DOCSLIB.ORG

Language, Mysticism and Revolution in Gustav Landauer

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Language, Mysticism and Revolution in Gustav Landauer LiberaPisano Anarchic Scepticism: Language, Mysticism and Revolution in Gustav Landauer Even for the anarchist, language is the rope of the law bound aroundhis neck; even the most free philosopher thinks with the wordsofphilosophical language.¹ GustavLandauer (1870 – 1919), aGerman-Jewish anarchist and aradical thinker,was brutallymurdered by the Freikorps in Munich. He was an almost forgotten figure for along time, even though his ideas exerted acrucial influenceonthe development of twentieth century Jewishthoughtand philosophy, particularlyregarding the rehabil- itation of utopian, messianic, anarchical and mystical elements. Landauer was one of very few Jewish authorspermitting the word ‘scepticism’ to be included in the title of one of his works—namely Skepsisund Mystik²—in my view this very termis the fil rouge running through all his political and philosophicalthought.However, this feature has not receivedthe proper attention by scholars, which focus mainly on Landauer’ssingular account of anarchism and mysticism, alongside his concep- tion of revolution and community. In this essay, Iwill attempt to shed light on the connection between Fritz Mauth- ner’s(1849–1923)linguistic critique and Landauer’sanarchy, showing the political implications of sceptical thought. To this end, Iwill focus on the sceptical features of Landauer’sanarchist socialism by analysingthe connection between scepticism and mysticism, the role playedbyscepticism in his thought of community and in his account of revolution, history and time, and the definition of his anti-political at- titude as sceptical Lebensform. 1Anarchy as (Anti)political Epoché There is an affinitybetween anarchism and scepticism, even if this binomial has not yetreceivedproper attention. One can define anarchism as an (anti)political attitude whose main features are aradical critique towards authorities and achallengetothe system of representations, while scepticism could be broadlydefined as amethod as well as an attitude, which criticizes dogmatic assumptions and leads to asuspension of judgment. If anarchism could be interpreted as arejection of political representa- tion, it is possibletoextend these particular critiques to anygeneral forms of label- Cf. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträgezueiner Kritik der Sprache,2nd edition, vol. 1(Stuttgart and Berlin: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung,1913), 221: ‘Die Sprache legt auch dem Anarchisten den Strick des Gesetzes um den Hals und auch der freiestePhilosoph denkt mit den Worten der philosophischen Sprache.’ GustavLandauer, Skepsis und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluss an MauthnersSprachkritik,inidem, Ausgewählte Schriften,vol. 7, ed. Siegbert Wolf (Lich/Hessen: Edition AV,2011). OpenAccess. ©2018 Libera Pisano, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/978-3-11-057768-6-013 252 Libera Pisano ling representation or to anydogmatic systems of rule.³ Anarchyand scepticism share this ongoingcriticism the aim of which is not aconcrete systematisation trans- forming them into their contraries with anarchybecominganinstitutionalframework and scepticism turning into dogmatism. Indeed, the transformation of these terms into their contrariesis, in both cases, aslipperyslope. Is it possible to define athink- er,inthe midstofanongoing criticism not accepting anyassumption, as beingadog- matic sceptic?Conversely, are we to define an anarchist,embedded in his criticism towards the state and the system, as representativeofanother form of authority and power?These open questions mayhelp us to shedlight on the special and con- troversial affinities between scepticism and anarchy. As is well known, the etymologyof‘anarchy’ is ‘absenceofgovernment’ or ‘of leader’ (archos), but at the same time it is alack of ‘arche’,which is one of the key words of Greek ancient philosophy. ‘Arche’ has adouble meaning:onthe one hand, it means ‘origin’, ‘beginning’ and ‘principle of action’,onthe other, ‘power’, ‘command’, ‘authorities’.Ifthe word ‘arche’ connects atemporal dimension to the authority,one can saythat an anarchic thought par excellence has to take into ac- count time and power,asLandauer did. Anarchyisnot just an overthrowingof the ‘arche’,but starts with aprocess of doubting and calling into question the status quo. As anarchydeniesall forms of systematisation, it is akind of suspension of au- thority,which, in my view,seems to be aform of (anti)political epoché. 