Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Available in English for the first time, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns revives discussion of the major political and philosophical tenets underlying contemporary liberalism through a revolutionary interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s thought. Domenico Losurdo, one of the world’s leading Hegelians, reveals that the philosopher was fully engaged with the political controversies of his time. In so doing, he shows how the issues addressed by Hegel in the nineteenth century resonate with many of the central political concerns of today, among them questions of community, nation, liberalism, and freedom. Based on an examination of Hegel’s entire corpus—including manuscripts, lecture notes, different versions of texts, and letters—Losurdo locates the philosopher’s works within the historical contexts and political situations in which they were composed. 
Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns persuasively argues that the tug of war between “conservative” and “liberal” interpretations of Hegel has obscured and distorted the most important aspects of his political thought. Losurdo unravels this misleading dualism and provides an illuminating discussion of the relation between Hegel’s political philosophy and the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He also discusses Hegel’s ideas in relation to the pertinent writings of other major figures of modern political philosophy such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Popper, Norberto Bobbio, and Friedrich Hayek.

History

Losurdo, Domenico

Europe

Duke University Press Books

Available in English for the first time, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns revives discussion of the major political and philosophical tenets underlying contemporary liberalism through a revolutionary interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s thought. Domenico Losurdo,one of the world’s leading Hegelians, reveals that the philosopher was fully engaged with the political controversies of his time. In so doing, he shows how the issues addressed by Hegel in the nineteenth century resonate with many of the central political concerns of today, among them questions of community, nation, liberalism, and freedom. Based on an examination of Hegel’s entire corpus—including manuscripts, lecture notes, different versions of texts, and letters—Losurdo locates the philosopher’s works within the historical contexts and political situations in which they were composed. 
Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns persuasively argues that the tug of war between “conservative” and “liberal” interpretations of Hegel has obscured and distorted the most important aspects of his political thought. Losurdo unravels this misleading dualism and provides an illuminating discussion of the relation between Hegel’s political philosophy and the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He also discusses Hegel’s ideas in relation to the pertinent writings of other major figures of modern political philosophy such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Popper, Norberto Bobbio, and Friedrich Hayek.

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend

Iskra Books is proud to publish the first authorized English edition of Domenico Losurdo's now-mythic text, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend-translated for the first time from the original Italian. Operating under the assumption that the prevalent rejection of, or dismissiveness about, Josef Stalin as a historical figure merits closer and critical inspection, Losurdo encourages readers to make up their own mind on Stalin, rather than to uncritically accept received, popular notions. In fact, it is precisely the now-widespread caricatures of Stalin as personified evil-rife in liberal democracies and uncritically accepted by most Western leftists-that Losurdo shows to be more related to contingent ruling class preoccupations than actual evidence. Even pointing out such problems with conventional representations of Stalin brought a shower of accusations of "Stalinism" or "neo-Stalinism" upon Losurdo, who made it clear that the text of Stalin was not a rehabilitation but a contribution to contextualizing and ending the demonization of Stalin, who was even, in 1946, praised by Gandhi.Losurdo's work on the historical representations of Stalin, as well as other works like it, is perhaps more vital today than it ever has been. With the passage of time, we become further removed from the contemporary voices challenging the construction of what has become the hegemonic view of Stalin. Losurdo teaches us, among other things, that historical contextualization and coeval comparisons are crucial to testing one's political philosophy and principles, to deepening our knowledge of socialist history, and, at the same time, a key to dismantling bourgeois ideologies."Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend recaptures the distorted personal and political narrative proffered by western historians for over 75 years. This magisterial work convincingly counters the biased distortions of both establishment and left historians through a balanced historiographic and philosophical exegesis of Stalin's complex life and leadership, as well as his contribution to socialism and the defeat of fascism. Losurdo's heretical counter-hegemonic history authentically counters the mythical, demonic figure into a true-to-life biography of the most significant political figure of the 20th century. Fifteen years after its publication in Italian, Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's superb translation brings Losurdo's compelling corrective of Stalin to English readers."Immanuel Ness, Author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class"In this intrepid and rigorous study, Domenico Losurdo takes on the myth of the monster by shedding much-needed light on the monstrous situation in which Joseph Stalin found himself: that of building the world's first socialist state under conditions of incessant imperialist assault, civil war, subversive plots, fascist invasion, and the risks of nuclear annihilation. Losurdo's dialectical assessment of the commendable as well as the deplorable decisions made by Soviet leadership, given the circumstances, provides the reader with an extraordinary opportunity to learn practical and difficult lessons from concrete history. This book is thus an essential antidote to the terrifying tales whose purpose is to produce fear-induced ignorance, and thus benighted ideological alignment against 'the monster.'"Gabriel Rockhill, Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Iskra Books

Available for the first time in English, this book examines and reinterprets class struggle within Marx and Engels' thought. As Losurdo argues, class struggle is often misunderstood as exclusively the struggle of the poor against the rich, of the humble against the powerful. It is an interpretation that is dear to populism, one that supposes a binary logic that closes its eyes to complexity and inclines towards the celebration of poverty as a place of moral excellence. This book, however, shows the theory of class struggle is a general theory of social conflict. Each time, the most adverse social conflicts are intertwined in different ways. A historical situation always emerges with specific and unique characteristics that necessitate serious examination, free of schematic and biased analysis. Only if it breaks away from populism can Marxism develop the ability to interpret and change the world.

Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)

Business & Money

Economics

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Domenico Losurdo reconstructs the genesis of Heidegger's philosophy in its historical context, analyzing the meaning and characteristics of the peculiar "ideology of war" developed in Germany at the outset of the First World War. In the 20th century, conflicts between states took the form for the first time of total war requiring the mobilization of an entire society. This all-pervasive ideological mobilization of consciences was associated at the purely military and industrial level in a form never seen before. On the one hand, among the allied nations the ideology of war centered on the principle of "democratic intervention," the Wilsonian idea of a holy crusade able to subvert the eternally militarist and autocratic Germany and, in this way, favor a kind of great "international democratic revolution." On the other hand, in a spiral of radicalization, the German ideology of war characterized the looming conflict as a great clash between irreconcilable civilizations, faiths, world-visions, and even races. Germans affirmed not only the superiority of their culture over the enemy countries, but above all the hypothesis of a political and social model that expelled from modernity every universalistic concept of emancipation and democratization. Moving within this milieu, Heidegger's philosophy contested the cultural decadence and "massification" reigning in Western industrial society. In a sharp confrontation with the entire philosophical tradition starting from ancient Greece, he finally condemned the conceptual basis that is the foundation of the modern world as a form of degenerated Platonism in which liberal, revolutionary, and Marxist ideas, and even Nietzsche's philosophy, were involved. Contrary to the majority of interpreters of Heidegger's philosophy, Losurdo reconstructs Heidegger's political dimension and shows the influence of historical and social forces on the development of his ideas.

Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Humanity Books

Product Description 
Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklärer and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his 'superman' the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. 
In a work widely regarded as the most important contribution to Nietzschean studies in recent decades, Domenico Losurdo instead pursues a less reductive strategy. Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's anti-democratic thinking―his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics―he nevertheless refuses to treat these from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, he restores Nietzsche's works to their complex nineteenth-century context, and presents a more compelling account of the importance of Nietzsche as philosopher than can be expected from his many contemporary apologists. 
Originally published in Italian by Bollati Boringhieri Editore as Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, Turin, 2002. 
 About the Author 
Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian. He was a Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Urbino and one of the world 's leading Hegel scholars and an expert on 19th and 20th-century intellectual history. He has produced a large body of scholarly work that aims at an analysis of European, and particularly German, philosophy and political thought. 
Gregor Benton is emeritus professor of Chinese history at Cardiff University. He has published many books on China and other subjects. 
Harrison Fluss is a corresponding editor with Historical Materialism and a lecturer in philosophy at St. John's University and Manhattan College.

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (Historical Materialism)

Professionals & Academics

Haymarket Books

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Liberalism: A Counter-History

Verso

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an “illness” originating with the French Revolution. The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson. In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.

War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

Historical Study & Educational Resources

How democracy became a form of soft authoritarian rule\nThe history of the advent of universal suffrage is a fraught one. As late as the mid-twentieth century, it was still impeded by forms of censitary, racial and sexual discrimination, which proved especially stubborn in countries with the most rooted liberal tradition. Moreover, no sooner had it been achieved than universal suffrage was subject to internal depletion that reduced the exercise of political rights to the acclamation of a leader vested with very wide powers.\nIn and through a complex historical process, Bonapartism has assumed its current 'soft' form, involving orderly competition and succession and resorting to the iron fist only in emergency situations. The electoral system most conducive to this regime seems to be one involving single-member constituencies. Cutting out organized parties with programmes and, courtesy also of the gigantic concentration of the mass media, depriving the subaltern classes of any political expression, it reduces 'democracy' to a contest between competing leaders, who are the interpreters exclusively oflocal realities or interests, over and above which towers the figure of thenation's charismatic leader. The United States represents the primary country-laboratory of the 'soft Bonapartism' that has also emerged in Italy, and which seems set to become the political regime of our time.

Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy

Legal Theory & Systems

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Losurdo, Domenico. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Losurdo, Domenico

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Losurdo, Domenico. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend

Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend

Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)

Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (Historical Materialism)

Liberalism: A Counter-History

War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century

Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy