Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

1. Broadly speaking, depoliticized politics consists of the neutralization of any form of collective agency that could threaten the mainstay of the political order (say, liberal-democratic capitalism in the United States and its forms of managed democracy). The crystallization of forms of depoliticized politics, accordingly, conforms to a phenomenon in which the grip of capitalism is so firmly in place—no matter how abated by crises, it ideologically and structurally debars any political alternative that calls into question its mainstay—that politicized identity has displaced political identity and politics is increasingly played out in relation to local questions of status related to particularized identity (religious, ethnic, racial, gendered) within the collectivity in question. That is one crucial reason why in the U.S. political spectrum alternative ways of organizing political and economic life are never at stake, let alone parties contending the hierarchies of status and privilege that are asymmetrically distributed in this liberal-democratic capitalist regime. The ethical politics of religion and culture constitute notorious instances of depoliticized politics. It is this pacified political space that then makes possible, even promotes, “managed democracy,” along with the politics of “small margins,” ideological “gridlock,” and the corporatization and marketization of governing processes that have come to define its rule. The political field is effectively pacified, and politics become so depoliticized that the demands and obduracies of genuinely political action, its predicaments and imperatives, becomes unthinkable. Accordingly, imperial citizens call for ethical responsibility, without political responsibility, while intellectual “bids” are theoretically scrutinized with no desire to embrace forms of collective agency that could successfully vie for political power, much less acknowledge the imperatives of ruling, let alone entertain the inauguration of a different political order. For the original articulation of the idea of “depoliticized politics,” see Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution (London: Verso, 2008), 3–18; and Theodore Huters, ed., The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 34–36, 41; on managed democracy, see Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131ff. For alternative accounts emphasizing the present as postpolitical or postdemocratic, see, inter alia, Josep Ramoneda, Después de la pasión política (Madrid: Taurus, 1999), passim; Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation,” in Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino, eds., Vocations of Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), especially 11–21, and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 561ff.; Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Verso, 2005), 1–34, 64–89; and Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 1–17, 28–33, 65–93, 242, 290ff.

2. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 254.

3. See, respectively, Robert Meister, After Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), passim; and Stephen L. Esquith, The Political Responsibilities of Everyday Bystanders (College Park: Penn State University Press, 2010), passim. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 17–48.

4. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 7.

5. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 341.

6. A word about the term diremption: this rather archaic word will be deployed throughout this book for specific conceptual reasons. Herein it would be used in the sense specified by Gillian Rose: “‘diremption’…implies ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’—it formally implies the third…implicit in any opposition, qua sundered unity, without positing any substantial pre-existing ‘unity,’ original or final, neither finitely past or future, nor absolutely, as transcendent. ‘Diremption’ draws attention to the trauma of separation of that which was, however, as in marriage, not originally united”; see Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 236.

7. Here speculative is deployed in the Hegelian sense of the term. For the best English-language discussion, see Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), passim. Sergio Valverde’s ongoing research decidedly establishes its critical and political import.

8. Two other dimensions of a political ethic worth mentioning: on the one hand, this ethic of collective life is concerned with political forms and the institutions and practices sustaining it and, by extension, sustained by it; on the other hand, it draws attention to political aspect of questions ranging from climate change, hunger, and war to the political dimension of traditional ethical questions—abortion, euthanasia, cloning—and what role, if any, the state or other forms of collective power have in dealing with them. Once politically conceived, these ethical questions become collective concerns and their valences and significance need to be recast. Even if these questions enjoy relative autonomy from political forms, or are indifferent to them, their concrete actualization is thoroughly mediated by the mainstay of collective life and how it is politically constituted and sanctioned. Cf. Francisco Fernández Buey, Ética y filosofía política (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2000), passim.

9. See Manuel Cruz, “On Pain, the Suffering of Wrong, and Other Grievances,” in María Pía Lara, ed., Rethinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198–209, Hacerse cargo (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999), passim, and Las malas pasadas del pasado (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005), 89–144.

10. See Joan C. Tronto, “Revisiting Tragedy and Cultivating the Good,” paper delivered at the Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, Minneapolis, March, 30–April, 2, 2011.

11. See Joan C. Tronto, Democratic Care (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 46ff.

12. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11–35.

13. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 598, and cf. The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 82–99.

14. See José Luis L. Aranguren, Ética y política (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968), 61, 90.

15. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76.

16. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1989), 100.

1. Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity (New York: De Capo, 1960), 240.

2. Pierre Mesnard, L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVI siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1951 [1936]), 3–4.

3. Williams’s formulation is found in Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2. See Charles Larmore, “What Is Political Philosophy?” Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (2013): 305.

4. Larmore, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 305–6; cf. Charles Larmore’s “The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 96 (December 1999): 599–625. Larmore’s essay offers a critique of Williams’s “realism,” but Raymond Geuss’s work is secluded to a wearily discrete footnote.

5. Reviewing Michael Sandel’s book “on the moral limits of markets,” titled What Money Can’t Buy (2013), Wendy Brown points out how it “offers a compelling expose [sic] of our current condition but frames what it exposes as a matter of values, decisions and inadvertent ‘drift’ rather than historical forces, social powers, a governing rationality or an economy whose life principle is growth and new markets. Consequently, he understates the dimensions and depth of the problem and places the burden of fixing it before the feet of a people interpellated by the condition he indicts and who cannot easily deliver us from the problem by deliberating about it,” whose net effect “is to abstract markets from capitalism itself.” See Book Reviews, Political Theory 42 (June 2014): 358.

6. Larmore, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 296.

7. E. P. Thompson, “The Long Revolution (Part I),” New Left Review 9 (May-June 1961): 25.

8. Cf. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Constructing a Critical Political Theory,” New Politics 12 (Summer 2009): 72–83.

9. See Roberto Schwarz’s parody of methodological protocols, O pai de família e outros estudos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008), 112–14.

10. Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, “Historiography as a Form of Political Thought,” History of European Ideas 37 (March 2011): 1–6.

11. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 75ff., and The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 5–76.

12. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 17. Accordingly, a good deal rides on how contexts are construed. One of the limitations of Quentin Skinner’s important work is its overreliance on linguistic and rhetorical contexts, in and of itself an upshot of the so-called linguistic turn. Even if this turn has yielded richer, more encompassing historical accounts of texts, they nevertheless remain a sophisticated modality of textualism that is rather innocent to social and economic history and how these two bear on political forms and institutional developments. See, inter alia, James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:passim. On the kinship between theory and the Cambridge School, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 209; and Martin Jay, “Intention and Irony,” History and Theory 52 (February 2013): 32–48. Important critiques of Skinner can be found in Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), x–xii; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Why It Matters,” London Review of Books, 25 September 2008, 3–6, Citizens to Lords (London: Verso, 2008) 7–10, and Liberty and Property (London: Verso, 2012), 9ff., 224ff.; Lucien Jaume, “El pensamiento en acción,” Ayer 53 (2004): 109–30; Enzo Traverso, L’histoire comme champ de bataille (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 14–23.

13. See Jaume, “El pensamiento en acción,” especially 110–20. A brilliant example of a historical account of a philosophical problematic whose focus could afford to bracket out political and social history is found in Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Needless to say, a history of the political ideas and problematics of the very same thinkers Förster engages would demand a more historically robust account of their political and economic, cultural and social, contexts of emergence, as well as of the political ideas and choices of their proponents. Concepts and categories of “theoretical reason” lack the sociohistorical, spatial, and institutional presuppositions and content that ideas of, say, autonomy, state and civil society, equality and freedom possess. Similarly, a historicization of the idea of “the subject” looks very different than that of, say, the citizen. On the subject, see Vincent Descombes, Le complément de sujet (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), passim, and Le parler de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 2014),13–181. Cf. Étienne Balibar, Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 67–118.

14. Bindingness (Verbindlichkeit) is a central term in Adorno’s negative dialectic that connotes the binding and obliging nature of genuinely philosophical insight. The bindingness of negative dialectics, as Robert Hullot-Kentor has lucidly formulated it, resides in it being devoid of the drive of subjective domination—it is at once noncompulsory and utterly obliging. Personal communication with the author, 13 August 2011.

15. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:103.

16. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 126–27.

18. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 2:112.

19. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie und Soziologie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 141.

21. On autonomy, see inter alia, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–15ff, and Ästhetik (1958/59), ed. Eberhard Ortland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 216–28, 244.

22. On the dialectic of displacement, see Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas, trans. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 19–32; on “emergence,” see Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), especially 36–39, 179ff.

23. See Carlo Ginzburg, “Our Words, and Theirs,” Historical Knowledge, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 97–98.

24. Adorno acknowledges the first concern in his great essay “Parataxis”—see Notes to Literature, 2:119.

25. See Marc Bloch, “Pour une historie compare des sociétés européenes,” in Mélanges Historiques (Paris: CNR, 2011), 16–40.

27. Critical statements about the uses of anachronism are found in Margaret Leslie, “In Defense of Anachronism,” Political Studies 18 (December 1970): 433–47; Nicole Loraux, “Éloge de l’anachronisme,” La genre humain 27 (1993): 23–39; and Ginzburg, “Our Words, and Theirs,” 97–119. Ginzburg explicitly objects to Loraux’s characterization and pleads for a clear distinction of the anachronism involved in formulating research questions and the need to purge any trace of it from the answers given to them (108).

28. See Lucien Jaume, Tocqueville, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 6.

29. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Viking, 1984), 26.

30. Roger Crisp, “Homeric Ethics,” in Roger Crisp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11. Alasdair MacIntyre has observed something analogous about ideas of “duty” and “obligation”; see A Short History of Ethics, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 124–25. See also his discussion on the relationship between philosophy and history in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 265–72. Early on in the book, he suggested that a moral philosophy “characteristically presupposes a sociology” (230).

31. See, for instance, the discussion of “subjective” and “objective” rights in Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 60–66.

32. Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, trans. C. Fredrick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 17.

33. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Thesen über die Sprachen des Philosophen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 1:368. Hereafter referred to as GS followed by volume and page number. Unless otherwise indicated all translations are my own.

36. See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 2 vols., ed. Rudolf Zur Lippe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973–75), 1:36.

37. Ibid., 2:10–11.

39. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Einführung in die Dialektik, ed. Christoph Ziermann (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 187.

40. See Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 1:14–16.

41. See GS 20.1:318–26.

42. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 6.

43. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), xi.

44. The most collective connotations of this concept were already adumbrated in the early writings. See Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simmons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 90–149, 177–93, 245–60, 289–305; and Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially 57–58, 78, 79, 142.

45. Jameson, The Modernist Papers, xi, xvii; see also, Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, 150.

46. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 78, 79.

47. Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, 187.

48. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 83.

49. Roberto Schwarz, “National Adequation and Critical Originality,” Cultural Critique 49 (Fall 2001): 37.

50. See Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:252.

51. For excellent discussions of these concepts, see Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 3 vols., trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 2:31–97, 118–41, 356ff; and Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 27–50, 140–50.

52. See Fredric Jameson, Sartre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 222ff.

53. See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 378–79, 406–7.

54. Jameson, Sartre, 222–23.

55. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 33–34. Even the most austere and solipsistic individualism is situated in a predicament of power to which the individual responds. For a remarkable literary exploration of the antinomies of solipsistic effacing, see Enrique Vila-Matas, Doctor Pasavento (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005).

56. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 33–34, 144–46, 170–72, 183–86.

57. Cf. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), xii–xvi.

58. See Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, 182.

59. Cf. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (New York: Schocken, 1995), 129.

60. For instance, Jameson’s contribution to the dialectical legacy receives comprehensive and perforce more critical treatment in a book to appear, tentatively titled “Wayward Dialectics.”

61. Cf. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 878.

1. See Peter Dews, “Uncategorical Imperatives,” Radical Philosophy 111 (January/February 2002): 33–37. See also Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000).

2. Think of, say, James Tully’s formidable ethical politics; see Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). I have written about Tully in “At the Edges of Civic Freedom,” in Robert Nichols and Jakeet Singh, eds., Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 48–70; for Tully’s forceful response, see pp. 233–48. That there has been such a turn, however, is undeniable. Witness the proliferation of titles such as The Ethics of…/ Ethics and… which then go on to encompass reading, writing, immigration, democracy, nationalism, business, corporations, and so on.

3. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 90.

4. See Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1.

5. See, inter alia, Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 40–66.

7. Raymond Geuss, A World Without Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 175–76.

9. Christoph Henning, Philosophie nach Marx (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), 18, 556–57.

10. See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression (London: Verso, 2008 [1979]), 56; cf. Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 189–93.

11. See Fredric Jameson, “Exit Sartre,” London Review of Books, 7 July 1994, 12–14.

12. See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 406, and The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 115ff.

13. See Régis Debray, I.F. suite et fin (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 95–106.

15. See Daniel Bensaïd, Le nouvel internationalisme (Paris: Textuel, 2003), 47–54, 123ff.; and Paulo Eduardo Arantes, Extinção (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2007), 31–98.

16. Chantal Mouffe, “Which Ethics for Democracy?” in Garber, The Turn to Ethics, 86; see also Mouffe, On the Political (London: Verso, 2005), 72–76. Mouffe’s statement only makes sense if it is taken as a tacit reference to such absence on the left.

17. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 29. Cf. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988), 273.