2Gustav Landauer at the Crossroad of Several Paths As apolitical activist and writer,journalist and translator,Landauer was one of the most important thinkers combiningJewish messianism with anarchy, politics with mysticism, and aromantic philosophyofhistory with abelief in the urgency of change. His works comprises manyarticles, translations, fragments,reviews,and anumber of discourses; important milestones are DieRevolution and Aufruf zumSo- zialismus,but his onlycompletephilosophicalstudy, on which he worked for two years following his release from prison earlyin1900,isSkepsisund Mystik. The complicated intrigue of Landauer’sanarchyconcerns the conjunction of two levels: the mystical experience and the political action. The weave of these elements positions his thoughtatacrossroads of several paths, something quite unique in the history of philosophy. At least threereasons demonstrate how he is to be considered acomplex thinker:firstly, his works are unsystematic; secondly, he mixes up differ- ent and—apparently—opposite elements; and thirdlyhegives asingular definition to some key concepts. Scholars have usedmanyadjectives in attemptingtodefine his political socialist anarchism: mystical, anarchical, regressive, Gemeindesozialismus See Jesse S. Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics,Aesthetics,Politics (Se- linsgrove: SusquehannaUniversity Press,2006). Anarchic Scepticism: Language, Mysticismand Revolution in Gustav Landauer 253 to name but afew.His particularidea of socialism is based on an anarchic opposi- tion towardany form of authority including political,social, ethical, and religious articulation of power.Itisatthe same time aproject of liberation from all the forms of enslavement,interior and external, and ashowing of the path required to take one from isolation to community—from theory to praxis. At this point,Ifeelitpertinent to consider Landauer’sbiography. Born, 7th April, 1870,toasecular Jewishfamily in Karlsruhe,southern Germany, he studied German and English literature,philosophyand art history in Heidelberg, Strasbourgand Ber- lin. However,hecompleted none of these studies as his political militancy had him banned from all German universities. Stirner,Nietzsche, Ibsen, Spinoza and Schopenhauerare just afew of the manyphilosophershewas impressed by in that time. His first political commitments sawhim rise to the top of German anarchist circles duringthe 1890s.⁴ This political activity and anarchist commitment,led to his acquaintancewith prominent activists such as Peter Kropotkin, Max Nettlau, and Er- rico Malatesta.⁵ His biographer Ruth Link-Salinger tells us this period was devoted ‘to asystematic definition of what anarchism was to be and was not to be,’⁶ and this was arrivedatalso duetohis collaboration with Fritz Mauthner. In the first decade of 1900,Landauer withdrew almost entirelyfrom public activ- ity to engageinprivatestudy. He wastofavour amore inner,philosophical and mys- tical idea of anarchism to the political manifestations of the time. This introspection was spurred by his translation of Meister Eckhart in prison and adeep affinity with the Mauthner’s Sprachskepsis.⁷ This new vein of Landauer’sthoughtissourced his “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” aspeech givenatameetingofthe newly foundedcircle Neue Gemeinschaft—wherehemet Martin Buber and Erich Mühsam —and later wastoserve as thefirst chapter of his Skepsis und Mystik. During these years Landauer and his second wife (the poet and translator,HedwigLachmann, whom he married in 1903) were extremelyactive translatingPeter Kropotkin, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Rabindranath Tagore. In the 1893heparticipated in the Zurich congress of the second International as an anarchist del- egate. The congress, dominated by German social democrats, expelled him along with the other an- archists.August Bebel—the leader of the social democrats—accused him of beingapoliceinformer. When Landauer returned to Berlin, he spent almost one year in prison for the writings he published in Der Sozialist. ForLandauer’slife, cf. Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: TheMystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1971); Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: TheRomantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress,1973); Ruth Link- Salinger, Gustav Landauer:Philosopher of Utopia (Indianapolis: Hackett PublishingCo., 1977): 74 – 76. He travelled as aanarchist delegatetoasecond international congress in London wherethe anar- chists were—oncemore—excluded and organised for themselvesanother conference.Landauer pre- pared areport for the occasion FromZurich to London, which became his most translatedpieceatthat time. Link-Salinger, Gustav Landauer:Philosopher of Utopia,48. Between 1893and 1900 he spent atotal of 18 months in prison on various chargesoflibel and def- amation. 254 Libera Pisano In 1906,Buber became editor in chief of abook seriescalled Die Gesellschaft and asked his friend Landauer to write abook on the intriguingtopic of revolution. Lan-
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Black Flag White Masks: Anti-Racism and Anarchist Historiography
