Aviezer Tucker | University of Ostrava (original) (raw)

Books by Aviezer Tucker

Cambridge University Press, 2024

Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empir... more Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis.
Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor
a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is
irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. This
Element applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic
reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission
of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed
historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and
independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A
history of historiographic reasoning since the late eighteenth
century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific
revolution across the historical sciences in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The underdetermination of
historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic
reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further
explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and the theory.

Polity Press, 2020

It should not surprise anyone that democracies can become dangerously illiberal; indeed, it was o... more It should not surprise anyone that democracies can become dangerously illiberal; indeed, it was one of the classical critiques of ancient democracies. Is the contemporary backlash against liberal democracy merely the same old story, or are we witnessing something unprecedented?

In this witty and engaging book, Aviezer Tucker argues that the contemporary revival of authoritarian populism combines the historically familiar with new technologies to produce a highly unstable and contagious new synthesis that threatens basic liberal norms, from freedom of the press to independent judiciaries. He examines how the economic crisis blocked social mobility and thereby awakened the dark, dormant political passions exploited by demagogues such as Orban and Trump. He argues that this slide towards ‘neo-illiberal democracy’ can be countered if we hard-headedly restore a ‘liberalism without nostalgia’ which institutes policies that can dampen down populist passions and strengthen liberal institutional barriers against them.

Readers interested in current affairs, social science, history, and political and social theory will find Aviezer Tucker’s original theoretical and historical analysis incisive, innovative, and entertaining.

Cambridge University Press, Oct 15, 2015

A political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights,... more A political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions like higher education, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse.
The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interests. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and consequentialist theories, conservative.
Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education meet New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identifies opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. I illustrate these legacies in writings of Habermas, Derrida and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidents, and totalitarianism.

Endorsements:

“Discussion about post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has long been tethered to imprecise, ideologically driven thinking. This book reframes the conversation in a manner befitting the region’s unique history and plugs a lingering gap in political theory.”
– Benjamin Cunningham, Prague correspondent for The Economist

“’Only dissidents can save us now. This will be the one truly positive legacy of totalitarianism (maybe together with public transportation),’ writes Aviezer Tucker. His book deals with the negative aspects of this legacy, though – and there are plenty of them, not only in the East. Essential reading at a time when the history of Central and Eastern Europe seems unfinished, again.”
– Aleksander Kaczorowski, editor of Aspen Review Central Europe

“In this superb and long-awaited book, Aviezer Tucker writes from a deep understanding of totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes, mainly under Communism but also elsewhere. In his vivid phrase, ‘Totalitarianism is not dead, it merely disintegrated. Its pieces are spread all over and they can be put back together again.’ Ranging from painstaking empirical documentation to acute conceptual analyses, written with passion and irony, the book will undermine the complacency and willful blindness of many Western intellectuals and politicians.”
– Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

“Aviezer Tucker does not let us forget the totalitarian past – and with good reason. In this admirably comprehensive book, he revisits the much-debated (but later ignored) notions of totalitarianism, late totalitarianism, and post-totalitarianism and offers a powerful, thought-provoking interpretation of their legacies. Tucker discusses interrelated issues in elite change, lustration, transitional justice, property rights, and the configuration of post-totalitarian thinking in a way that opens new insights for academic debates. This book is a welcome contribution to studies in both political philosophy and historical sociology.”
– András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University

Routledge, 2015

Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on ... more Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on actual social contracts that are explicitly negotiated and signed between states and their prospective citizens. The explicit social contract, or a constitution, sets the terms under which a state may use coercion against its citizens and the conditions under which the contract may be annulled, revised, rescinded, or otherwise exited from. Panarchy does not advocate any particular model of the state or social justice, but intends to encourage political variety, innovation, experimentation, and choice. With its emphasis on explicit social contracts, Panarchy offers an interesting variation on traditional social contract theories.

Today, Panarchist political thought is particularly relevant and interesting in the context of globalization, increased international migration, the weakening of national sovereignty, the rise of the internet "cloud" as a non-territorial locus of political and protopolitical social networks that are not geographic, the invention of cryptocurrencies that may replace national currencies, and the rise of urban centers where people of many different political identities live and work together.