18. On the idea of “metacommentary,” see Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, 5–76.

19. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), passim. For a critique, see Robin Blackburn, “Reclaiming Human Rights,” New Left Review 69 (May-June 2011): 126–38. See also Moyn’s “The Continuing Perplexities of Human Rights,” Qui Parle 22 (Fall/Winter 2013): 95–115. With the onset of the cold war, there was another equally anti-Marxist ethical turn, which is relevant for an understanding of Levinas’s ethics of the Other. See chapter 4, this volume.

20. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 220ff.

21. Even so, the logic of their historical eventuation as part of the same political constellation has yet to be unraveled. It is thought that Moyn is currently at work on it.

22. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 221.

23. See, respectively, Régis Debray, Le moment fraternité (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 165; and Enzo Traverso, El final de la modernidad judía, trans. Gustau Muñoz (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 2014), 201ff.

24. For a discussion, see Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “How Not to Learn from Catastrophe,” Political Theory 41 (October 2013): 738–65 (especially 743–48).

25. Étienne Balibar, “Toward a Diasporic Citizen?,” The Creolization of Theory, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 212.

26. See, for instances, Etienne Balibar, “On the Politics of Human Rights,” Constellations 20 (March 2013): 18–26; James D. Ingram, Radical Cosmopolitics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 226ff.; and Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible (London: Verso, 2011), 477ff.

27. See Perry Anderson, “Imperium,” New Left Review 83 (September-October 2013): 5–111; and Josep Fontana, Por el bien del imperio (Barcelona: Pasado & Presente, 2011), passim. Fontana offers a remarkable global history of the rise of American imperial hegemony after 1945 and provides a wealth of detail that independently confirms the main tenets of Anderson’s essay.

28. See Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (New York: Pantheon, 2009), passim.

29. Robert Meister, “Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood,” Ethics and International Affairs 16 (September 2002): 91.

30. For a caustic critique of “the consecration of human rights” and its healing role as the civil religion of the North Atlantic West, see Debray, Le moment fraternité, 113–234. Cf. Marcel Gauchet, “Le droits de l’homme ne son pas une politique,” Le Débat 3 (July-August 1980): 3–21. However much resonance could at first glance be perceived between Debray’s scathing account of “the religion of human rights,” and its disavowals of political responsibility in the name of ethical responsibility, with Gauchet’s critique of the depoliticizing drive of human rights, the political impulses animating the two thinkers are drastically opposed, as are the terms upon which their respective critiques are couched. The distance between the two is best seen in their views of “totalitarianism”: while Gauchet’s reliance on the totalitarian/democracy dyad is notorious, Debray’s trenchant critique of it during its heyday, when figures like Gauchet were riding the tide of “the antitotalitarian moment” of the late seventies, is no less so. Debray’s mordant formulation, “In the arsenal of our ‘political science’ totalitarianism has roughly played the same role as fanaticism in the Enlightenment, and totemism in primitive anthropology: an alibi for misrecognition and a ritual of conjuration”; see Régis Debray, Critique de la raison politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 22.

31. See Robert Meister, After Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 316.

33. See Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), passim.

34. Meister, After Evil, 303.

35. For an overview of this history, see Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 87–124. As Patrick William Kelly accurately writes, “the turn to human rights represented a significant scaling back of the parameters of social change, especially for Latin Americans who once longed for revolution and the enactment of a socialist state” (89). Even at its most robust, this discourse has been defensive and never systematically questioned the liberal-capitalist mainstay structuring postdictatorial orders.

36. Explaining what he calls a “rebirth of politics in the spirit of morality,” Jan Eckel has suggested the advent of human rights in the seventies represented “a profoundly moral yet multifaceted way of revitalizing politics”—see Eckel and Moyn, The Breakthrough, 252. Yet the word “multifaceted” is misleading, as every significant instance of revitalized politics adduced consists of either the neutralization or pacification of the political field amidst, or the restoration of, a liberal-capitalist order.

37. Meister, After Evil, 47, 48.

38. Esther Benbassa, Suffering as Identity, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2010), 2–3.

39. See Mahmood Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming,” London Review of Books, 8 March 2007, 5–8. Also relevant: Enzo Traverso, L’histoire comme champ de bataille (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 59–183 and Étienne Balibar, Violence et civilité (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 9–142, 251–321. On “structural violence,” see New Political Science 34 (June 2012): 191–227.

40. Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7 (2006): 1–20.

41. On autonomy and fields, see inter alia, Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), passim.

42. Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” 2 (emphasis added).

44. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998). Still the best critical discussion is found in Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998).

45. Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” 3. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 142–43.

46. León Rozitchner, Moral burguesa y revolución (Buenos Aires: Procyon, 1963), passim. On Rozitchner’s intellectual itinerary, see Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America (London: Verso, 2007), 97–157, cf. 304–10.

47. Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” 9, see also 18–19.

48. For further discussion, see Vázquez-Arroyo, “How Not to Learn from Catastrophe.”

49. Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” 18.

50. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), xi.

51. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 6.

52. Rose, The Broken Middle, xii.

53. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3, 4.

54. Gillian Rose, Paradiso (London: Menard, 1999), 42–43.

55. Rose, The Broken Middle, 267; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 228–37.

56. An aspect of this political ethic she allegorized by way of her beautiful retelling of the story of King Arthur—see Rose, Love’s Work, 121ff.

57. For a meticulous historical account of the turn to ethics in French thought, see Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). Bourg’s book is best read alongside Michael Scott Christofferson’s excellent book, French Intellectuals Against the Left (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004). These books provide accounts of the French intellectual and political scenes after 1968 that should put paid to the moralism, willful misreading, and liberal pieties marring the influential work of Tony Judt. For searching assessments of Judt’s writings, see Dylan Riley, “Tony Judt,” New Left Review 71 (September-October 2011): 31–63; and Julian Bourg, “Blame It on Paris,” French Historical Studies 35 (Winter 2012): 181–97.

58. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 5.

59. A prominent figure in the Anglo-American scene, whose recent work has taken an ethicist cast, is the Italian political thinker Antonio Negri. As influential as the political experience of the Italian ’68 has been, it was his encounter with Gilles Deleuze in the early 1980s that proved most crucial, or, as Negri himself has put it, “I can truly say that I went to wash my clothes in the Seine!” See Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 57ff. and 136. A fine historical account of the Italian ’68 is found in Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 298–347. See also Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 326–51; Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan, trans. Romy Clark Giuliani (London: Verso, 2010), 287ff.; and Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2011), 195–243. Of interest is Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” New Left Review 73 (January-February 2012): 119–39.

60. See Anderson, The New Old World, 221–22.

61. On the Green Party, see Werner Hülsberg, The German Greens, trans. Greg Fagan (London: Verso, 1988), 64–139; on the Red Army Faction, see Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Uli Edel’s film The Baader-Meinhof Complex (MPI Media Group, 2009), itself an adaption of Aust’s book. Unlike the book, which is marred by many a colorful psychologizing and moralizing statement, the film captures the different layers of complexity and nuance in the actions of the RAF and the predicaments of power, as well as the generational differences.

62. See Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1–28. He writes: “‘1968’ in Germany was therefore a moral movement before it was a political one” (11).

63. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 365. In his 1965 lectures, Adorno elaborated on its meanings by connecting Auschwitz to Vietnam; see Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 101.

64. For the significance of 1945 and 1968 for Habermas, see Martin Beck Matuštík’s intellectual portrait, Jürgen Habermas (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), passim.

65. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), passim. This is a fine study of the historical roots of May 1968, offering a compelling periodization, which extends before (the Algerian War) and after (the counterculture of the 1970s) May of that momentous year.

66. A “fetishism of the event,” which, as Daniel Bensaïd once eloquently suggested, misrecognizes “a strategic concept” and recasts it “as the deus ex machina of a history lacking any compass,” rather than as part of a profane philosophy of history in which “awakening,” and recommencement, “tie the necessity of historical determinations to the contingency of the event, making it possible to grasp on the wing the opportunity of a conjuncture”—see Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life: A Political Memoir, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2013), 88, 204, 290–91.

67. See Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 174–75, 270–74.

68. See Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz, 8–9.

69. On Mexico’s ‘68, see Jorge Volpi, La imaginación y el poder (Mexico, DF: Era, 1998); and Bruno Bosteels, “Travesías del fantasma,” Metapolítica 3 (1999): 733–68. On its own ethical content, see Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Ética (Barcelona: Crítica, 1999), 7–8.

70. See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 65–79. Cf. Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 49–56. On role of workers and class struggles during the French sixties, see Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), especially chapters 2–3.

71. See Anderson, The New Old World, 140–54; and Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 75.

72. But not everyone on the French left saw it that way: see Régis Debray, “A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary,” New Left Review 115 (May-June 1979): 45–65. For a spirited if not entirely persuasive critique, see Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 182–95.

73. Debray, Le moment fraternité, 178.

74. Christofferson, Intellectuals Against the Left,, 90.

75. See Claude Lefort, Le temps présent (Paris: Belin, 2007), 301–8. For critical discussions, see Christofferson, Intellectuals Against the Left, 4–18, 68–74, 184–228; Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 237–46; and Peter Dews, “The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault,” Economy and Society 8 (May 1978): 127–71. Lefort, of course, partook in the assault on the left. For a discussion of Lefort and the politics of his two most prominent heirs—Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour—see James D. Ingram, “The Politics of Claude Lefort,” Thesis Eleven 87 (November 2006): 33–50. For the best survey of the historical debates around totalitarianism, see Enzo Traverso, Le totalitarisme (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 9–110.

76. Christofferson, Intellectuals Against the Left, 229–66; and Anderson, The New Old World, 154–59, 164–68. Cf. Marcel Gauchet, La condición histórica, trans. Esteban Molina (Madrid: Trotta, 2007), 120–25. See also Michael Scott Christofferson, “François Furet Between History and Journalism, 1958–1965,” French History 15 (December 2001): 421–47. On the actual substance of Furet’s contribution, see the Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Anti-Totalitarian History of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 22 (Autumn 1999): 557–611.

77. See, for instance, Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 390ff. Reconstructions of the intellectual itineraries of Gauchet and Rosanvallon are found in Samuel Moyn, “Savage and Modern Liberty,” European Journal of Political Theory 4 (April 2005): 164–87; and Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity,” Journal of Modern History 76 (March 2004): 107–54. These essays present scrupulous historical analyses that nevertheless invite a more searching critique than what these authors provide. For refreshing contrasts, see Anderson, The New Old World, 154–69, 202–9; and Jacob Collins, “A Metaphysics of Democracy,” New Left Review 74 (March-April 2012): 145–53.

78. The expression is Bernard Henri-Levy’s, as cited by Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 236.

79. See, respectively, Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 197; and Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 32.

80. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 5.

81. Ibid, 33–42; see also Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 190–95.

82. According to Bourg, Anti-Oedipus represents a “certain peak,” which is perhaps best characterized as a plateau—see From Revolution to Ethics, 171.

83. On Tel Quel, see Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 206. For a discussion of the circle around Le Débat, see Gérard Noiriel, Le fils maudits de la République (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 103–99; and Enzo Traverso, Ou sont passes les intellectuels? (Paris: Textuel, 2013), 52ff.

84. See Fredric Jameson, “Après the Avant Garde,” London Review of Books, 12 December 1996, 5–7. See also Riley, “Tony Judt,” 35–38; and Jameson, “Exit Sartre.”

85. For an eloquent representative, see David Bromwich, Moral Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 3–179. Intellectually lucid and elegantly written, these essays constitute an exhibit of the assortments of heroes—obviously Lincoln, alongside Whitman and Martin Luther King Jr.—and commonplaces that define the American tradition of ethical politics mediating the advent of the turn to ethics.

86. For a powerful sociological dissection of these trends, see Robert Castel, El ascenso de las incertidumbres, trans. Víctor Goldstein (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), passim.

87. Cf. Kristin Ross, “Historicizing Unseemliness,” in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts, eds., Jacques Rancière (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 17. Gauchet has candidly spoken about his Atlanticist disposition—see his La condición histórica, 35.

88. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 303. This is not to say that the ethical turn exhausts the French intellectual scene of the late seventies and eighties. In addition to the aforementioned revival of political theory—even if, in the case of Aron, it betrays a moralizing tone in the form of occasional pleas for political responsibility or responsible exercise of political power, which actually amounts to a liberal anticommunist stance—a series of thinkers have built on the anthropological legacies of French thought to formulate impressive bodies of work that represent an original “attempt to rethink autonomous political collectivities along an anthropological axis.” See Jacob Collins, “An Anthropological Turn?” New Left Review 78 (November-December 2012): 31–60. Curiously, Collins leaves out any consideration of Louis Dumont in this context; likewise, Georges Balandier is only cursorily mentioned as an influence on Debray.

89. See Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le paradoxe de la morale (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 7.

91. See Pierre Nora, “Mémoire et identité juives dans la France contemporain,” Le Débat 131 (September-October 2004): 28.

92. León Rozitchner has emphasized these other determinants along with the loss of political illusions and the counterrevolutionary terror of right-wing dictatorships—see Levinas o la filosofía de la consolación (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2013), 32, 27. In contrast, Enrique Dussel’s work offers an ambitious attempt to recast Levinas’s ethics in terms of a radical political theory and long predates the Lithuanian’s ascendance in the North Atlantic world—see Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y la exclusión (Madrid: Trotta, 1998), 359ff. The political and historical context out of which Dussel’s philosophy emerged is reconstructed in Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005).

93. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153. The essay was originally published in 1964. It was Paul Ricouer who introduced Derrida to Totality and Infinity in the early sixties, which became a pivotal text in Derrida’s own “religiously minded phenomenology.” For a subtle discussion, see Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 267–73. On Ricouer’s complex relationships with Derrida and Levinas, see François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, trans. Pablo Corona (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), especially 255–68, 391–96, 404–5, 676–97.

94. Derrida’s protestations are found in Jacques Derrida, Rouges, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 39. For a careful discussion of Derrida’s undeniable turn to ethical politics, see Jacob Rogozinski, Faire part (Paris: Lignes & Manifestes, 2005), 133–72.

95. Just how central structuralism was in the reformulation of Derrida’s thought is carefully documented in Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 190–220.

96. See Nancy Fraser, “The French Derrideans,” New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984): 127–54.

97. See Benoît Peeters, Derrida (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 379–401.

98. Early on, to be sure, Derrida articulated a typical liberal response to the Algerian war—see Edward Baring, “Liberalism and Algeria,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010): 239–61.

99. Jonathan Culler, “Afterword,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 2011): 223–30.

100. For an account of periodization that bears directly on this question, see Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, 483–515.

101. On the historicity of Theory, see: François Cusset, French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Fredric Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 403–8, and “How Not to Historicize Theory,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Spring 2008): 563–82; Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 78–112; “Scenes from the History of Postructuralism,” New Literary History 41 (Summer 2010): 491–516; Kenneth Surin, “Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy,” in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, eds., A Companion to Comparative Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011): 65–72; Warren Breckman, “Times of Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71 (July 2010): 339–61, and “Theory Now,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110 (Winter 2011).

102. See Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 9ff.; and Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1–76.

103. Sheldon S. Wolin, “The Politics of the Study of Revolutions,” Comparative Politics 5 (April 1973): 356.

104. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism,” in Stephen Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties (New York: Norton, 1997), 129–56, “A Look Back at the Ideas That Led to the Events, New York Times, 26 July 1998, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xv–xxi, 581ff., and Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 95–107, 211–21.

105. See Fontana, Por el bien del imperio, 377–78.

106. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1954), chapter 10, and One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 72–83.

107. For an account, see Rodgers, Age of Fractures, 155–79.

108. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 18–37.

110. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “The American Pluralist Conception of Politics,” in Arthur L. Caplan and Daniel Callahan, eds., Ethics in Hard Times (New York: Plenum, 1981), 228ff. Notice how in 1981 Wolin recorded the intrusion of “ethicists” as part of elite-level attempts to manufacture consensus, a development he referred to as “a recent innovation in the practice of pluralism” (223). Yet it merely presaged a larger concatenation that would define the next two decades in which ethical language has come to colonize political life; see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–24, 48–77.

111. See Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), passim. Keys carefully documents Carter’s belated embrace of human rights, along with the relative political fluidity of other devotees.

112. In contrast to the French embracing of human rights, in the U.S., anticommunism ran in tandem with a selective, slanted, and truncated rhetorical critique of Latin American dictatorships. On the larger crystallization of a human rights discourse in the overall international context of the seventies, with attention to the United States, see Eckel and Moyn, The Breakthrough, 1–48, 88–106, 226–59.

113. Cf. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 336–40.

1. See Manuel Cruz, Las malas pasadas del pasado (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005), 53–54; and Carol Gluck, “Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan,” in Carol Cluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 83–106.

2. The foregoing discussion is indebted to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, L’Idée de responsabilité (Paris: Hachette, 1884); José Ferrater Mora, “Responsabilidad,” in Diccionario de filosofía, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1951); Nicola Abbagnano, “Responsabilità,” in Dizionario di filosofia (Turin: Utet, 1971); Michel Villey, “Esquisse historique sur le mot responsable,” Archives de philosophie du droit 22 (1977): 45–58; and Manuel Cruz, Hacerse cargo (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999).

3. On the history of occidental ethics, see Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998); and Victoria Camps, Breve historia de la ética (Barcelona: RBA, 2013). See also Roger Crisp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Terence Erwin, The Development of Ethics, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. See, inter alia, J. Peter Euben, John Wallach, Josiah Ober, ed., Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Josiah Ober and Charles Hendrick, ed., Demokratia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Kurt Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, Robert Wallace, ed., Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). On mediating antecedents, see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986–2012), 1:73–230. For a corrective of the unreflective Hellenocentrism, see Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación: historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Trotta, 2007), 11–66; but some of Dussel’s historical claims are occasionally weak, and the less said about his etymological conceits the better. For succinct depiction of Athenian democracy, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 283–85. An extended portrait is found in Luciano Canfora, El mundo de Atenas, trans. Edgardo Dobry (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014), 13–170—see also La guerra civile ateniese (Milan: Rizzoli, 2013), passim.

5. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords (London: Verso, 2008), 28–50, and Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 1997), passim. Cf. Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, 140–47.

6. Say, in Genesis 25, Exodus 9 and 20, or in Jeremiah 31:30 and Ezekiel 18. For an argument about the presence of an ethical politics, and a practice of responsibility, in the Hebrew Bible, see Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 111–25, 152, 199ff.

7. Cf. Roger Crisp, “Homeric Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, 1–20. For a memorable discussion of fate and character in Homer, see Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: NYRB, 2007), 1–3.

8. See Canfora, El mundo de Atenas, 74, cf. 100ff. But it is Thucydides who delivered the most trenchant account of political responsibility in violent predicaments of power defined by the Athenian empire and its wars, along with the demise of democracy and the monetary surge of an oligarchic order, in book 8 of his History of the Peloponnesian War.

9. For a fine overview, see Paula Gottlieb, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, 44–72. See also Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 1.

10. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1110b–11a24, 1179a35–79b5; and Physics, 194b17–195a15.

11. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18–22 and 1112b10–15. See chapter 6, this volume.

12. For an account of prudence in Aristotle, see Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 64ff.; especially instructive is Aubenque’s discussion of the centrality of limits in his conception of deliberation, responsibility, and judgment.

13. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 83. On the Roman Empire as the first “true territorial empire,” see Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1:250–300.

14. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 85. Other accounts that I have found instructive are Carlo Galli, Spazi politici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 19–26; and Wood, Citizens to Lords, 99–163.

15. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 63. For a suggestive discussion of Aristotle that bears on questions of political space, see Mary G. Dietz, “Between Polis and Empire,” American Political Science Review 106 (May 2012): 275–93.

16. Albeit these were not entirely secondary for Wolin—see Politics and Vision, 70.

18. In Ellen Meiksins Wood’s rendering, “The Roman Republic, and the Roman law, encouraged a perception of a clearly defined public sphere and a conception of the state as a formal entity apart from the citizens who comprised it, even distinct from the particular persons who governed them at any given moment”; see Wood, Citizens to Lords, 140.

19. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 83. It is important not to conflate Wolin’s argument with any nostalgic lament or polis envy; see Wolin’s “History and Theory,” in John S. Nelson, ed., Tradition, Interpretation, and Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 43–68.

20. Cf. Villey, “Esquisse historique sur le mot responsable,” 46–52.

21. See Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “respondeo” and “spondeo.”

22. But this contrast between the visual and the abstract need not suggest that a visual politics is always participatory and decentralized. See Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 55.

23. For a fine overview of Cicero’s political thought, see E. M. Atkins, “Cicero,” The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 477–516. Atkins argues that the centrality accorded to patriotism in Cicero “constitutes an original development in political thought” (514).

24. Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 67. Characteristically, Agamben offers shrewd local insights among unconvincing and misguided broad claims.

25. Needless to say, Cicero was hardly oblivious to violence and sought to establish some fetters on cruelty from the perspective of the ruling power (see On Duties, I.23, 82, II.29–30, 63). For a trenchant account of Cicero, see Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 135–48.

26. The phrase is Goldschmidt’s, who pairs it with devoirs d’état, and shows how both require adjusting to circumstances; see Victor Goldschmidt, Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 155–56.

27. See Syme, The Roman Revolution, 145. Brown characterizes the period as one “of mounting crisis”; see Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 129.

28. See Cicero, On Duties, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1913), 60.

29. In Erich Auerbach’s formulation, “Vergil was the poet of the Roman Empire. It was he who replaced the ancient Roman national (sic) sense of identity…with the new ideology of Rome’s global vision”; see James I. Porter, ed., Time, History, and Literature, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 125. For penetrating discussions, see Syme, The Roman Revolution, 440–75; and David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 50–96. For an instructive treatment of the visual culture of the Augustan imperial order, and the republican imagery it replaced, see Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), passim; a consistently interesting treatment of Augustus’s “first march to Rome” is found in Luciano Canfora, Augusto figlio di Dio (Bari: Laterza, 2015), 3–7, 292ff.

30. See Nicholas Xenos, “A Patria to Die For” (unpublished MS), 16.

31. This dialectic unfolded down to the late Middle Ages where political thought hibernated, as it were, in the context of theology without becoming entirely effaced; for a discussion, see Wolin, Politics and Vision, 118–26. For an excellent account of the earthliness of Christianity at the time, which appropriately contrasts it with Epicurean and Stoic tendencies “to remain at least inwardly free from earthly ties,” see Auerbach, Dante, 14ff.

32. On the intermediary classes between the very rich few and the extremely poor, see Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 23ff.

33. Ibid., 48. In an earlier work Brown called this process “aristocratization”; see Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Norton, 1989), 32. On the continuities and discontinuities of aristocratic power structures down to the early Middle Ages, see Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 153–238.

34. See Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 73–79, 81–83. Brown offers a pertinent warning about overemphasizing the continuities in these transitions. Even so, the overall picture of a transition in which the Church emerges as at once substitute and locus for civic life holds.

35. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 53–58.

36. See Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 108.

37. For a discussion, see Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 126–47.

38. On officium, see Agamben, Opus Dei, 69–76ff.

39. See Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 102–03; and The World of Late Antiquity, 135. Cf. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1974), 73.

40. On the use of “public” in this context see Chris Wickham,’ “The ‘Feudal Revolution,’” Past and Present 155 (May 1997): 202. Of course, the lords in question resorted to violence and domination outside the purview of public authority: in Wickham’s caustic formulation, “Aristocrats were brutal in all periods; it was one of the signs of aristocracy” (197), a violence that became more recrudescent with the demise of Carolingian public power. On lordship violence, see Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), passim.

41. See Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 148ff. See also Wood, Citizens to Lords, 171ff., and Liberty and Property (London: Verso, 2012), 6–7.

42. See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 36–37.

43. See Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37–72, 144–208, 321ff.; Chris Wickham, “The ‘Feudal Revolution’ and the Origins of the Italian City-Communes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (December 2014): 29–55, and Sleepwalking Into a New World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), passim.

44. Their significance, however, is vastly overstated in accounts that portray these communes as “desirous of liberty” or the unmistakable point of departure of the early modern republican ideal of liberty. Cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:3.

45. See Wickham, Sleepwalking Into a New World, 194ff.

46. See ibid., 6. Wickham observes that the debate among recent historians is about “the nature of the elites,” not their dominance, as the elites presiding over the early communes were economically heterogeneous and their configuration varied across cities—see 11, 156–60.

47. Discussions of this office are found in Martines, Power and Imagination, 42–44; Jones, The Italian City-State, 405ff.; and Mario Ascheri, La Città-Stato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006), 101ff.

48. The popolo cannot be conflated with the Athenian demos, or with the Anglo-Saxon people, let alone the Latin American pueblo. And yet the presence of nobles and a large merchant class within it cannot erase the differences between its vindications and the onset of seigniorial rule that followed its demise. For a balanced account of the popolo, see Martines, Power and Imagination, 62ff.; cf. John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 35–62.

49. See Jones, The Italian City-State, 403–6; and Martines, Power and Imagination, 51–61. Indeed, the podestá often amounted to the substitution of consular elites in ruling these cities.

50. See Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:4; and Wood, Liberty and Property, 42; Citizens to Lords, 219ff.

51. For a discussion see Martines, Power and Imagination, 34–71.

52. See Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, 368, 429, 497, 577.

53. See Philip Jones, The Italian City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 55.

54. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1339–72; and Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 148ff.

55. See Martines, Power and Imagination, 7–21; and Jones, The Italian City-State, 333–47.

56. See Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Francis Goyet, Les Audaces de la prudence (Paris: Garnier, 2009). On the continuities and discontinuities in “the political use of the city,” see Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance, trans. Daniel Sherer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 59–97.

57. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, ed. Corrado Vivanti, 3 vols. (Torino: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–2005), 1:197.

58. For a thoughtful discussion, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 39–61.

59. Cf. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 64–84, and On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 217–26.

60. See Galli, Spazi politici, 27–28.

61. See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 166–70.

62. See Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 135, Les Provinciales, ed. Michel Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 145.

63. For a stimulating discussion of “diachronic identity,” see Vincent Descombes, The Institutions of Meaning, trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 149–54.

64. Cf. ibid., 137. Elsewhere, Descombes accurately argues that by attributing a diachronic identity to a group the historical changes supervening it, which in the case of political collectivities include changes in its political form, are more adequately grasped; see Vincent Descombes, Les embarras de l’identité (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 249.

65. On the latter, see chapter 3, this volume; on Hobbes’s conception of “obligation,” see Raymond Polin, Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 153–75. For the discursive context, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3:264–86.

66. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 254.

67. See Polin, Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes, 207–33. For contrasting accounts of the exact relationship between ethics and politics in Hobbes, see, inter alia, Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 6–29, 108–28; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 78–81; and Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51–64.

68. Hobbes, Leviathan, 90.

69. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 518. Cf. Polin, Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes, 107. Still highly instructive on Hobbes and representation is Raymond Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 221–50; and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14ff. See also José María Hernández, El retrato de un dios mortal (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2002), 125–203.

70. Skinner records the novelty of this insight; see Visions of Politics, 2:368–404, 3:177–208.

71. Hobbes, Leviathan, 111.

75. How Hobbes tends to collapse the two is clearly seen in chapter 17; see ibid., 120.

76. This term is nowadays associated with Foucault-inspired discussions of neoliberalism to denote “the process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another—usually a state agency—or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all.” See Pat O’Malley, s.v. “Responsibilization,” in The Sage Dictionary of Policing. I herein invoke the term to highlight this early instantiation of the mechanism involved—namely, holding someone responsible in ways hitherto unavailable and without any shared power in determining one’s fate—which in this context it is necessarily devoid of its neoliberal connotations. Also, my usage echoes verb-forms found in Romance languages: responsabilisation (French), responsabilizar (Spanish), responsabilizzare (Italian).

77. Hobbes, of course, is hardly the only early modern thinker theorizing a form of neutralization. A humanist writer like Alberico Gentili sought to analogously theorize and enact political neutralization, albeit through different means; see Carlo Galli, Contingenza e necessità nella ragione politica moderna (Bari: Laterza, 2009), 72–92. Cf. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 109.

78. See Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 57–79.

79. Hobbes, Leviathan, 112.

80. Ibid., 117. For this securitization and protection a “common power to keep them all in awe” is paramount (118; the need to keep subjects in “awe” is repeated throughout). For an insightful discussion of “the conversion of violence” in Hobbes, see Étienne Balibar, Violence et civilité (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 50–58; 349–60. “Conversion,” as Balibar specifies it, consists of “a sublimation or spiritualization, but also the transformation of violence into (historically) productive force, the annihilation of violence as a destructive force and its re-creation as an energy or power internal to institutions” (60). In the case of Hobbes this conversion is part of larger theoretical strategy of reducing political complexity and dehistoricizing space as part of a preemptive counterrevolutionary order seeking to theoretically conceive subjects that are calculable and predictable. For instructive discussions, see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” in Mary G. Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 9–36; and Khan, Wayward Contracts, 147–51. On the political uses of force in Hobbes, see Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes, 53ff.

81. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth,” Social Research 52 (Summer 1985): 235. Here it is worth reclaiming Kahn’s aforementioned discussion of the anxiety about contracts and the sense of fragility lurking in even colossal constructions like Hobbes’s.

82. Hobbes, Leviathan, 112–13.

83. On reason as a passion for order, see Remo Bodei, Geometría de las pasiones, trans. Isidro Rosas (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 84.

84. Hobbes, Leviathan, 114; see also 112–13.

87. Cf. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 19–28.

88. This account of personation constitutes a departure from De Cive (1642), where the transfer of power to the sovereign takes place once and for all. In contrast, in Leviathan personation implies at once responsibility and limits. On the variations between the two books, see Noel Malcolm, “Editorial Introduction,” in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:12–24.

89. See Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 20.

90. See Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. Malcolm), 2:388.

91. See Wood, Liberty and Property, passim.

92. In Wolin’s formulation, “[Hobbes’s] world is a bare place of abstract space and time, and his man is a de-historicized bit of matter in motion”; see “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” 25. Political space is thus pacified and neutralized. For a complementary discussion of the spatiality of Leviathan, see Galli, Spazi politici, 40–49, 51–72. See also Galli, Contingenza e necessità nella ragione politica moderna, 38–71. It is well known how Hobbes’s formidable theoretical edifice sought to displace, among other things, the egalitarian sense of freedom associated with the Levellers. Less discussed, however, is how it also challenged the corollary sense of responsibility. For, built into the Leveller idea of democracy, there was a different sense of responsibility: the many “good laws” formulated after the Agreement of the People of 1647 included “responsibility of ministers to parliament.” An idea not only at odds with his logic of sovereignty and personation but that also required historically constituted spatial differentiations running against the smoothness of Hobbes’s rather undifferentiated conception of space. See Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Viking, 1984), 30. Not that these positions exhaust the range of invocations for responsibility. See, for instance, Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 229–30. For a sobering assessment of seventeenth-century English republicanism, see Wood, Liberty and Property, 228–31.

93. See Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, trans. J. Lewis May (New York: NYRB, 2013), 284ff.

94. See ibid., 330–31.

95. Rousseau’s Emile (1762) articulates this transition. Also relevant are his musings on duty and obligation in the Sixth Walk of Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782). On Rousseau’s contribution, see Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (London: Verso 2009), 57ff.

96. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 37–65; and D. A. Brading, The First Americans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim. On the centrality of space, its artificial production, and regularization, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 105.

97. See James Madison’s contribution to The Federalist Papers (1787–88). Constant’s views are explicitly set out in two works: his Responsabilité des ministres (1815) and in Principes du politique (1815). For the latter, see Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 227–50.

98. See Simón Bolívar, Obras completas, 3 vols. (Caracas: Librería Piñango, 1982), 3:674–97. On Bolívar, and Constant’s influence on his thought, see Carolina Guerrero, Liberalismo y republicanismo en el pensamiento de Bolívar (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2005), passim.

99. See Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 195.

100. See Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 193; on means/ends, see also Hamilton’s comments in no. 23 (147). Wolin has acutely observed how Hamilton’s “maxims turn out to be exclusively about power, and they promote a grandiose conception of it which foreshadows virtually all of Hamilton’s later arguments”; see Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 97; on the conception of reason and rationality underpropping these maxims, see 100–19.

101. See Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 194.

102. Ibid., 195–96.

103. Ibid., 256. Later on Madison writes about how certain powers constitute “necessary means of attaining a necessary end” and how “in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness, involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused” (no. 41); ibid., 268–69.

104. See Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince (New York: Free Press, 1989), 247ff.

105. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 424.

106. Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 271.

107. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 423.

108. See, for instances, ibid., 140, 248–49 (nos. 22, 38). A not insignificant aspect of Madison’s preference for republicanism over democracy is its susceptibility to expansion; see p. 63.

109. See Jason Frank, Publius and Political Imagination (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 125ff.

110. For a discussion see Wolin, “The American Pluralist Conception of Politics,” 241–56.

111. See Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 62–65. That protection of property was the central concern, even when others are adduced, is clear by how much emphasis Madison places on it (58–59).

112. Ibid., 64 (emphasis added).

114. Contemporary advocates of neo-Roman theories of liberty have similarly contributed to this trend. The moniker “neo-Roman” is Skinner’s; see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the centrality of responsibility, see Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism, trans. Antony Shugaar (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); and Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11ff., 105–24; and “Responsibility Incorporated,” Ethics 117 (January 2007): 171–201. Pettit’s republicanism advocates a modicum of depoliticization that acquiesces with the forms of depoliticized politics that have come to define the present – see “Depoliticizing Democracy,” Ratio Juris 17 (March 2004): 52–65.

115. See Jules Michelet, Historie de la Révolution français, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1:406; see also 21ff. Cf. Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), 149–90.

116. See Arno J. Mayer, The Furies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 148–50, 533ff.; and Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1996), 77–98.

117. This is not to deny the constitutive tensions between the spatial logics of capitalism and the territorial nation-states necessary for the stable reproduction of capitalist social relations. See Perry Anderson, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 112; and Robert Brenner, “What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism,” Historical Materialism 14 (2006): 79–105; cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 89–112, 229ff.

118. At the outset of Responsabilité des ministres, Constant writes: “La responsabilité des Ministres est la condition indispensable de toute monarchie constitutionnelle.”

119. Instructive treatments of Constant’s political thought are found in Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 63–117, 185–92; Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 146–75; and Marcel Gauchet’s essays in Benjamin Constant, Écrits politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 11–110, and La condition politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 277–304.

120. On the 1798, see Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 214; the 1819 speech is found in Constant, Political Writings, 309–28.

121. See Constant, Political Writings, 239. On Constant’s views of political responsibility, see Mary S. Hartman, “Benjamin Constant and the Question of Ministerial Responsibility in France, 1814–1815,” Journal of European Studies 6 (1976): 248–61; and Lucien Jaume, “Le concept de ‘responsabilité des ministres’ chez Benjamin Constant,” Revue française de Droit constitutionnel 42 (2000): 227–43.

122. Constant, Political Writings, 239. For his views on arbitrary power, see also Des réactions politiques (1797), in Benjamin Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y rallier—Des réactions politiques—Des effets de la Terreur, ed. Philippe Raynaud (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 141–52.

123. Cf. Jaume, “Le concept de ‘responsabilité des ministres’ chez Benjamin Constant,” 235–36. Here, as elsewhere, Constant struggled with a contradiction stemming from liberalism’s colonization of democracy: it presupposes a politicalness (and its corollary sense of political responsibility), which it actively undermines. For a discussion see Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism,” New Political Science 30 (June 2008): 141–45.

124. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 44, 103, Œuvres, ed. André Jardin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2:43, 101. Subsequent references will be given to the English edition followed by French original (i.e., 44/43, 103/101).

125. For instance, when he speaks of “the sole responsibility for the laws,” the connotation of responsibility is that of chargés; or elsewhere that of se charge. See ibid., 240/238, 278/278, and 422/424.

126. Ibid., 155/153, 235/233. Apropos of this question in relation to executive power, see 174/173.

127. For all his notorious admiration of New England localism, the category of the citizen is truncated in the theoretical armature of Tocqueville’s reflections. On Tocqueville’s “social” concept of democracy, see Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 71–126; see also Lucien Jaume, Tocqueville, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 15–93.

128. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London: Everyman’s Library, n.d.), 28–39, 39–40.

129. By just glancing at Mazzini’s account of responsibility, one can better grasp what Nietzsche was trying to debunk. For this defender of “historical sense” knew exactly what was happening in European politics and sought to subvert it by, among other things, recasting responsibility in ways that dirempted it from the social matrix avowed by the likes of Mazzini. See, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 80. For a discussion, see Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), 295, 370–73; on his “robust sense of history,” see 386–87.

130. See Anderson, English Questions, 118.

131. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y del azúcar (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002), 213.

132. At the very least, as Wolin once observed, “political responsibility has traditionally connoted a form of responsibility owed to a general constituency,” and that is precisely what ideas of responsible corporate management increasingly undermined, as their locus of responsibility was not the political collectivity, but groups within it. And even then it threatened to become tenuous; see Wolin, Politics and Vision, 388.

133. See John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (1843), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 8:861–74. On “the idea of character,” see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 91–118. The actual sociological content of these theorizations, and the moralization of poverty these often reverted to, is sharply described in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (New York: New Press, 1984), 262ff.

134. See Enrica Villari, “Il dovere,” in Il Romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti, 4 vols. (Torino: Einaudi, 2003), 1:449.

135. See, inter alia, Alain Supiot, “Grandeur and Misery of the Social State,” New Left Review 82 (July-August 2013): 99–113, The Spirit of Philadelphia, trans. Saskia Brown (London: Verso, 2012), 117–28, and La gouvernance par les nombres (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 388ff.; and François Ewald, L’état providence (Paris: Grasset, 1986), esp. 9–140, 225ff. Heir of Foucault and de facto executor of his intellectual estate, Ewald subsequently became a staple in the French corporate world, “the house intellectual of the French insurance industry”; see Michael C. Behrent, “Accidents Happen,” Journal of Modern History 82 (September 2010): 585–624.

136. Ewald refers to the 1898 piece of legislation enacting this change as a “philosophical event” (évènement philosophique); see Ewald, L’état providence, 9; 143–91 (on risk).

137. See ibid., 191, 283–87, 349–51, 600.

138. In Supiot’s succinct formulation: “Whoever experiences the benefits bears the burdens, and is therefore liable”; see Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia, 122.

139. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 51–62. The idea of interpreting Marx’s proletariat as an attempt “to revive the dormant ideal of a politically active demos” is Wolin’s; see his Politics and Vision, xix.

140. See Arno J. Mayer, “Internal Crises and War Since 1870,” in Charles L. Bertrand, ed., Revolutionary Situations in Europe (Montréal: Centre Universitaires, 1977), 201–32.

141. See, inter alia, Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, 1981), ix–15, 129–87, 275–329; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London: Abacus, 1994), 302–27; Perry Anderson, “Internationalism,” New Left Review 14 (March-April 2002): 11–14. For a remarkable explanation of the origins of the Great War, see Paul W. Schroeder, Systems, Stability, and Statecraft (New York: Palgrave, 2004), chapters 7–8; on the recent scholarship, see Thomas Lacquer, “Some Damn Foolish Thing,” London Review of Books, 5 December 2013, 11–16.

142. See Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–91; and Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang (Paris: Stock, 2007), passim.

143. Anderson, “Internationalism,”14.

144. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 33. Weber is discussed in chapter 6, this volume.

146. The most infamous formulation is found in Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895). For an excellent account of this ideology, see Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), passim. Jonsson offers acute observations on Simmel (54–61), who emerges as a pivotal figure in the arrival of “mass” as a pseudo-concept by reworking insights from French and Italian sources into a different sociological context peppered by Nietzschean motifs, thus turning “mass” into a respectable sociological category. Early on, Simmel reviewed Le Bon’s book in 1895, as well as the German translation of Scipio Sighele’s La folla delinquente (1895); the latter, the more substantial contribution, from an Italian grande who notoriously reflected on the power of “suggestion” as part of mass action—see La folla delinquente (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1895), 118ff. Alongside many a colorful reference to cannibalism and the unstoppable sanguinary instinct of the masses, there is the following description of the masses during the French Revolution: “Allora il popolo era una belva, insaziabile nella sua sete di rapine e di sangue” (86); in English: “The people was a beast, insatiable in its thirst for rapine and blood.” For the significance of this ideology in the initial forging of “democratic theory,” see Richard Bellamy, “The Advent of the Masses and the Making of the Modern Theory of Democracy,” in Terrance Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70–103. In La rebelión de las masas Ortega y Gasset, reflecting on intellectual responsibility and the irresponsibility of demagogues, argues that, historically, the nobility is characterized by is acute sense of responsibility and writes about how “it is only the illusion of empire and the discipline of responsibility which it inspires that can keep Western souls in tension”; see José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Madrid: Espasa, 2010), 191.

147. Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy, 53.

148. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 133–34.

149. Ibid., 103, 111.

150. Cf. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (New York: Zone, 2015), 17–45, 131–34.

151. Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 133ff.

152. For a contrast between Rawls and Hayek along these lines, see Vázquez-Arroyo, “Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism,” 149–54. While the deepening of neoliberalism exhibits attributes of the world-capitalist economy—its imperatives and relations of reproduction—unforeseen by, say, Hayek, these inflections constitute a deepening, not a departure, of earlier visions.

153. See Robert Castel, El ascenso de las incertidumbres, trans. Víctor Goldstein (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), 15–58, 227ff.

1. For a lucid discussion see Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Ética (Barcelona: Crítica, 1999), 17–60.

2. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s, 1965), 41 (B1).

3. On the British moralists, see Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), chapter 2. See also Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 13–26, 179–202; and Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 1993), chapter 2.

4. Still instructive discussion is Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). See also Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), part 1; and Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 32–66.

5. Kant’s aesthetics and moral theory could be interpreted as attempts to address the antinomies generated by the concept of freedom in which Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, anchors his transcendental idealism. Cf. Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 125–52.

6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 120ff. (B 116–22).

7. For a discussion, see Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason, ed. Richard L. Velkley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), chapters 1, 4.

8. On Kant’s moral philosophy, see Andrew Reath, “Kant’s Moral Philosophy” and Otfried Höffe, “Kantian Ethics,” both in Roger Crisp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 444–82. Of interest is Reath’s Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim.

9. See Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 47, 513.

10. See Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 34ff.

11. Brandom acknowledges this and suggests that Hegel historicizes the Kantian insight about the normativity of mental activity; see ibid., 66. This is, of course, something argued in more politically robust terms by Taylor, who recasts Hegel’s inheritance of the idea of mental life as conceptual activity in terms of a form of self-understanding that is historical and thus predicated on shared institutions and practices; see Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 77–96. Moreover, for all the acuity of Brandom’s formulations, his account of Hegel’s idea of geistig is ultimately reductionist. By unfortunately reducing it to a “normative order,” the sociological and historical mediations of his dialectical formulations freedom, ethical, and political life are significantly distorted with the effect of decreasing its critical and political import. Cf. Robert Pippin, Interanimations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 39–61, 117–38.

12. Brandom also suggests that becoming “epistemically responsible” entails “a commitment to justify many, if not most, of her beliefs, under suitable circumstances,” even if the social dimension of responsibility is only perfunctorily avowed; see Robert B. Brandom, From Empiricism to Expressivism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 165, 113.

13. As Schopenhauer pointed out, in Kant’s moral philosophy the actual reasons for acting morally are ultimately unfathomable; see Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indiana: Hackett, 1995), passim.

14. See Étienne Balibar, Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 15.

15. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 512, 525.

16. The phrase is from Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 11.

17. On the post-Kantian philosophical milieu, see Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–53; Terry Pinkard, “Virtues, Morality, and Sittlichkeit,” European Journal of Philosophy 7 (1999): 217–38, and German Philosophy, 1760–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–16; and Raymond Geuss, “Post-Kantianism,” in Crisp, The Oxford Handbook for the History of Ethics, 483–84. Indispensable guides on the philosophical trajectory of German idealism are Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, ed. David S. Pacini (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy.

18. See Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, 10, 11.

19. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 126. Cf. Vincent Descombes, The Institutions of Meaning, trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 295–313; and Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chapter 9.

20. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 67–68.

21. See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), especially 84–97. See also Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, trans. Marella and Jon Morris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 260–63; and Robert B. Pippin, “Hegel on Political Philosophy and Political Actuality,” Inquiry 53 (October 2010): 410–16.

22. For a compelling account of Hegel’s understanding of the externalization of action, see Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (London: Verso, 2010), 59, 66–68, 75–115.

23. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 233–34.

24. For an excellent discussion, see Carla Cordua, El mundo ético (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989), passim.

25. See Eliseo Cruz Vergara, La concepción del conocimiento histórico en Hegel (Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997), 1–244, and “Filosofía y espiritualidad,” Diálogos 81 (2003): 131–60.

26. See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 238.

27. Also relevant is Hegel’s account of externalization, purpose, and responsibility in his Encyclopedia, §504ff., see Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,), 249ff.

28. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 145.

29. See Carla Cordua, “Hegel y la participación política,” Ideas y Valores 100 (April 1996): 19–36.

30. See Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, trans. C. Fredrick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 29.

31. For a fine discussion, see Pinkard, “Virtues, Morality, and Sittlichkeit,” especially 226ff. and 234–35n37.

32. See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 24. Cf. Balibar, Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, 77–78. Jacobin ideas of citizenship were never far from Marx’s vision of political action—see Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx (New York: Liverlight, 2013), 535.

33. For overly formalist discussions of Nietzsche’s grand politics, see Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 206–26; and Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 147–62.

34. Walter Kaufmann offered the seminal interpretation that turned this mordant and irreverent thinker, one of the nineteenth century’s foremost philosophers of power, into an apolitical ironist, “a charming and inoffensive salonfähig existentialist”; see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 224.

35. Variations of this theme can be found in Christa Davis Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” in Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 147–62; Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); and Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chapters 1, 7.

36. Malcolm Bull, “Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?” New Left Review 3 (May-June 2000): 121–45.

37. Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9, 68, 80n15; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 52, 64; Vanessa Lemm, “Memory and Promise in Arendt and Nietzsche,” Revista de Ciencia Política 26 (2006): 161–73 (167, 168); see also her Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, 36–47; David Owen, “Equality, Democracy and Self-Respect,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (Fall 2002): 113–31 (118); Christian Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 166, 298, 224, 298; Robert Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 143; and Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 84, 178, 132 (see also 128, 135).

38. Quasi insofar as defenses of hierarchical order are sometimes qualified by the word hitherto (bisher), something that constitutes a tacit avowal of historicity, which is precisely what a transcendental structure of argumentation explicitly disavows. These invocations of hitherto, however, at once connote obduracy and plausible deniability. For contrasting interpretations, see the essays by Peter Dews and Raymond Geuss, respectively: “Nietzsche for Losers?” and “Systems, Value, and Egalitarianism,” New Left Review 86 (April-March 2014): 95–120.

39. For instance, see Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 84–127, 194–226.

40. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), chapter 3; and Geuss, “Systems, Value, and Egalitarianism.”

41. Nietzsche’s reflections on power are mostly silent about the role of institutional—market and Statist—imperatives. His explicit account mostly operates at the level of culture and for the sake of a radical, albeit individualist, and often aristocratic, ethos of action, even if there is an institutional mainstay implicit in it. This ethos is well captured by Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), chapters 2–3.

42. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s “ecology of value,” cf. Malcolm Bull, The Anti-Nietzsche (London: Verso, 2011), chapters 2–3.

43. Dews, “Nietzsche for Losers?,” 99.

44. See Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), especially 5–103, 195–401, 555–90, 767–896. That any contextualization is quickly reduced to a caricature of Georg Lukács’s position in The Destruction of Reason, or as a reductionism, can be seen in the defensive posture or silence vis-à-vis this study. For instance, in Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy Lemm quickly mentions Losurdo and hastily dispatches his arguments as an iteration of the casting of Nietzsche “as a precursor of authoritarian and totalitarian politics” (168n1). But Lemm scuffles away from any direct reckoning with the evidence Losurdo presents of the political and theoretical obduracy of aristocratic categories in Nietzsche’s political thought either by abjuring some of the textual evidence that fits awkwardly with her constructions or by dehistoricizing Nietzsche and interpreting his radical assertions in terms of broader and altogether looser categories: say, euphemisms about civilization or “aristocratic culture.” Noyer le poisson, the French call it. For Lemm’s most recent revamping of Nietzsche’s aristocratic posture, and the idea of an “order of rank,” see Nietzsche y el pensamiento político contemporáneo (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 65–91.

45. See Losurdo, Nietzsche, 1007–29.

46. Ibid., 893; see also 1077ff.

47. See Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 275ff.; and Perry Anderson, “Internationalism,” New Left Review 14 (March-April 2002): 11–16.

48. Losurdo, Nietzsche, 935. One can state things slightly differently by invoking a series of passages from Adorno that articulate a dialectical interpretative principle analogous to Losurdo’s ideas of “theoretical excess:” “I believe that Max Weber’s thought, like any other intellectual formation of considerable magnitude, can only be understood by understanding at which points such a formation goes beyond that which it understands itself to be, and which it purports to be.” To be precise, by immanently discerning those moments of nonidentity between intention and effect in the architecture of a theory, one can see how it exceeds itself in ways that it could be productively recast. But such recasting has to scrupulously consider how “even if one operates with concepts defined in a purely instrumental manner, the structured character of the subject matter asserts itself in such a way that something of the objective structure imprints itself on these…concepts through their own structural determinateness.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 121, 123.

49. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57–59.

50. Multiple references and characterizations of the new philosopher are found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973), passim. See also Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human, 5–11, and On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 218; cf. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 228–29.

51. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 58ff.

52. Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes El Memorioso,” in Obras completas, 4 vols. (Mallorca: Emecé, 1996), 1:490; and “El hilo de la fábula,” ibid., 3:477.

53. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 86, 142–43. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin, 1978), 196ff.

54. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 72, 192; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 100–3, 112–13.

55. Roberto Alejandro, Nietzsche and the Drama of Historiobiography (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 81.

57. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carole Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36–37.

58. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 14, 37; and On the Genealogy of Morality, 26.

59. Cf. Robert C. Salomon, “Nietzsche ad hominen,” in Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higggins, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180–222; and Alejandro, Nietzsche and the Drama of Historiobiography, 43–44, 308–9n17.

60. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, 103.

62. Ibid., 104. For a thoughtful interpretation Nietzsche’s idea of overcoming, even if mostly evasive about its political presuppositions, see Robert B. Pippin, “How to Overcome Oneself,” in Ken Gemes and Simon May, eds., Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 69–87, cf. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 105ff.

63. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, 190–191.

64. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 274.

65. In 1872, as part of his lectures in Basel “On the Future of our Educational Institutions,” he asserted, “not the education of the masses can be our goal but the education of individually selected people, armed for great and permanent achievements.” As a leading historian of Germany explains, Nietzsche then “went on to charge that those who argued for a further extension of Volksbildung were seeking to destroy ‘the natural order of rank in the kingdom of the intellect’”; see Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 187–88.

66. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32.

67. See Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, 285–90; Losurdo, Nietzsche, 370–98, 767ff.; and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2–60.

68. Of course, at stake is not just political rule but rather the self-cultivation of a cultural elite: a race “whose task is not limited to governing; but a race with its own sphere of life”; see Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 166.

69. Ibid., 232; see also 251.

70. See Ellen Frankel Paul et al., eds., Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), passim.

71. See, for instance, Alexander Brown, Personal Responsibility (London: Continuum, 2009), 1, 177–80.

72. Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5–6.

73. Ibid., 254, 256.

74. See Thomas M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4ff.

75. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 9, 247–94.

76. Ibid., 290. On blame, see Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, chapter 4.

77. See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 263ff.

78. See Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 125.

79. See Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 202.

82. See Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 55. For an original and highly suggestive elaboration of his idea of responsibility, see Farid Abdel-Nour, “National Responsibility,” Political Theory 31 (October 2003): 693–719, and “Responsibility and National Memory,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 17 (Spring 2004): 339–63.

83. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 56.

84. See Williams, “Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom,” 97.

85. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 57.

87. Although Williams is routinely credited with a realist disposition and an acute sense of history, his invocations of realism and history are rather labile and severely dehistoricized—see, inter alia, Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20–40, 149–71, and Essays and Reviews, 119–24, 405–12.

88. See Geuss, A World Without Why, 184.

89. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 96.

90. Cf. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 71ff.

91. See Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–41.

92. See Manuel Cruz, “On Pain, the Suffering of Wrong, and Other Grievances,” in María Pía Lara, ed., Rethinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 199.

93. This is, of course, part of what Jonas emphasizes: a need to be more responsive to the vulnerability of nature and the forms of power that largely unaccountable technological achievements have inaugurated; see Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, trans. Hans Jonas in collaboration with David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), passim.

