Renate Holub - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Renate Holub

Journal of Social Sciences, 2001

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Aug 30, 2003

Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe ... more Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe worked primarily with national concepts. In the twentieth century, nationalist ideologies have, of course, lost some of their glamour due to the impact of two disastrous world wars. But while leading European intellectuals over the past 50 years developed a research program that transcended the national spirit, they nonetheless remained bound by the concept of “modernity,†which comprises the concept of the modern nation state and the modern nation state system. Steeped in this cultural unconscious, Europe has neglected the systematic study of alternative modernities and alternative systems of governmentality -- including systems of democratic governmentality in the internet age -- especially as these alternative modernities relate to the influx of Muslim populations. Key conceptual relations: modernity and violence; intellectuals north-south; ontology of peace and ontology of violence; modern modes of knowledge organization and alternative modes of knowledge organization; history of jurisprudence 1500-1700 and inversion of rights; principle of rights and principle of the mind/soul; anthropological principal of the human capacity for justice; ontology of violence and modern philosophy; ontology of violence and modern social sciences; right to the right to knowledge on global peace and disciplinary censorship.

In this article, I approach Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi as members of a par-ticular generation... more In this article, I approach Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi as members of a par-ticular generation in Europe. Since all three of them were born late in the 19th century, they could not but experience a range of world-historical events. These ranged from World War One, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and failed attempts at socialist revo-lutions on the European continent to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the expan-sion of European colonialism in the Middle East, the spectacular collapse of the transat-lantic capitalist financial system in October of 1929, and the gradual assumption of shared geopolitical hegemony on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union. By the same token, Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi, as European intellectuals, could not but develop their predominant conceptions of the world in the context of a particular space of intellectual systems [Idealism, Marxism, Utilitarianism, Positivism, Historicism, etc]. While all of these intellectual syste...

Journal of Social Sciences, 2001

Italica, 1994

This book deals with Gramsci as a critic of the twentieth century. Christopher Norris, the editor... more This book deals with Gramsci as a critic of the twentieth century. Christopher Norris, the editor of the present series, was the first person to suggest the topic to me, and I would like to thank him here not only for doing so, but also for his unfailing friendship over the years and the many new ideas and ways of seeing he brought into my life. I would also like to thank Janice Price, the editor at Routledge, for her admirable patience. It was a great pleasure working with her. Along the way, while I was working on the project, various friends have been supportive. Volker Gransow and Gregory Vlastos have listened, over lunch or coffee, to fragmented and disjointed minilectures on Gramsci, and they have always, and with kind words, encouraged me. Two very good friends, on the East and West Coasts respectively, have reminded me intermittently, and in no uncertain terms, that I 'should get it done'. Thank you for your advice and friendship, Peter (Carravetta) and Lucia (Birnbaum), which have served me well. Many sections of the book I had the opportunity to present at various conferences, and I would like to thank those friends who invited me to do so. Again, my thanks to Peter Carravetta and Lucia Birnbaum, and also to Anthony Tamburri and Tibor Wlassics. My students at UC-Berkeley in 'The Feminist Challenge to Critical Theory' (Fall 1989) and 'Gramsci, Western Marxism, Gender' (Spring 1990) got to know many of the ideas presented in the book, and their challenging questions, unsettling as some of them seemed at the time, have found their way, I think, in one way or another, into the final version of the project. I would like to thank Melissa Ptacek, Nadia Babella, Winifred Poster, Melissa Gum and Lisa Daniel; and also Liz Goodstein and Mary Foertsch, women whose practical feminisms have meant a lot to me. There are two more very special friends I would like to thank here: Bob Holub and Alexei Holub, both of whom had little choice but to live with me during the ups and downs of completing this project. I would like to thank both of you very much. In particular, I am indebted in many ways to my companion Bob, who listened to me on Gramscian matters on innumerable occasions and helped me with technical and not-so-technical problems alike, and, above all, whose solid knowledge of twentieth-century theory and intellectual history provided an excellent structure to my lifeworld within which it was a pleasure to construct my own version of Gramsci's critical theories. To you, Bob, and to Alexei, a big hug.