This is the first volume to bring together key philosophically and politically interesting yet often overlooked Panarchist texts. From the first published translation of de Puydt seminal 1860 article to contemporary Silicon Valley political theory, the volume includes Panarchist texts from different eras, cultures and geographical regions. The amassed wealth of theoretical insight enables readers to compare different texts in this tradition of political thought and distinguish different streams and varieties within this political tradition, in comparison with Cosmopolitanism, Contractarianism, and Anarchism.

Prometheus Press, 2013

Plato for Everyone takes the still-relevant issues of Plato’s time and recasts five of the Greek ... more Plato for Everyone takes the still-relevant issues of Plato’s time and recasts five of the Greek philosopher’s dialogues into accessible and entertaining short stories, capturing their tone, wit, and philosophical essence in a modern interpretation.

Blackwell, 2008

The fifty entries in this Companion cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography a... more The fifty entries in this Companion cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography and history, including natural history and the practices of historians. •Written by an international and multi-disciplinary group of experts
•A cutting-edge updated picture of current research in the field
•Part of the renowned Blackwell Companions series

Cambridge University Press, 2004

This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that reveal scientific knowledge o... more This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that reveal scientific knowledge of the past. Aviezer Tucker argues that historiography as a scientific discipline should be considered an attempt to analyze the evidence of past events. This new approach to historiography will interest philosophers, historians and social scientists concerned with the methodological foundations of their disciplines.

Pittsburgh University Press, 2000

Theory meets practice in The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel, a... more Theory meets practice in The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel, a critical study of the philosophy and political practice of the Czech dissident movement Charter 77. Aviezer Tucker examines how the political philosophy of Jan Patocka (1907–1977), founder of Charter 77, influenced the thinking and political leadership of Vaclav Havel as dissident and president. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel is the first serious treatment of Havel as philosopher and Patocka as a political thinker. Through the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, opponents of communism based their civil struggle for human rights on philosophic foundations, and members of the Charter 77 later led the Velvet Revolution. After Patocka’s self-sacrifice in 1977, Vaclav Havel emerged a strong philosophical and political force, and he continued to apply Patocka’s philosophy in order to understand the human condition under late communism and the meaning of dissidence. However, the political/philosophical orientation of the Charter 77 movement failed to provide President Havel with an adequate basis for comprehending and responding to the extraordinary political and economic problems of the postcommunist period. In his discussion of Havel's presidency and the eventual corruption of the Velvet Revolution, Tucker demonstrates that the weaknesses in Charter 77 member's understanding of modernity, which did not matter while they were dissidents, seriously harmed their ability to function in a modern democratic system. Within this context, Tucker also examines Havel’s recent attempt to topple the democratic but corrupt government in 1997–1998. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel will be of interest to students of philosophy and politics, scholars and students of Slavic studies, and historians, as well as anyone fascinated by the nature of dissidence.

Papers by Aviezer Tucker

Perspectives on Science, 2024

Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers... more Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers. Originary sciences identify information preserving receivers and decode the signals to infer their origins. Paradigmatic cases of scientific origination such as the Big Bang, the origins of species, horizontal gene transfer, the origin of the Polynesian potato, and ideational origins in the history of ideas are analyzed to discover what is common to them ontologically and epistemically. Some causes are not origins. Origination supervenes on causation, but has different properties. The unique properties of origins that causes do not share shield theories of origination from the kind of counterexamples and counterintuitive results that challenge comparable theories of causation. The epistemology of origination may serve as a basis for founding a novel epistemic and methodological division of the sciences into originary historical sciences and causal theoretical sciences.

Institutions of the Soviet Block, Manuela Ungureanu ed., 2024

Analysis of post-Communist and Post-Nazi Historiographic Revisionism

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, 2023

This paper applies Bayesian theories to critically analyse and offer reforms of intelligence anal... more This paper applies Bayesian theories to critically analyse and offer reforms of intelligence analysis, collection, analysis, and decision making on the basis of Human Intelligence, Signals Intelligence, and Communication Intelligence. The article criticises the reliabilities of existing intelligence methodologies to demonstrate the need for Bayesian reforms. The proposed epistemic reform program for intelligence analysis should generate more reliable inferences. It distinguishes the transmission of knowledge from its generation, and consists of Bayesian three stages modular model for the generation of reliable intelligence from multiple coherent and independent testimonial sources, and for the tracing and analysis of intelligence failures. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research, the development of artificial intellignce that may measure coherence and reliability of HUMINT sources and infer intelligence following the outlined general modular model.