94. Descombes, The Institutions of Meaning, 9. Also relevant is Vincent Descombes, Le complément de sujet (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 7–44, 457ff.

95. Full elucidation of dialectical materialism goes beyond the scope of the present work. Suffice it for now to establish that it is not an “ontological standpoint,” nor a mere opposition to idealism, but, rather, a critique of both idealism and existing reality, which nevertheless does not reject the moment of critique embedded in reflection. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 178–98; the German text is found in Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 6:382. For an illuminating account of the dialectic of materialism and idealism, see Eliseo Cruz Vergara, “Idealismo y materialismo,” Diálogos 32 (1997): 53–108.

96. Cf. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 39–44.

1. See François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 163, 164. Cf. Vincent Descombes, Le parler de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 52ff.

2. See Judith Butler, Parting Ways (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 27.

3. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17.

4. See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 291ff.

5. See “Responsabilité,” in Sylvie Mesure and Patrick Savidan, ed., Le dictionnaire des sciences humaines (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 1001.

6. See Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 196.

7. See Carlo Galli, Spazi politici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 114.

8. See Peter Galison, Einstein Clocks, Poncairé’s Maps (New York: Norton, 2003). Empires of Time is the book’s apt subtitle.

9. On neo-Kantianism see Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), 1–47. For a helpful overview, see Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 52–86. On Heidegger’s dismantling of tradition and his ontologization of history, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 17ff., and Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 58–60.

10. See Heidegger, Ontology, 5. Heidegger even temporalized the notion of “concept,” thus disavowing how concepts acquire their formal determinations, the contents of conceptual forms, and their historicity; see ibid., 12–13.

11. On Heidegger’s “originary ethics” of responsibility, see Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility, 220–81.

12. On Barth’s influence, see Moyn, Origins of the Other, 116, 134–41, 229–37, 250ff. For a lucid overview of this intellectual milieu, see Peter E. Gordon, “Weimar Theology,” in Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick, eds., Weimar Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 150–78.

13. Phenomenological reductions, as one of Husserl’s best commentators has explained, entail “a radical shift in attention from factuality and particularity to essential and universal qualities,” namely, a turn to transcendental subjectivity. See Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 65.

14. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (Oxon: Routledge, 2002), 96.

15. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 36.

16. For sound criticism of this strategy, see Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 188. See also Gunther Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (March 1948): 337–71.

17. If in Heidegger there is a pseudoconcreteness accompanied by invocations of historicity without history, in Levinas a similar pseudoconcreteness is at work, even if the appeal to the history of the twentieth century is more concrete and historical than anything found in Heidegger. But the narrative of the twentieth century on which his account pivots is thoroughly dehistoricized; the century is primarily cast as representing an ethical failure; see Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 97.

18. See Moyn, Origins of the Other, 87ff.

20. Ibid., 214–19.

21. On the U.S.’s vision of postwar order in the aforementioned nations, see Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 1–98, 131–38, 172–93, and 428–56.

22. Moyn, Origins of the Other, 226–27.

23. Ibid, 227. But a defensive politics never precluding the offensive politics of Zionism and their casting as “a kind of politics beyond polity.” On his ethical politics, their continuities and innovations, which gained different accents depending on the occasion, see Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002).

24. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21.

25. Indeed, consideration of what Simone de Beauvoir shrewdly characterized as “the antinomies of action” is preemptively (and peremptorily) debarred in Levinas’s ethics; see Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 120–43.

26. Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 162; later on, Dews observes how, by shifting the burden of responsibility onto inwardness, Levinas’s ethical responsibility “threatens to drain of all meaning the very ethical demand whose unconditional pressure it seeks to disclose” (182).

27. See Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 291. But see Moyn, Origins of the Other, 195ff.

28. See Dews, The Idea of Evil, 166; Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 234; and Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 57.

29. See Bertolt Brecht, Prosa (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013), 926.

30. Cf. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 227. Even if Eagleton’s overall argument is marred by his version of Marxist ethical politics in lieu of a properly political ethic, he never conflates the two domains—see pp. 306ff.

32. Cf. Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 373ff.

33. Adorno, for instance, immanently criticized and discerned the truth content of this tradition. For him, consciousness is historically situated and embodied, but, crucially, never at one with itself. Mediating consciousness is both the obduracy of its own objectivity and the constitutive block that is nonidentity. For a suggestive contrast of the primacy of the other (Levinas) with the primacy of the object (Adorno), see Jeffrey M. Jackson, “Persecution and Social Histories,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (2010): 719–33.

34. See chapter 2, this volume.

35. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 25.

38. See chapter 1, this volume. Another version of this inheritance is found in Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007). For contrasting critiques, see Myers, Worldly Ethics, 68–75; and Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 339–50. That Critchley’s ethical politics today stands for a radical political ethic is symptomatic of the degree of political illiteracy and disorientation in the North Atlantic left. So politically labile and intellectually negligible is his treatment of ethics and politics that the book could be more aptly titled Infinitely Undemanding.

39. For sympathetic elucidations, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 426–28; Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 227–50; and Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 84–127.

40. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 250ff.

41. On the transcendental and the quasi-transcendental, see Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 83.

42. Jacques Derrida, Psyche, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1:15; see also Derrida, Paper Machine, 81.

43. Cf. Simon Lumsden, “Dialectic and Différance,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (December 2007): 667–90.

44. See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), 10–21, 107–18, 210–33, 281–95, and 412–16. Modernist techniques of the “middle voice” and “effacement” pervade Derrida’s work, and so does the conceit of unmediated innovation.

45. Derrida, Psyche, 23.

46. With the exception of his first work, Derrida consistently disavows the dialectic—see Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), passim.

47. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5.

48. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 56.

49. As cited by Simon Critchley, “Remarks on Derrida and Habermas,” Constellations 7 (December 2000): 458.

50. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 14. Cf. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 55.

51. For a critical discussion, see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), chapter 1, and The Limits of Disenchantment (London: Verso, 1995), chapters 1, 4.

52. The year 1964 is a crucial moment here—see Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 277ff.

53. Derrida’s statements are found in John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 66. For discussions of the “impossible,” see Derrida, Paper Machine, chapters 8, 12.

54. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of the Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 70–87, 129ff.; see also his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27.

55. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 103.

56. Ibid. 86–87. Cf. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 1–40, 124–85.

57. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 19; see also Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment, 31–33, and “Déconstruction et dialectique négative,” in Patrice Maniglier, ed., Le moment philosophique des années 1960 en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 409–27.

58. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 69.

59. Even if in both cases the boundless nature of action, or Event, is vastly overstated. Cf. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 135–41. For a thoughtful formulation of the relative boundlessness of action, see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chapter 3.

60. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 427.

61. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92.

65. See José María Ripalda, Los límites de la dialéctica (Madrid: Trotta, 2005), 225.

66. See Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 39. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973), 56–57, 210, 214.

67. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 6.

69. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 258.

70. On the “responsibility to protect,” see Anne Orford, International Authority and Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and “Moral Internationalism and the Responsibility to Protect,” European Journal of International Law 24 (February 2013): 83–108. In the contemporary “nomos of the earth,” the ethical politics of infinite responsibility for the Other bears an elective affinity with the catechism of “Responsibility to Protect.” For a gullible articulation of their affinity, see Alain Toumayan, “The Responsibility to the Other and the Responsibility to Protect,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40 (2014): 269–88.

71. Cf. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 235.

72. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 86.

73. A lucid formulation of the distinction between an intersubjective and a social relation is found in Descombes, Le parler de soi, 225–30.

74. At times Butler shows awareness of the need for this epistemological dimension, but not of the challenge that her refusal to theorize it presents to her project. But the political and the epistemological aspect of critique emerges as belated “add-ons” to a theoretical architecture that otherwise disowns it. See, for instance, Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, 96, 99, 107.

75. For a rigorous elucidation of the ethical and political significance of parrhesia, see Nancy Luxon, Crisis of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), passim. For a critique of conceiving democratic relations in terms of it, see James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2:291.

76. As cited in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 130.

77. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), 20, 22.

80. Ibid., 31, 42–43.

81. For a different materialist tradition that takes the vulnerability of the body as the point of departure for a radical politics, see Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Verso, 1980); Raymond Williams, “Problems of Materialism,” New Left Review 109 (May-June 1978), 3–17; and Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), ix–xvii.

82. Occasionally Butler has veered from vulnerability to subordination; see Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 81ff.

83. See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 100–1.

84. Butler, Precarious Life, 21, see also 139–40, and Giving an Account of Oneself, 83ff.

85. See Judith Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” in Marjorie B. Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 25.

86. See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering (New York: Knopf, 2008), passim.

87. At one point Butler reverts to the language of “national melancholy” and of national—as opposed to political—identity; see Butler, Precarious Life, 41.

88. Cf. Judith Butler, “Finishing, Starting,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 295–300.

89. See Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 1–62. The differentiations that the concept of precarity is meant to thematize are not formulated as such in earlier works. Furthermore, this distinction does not always hold up in Butler’s formulations; elsewhere, precarity is virtually conflated with precariousness—see Butler, Parting Ways, 174; cf. Myers, Worldly Ethics, 77–81, 175n134.

90. Butler, Parting Ways, 27.

92. See Theodor W. Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 305.

93. Ibid., 336; see also Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 173. Unfortunately, Ashton’s English translation completely goes astray in this crucial section.

94. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 384–90, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138–79.

95. See Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik, 325.

96. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 53–88.

97. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 23, Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 5:30.

98. See Butler, Parting Ways, 205ff. Not incidentally, the concluding essay of Parting Ways is virtually lacking Levinasian motifs. It accordingly provides a rare example of what a political ethic could look like along the lines of Butler’s ethical politics.

100. On Jewish modernity, see Enzo Traverso, El final de la modernidad judía, trans. Gustau Muñoz (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 2014), 9–40, 67–108.

101. See Judith Butler, “Judith Butler Responds to Attack: I Affirm a Judaism That Is Not Associated with State Violence,” mondoweiss.net, 27 August 2012, http://mondoweiss.net/2012/08/judith-butler-responds-to-attack-i-affirm-a-judaism-that-is-not-associated-with-state-violence (last accessed 17 December 2015).

102. Butler, Parting Ways, 99.

103. The year 1948 is when “the imperial baton” was officially passed to the U.S.; see Perry Anderson, “Scurrying Towards Bethlehem,” New Left Review 10 (July-August 2001): 5–30.

104. Butler, Parting Ways, 93.

105. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 1:250, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 14 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 2.1:200–1.

106. See León Rozitchner, Ser judío y otros ensayos afines (Buenos Aires: Losada, 2011), passim.

107. See León Rozitchner, Persona y comunidad (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2013), 181–94, 270, 289ff, and Levinas o la filosofía de la consolación, 10ff.

108. León Rozitchner, Acerca de la derrota y de los vencidos (Buenos Aires: Quadrata, 2011), 45ff.

109. León Rozitchner, El terror y la gracia (Buenos Aires: Norma, 2003), 256–62.

110. Cf. Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, Wars, and Revolutions (London: Verso, 1984), 256–62.

111. Cf. Étienne Balibar, Violence et civilité (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 390ff.

112. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 241.

113. See, inter alia, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together,” Constellations 10 (September 2003): 291–97; and Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 117–214, 371ff. While not partaking in the “antitotalitarian” moment in French thought, in 1961 Derrida tacitly subsumed the FLN and the PCF “under the banner of totalitarianism”; see Edward Baring, “Liberalism and Algeria,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010): 256. An aversion to revolutionary forms of collective agency never recanted.

114. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 161.

116. On “the beautiful soul” as ethical equivocation, see Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 153–246.

117. Cf. Soraya Tlati, “Algeria as an Archive,” in Cheah and Guerlac, Derrida and the Time of the Political, 177–95. Derrida’s neither/nor stance is invoked and tacitly vindicated as a political stance vis-à-vis French Algeria in Baring’s “Liberalism and Algeria,” 258. Obviously, in this particular situation, Derrida’s “neither/norism” is ultimately the perspective of the colonist, not the colonized.

118. See Jacques Rancière, “Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Cheah and Guerlac, Derrida and the Time of the Political, 278–80.

119. Wendy Brown, “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Cheah and Guerlac, Derrida and the Time of the Political, 25.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 245.

2. See Fabio Akcelrud Durão, “Adorno Thrice Engaged,” Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 261.

3. See Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy After Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 155–81.

4. See, respectively, J. M. Bernstein, Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), passim; Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Routledge, 1992), 13–38; and Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chapter 2. For a cogent discussion of efforts to reconstruct the argument of the book on ethics that Adorno never wrote, and an important contribution in its own right, see Marta Tafalla, Theodor W. Adorno (Barcelona: Herder, 2003), 44–66. See also the special issue and the dossier on the subject of Adorno and ethics published by two preeminent journals: “Adorno and Ethics,” New German Critique 33 (Winter 2006); “Adorno: Critique, Ethics, Knowledge,” Constellations 12 (March 2005): 3–82. For other recent accounts, see James Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable,” European Journal of Philosophy 10 (April 2002): 1–25; and Fabian Freyenhagen, “Moral Philosophy,” in Deborah Cook, ed., Theodor Adorno (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 99–114.

5. Elsewhere, Bernstein has readily grasped this aspect of Adorno: see his essay, “Negative Dialectics as Fate,” in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19–50. Still, the imperative to make Adorno speak “analytic” abides. On Bernstein, see Durão, “Adorno Thrice Engaged,” 262–68; and Deborah Cook, “From the Actual to the Possible,” Constellations 12 (March 2005): 21–35.