Differentia: Review of Italian Thought, 1991

Perspectives on Politics, 2016

It has been the signature of Fred Dallmayr’s major intellectual inquiries over the past 50 years ... more It has been the signature of Fred Dallmayr’s major intellectual inquiries over the past 50 years or so not only to critique fundamental aspects of the paradigm of transatlantic modernity but also to reassess those of its values which lend themselves to integration into a humanistic democratic vision. In earlier publications, Dallmayr predominantly focused diasapprobation on philosophical knowledge formations excessively organized around the Cartesian concepts of individual rationality in order to philosophically overcome the dualistic separation of mind from matter, the subject from the object, culture from nature, and thought from spirituality. Thereby, he had critically assessed the limits of the beliefs in the virtues of the scientific control and manipulation of nature, of secularism, and individual liberalism. Over the past 20 years or so, he has predominatly inquired into ways in which Western ethnocentricity, a major pillar of the paradigm of modernity, can be overcome by practices that involve nongovernmentally organized intercivilizational dialogues with important leading intellectuals from practically all global regions. The publication under review is, from my perspective, nonetheless unique among Dallmayr’s intellectual accomplishments to date in that it constitutes his most interdisciplinary approach to modernity’s scarred relations between freedom and solidarity, on one hand, while simultaneously participating in the construction of a global coalition of intellectuals for assessing the conditions of possibility for reconciliations between Eastern and Western experiential forms of freedom, solidarity, and spirituality, on the other hand. Through this humanistic coalition, which includes leading figures such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, John Dewey, Ashis Nandy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus, Leo Tolstoy, Raimon Pannikar, Tu Weiming, and the so-called renaissance traditions from within Islamic thought (Al Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Ruschd), Dallmayr explores the construction of solidarious relations on a global scale in order to overcome the traditional tensions between individual freedom and solidarity embedded in Western mainstream political, social, economic, and cultural thought. Both Dallmayr’s critique ofmodernity and the construction of a global intellectual and spiritual coalition on the subject of conciliatory relations between freedom and solidarity is framed by fundamental philosophical assumptions derived fromMartin Heidegger’s famous inquiries on the Seinsfrage, or on the question of Being. In this context, where one reaches out toward the meaning of Being, one cannot but share one’s freedom through collective existence, orMitsein. Here, the Cartesian separation of ego from society, of the subject from the object, of the res cogitans from the res extensa, of mind from spirituality, of culture from nature, no longer holds. It can be overcome. The assumption of such a Heideggerian position lends itself to a critique of the laissez-faire market triumphalisms of neoclassical and neoliberal macroeconomics, respectively symbolized by the twentieth-century Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. In addition, the author argues that to the extent to which oligarchic corporate and financial elites attempt to control and manipulate the political, social, and cultural conduct in the daily lives of the masses of the people, democracy has turned into a fragile system. When, furthermore, politicians are purchased by the highest bidder, or when citizens are predominantly valued on account of their individual buying power, then Dallmayr recalls Karl Polanyi’s unexampled analysis of the dangerous separation of the economic sphere from culture, history, and ethics, while observing the simple fact that only individuals with the means to participate in consumerism exercize individual choice. Finally, Dallmayr critically addresses the pervasive cultures of violence by confronting them with a promotion of cultures of nonviolence, as evidenced by an entire series of public intellectuals and writers from the East to the West over the past two centuries. Central in this context are the reappraisals of Ghandi’s practices of nonviolent disobedience, Camus’s rejection of violence as part of the human condition, Tolstoy’s holistic view of the multiple relations between human communities and their environments, and Dewey’s pragmatic design on the relations between the self and society. Under the impulsions of such diverse traditions, all pointing in various degrees to foundational reassessments of the predominant Western conceptions of the relations between individual freedom and solidarious practice, Dallmayr concludes that a paradigm shift is impending (p. 111) in that a consciousness rooted in individual selfinterest, secularism, and anthrocentrism is increasingly poised to allow for greater ethico-religious considerations. Hinduism and Buddhism in particular lend themselves for…