    Black Flag White Masks: Anti-Racism and Anarchist Historiography Süreyyya Evren1 Abstract Dominant histories of anarchism rely on a historical framework that ill fits anarchism. Mainstream anarchist historiography is not only blind to non-Western elements of historical anarchism, it also misses the very nature of fin de siècle world radicalism and the contexts in which activists and movements flourished. Instead of being interested in the network of (anarchist) radicalism (worldwide), political historiography has built a linear narrative which begins from a particular geographical and cultural framework, driven by the great ideas of a few father figures and marked by decisive moments that subsequently frame the historical compart- mentalization of the past. Today, colonialism/anti-colonialism and imperialism/anti-imperialism both hold a secondary place in contemporary anarchist studies. This is strange considering the importance of these issues in world political history. And the neglect allows us to speculate on the ways in which the priorities might change if Eurocentric anarchist histories were challenged. This piece aims to discuss Eurocentrism imposed upon the anarchist past in the form of histories of anarchism. What would be the consequences of one such attempt, and how can we reimagine the anarchist past after such a critique? Introduction Black Flag White Masks refers to the famous Frantz Fanon book, Black Skin White Masks, a classic in anti-colonial studies, and it also refers to hidden racial issues in the history of the black flag (i.e., anarchism). Could there be hidden ethnic hierarchies in the main logic of anarchism's histories? The huge difference between the anarchist past and the histories of anarchism creates the gap here.
    [Show full text]
  • The History and Philosophy of the Postwar American Counterculture
    The History and Philosophy of the Postwar American Counterculture: Anarchy, the Beats and the Psychedelic Transformation of Consciousness By Ed D’Angelo Copyright © Ed D’Angelo 2019 A much shortened version of this paper appeared as “Anarchism and the Beats” in The Philosophy of the Beats, edited by Sharin Elkholy and published by University Press of Kentucky in 2012. 1 The postwar American counterculture was established by a small circle of so- called “beat” poets located primarily in New York and San Francisco in the late 1940s and 1950s. Were it not for the beats of the early postwar years there would have been no “hippies” in the 1960s. And in spite of the apparent differences between the hippies and the “punks,” were it not for the hippies and the beats, there would have been no punks in the 1970s or 80s, either. The beats not only anticipated nearly every aspect of hippy culture in the late 1940s and 1950s, but many of those who led the hippy movement in the 1960s such as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg were themselves beat poets. By the 1970s Allen Ginsberg could be found with such icons of the early punk movement as Patty Smith and the Clash. The beat poet William Burroughs was a punk before there were “punks,” and was much loved by punks when there were. The beat poets, therefore, helped shape the culture of generations of Americans who grew up in the postwar years. But rarely if ever has the philosophy of the postwar American counterculture been seriously studied by philosophers.
    [Show full text]
  • Rancour's Emphasis on the Obviously Dark Corners of Stalin's Mind
    Rancour's emphasis on the obviously dark corners of Stalin's mind pre- cludes introduction of some other points to consider: that the vozlzd' was a skilled negotiator during the war, better informed than the keenly intelli- gent Churchill or Roosevelt; that he did sometimes tolerate contradiction and even direct criticism, as shown by Milovan Djilas and David Joravsky, for instance; and that he frequently took a moderate position in debates about key issues in the thirties. Rancour's account stops, save for a few ref- erences to the doctors' plot of 1953, at the end of the war, so that the enticing explanations offered by William McCagg and Werner Hahn of Stalin's conduct in the years remaining to him are not discussed. A more subtle problem is that the great stress on Stalin's personality adopted by so many authors, and taken so far here, can lead to a treatment of a huge country with a vast population merely as a conglomeration of objects to be acted upon. In reality, the influences and pressures on people were often diverse and contradictory, so that choices had to be made. These were simply not under Stalin's control at all times. One intriguing aspect of the book is the suggestion, never made explicit, that Stalin firmly believed in the existence of enemies around him. This is an essential part of the paranoid diagnosis, repeated and refined by Rancour. If Stalin believed in the guilt, in some sense, of Marshal Tukhachevskii et al. (though sometimes Rancour suggests the opposite), then a picture emerges not of a ruthless dictator coldly plotting the exter- mination of actual and potential opposition, but of a fear-ridden, tormented man lashing out in panic against a threat he believed to real and immediate.