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2022

This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous... more This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique singular events. Introspective historicism considers the epistemology of historiography to be founded on self-knowledge. Scientistic historicism considers historiography an applied psychology or social science that can expand to overtake the social sciences. Methodological historicism extends the use of historiographic methodologies to unreliable or dependent evidence. The first four historicisms are inconsistent with historiography within bounds and implode. Methodological historicism describes proper historiographic methodologies that are applied out of their proper bounds, but are used in historiography based on the epistemology of testimony and the tracing of the transmission of information from historical event to historiographic evidence.

Key terms: Historicism, philosophy of historiography, Physicalism, Scientism, Epistemology of Testimony, Idiographic science, Introspection, self-knowledge, Neo-Kantian philosophy.

Anthony Jensen & Carlotte Santini eds., Nietzsche on Memory and History: the Re-Encountered Shadow, 2020

I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of... more I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of origins. I am interested here in distinguishing what is different, and pardon the pun, original, in Nietzsche’s concepts of origins and genealogies by comparing it with the alternative mythical, rationalist, and scientific concepts of origins.
I identify four types of origins that share family relations: Mythical, Rationalist, Genealogical, and Scientific. I distinguish between them according to six criteria: The ontology of the origins and what they transfer; how they transfer what they transfer; whether what they transfer is path dependent on the origin; teleology, do origins have a manifest destiny; value judgements about the origins, positive, negative, both, or neither; and finally, the epistemology of the inference of origins.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2020

This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins. I... more This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins. It distinguishes and subjects to critical analysis thirteen interpretations of “the inference of common cause” whose conclusions do not follow from their assumptions. Instead, I introduce six types of inferences of common origins of information signals from their receivers to reduce, in the sense of supersede and replace, the thirteen inferences of common causes. I show how the paradigmatic examples of inferences of common cause, as well as a broader scope of inferences in the historical sciences, are better explained by inferences of origins.
Inferences of origins from information rich coherences between receivers of information signals both fit more closely and explain better the range of examples that have traditionally been associated with inferences of common causes, as well as a broader scope of examples from the historical sciences. Shannon’s concept of information as reduction in uncertainty, rather than physicalist concepts of information that relate it to entropy or waves, simplifies the inferences, preempts objections, and avoids the underdetermination of conclusions that challenge models of inferences of causes from information transmissions.
In the second part of the paper I model inferences of information about common origins from information preserved in their receivers. I distinguish information poor inferences that there were some common origins of receivers from the information richer inferences of ranges of possible common origins and the information transmission channels by which they transmitted signals to receivers. Lastly and most information rich, I distinguish the inference of the defining properties of common origins. The information transmission model from origins to receivers allows the reconceptualization of the concepts of independence as absence of intersections between information channels and reliability as the preservation of information from origins in receivers. Finally, I show how inferences of origins form the epistemic basis of the historical sciences.

Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, 2020

Handbook of historical musicology. Introduction and reflection on the methods of the discipline. ... more Handbook of historical musicology. Introduction and reflection on the methods of the discipline. In general the volume advocates a scientific approach towards music historiography.

The American Interest, 2019

Storia della Storiografia, 2019

Historiography and jurisprudence are founded on the epistemology of testimony. They generate know... more Historiography and jurisprudence are founded on the epistemology of testimony. They generate knowledge mostly, though not exclusively, from testimonies. Reliance on the epistemology of testimony distinguishes jurisprudence and historiography from the empirical sciences that infer knowledge from sense data, and from mathematics and logic that infer a-priori knowledge from reason.
This article models how independent multiple coherent testimonies generate probable knowledge in historiography and jurisprudence. Individual testimonies can at most transmit their own reliabilities. Multiple independent testimonies, even unreliable but coherent and independent testimonies, can generate knowledge with higher probability than any of the testimonies. For this reason, historians, detectives, and triers search for coherent, yet independent, testimonies.
I discuss in particular the concepts of coherence between testimonies, the independence of testimonies, and their reliability. I argue that all these concepts are best understood as aspects of information flows from events to testimonies. I present a new modular model of the inference of knowledge from testimonies in three stages that fits the best practices of institutionally embedded expert historians, jurists, and detectives, who infer knowledge from multiple testimonies.