Modern Italy, 2007

This volume on the Risorgimento and the unification in Italy first appeared in English in 2002, a... more This volume on the Risorgimento and the unification in Italy first appeared in English in 2002, and parts of it appear to have received copyrights that date back to 1971. Since the early 1970s, there has been a lively discussion in a variety of social science quarters with respect to the criteria that measure the level of 'modernity' of individual nation states-of both the global North and global South. Among these criteria are levels of democratization, economic development, and social inclusion. Reflections on 'modernity' and its 'others' or 'alternative modernities' have contributed to reexamining predominant theoretical parameters underlying the presentation of the histories of individual nation states in Europe. In the Italian case, the modernization history of which indicates considerable variation as compared to that of Britain, France, and Germany, the 'question of modernity' has generated very useful historiographical innovations. The book under review here is a case in point. In it, the political events of Italy's unifications in 1861 and 1871, and the Risorgimento movement preceding unification, are conceptually placed in the broad context of European economic modernization processes, spearheaded by the powerful capitalist economies of Britain, Germany, and France. It is thus no surprise that chapter 10 of this book, which focuses on the years 1863-76, deploys in its title terms such as 'free trade' and 'globalization'. The historical events within Italy as it turned into a modern nation state are thus framed in a European context of political economy. This framework considerably enables the authors first of all to distance themselves from the historiographical habit of personifying political eras, a habit that simplistically links the pace of economicpolitical development of a nation to the virtues or vices of a political leader. More importantly, this framework enables the authors to present the Risorgimento and Italy's unification as a process that is both national and international, as it is forged by domestic as well as foreign economic and geopolitical interests. This relational approach is beneficial for presenting the history of nineteenth century Italy not from a linear but from a dialectical point of view. At the same time, the authors' dialectics do not go far enough. For Italy's national history is tied not only to Europe but also to the global history of a capitalist economic world system. The focus of the book is, of course, not the economic world system of global capitalism, but Italy's integration in the nineteenth century into a European capitalist system, intermittently driven, as it was, by laissez-faire economic policy and protectionism. This economic framework, and hence economic conceptuality, impacts the political vocabulary of the authors' operations.

Italica, 1987

NEW VICO STUDIES publishes articles, reviews, abstracts, and notes that reflect the current state... more NEW VICO STUDIES publishes articles, reviews, abstracts, and notes that reflect the current state of the study of the thought of Giambattista Vico. The editors understand the study of Vico to be not only the study of Vico's works but to be inclusive of ideas that are Vichian in nature, ideas that may have some special interest for those involved in Vico's thought. The INSTITUTE FOR VICO STUDIES is located both in New York and in The Department of Philosophy of Emory University, in Atlanta, GA.

Italica, 1996

... [Selections. English. 19915] Further selections from the prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci: ... more ... [Selections. English. 19915] Further selections from the prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci: edited and translated by Derek Boothman. p. cm. ...

Italica, 1996

This comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Giovanni Battista Vico puts all the elements... more This comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Giovanni Battista Vico puts all the elements of his theories of authority, politics and civil religion in their proper relationship with his theory of history. As such, it raises provocative questions about the subsequent intellectual development of the anti-modern tradition as it relates to the historical and social sciences of our time.

Journal of Social Sciences, 2001

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Aug 30, 2003

Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe ... more Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe worked primarily with national concepts. In the twentieth century, nationalist ideologies have, of course, lost some of their glamour due to the impact of two disastrous world wars. But while leading European intellectuals over the past 50 years developed a research program that transcended the national spirit, they nonetheless remained bound by the concept of “modernity,†which comprises the concept of the modern nation state and the modern nation state system. Steeped in this cultural unconscious, Europe has neglected the systematic study of alternative modernities and alternative systems of governmentality -- including systems of democratic governmentality in the internet age -- especially as these alternative modernities relate to the influx of Muslim populations. Key conceptual relations: modernity and violence; intellectuals north-south; ontology of peace and ontology of violence; modern modes of knowledge organization and alternative modes of knowledge organization; history of jurisprudence 1500-1700 and inversion of rights; principle of rights and principle of the mind/soul; anthropological principal of the human capacity for justice; ontology of violence and modern philosophy; ontology of violence and modern social sciences; right to the right to knowledge on global peace and disciplinary censorship.

In this article, I approach Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi as members of a par-ticular generation... more In this article, I approach Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi as members of a par-ticular generation in Europe. Since all three of them were born late in the 19th century, they could not but experience a range of world-historical events. These ranged from World War One, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and failed attempts at socialist revo-lutions on the European continent to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the expan-sion of European colonialism in the Middle East, the spectacular collapse of the transat-lantic capitalist financial system in October of 1929, and the gradual assumption of shared geopolitical hegemony on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union. By the same token, Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi, as European intellectuals, could not but develop their predominant conceptions of the world in the context of a particular space of intellectual systems [Idealism, Marxism, Utilitarianism, Positivism, Historicism, etc]. While all of these intellectual syste...