6. Martin Seel, “Adorno’s Contemplative Ethics,” Critical Horizons 5 (2004): 259–60ff.

7. See Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 7.

8. On the intellectual matrixes of Adorno’s critical theory, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1979); and Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Other thoughtful introductions to Adorno are Simon Jarvis, Adorno (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. James Rolleston (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); and Brian O’Connor, Adorno (Oxon: Routledge, 2013).

9. For an illuminating discussion, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 15.

10. For a discussion, see my essay “Minima Humana,” Telos 149 (Winter 2009): 105–25.

11. “The celebrated quest for genuine foundations, for some external source of authority rather than one derived from rigorous reflection, already harbors a reactionary dimension, and the intellectuals like to call this ‘ontology’”; see Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence, 1943–1955, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 35.

12. See Detlev Claussen, “Malentendu?,” Telos 155 (Summer 2011): 7–20, and, “Intellectual Transfer,” New German Critique 33 (Winter 2006): 5–14.

13. On the political, cultural, and intellectual ambience of this period, see Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), passim. On the early history of the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Instructive, if quite slanted by its barely concealed hostility to Adorno, is Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Adorno’s life and intellectual itinerary are well documented in Stefan Müller-Doohm, En tierra de nadie, trans. Roberto H. Bernet and Raúl Gabás (Barcelona: Herder, 2003); and Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

14. This felicitous formulation is Schwarz’s, who employs it apropos of the Brazilian poet Francisco Alvim; see Roberto Schwarz, Two Girls and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2012), 191–222.

15. See Adorno’s “Trying to Understand Endgame,” his best statement of the historicity and critical import of minimalism, in Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 259–94.

16. I have elaborated on this question in “Minima Humana.”

17. On the meanings of Catastrophe and catastrophes, see my essays “The Antinomies of Violence and Catastrophe,” New Political Science 34 (June 2012): 211–21, and “How Not to Learn from Catastrophe,” Political Theory 41 (October 2013): 738–65.

18. See Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 125–70; “Beyond Militant Democracy?” New Left Review 73 (January-February 2012): 39–47.

19. See Claussen, “Intellectual Transfer.” On the actual historical details of postwar Germany’s rather tortuous reckoning with the Nazi past, see Jeffrey K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, trans. Joel Glob (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Robert G. Moeller, War Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). These works are best read alongside Adam Tooze, “Reassessing the Moral Economy of Post-War Reconstruction,” Past and Present 210 (2011): 47–70.

20. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 17.

21. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973–75), 1:83.

22. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202.

23. Ibid., 203–04.

24. Cf. Michael Marder, “Minima Patientia, New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 53–72.

25. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 435.

26. See Rolf Tiedemann, “Not the First Philosophy but a Last One,” ibid., xx.

27. Dews has persuasively argued that in Adorno’s critical theory “evil is primarily a category of the social, and only in a secondarily sense applicable to human beings and their actions”; see Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 198.

28. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 19. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 101, 103–28.

29. Dews accurately captures this aspect of Adorno’s thinking when he writes, “Evil is not the equivalent of a historical fate…. It is something for which human beings are responsible, collectively, if not individually.” Indeed, “the social world obliges people to be evil, in the interest of survival.” A social world mediated by the catastrophic nature of history as domination. See The Idea of Evil, 199, 201.

30. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192. Of course, here Adorno’s essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” is also central, as is his controversial assertion about fascism living on, as well as his collaborative studies on group psychology. For an excellent discussion and translations of key texts, see Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

31. Cf. Adorno, Critical Models, 289–93.

32. See ibid., 195, 201; and 281–88.

34. See Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 96.

35. See Adorno, Critical Models, 281.

36. For an alternative formulation of this intersection, see Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 111–30.

37. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365; for the original, see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 358. All references hereafter will be to the English translation followed by the original: i.e., ND 365/358. For contrasting interpretations of this “imperative,” see Bernstein, Adorno, 371–96; and Tafalla, Theodor W. Adorno, especially 49–66. Tafalla offers an arresting interpretation of the “materialism” of this new imperative.

39. Cf. Dews, The Idea of Evil, 205.

40. On the “primacy of the object,” see, inter alia, ND 183–89/184–90; Adorno, Critical Models, 129, 245–58, 265, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 154–56, 200; and Ontologie und Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 333–36.

41. Cf. Geuss, Outside Ethics, 126–30.

44. G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Stephen Houlgate, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 365ff.

45. Cf. Freyenhagen, “Moral Philosophy.” Of interest is the glossing of Hegel’s passage, and the ultimate ineffectiveness of Kantian responses to Hegel’s critique, found in Fabian Freyenhagen, “Empty, Useless, and Dangerous?,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 63 (2011): 95–118.

46. ND 242/240–41 (translation modified and emphases added).

47. Ibid., 242–43/241 (translation modified). NB: ingenuim is Latin for natural disposition, capacity, or innate quality. See Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2d ed., s. v. “ingenium.”

48. An excellent discussion of this aspect of Adorno’s critical theory is found in José Antonio Zamora, Theodor W. Adorno (Madrid: Trotta, 2004), 262ff.

49. For a concise elucidation of “model” and its role in his negative dialectic, see Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 184–85.

50. See ND 274–76/271–72.

51. See Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 149.

53. See ND 211–99, especially 281–85/211–94, especially 277–81.

54. Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno, 71–72.

55. For a sensitive discussion of this aspect of Adorno’s reflections on responsibility, see Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 95–100. This subtle study came too late to my attention; hence I cannot engage with it here, nor fully encompass its findings.

56. Adorno, History and Freedom, 203.

57. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 146.

58. Adorno, History and Freedom, 190–200.

60. See ibid., 299/294 (translation modified). One of Roberto Bolaño’s most unsettling short stories, “El policía de las ratas,” comes to mind here, as it at once lends expression to an analogous insight and complicates it. See Roberto Bolaño, El gaucho insufrible (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003), 53–86.

61. See Bertolt Brecht, Prosa (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013), 778–917. The broad outlines of Brecht’s political ethic are discussed in chapter 6, this volume.

62. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 167.

63. See Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, 8 vols. (London: Methuen, 1998), 3:305–6.

64. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 142, 143. Needless to say, references to Brecht are more positive in these lectures than in “Commitment”; see Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 246–47.

65. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 143.

66. Ibid., 165, cf. 143–45.

67. Elsewhere, Adorno acknowledges the power of Hegel’s critique of the contradictions of bourgeois civil society, but mischaracterizes his account of the state; see Theodor W. Adorno, Einführung in die Dialektik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 118.

68. This poignant phrase is from Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 54.

69. Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, 264.

71. See ND 173–74/174–75.

72. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 264, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 10:765; hereafter referred to as GS followed by volume and page number.

74. Adorno alludes to the political closure of the Federal Republic in a 1949 letter to Thomas Mann: “We are discussing extremely obscure questions at the very limits of logic and metaphysics, but precisely as if they were political issues—perhaps because there is in truth no longer politics”; he adds, “Germany has ceased to be a political subject at all, and politics is now simply role play”; see Adorno and Mann, Correspondence, 34, 35. But acknowledging the lucidity of Adorno’s registration of epochal closure need not justify every single political judgment on his part. His 1969 correspondence with Marcuse shows yet another instance of how philosophical rigor and political literacy rarely move on a par: in this case, Marcuse, the lesser philosopher, proved to be the superior political observer; see Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 223 (January-February 1999): 123–36.

75. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 70–71.

76. See Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 695–718.

77. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 266. Adorno pedagogically expanded on the dialectic of the totality, system and antisystem, tendencies and trends with implications to the question of spontaneity, in Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, ed. Tobias ten Brink and Marc Philip Nogueira (Fankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 37–49, 191ff.

79. Adorno: “To a real fascism, one can only react with violence. I am anything but rigid on this point”; see Theodor W. Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower?,” Monatshefte 94 (Spring 2002): 18. For excellent commentary on the dialectic of violence in Adorno’s engagement with the aesthetic realm, see Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, 207.

80. Elsewhere, Adorno and Horkheimer pose the quintessential political question: “One must ask, who speaks of peace, on whose behalf and in function of what”; see GS 20:391.

81. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 268.

83. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 272ff.

84. See Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–38, 130ff., and “Staying Alive,” Rethinking Marxism 18 (July 2006): 433–47.

85. See Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 144–45.

87. Cf. ibid., 165, 162.

88. Adorno, Critical Models, 292–93 (emphasis added).

89. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, 1990), 360.

90. For a discussion, see Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno, 91ff.

91. See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 150.

92. See Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, 1–22. The concluding paragraphs build upon my “Minima Humana,” 125.

93. At least since Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno had been preoccupied with the logic of fungibility, which bears on his critiques of superfluity and abstract identity, not least in his account of torture and its reduction of the tortured body to a specimen—a logic of power that in his lectures on metaphysics he suggests remains “untouched even by political forms of rule.” See Adorno, Metaphysics, 109.

94. See Adorno, History and Freedom, 213–18, and “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 266.

95. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1:80–85.

1. See Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 182.

2. See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 6. See also Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, eds., The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 1–14; and Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–68. Cf. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), passim.

3. See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 68; and Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 649–52.

4. For a scathing critique of the superimposition of “pathological” psychoanalytic categories on collective life, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–3.

5. For political statements on “loss” within political theory, see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation,” in Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino, eds., Vocations of Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 5ff.; Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), passim, and Edgework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chapter 6. Unsurprisingly, in an essay where Wolin meditates about loss and defeat, Adorno and Gramsci constitute important signposts. For a philosophically sophisticated account of loss that does not eschew its political dimensions, see Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils, trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Carel (New York: Zone, 2005). passim.

6. Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 5.

7. See Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 4. For an earlier account of political losses see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), 372–79.

8. Carl Schmitt notoriously gave expression to this aspect of political life, even if his formulation tended to hypostatize it by placing this constitutive aspect at the center of “the political,” as its defining attribute. Yet this hypostatization is itself historically symptomatic of the period of hyperpoliticization he lived through, which is a historical sediment of his formal definition. For a thoughtful discussion of Schmitt, see Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy (London: Verso, 2000), 1–9, 101–37, 260ff.

9. Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 4.

10. León Rozitchner, Acerca de la derrota y de los vencidos (Buenos Aires: Quadrata, 2011), 25ff.

11. On defeat, see: María Zambrano, “Sentido de la derrota,” in José Luis Argos, ed., Islas (Madrid: Verbum, 2007), 164–68; Carl Schmitt, Ex captivitate salus, trans. Anima Schmitt de Otero (Madrid: Trotta, 2010), 37–42; Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapter 4; Eric Hobsbawn, On History (New York: Free Press, 1997), chapter 18; Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Viking, 1984), 17ff; Perry Anderson, Spectrum (London: Verso, 2005), chapter 13, especially pp. 315–20; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), 1–35; David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–209; and Ana María Amar Sánchez, Instrucciones para la derrota (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2010), 9–124.

12. Amar Sánchez, Instrucciones para la derrota, 12.

13. For a discussion, see José Luis L. Aranguren, Ética y política (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968), 1–28, 93–111.

14. See the highly suggestive account of defeat and the figure of the vanquished found in Amar Sánchez, Instrucciones para la derrota, 77ff.

15. See Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (November-December 1976): 5–78. Decried by many a Gramsci scholar, this essay remains one of the most intelligent interpretations of this opposition, and Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony,” available in English. For a critique, see Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 47–83ff. While Thomas offers a thoughtful philological approach to Gramsci, and a critique of Anderson’s, his critique is marred by a fundamental misunderstanding of Anderson’s interpretative strategy and the conflation of historical judgments with political commitments, say, the difference between accurately registering the noncapitalist nature of the czarist state overthrown by the Russian Revolution and endorsing “a Menshevik analysis.” Ibid., 75n111.

16. See Zambrano, “Sentido de la derrota,” 167.

17. Adolph Reed Jr., “Nothing Left,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2014): 34–35.

18. On this question in relation to neoliberalism, see Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism,” New Political Science 30 (June 2008): 156ff.

19. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-cognition,” Political Theory 21 (August 1993): 480ff.,” and Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 212ff.

20. Here my argument is indebted to but does not follow Badiou’s theorization of fidelity. Cf. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 40–48.

21. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 68.

22. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.

23. See Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 310; and Mourning Becomes the Law, 13.

24. See Rose Mourning Becomes the Law, 13–14, 121–22.

25. Ibid., 141–46. Cf. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 42–75.

26. The best treatment of the centrality of political ethic in twentieth-century European political thought—Arendt, Benjamin, Brecht, Krauss, Lukács, Levi, Weil—is found Francisco Fernández Buey, Poliética (Madrid: Losada, 2003), passim. On his own original contribution, see Manuel S. Almeida Rodriguez, “La política como ética de lo colectivo,” in Artemis Torres and Márcia Cristina Machado Pasuch, eds., Encontros com Paco Buey (Cuiabá-MT: Editora da Universidade Federal Mato Grosso, 2013), 55–63.

27. See Aranguren, Ética y política, 29–34; and Raymond Polin, Éthique et politique (Paris: Sirey, 1968), 101–40.

28. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in David Owen and Tracy Strong, eds., The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 72.

29. See Fredric Jameson, “The Dialectics of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (Spring 2002): 303.

30. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 282. Or, in Jameson’s formulation, “Ethical maxims and categories only work within a situation of homogenous class belonging; when operative from one class to another, they absorb the signals of class struggle and tension itself and begin to function in a very different, socio-political way”—see Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 212.

31. The classic treatment of this question is found in Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 175–213. See also Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147–81.

32. For an instructive discussion, see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chapters 1–6. See also Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe?, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 116–17. Cf. Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone, 2003), chapter 7. On liberal democracy’s furtive forces of reaction and counterrevolution, see Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

33. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Violence and the Western Political Tradition,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 33 (January 1963): 15–28.

34. The locus classicus on this question (and the phrase “economy of violence”) is Wolin’s Politics and Vision, 197–200. For a stimulating treatment of the centrality of violence in the foundation of political orders, see Thomas Burns, Violence de la loi a la renaissance (Paris: Kimé, 2000), 9–218. Yet the instrumental nature of violence is not exhaustive of Machiavelli’s thematization of violence. For a vivid account of another dimension, see Yves Winter, “Plebeian Politics,” Political Theory 40 (December 2012): 736–66. For a fascinating earlier interpretation of Machiavelli’s account of the Ciompi revolt, see Simone Weil’s 1934 essay, “Un soulèvement prolétarien a Florence au XIV siècle,” in Œuvres complètes, 8 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988): 2.1:334–50.

35. See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 163–69. For a depiction of Florentine realities, see John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 374ff.

36. See Charles S. Singleton, “The Perspective of Art,” Kenyon Review 15 (Spring 1953): 169–89.

38. As cited in Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 105. On Schmitt and Machiavelli, see Carlo Galli, La mirada de Jano, trans. María Julia de Ruschi (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 97–124.

39. See Victoria Khan, The Future of Illusion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 92. Khan productively engages with Singleton and offers a terrific interpretation of Machiavelli’s “poetics” of political autonomy with emphasis on his account of religion.

40. For a compelling account of the centrality of political accountability for Machiavelli’s understanding of ruling, which also has the virtue of accurately registering the centrality of institutions in his political thought, see John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), passim.

41. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere, ed. Corrado Vivanti, 3 vols. (Torino: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–2005), 2:137; cf. The Prince, chapter 25; and Discourses on Livy, 3.9, ibid., 1:186–89, 448–50. On the Ghiribizzi al Soderino, see Gennaro S. Sasso, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, 3 vols. (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1987–88), 2:3–56; and Carlo Ginzburg, “Diventare Machiavelli,” Quaderni Storici 121 (April 2006): 151–64.

42. Chapter 6 of The Prince deftly encapsulates this aspect of his political thought. Here Machiavelli soberly emphasizes that “one must consider how there is nothing more difficult to handle, dubious to succeed and dangerous to manage, than to be in charge of introducing new political orders,” and along these lines brings into sharp relief the cognitive dimension of his political action. This is something that Machiavelli had already stressed in “Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati” (1502): “che siano conoscitor della occasione et che la sappiano usare benissimo”; see Opere, 1:132, 26. On the centrality of occasions, accidents, and ruptures in Machiavelli’s thought, see Giorgio Inglese, Per Machiavelli (Rome: Carocci, 2013), 104–7; and Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics (London: Verso, 2009), 265–79.

43. For an excellent discussion, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Machiavelli, l’eccezione e la regola,” Quaderni Storici 112 (April 2003): 195–213.

44. On Machiavelli’s “casuistry,” see ibid.; and Bernard Guillemain, Machiavel (Genève: Droz, 1977), 347ff. Cf. Luigi Russo, Machiavelli (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 123–24. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown, this logic is exhibited not only in the content of Machiavelli’s political thought but also at the level of the sentence: Machiavelli’s penchant for conjunctive adverbs such as nevertheless (nondimeno) and nonetheless (nondimanco); see ibid, 199–202.

45. On this tradition, which has both an absolutist and a constitutional variant, see Friedrich Mienecke, Machiavellism, trans. Douglas Scott (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 429ff. See also C. J. Friedrich, Constitutional Reason of State (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957), passim; Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 151–79; Maurizio Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept of Politics,” Political Theory 20 (August 1992): 473–95; Pierre Bourdieu, “From the King’s House to the Reason of State,” Constellations 11 (March 2004): 16–36; and Victoria Khan, “Machiavelli’s Reputation to the Eighteenth Century,” John M. Najemy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 247–50.

46. See, for instance, Marx’s scathing essay “Moralizing Criticism and the Critique of Morality,” in Karl Marx, Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International, 1975–2004), 6:312–40.

47. See, for instances, Bertolt Brecht, Prosa (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013), 778–1030. Instructive discussions about Brecht’s critique of ethical categories and the primacy he accords to collective situations are found in Fernández Buey, Poliética, 157–96; and Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), passim.

48. See Jameson, Brecht and Method, 158.

49. Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 277–90.

50. See Bertolt Brecht Journals, trans. Hugh Rorrison (New York: Routledge, 1996), 30.

53. See Bertolt Brecht Letters, ed. John Willett, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Routledge, 1990), 408–9, 412–13.

54. See Brecht, Prosa, 1008–9.

55. Ibid., 942. Here one might think of how Shen Teh is violently torn asunder by the demands of goodness in The Good Person of Szechwan or of Frau Hausmann’s tragic predicament in the short story “The Job.” Through these characters, Brecht recasts Machiavelli’s dictum on the need to “learn how not to be good” in order to survive their predicaments, a demand that places a strain on the political actor that he poetically captures in “The Mask of Evil.”

56. See Bertolt Brecht, Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), 6:172.

57. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 30, 29.

58. See Bertolt Brecht, Collected Short Stories, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1984), 150.

59. Bertolt Brecht, Der Untergang der Egoisten Johann Fatzer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 118. See also Bertolt Brecht, Poems, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 2000), 286–89.

60. Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo, scene 14, in Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, 8 vols. (London: Methuen, 1998), 5:98.

61. Brecht’s invocation of a new ethics, and a new science, not only evokes Machiavelli’s own new science of politics, but it similarly emphasizes the need to allocate terminology to its proper domain of inquiry and valuation. This is readily articulated in Brecht’s short story “The Experiment:” “There were…some words that it was better not to use since, strictly speaking, they meant nothing: words like ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘beautiful,’ and so on. The boy soon realized that there was no sense in calling a beetle ‘ugly’”; see Brecht, Collected Short Stories, 154.

62. Brecht, The Days of the Commune, in Collected Plays, 8:111.

63. See, respectively, ibid., xviii; and Bertolt Brecht Letters, 486.

64. Brecht, The Days of the Commune, 8:103.

65. Brecht, scene 11b, ibid., 115.

66. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: NLB, 1979), 395.

67. Or as Brecht put it apropos of epic theater: “The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary”; see Brecht on Theater, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 71.

68. Brecht, Poems, 318–20; see also 450.

69. Brecht, Collected Short Stories, 211. In “The Experiment” the proper use of “good” is specified along materialist lines: “‘Now here you may safely use the word ‘good,’ said the old man, ‘for bread is for people to eat and can be good or bad for them.’” Ibid., 154.

70. For the best overall discussion of Gramsci’s political ethic, one that I am deeply indebted to, see Francisco Fernández Buey, Leyendo a Gramsci (Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 2001), 83–128. Other highly suggestive treatments are found in Aldo Tortorella, “Il fondamento etico della politica in Gramsci,” Critica marxista 2/3 (March-June 1997): 62–71; and Domenico Jervolino, “Etica e politica in Gramsci,” in Giorgio Baratta and Guido Liguori, eds., Gramsci da un secolo all’altro (Roma: Riuniti, 1999), 199–210.

71. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Einaudi, 2007), 2103; hereafter referred to as QC followed by page number.

72. QC 1599. For a discussion, see Fernández Buey, Leyendo a Gramsci, 119ff. Cf. Benedetto Croce, Etica e politica (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 255–61.

73. Gramsci’s polemic against Kant mostly stemmed from a historicist account of humanity; see QC 1598–99; and on the Kantian turn in Marxism, see QC 1855. For a thoughtful discussion, see Tortorella, “Il fondamento etico della politica in Gramsci,” 65–67.

75. On the centrality of the etico-politico in the philosophy of praxis, see QC 1224, 1244.

76. See Antonio Gramsci, Antología, ed. Manuel Sacristán (Madrid: Akal, 2013), 21–23, 29.

77. QC 699–700, 749–50.

78. Despite the different usages of Jesuit—ranging from substantive to adverbial and adjectival forms, often with a derogatory content—Gramsci considered the Jesuits Machiavelli’s best disciples in practice (in pratica i migliori discepoli)—see ibid., 1857. That they notoriously perfected casuistic ethics, and inaugurated new orders, might not be far from Gramsci’s mind here.

79. Raymond Geuss, A World Without Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 66.

81. For a compelling discussion of this dialectic and how it constitutes the interpretative key to interpret Gramsci’s political thought, see Manuel S. Almeida Rodríguez, Dirigentes y dirigidos (Bogotá: Envión, 2010), passim.

82. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–78.

83. See Max Weber, “Economic Policy and National Interest in Imperial Germany,” in W. G. Runciman, ed., Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 267. See also Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1392; Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Runciman, From Max Weber, 152; and Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 286.

84. Weber, “Economic Policy and National Interest in Imperial Germany,”267–68; see also “Politics as a Vocation” (Gerth and Mills, eds.) 79–80, 128. Weber was not only responding to the crises of bourgeois life in Germany, but to the decline of the aristocratic class, the political class par excellence in European imagery. For a discussion, see Harvey Goldman, Politics, Death, and the Devil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5, 163–64.

85. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (Gerth and Mills, eds.), 124.

86. Passion, perspective, the boldness to reach out for the impossible, sober heroism, unwillingness to crumble or seek refuge when the world does not conform to one’s ideals—these are the attributes of Weber’s political hero, the possessor of a true vocation for politics; see Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (Gerth and Mills, eds.), 78, 128.

87. On this last point, see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Agitated Times,” Parallax 11 (2005): 5–7. Cf. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, “Introduction,” in Owen and Strong, The Vocation Lectures, ix–lxii.

88. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Owen and Strong, The Vocation Lectures, 26–27. Cf. Charles Thorpe, “Violence and the Scientific Vocation,” Theory, Culture and Society 21 (June 2004): 59–84.

89. Here one finds an embryonic version of the distinction between accountability and responsibility subsequently formulated by Arendt. Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 121–39, and Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1994), 297–98.

90. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (Gerth and Mills, eds.), 127.

91. Ibid. (Owen and Strong ed.), 92.

92. Ibid., 78. On freedom and necessity in tragedy, as a genre, see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), chapter 5.

93. “My inward ‘calling’ is scholarly work and scholarly teaching. And the nation does not need that now. So I shall have to try to reorient myself. But how? To what? I still do not know.” Weber in a letter dated 10 October 1918, as cited by Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 286.

94. See Goldman, Politics, Death, and the Devil, 166.

95. Weber, “Parliament and Government,” in Economy and Society, 1461. In this formulation, there is a tension between the concern for leadership and the concern with the political sophistication of the nation. But as will become clearer in his reflections on parliamentary government, it is leadership, a new aristocracy of spirit, that ultimately concerns Weber. See ibid., 1414, 1447ff., 1449ff.

96. See Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Stuttgart: UTB, 1988), 176, 442–43. Statements that are, of course, consistent with his rendering of how in the Nation there is a “responsibility towards succeeding generations;” one that is related to the great power structures and the “responsibility of their own for the way in which power and prestige are distributed between their own and foreign polities”; see Weber, Economy and Society, 921–22.

97. See Weber, Economy and Society, 1007.

98. As cited in Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 191.

99. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (Owen and Strong ed.), 124.

100. On Weil’s political thought, see Emilia Bea Pérez, Simone Weil (Madrid: Trotta, 1993); David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist (New York: Poseidon, 1990); and Mary G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).

101. Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” in Simone Weil, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove, 1986), 163.

102. Ibid., 163, 184–85.

105. See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 71.

106. Force is a concept that many interpreters of Weil’s thought have found enigmatic. This is not the place to elucidate its multifarious meanings. Suffice it to say here that force cannot always be equated with violence, as Weil makes abundantly clear in other places; in the context of the essay on the Iliad, however, it refers to the violent forms that force takes in a predicament of war.

107. See Simone Weil, Formative Writings, 1929–1941, ed. and trans. Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 240; and the meditations on action, reaction, and limits found in Weil’s Cuadernos, trans. Carlos Ortega (Madrid: Trotta, 2001), especially 217–20.

108. For details, see Bea Pérez, Simone Weil, 115–32. See also Raymond Aron, Memorias, trans. Amanda Forns de Gioia (Barcelona: RBA, 2013), 144–45.

109. Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” 179.

110. Ibid., 163, translation modified; see Simone Weil, Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard 1999), 537.

111. Weil, Simone Weil, 56ff. Weil’s formulations, especially her treatments of “reflection,” “attention,” and “virtue,” imply a cognitive shift that is well captured by the term re-cognition. On the re-cognitive dimension of “attention,” see Sharon Cameron, “The Practice of Attention,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003): 216–52. Cf. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine, 96–103; and Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 59–63. Of interest is Françoise Meltzer, “The Hands of Simone Weil,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001): 611–28.