Ethical Perspectives, 2018

An application of the theories about risk distribution of Beck and risk assessments of Luhmann an... more An application of the theories about risk distribution of Beck and risk assessments of Luhmann and Giddens, and Schmidtz’ theory of justice as the internalization of externalities to understand the social and political reactions to new “unconventional” technologies for extracting natural gas and oil from shale rock discovered correlations between injustice in the distribution of risks and rewards and risk assessment and trust, reinforced by a feedback causal loop where high assessment of risk and distrust reinforce each other. The unaccountability of technocratic and political elites increased distrust and generated a feedback causal loop that increased the unaccountability of elite decision making, when elites adjusted to popular distrust by attempting to make decisions about the distribution of risk from new technologies in stealth or when the population was distracted. Geopolitical risk may balance technological risk assessment when assuming technological risks reduces geopolitical risks. The article applies this model to explain the politics and policies of unconventional energy in Europe. It further supports the model by a comparison with regulatory policies for the extraction of unconventional energy resources in the United States and by examining a case in England where the government attempted to decrease injustice in the distribution of risk.

Cambridge University Press, 2024

Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empir... more Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis.
Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor
a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is
irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. This
Element applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic
reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission
of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed
historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and
independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A
history of historiographic reasoning since the late eighteenth
century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific
revolution across the historical sciences in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The underdetermination of
historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic
reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further
explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and the theory.

Polity Press, 2020

It should not surprise anyone that democracies can become dangerously illiberal; indeed, it was o... more It should not surprise anyone that democracies can become dangerously illiberal; indeed, it was one of the classical critiques of ancient democracies. Is the contemporary backlash against liberal democracy merely the same old story, or are we witnessing something unprecedented?

In this witty and engaging book, Aviezer Tucker argues that the contemporary revival of authoritarian populism combines the historically familiar with new technologies to produce a highly unstable and contagious new synthesis that threatens basic liberal norms, from freedom of the press to independent judiciaries. He examines how the economic crisis blocked social mobility and thereby awakened the dark, dormant political passions exploited by demagogues such as Orban and Trump. He argues that this slide towards ‘neo-illiberal democracy’ can be countered if we hard-headedly restore a ‘liberalism without nostalgia’ which institutes policies that can dampen down populist passions and strengthen liberal institutional barriers against them.

Readers interested in current affairs, social science, history, and political and social theory will find Aviezer Tucker’s original theoretical and historical analysis incisive, innovative, and entertaining.

Cambridge University Press, Oct 15, 2015

A political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights,... more A political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions like higher education, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse.
The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interests. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and consequentialist theories, conservative.
Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education meet New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identifies opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. I illustrate these legacies in writings of Habermas, Derrida and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidents, and totalitarianism.

Endorsements:

“Discussion about post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has long been tethered to imprecise, ideologically driven thinking. This book reframes the conversation in a manner befitting the region’s unique history and plugs a lingering gap in political theory.”
– Benjamin Cunningham, Prague correspondent for The Economist

“’Only dissidents can save us now. This will be the one truly positive legacy of totalitarianism (maybe together with public transportation),’ writes Aviezer Tucker. His book deals with the negative aspects of this legacy, though – and there are plenty of them, not only in the East. Essential reading at a time when the history of Central and Eastern Europe seems unfinished, again.”
– Aleksander Kaczorowski, editor of Aspen Review Central Europe

“In this superb and long-awaited book, Aviezer Tucker writes from a deep understanding of totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes, mainly under Communism but also elsewhere. In his vivid phrase, ‘Totalitarianism is not dead, it merely disintegrated. Its pieces are spread all over and they can be put back together again.’ Ranging from painstaking empirical documentation to acute conceptual analyses, written with passion and irony, the book will undermine the complacency and willful blindness of many Western intellectuals and politicians.”
– Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