    [Show full text]
  • Things Are Nothing to Me: the Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner'
    H-Socialisms Price on Blumenfeld, 'All Things Are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner' Review published on Monday, December 14, 2020 Jacob Blumenfeld. All Things Are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner. Winchester: Zero Books, 2018. 155 pp. $17.46 (paper), ISBN 978-1-78099-663-9. Reviewed by Wayne Price (Independent Scholar) Published on H-Socialisms (December, 2020) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56060 Self and Others: Max Stirner and Revolutionary Anarchism Max Stirner was the pen name of Johann Kasper Schmidt (1806-56). He was part of a milieu of young philosophers who sought to develop further the philosophy of the great German thinker Georg W. F. Hegel, who had died in 1831. This milieu has been referred to as the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians. While Hegel’s system had solidified into a reactionary form, they mainly tried to rework it in more humanistic, naturalistic, and democratic directions. The most well-known of these young men today (there were women in the grouping, but their names have dropped out of history) are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (Engels had been a personal friend of Stirner’s for a time.) Michael Bakunin—later a founder of revolutionary socialist-anarchism—also studied Hegel and was in contact with this milieu. Stirner wrote his masterwork, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, in 1844. In 1907 it was translated into English as The Ego and His Own, although a current translation by Wolfi Landstriecher (2017) more correctly has it as The Unique and Its Property.
    [Show full text]
  • Anarcho-Surrealism in Chicago
    44 1 ANARCHO-SURREALISM IN CHICAGO SELECTED TEXTS DREAMS OF ARSON & THE ARSON OF DREAMS: 3 SURREALISM IN ‘68 Don LaCross THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF WORK 19 Penelope Rosemont DISOBEDIENCE: THE ANTIDOTE FOR MISERABLISM 22 Penelope Rosemont MUTUAL ACQUIESCENCE OR MUTUAL AID? 26 Ron Sakolsky ILL WILL EDITIONS • ill-will-editions.tumblr.com 2 43 AK Press, 2010, p. 193. [22] Laurance Labadie, “On Competition” in Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist and Egoist Thought (Ardent Press, San Francisco, 2011) p. 249. The underpinnings of Labadie’s point of view, which are similar to those of many other authors featured in this seminal volume, are based on the assumption that communitarian forms of mutual aid do not necessarily lead to individual emancipation. Rather, from this perspective, their actual practice involves the inherent danger of creating an even more insidious form of servitude based upon a herd mentality that crushes individuality in the name of mutuality, even when their practitioners intend or claim to respect individual freedom as an anarchist principle. [23] The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. [24] Anonymous. “Taking Communion at the End of History” in Politics is not a Banana: The Journal of Vulgar Discourse. Institute for Experimental Freedom, 2009, p. 70. [25] Anonymous. Desert. St. Kilda: Stac an Armin Press, 2011, p 7. [26] Ibid, p 68. [27] James C. Scott. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. [28] PM. Bolo Bolo. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995, pp 58–60. [29] Richard Day.