Journal of Social Sciences, 2001

Italica, 1994

This book deals with Gramsci as a critic of the twentieth century. Christopher Norris, the editor... more This book deals with Gramsci as a critic of the twentieth century. Christopher Norris, the editor of the present series, was the first person to suggest the topic to me, and I would like to thank him here not only for doing so, but also for his unfailing friendship over the years and the many new ideas and ways of seeing he brought into my life. I would also like to thank Janice Price, the editor at Routledge, for her admirable patience. It was a great pleasure working with her. Along the way, while I was working on the project, various friends have been supportive. Volker Gransow and Gregory Vlastos have listened, over lunch or coffee, to fragmented and disjointed minilectures on Gramsci, and they have always, and with kind words, encouraged me. Two very good friends, on the East and West Coasts respectively, have reminded me intermittently, and in no uncertain terms, that I 'should get it done'. Thank you for your advice and friendship, Peter (Carravetta) and Lucia (Birnbaum), which have served me well. Many sections of the book I had the opportunity to present at various conferences, and I would like to thank those friends who invited me to do so. Again, my thanks to Peter Carravetta and Lucia Birnbaum, and also to Anthony Tamburri and Tibor Wlassics. My students at UC-Berkeley in 'The Feminist Challenge to Critical Theory' (Fall 1989) and 'Gramsci, Western Marxism, Gender' (Spring 1990) got to know many of the ideas presented in the book, and their challenging questions, unsettling as some of them seemed at the time, have found their way, I think, in one way or another, into the final version of the project. I would like to thank Melissa Ptacek, Nadia Babella, Winifred Poster, Melissa Gum and Lisa Daniel; and also Liz Goodstein and Mary Foertsch, women whose practical feminisms have meant a lot to me. There are two more very special friends I would like to thank here: Bob Holub and Alexei Holub, both of whom had little choice but to live with me during the ups and downs of completing this project. I would like to thank both of you very much. In particular, I am indebted in many ways to my companion Bob, who listened to me on Gramscian matters on innumerable occasions and helped me with technical and not-so-technical problems alike, and, above all, whose solid knowledge of twentieth-century theory and intellectual history provided an excellent structure to my lifeworld within which it was a pleasure to construct my own version of Gramsci's critical theories. To you, Bob, and to Alexei, a big hug.

Differentia: Review of Italian Thought, 1991

Perspectives on Politics, 2016

It has been the signature of Fred Dallmayr’s major intellectual inquiries over the past 50 years ... more It has been the signature of Fred Dallmayr’s major intellectual inquiries over the past 50 years or so not only to critique fundamental aspects of the paradigm of transatlantic modernity but also to reassess those of its values which lend themselves to integration into a humanistic democratic vision. In earlier publications, Dallmayr predominantly focused diasapprobation on philosophical knowledge formations excessively organized around the Cartesian concepts of individual rationality in order to philosophically overcome the dualistic separation of mind from matter, the subject from the object, culture from nature, and thought from spirituality. Thereby, he had critically assessed the limits of the beliefs in the virtues of the scientific control and manipulation of nature, of secularism, and individual liberalism. Over the past 20 years or so, he has predominatly inquired into ways in which Western ethnocentricity, a major pillar of the paradigm of modernity, can be overcome by practices that involve nongovernmentally organized intercivilizational dialogues with important leading intellectuals from practically all global regions. The publication under review is, from my perspective, nonetheless unique among Dallmayr’s intellectual accomplishments to date in that it constitutes his most interdisciplinary approach to modernity’s scarred relations between freedom and solidarity, on one hand, while simultaneously participating in the construction of a global coalition of intellectuals for assessing the conditions of possibility for reconciliations between Eastern and Western experiential forms of freedom, solidarity, and spirituality, on the other hand. Through this humanistic coalition, which includes leading figures such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, John Dewey, Ashis Nandy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus, Leo Tolstoy, Raimon Pannikar, Tu Weiming, and the so-called renaissance traditions from within Islamic thought (Al Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Ruschd), Dallmayr explores the construction of solidarious relations on a global scale in order to overcome the traditional tensions between individual freedom and solidarity embedded in Western mainstream political, social, economic, and cultural thought. Both Dallmayr’s critique ofmodernity and the construction of a global intellectual and spiritual coalition on the subject of conciliatory relations between freedom and solidarity is framed by fundamental philosophical assumptions derived fromMartin Heidegger’s famous inquiries on the Seinsfrage, or on the question of Being. In this context, where one reaches out toward the meaning of Being, one cannot but share one’s freedom through collective existence, orMitsein. Here, the Cartesian separation of ego from society, of the subject from the object, of the res cogitans from the res extensa, of mind from spirituality, of culture from nature, no longer holds. It can be overcome. The assumption of such a Heideggerian position lends itself to a critique of the laissez-faire market triumphalisms of neoclassical and neoliberal macroeconomics, respectively symbolized by the twentieth-century Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. In addition, the author argues that to the extent to which oligarchic corporate and financial elites attempt to control and manipulate the political, social, and cultural conduct in the daily lives of the masses of the people, democracy has turned into a fragile system. When, furthermore, politicians are purchased by the highest bidder, or when citizens are predominantly valued on account of their individual buying power, then Dallmayr recalls Karl Polanyi’s unexampled analysis of the dangerous separation of the economic sphere from culture, history, and ethics, while observing the simple fact that only individuals with the means to participate in consumerism exercize individual choice. Finally, Dallmayr critically addresses the pervasive cultures of violence by confronting them with a promotion of cultures of nonviolence, as evidenced by an entire series of public intellectuals and writers from the East to the West over the past two centuries. Central in this context are the reappraisals of Ghandi’s practices of nonviolent disobedience, Camus’s rejection of violence as part of the human condition, Tolstoy’s holistic view of the multiple relations between human communities and their environments, and Dewey’s pragmatic design on the relations between the self and society. Under the impulsions of such diverse traditions, all pointing in various degrees to foundational reassessments of the predominant Western conceptions of the relations between individual freedom and solidarious practice, Dallmayr concludes that a paradigm shift is impending (p. 111) in that a consciousness rooted in individual selfinterest, secularism, and anthrocentrism is increasingly poised to allow for greater ethico-religious considerations. Hinduism and Buddhism in particular lend themselves for…

