls the language of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, they welcome the “vain myths” we introduce to make our wartime decisions seem painless and our moral dilemmas disappear. Only the mother Clytemnestra refuses to be lulled by the stories or disappear happily within the walls of her palace. The tragedian can give full voice to the complex role of those stories; the rhetoric of the political leader obscures the ambiguity and “vanity” of those myths. Given the wide familiarity with Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I devote most of my attention to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and conclude with a discussion of Pericles’s famous speech.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the word “democracy” was rarely used to describe existing political systems. Rather, it was usually employed polemically to criticize European parliamentary regimes for their incapacity to actualize the principle of popular power. Critiques of parliamentarism in the name of democracy were numerous and came from all sides of the political spectrum. This paper analyses them through the lens offered by debates about the use of the referendum. The “direct appeal to the people” was widely discussed at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: It was the lowest common denominator of otherwise highly divergent political projects, all of which appealed to democracy to overcome the failures of parliamentarism. Yet their diagnoses of what was wrong with parliamentary regimes differed widely, as did their interpretations of the democratic nature of the referendum. In what follows, I will analyze three different critiques of parliamentarism, and their corresponding theories of democracy, as outlined through debates about the referendum in Europe from 1890 to 1935.
Can contemporary Confucian political theory contribute to both a culturally relevant and politically practicable public philosophy for East Asian societies, while simultaneously providing a model of comparative political theory that aspires to deprovincialize the West? This state-of-the-field essay examines how contemporary Confucian political theory has evolved in the past two decades in Anglophone academia, what challenges are posed to its further development, and how they could be addressed to anticipate a new epoch of modern political Confucianism in which Confucian political theory becomes more engaged and grounded as a public philosophy that can also inspire Western political theory for mutual learning and growth. After critically examining various contemporary Confucian political theories—Confucian communitarianism, Confucian democracy, Confucian meritocracy, Confucian perfectionism, progressive Confucianism, and public-reason Confucianism—and their liberal challenges, this essay diagnoses the current crisis of Confucian political theory and shows a way to overcome it.
This article examines Ludwig von Mises's utilitarianism in the context of his liberal social theory. It contends that he sought to reorient classical liberalism away from natural law theory and refound it in utilitarianism. This significant shift distinguishes and differentiates Misesian liberalism from the classical liberal tradition with which Mises consciously identified it, as well as later Rothbardian libertarianism, which, while identifying with the Misesian tradition, reverted to a natural law philosophy that produced irreconcilable differences with Misesian liberalism over the legitimacy of the state.
This article contests the tendency to see Islam as overwhelmingly collective and theorizes the individual from Islamic history and tradition of thought. It does so by recovering and recasting the ideas of Abul Hashim (1905-1974), a prominent South Asian anticolonial Muslim thinker and political actor. It examines how Hashim reconstructs Quranic ideas to oppose modern individualism primarily due to its loss of moral unity and advances a theory of the individual that argues for a unified ethical framework, which binds the individual, God, and others in an embedded relationship of love and care in the community. The article explores a unique trajectory for self-constitution developed within Islamic history and tradition-a trajectory that goes beyond the rise of the autonomous, reflexive, and self-serving individual without compromising the importance of one's intention and conscience in shaping the self. This theory of the individual from Islamic tradition refutes the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the concept by presenting a distinct framework that transcends the dichotomy between the individual and the community, a battle that is pervasive in contemporary Euro-American political thought.