    [Show full text]
  • Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)
    Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) James Horrox Contents Bibliography ................................. 25 2 Although acknowledged by those who have encountered his ideas as one of the finest minds ever to have come out of the anarchist movement, Gustav Landauer re- mains relatively unknown outside the German- and Hebrew-speaking world. Pre- cious little of his voluminous corpus of work is presently available in English, and despite a minor resurgence in interest in his ideas during the early 1970s Landauer is known today primarily for his involvement in the Bavarian revolution of 1918– 19, or in connection with one or more of the many illustrious individuals with whom he was in close touch throughout his life, rather than for his own inimitable philosophy. Landauer’s was a Romantic, non-doctrinaire anarchism which, although rooted in the ideas of Proudhon and Kropotkin, went unashamedly against the grain of the anarchist orthodoxy of late 19th and early 20th century Europe. Central to his thinking is a fundamental comprehension that the capitalist state by its very na- ture is not something that can be “smashed” — rather, as he famously declared in 1910, it is “a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently”1. Rejecting the historical materialists’ reification of the state and soci- ety he argued that in reality “we are the State and continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community”. He maintained that although externally imposed the state lives within each and every human being, and can only perpetuate itself as long as human beings exist in this ‘statual’ rela- tionship which makes its coercive order necessary; following thinkers like Étienne de la Boétie he therefore insisted that all it takes is for human beings step out of this relationship, this artificially-created social construct of reality, and the state is rendered obsolete, it disintegrates.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction Blasting the Canon
    Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies ISSN: 1923-5615 2013.1: Blasting the Canon Introduction Blasting the Canon Ruth Kinna & Süreyyya Evren* This issue was inspired by Süreyyya Evren’s doctoral research into postanarchism and the conversations that resulted from it about the construction of the anarchist past, the theoretical integrity of ‘classical anarchism’—particularly as it is understood 1 in postanarchist writings—and the nature of anarchist history. *Ruth Kinna is a political theorist at the University of Loughborough, UK. She is the author of the Beginner's Guide to Anarchism (Oneworld, 2005), editor of the journal Anarchist Studies and the recently published Continuum Companion to Anarchism (2012). With Laurence Davis, she co-edited the collection Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester, 2009). She is also co-editor, with Alex Prichard, Saku Pinta and David Berry of Libertarian Socialism (Palgrave, 2012), which explores canonical issues by examining the inter-relationships, tensions, overlaps, and ruptures in anarchism and Marxism. *Süreyyya Evren (b. 1972) writes on anarchism, contemporary art, and literature. He has published several books in Turkish and several articles in English and German. He is the editor and founder of the post- anarchist magazine Siyahi (Istanbul, 2004-2006). Together with Duane Rousselle, he edited the Post-Anarchism Reader (Pluto, 2011) and founded the postanarchist journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. 1 Süreyya Turkeli, “What is Anarchism? A Reflection on the Canon and The Constructive Potential of Its Destruction,” PhD diss. (Loughborough University, 2012). 2 | RUTH KINNA & SÜREYYYA EVREN The questions that this research raised were less about the persuasiveness of postanarchist treatments of nineteenth-century anarchists, which had already been explored in some detail, than about the ways in which the tradition of classical anarchism was constructed in postanarchist critique.
    [Show full text]
  • Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature
    i “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union in Jewish Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair Professor Naomi Seidman Professor Nathaniel Deutsch Professor Juana María Rodríguez Summer 2016 ii “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature Copyright © 2016 by Anna Elena Torres 1 Abstract “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the Graduate Theological Union in Jewish Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Chana Kronfeld, Chair “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature examines the intertwined worlds of Yiddish modernist writing and anarchist politics and culture. Bringing together original historical research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish avant-garde poetry by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Peretz Markish, Yankev Glatshteyn, and others, I show that the development of anarchist modernism was both a transnational literary trend and a complex worldview. My research draws from hitherto unread material in international archives to document the world of the Yiddish anarchist press and assess the scope of its literary influence. The dissertation’s theoretical framework is informed by diaspora studies, gender studies, and translation theory, to which I introduce anarchist diasporism as a new term.
    [Show full text]
  • Anarchy Is What Anarchists Make of It: Reclaiming the Concept of Agency in IR and Security Studies
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Research Online Chris Rossdale Anarchy is what anarchists make of it: reclaiming the concept of agency in IR and security studies Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Rossdale, Chris (2010) Anarchy is what anarchists make of it: reclaiming the concept of agency in IR and security studies. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39 (2). pp. 483-501. ISSN 0305-8298 DOI: 10.1177/0305829810384006 © 2010 The Author This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/75253/ Available in LSE Research Online: May 2017 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Anarchy is What Anarchists Make of it: Reclaiming the Concept of Agency in IR and Security Studies Dr Chris Rossdale [email protected] International Relations Department, London School of Economics & Political Science A later version of this paper was published in Millennium: Journal of International Relations, Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Gustav Landauer — the Man, the Jew and the Anarchist
    Gustav Landauer — the Man, the Jew and the Anarchist Avraham Yassour 1989 Contents 1. 4 2. 10 A. ....................................... 10 B. ....................................... 14 C. ....................................... 17 Bibliography 19 A. Landauer’s writings ........................... 19 B. Translations ................................ 20 C. On Landauer ............................... 20 D. Landauer in Hebrew ........................... 21 2 “I am, the Jew, a German — I accept my complexity.” Der Werdende Mensch 3 1. I will begin with the main details about Gustav Landauer’s life and his epoch, because I assume that only little is known about them, and because a combined analytical and historical approach is required. Gustav Landauer was born in 1870 in Karlsruhe (south-west Germany) into a petit-bourgeois family. From his youth he showed great interest in philosophy and the humanities, in literature and in the Bohemian life that attracted young people to the cafes of Berlin. Those days were the days of Germany’s victory over France and its growing in Europe. In 1893 Landauer was expelled from Berlin University because of a speech he made before workers. He was arrested again in 1896 as an anarchist calling for disobedience, although throughout his life Landauer refrained from what is commonly termed “extremism”. He was a determined pacifist but was unremitting in explaining his position and his socialist propaganda, to whichhe devoted much time despite the need to make a living and his passion for scientific and literary work. His life ran in this twofold direction until his foul murder in a prison-yard on 2 May 1919, the victim of German anti-revolutionary terror that already portended the Nazi barbarity (including violent antisemitism.) Landauer was a prolific publicist and was bound up in the fin du siecle current that brought an era to an end and opened a new century.
    [Show full text]
  • The Revolutionary Potential of Mythology
    The Revolutionary Potential of Mythology: Examining the Rise of Nationalism in Judaism and Hinduism in the 20th Century And the Egalitarian, Revolutionary Communities and Thinkers Who Challenge Statism, Nationalism, and Capitalism Within these Traditions Zachary Sager Morgan Thesis Adviser: Vasudha Paramasivan Comparative Literature Department University of California, Berkeley Spring 2017 i Acknowledgements First and foremost, I have to thank the massive amount of support I have received from my close friends and family who have not only encouraged and supported me throughout this project, but have also taken their personal time to give me notes on my work, enriched my interest in the study of politics, religions, and literature, and have all around been a copious wellspring of inspiration, both personally and intellectually. More specifically I would like to thank my thesis adviser Vasudha Paramasivan for working with me closely throughout the semester. Taking her class Religions in Modern India last semester provided me with many of the initial ideas that went into forming this comparative analysis I have created. Our weekly talks were both insightful, encouraging, and allowed me to check my own personal and academic biases throughout this research project. I certainly could not have done this without her expertise in the history of Indian politics and religions. I would also like to thank my professor Gilad Sharvit who’s class in 20th century Jewish philosophy peaked my interest in the subject and made me decide to pursue the examination of nationalist Zionism in this paper, as opposed to another tradition. He also provided support with (strictly informally) editing the introductory section on Judaism.
    [Show full text]
  • This Item Was Submitted to Loughborough's Institutional
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Loughborough University Institutional Repository This item was submitted to Loughborough’s Institutional Repository (https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/) by the author and is made available under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions. For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ 12 Anarchism and the politics of utopia Ruth Kinna There is a curious paradox at the heart of contemporary debates about the relationship between utopian and anarchist studies. While anarchistic ideas have gained some purchase in utopian studies, there is a strong anti-utopian trend in modern anarchism. What is puzzling about this paradox is that both positions seem to be shaped by a common set of concerns. The anarchistic aspect of modern utopianism is marked by an engagement with an imaginative and open-ended exploration of alternative ways of being. Valérie Fournier’s embrace of ‘grass roots utopianism’ flows from a rejection of utopias that prioritise ‘destinations’ over ‘journeys’ and ‘“better states”’ over ‘movement and process’.1 The anti-utopian bent of modern anarchism is shaped by a worry that utopianism threatens precisely these kinds of practice. Jason McQuinn’s anarchist treatment of utopianism is informed by a suspicion of ends. All preconceived ideals, he argues, necessarily constrain free thought. Anarchists must, therefore, take particular care when discussing the nature of anarchy for any such discussion runs the risk of embedding in the analysis an ‘idealized, hypostatized vision’.2 It is possible to explain this paradox by looking at the different anarchist traditions to which these parties appeal.
    [Show full text]