Modern Italy, 2007

This volume on the Risorgimento and the unification in Italy first appeared in English in 2002, a... more This volume on the Risorgimento and the unification in Italy first appeared in English in 2002, and parts of it appear to have received copyrights that date back to 1971. Since the early 1970s, there has been a lively discussion in a variety of social science quarters with respect to the criteria that measure the level of 'modernity' of individual nation states-of both the global North and global South. Among these criteria are levels of democratization, economic development, and social inclusion. Reflections on 'modernity' and its 'others' or 'alternative modernities' have contributed to reexamining predominant theoretical parameters underlying the presentation of the histories of individual nation states in Europe. In the Italian case, the modernization history of which indicates considerable variation as compared to that of Britain, France, and Germany, the 'question of modernity' has generated very useful historiographical innovations. The book under review here is a case in point. In it, the political events of Italy's unifications in 1861 and 1871, and the Risorgimento movement preceding unification, are conceptually placed in the broad context of European economic modernization processes, spearheaded by the powerful capitalist economies of Britain, Germany, and France. It is thus no surprise that chapter 10 of this book, which focuses on the years 1863-76, deploys in its title terms such as 'free trade' and 'globalization'. The historical events within Italy as it turned into a modern nation state are thus framed in a European context of political economy. This framework considerably enables the authors first of all to distance themselves from the historiographical habit of personifying political eras, a habit that simplistically links the pace of economicpolitical development of a nation to the virtues or vices of a political leader. More importantly, this framework enables the authors to present the Risorgimento and Italy's unification as a process that is both national and international, as it is forged by domestic as well as foreign economic and geopolitical interests. This relational approach is beneficial for presenting the history of nineteenth century Italy not from a linear but from a dialectical point of view. At the same time, the authors' dialectics do not go far enough. For Italy's national history is tied not only to Europe but also to the global history of a capitalist economic world system. The focus of the book is, of course, not the economic world system of global capitalism, but Italy's integration in the nineteenth century into a European capitalist system, intermittently driven, as it was, by laissez-faire economic policy and protectionism. This economic framework, and hence economic conceptuality, impacts the political vocabulary of the authors' operations.

Italica, 1987

NEW VICO STUDIES publishes articles, reviews, abstracts, and notes that reflect the current state... more NEW VICO STUDIES publishes articles, reviews, abstracts, and notes that reflect the current state of the study of the thought of Giambattista Vico. The editors understand the study of Vico to be not only the study of Vico's works but to be inclusive of ideas that are Vichian in nature, ideas that may have some special interest for those involved in Vico's thought. The INSTITUTE FOR VICO STUDIES is located both in New York and in The Department of Philosophy of Emory University, in Atlanta, GA.

Italica, 1996

... [Selections. English. 19915] Further selections from the prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci: ... more ... [Selections. English. 19915] Further selections from the prison notebooks / Antonio Gramsci: edited and translated by Derek Boothman. p. cm. ...

Italica, 1996

This comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Giovanni Battista Vico puts all the elements... more This comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Giovanni Battista Vico puts all the elements of his theories of authority, politics and civil religion in their proper relationship with his theory of history. As such, it raises provocative questions about the subsequent intellectual development of the anti-modern tradition as it relates to the historical and social sciences of our time.