“Aviezer Tucker does not let us forget the totalitarian past – and with good reason. In this admirably comprehensive book, he revisits the much-debated (but later ignored) notions of totalitarianism, late totalitarianism, and post-totalitarianism and offers a powerful, thought-provoking interpretation of their legacies. Tucker discusses interrelated issues in elite change, lustration, transitional justice, property rights, and the configuration of post-totalitarian thinking in a way that opens new insights for academic debates. This book is a welcome contribution to studies in both political philosophy and historical sociology.”
– András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University

Routledge, 2015

Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on ... more Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on actual social contracts that are explicitly negotiated and signed between states and their prospective citizens. The explicit social contract, or a constitution, sets the terms under which a state may use coercion against its citizens and the conditions under which the contract may be annulled, revised, rescinded, or otherwise exited from. Panarchy does not advocate any particular model of the state or social justice, but intends to encourage political variety, innovation, experimentation, and choice. With its emphasis on explicit social contracts, Panarchy offers an interesting variation on traditional social contract theories.

Today, Panarchist political thought is particularly relevant and interesting in the context of globalization, increased international migration, the weakening of national sovereignty, the rise of the internet "cloud" as a non-territorial locus of political and protopolitical social networks that are not geographic, the invention of cryptocurrencies that may replace national currencies, and the rise of urban centers where people of many different political identities live and work together.

This is the first volume to bring together key philosophically and politically interesting yet often overlooked Panarchist texts. From the first published translation of de Puydt seminal 1860 article to contemporary Silicon Valley political theory, the volume includes Panarchist texts from different eras, cultures and geographical regions. The amassed wealth of theoretical insight enables readers to compare different texts in this tradition of political thought and distinguish different streams and varieties within this political tradition, in comparison with Cosmopolitanism, Contractarianism, and Anarchism.

Prometheus Press, 2013

Plato for Everyone takes the still-relevant issues of Plato’s time and recasts five of the Greek ... more Plato for Everyone takes the still-relevant issues of Plato’s time and recasts five of the Greek philosopher’s dialogues into accessible and entertaining short stories, capturing their tone, wit, and philosophical essence in a modern interpretation.

Blackwell, 2008

The fifty entries in this Companion cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography a... more The fifty entries in this Companion cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography and history, including natural history and the practices of historians. •Written by an international and multi-disciplinary group of experts
•A cutting-edge updated picture of current research in the field
•Part of the renowned Blackwell Companions series

Cambridge University Press, 2004

This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that reveal scientific knowledge o... more This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that reveal scientific knowledge of the past. Aviezer Tucker argues that historiography as a scientific discipline should be considered an attempt to analyze the evidence of past events. This new approach to historiography will interest philosophers, historians and social scientists concerned with the methodological foundations of their disciplines.

Pittsburgh University Press, 2000

Theory meets practice in The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel, a... more Theory meets practice in The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel, a critical study of the philosophy and political practice of the Czech dissident movement Charter 77. Aviezer Tucker examines how the political philosophy of Jan Patocka (1907–1977), founder of Charter 77, influenced the thinking and political leadership of Vaclav Havel as dissident and president. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel is the first serious treatment of Havel as philosopher and Patocka as a political thinker. Through the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, opponents of communism based their civil struggle for human rights on philosophic foundations, and members of the Charter 77 later led the Velvet Revolution. After Patocka’s self-sacrifice in 1977, Vaclav Havel emerged a strong philosophical and political force, and he continued to apply Patocka’s philosophy in order to understand the human condition under late communism and the meaning of dissidence. However, the political/philosophical orientation of the Charter 77 movement failed to provide President Havel with an adequate basis for comprehending and responding to the extraordinary political and economic problems of the postcommunist period. In his discussion of Havel's presidency and the eventual corruption of the Velvet Revolution, Tucker demonstrates that the weaknesses in Charter 77 member's understanding of modernity, which did not matter while they were dissidents, seriously harmed their ability to function in a modern democratic system. Within this context, Tucker also examines Havel’s recent attempt to topple the democratic but corrupt government in 1997–1998. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel will be of interest to students of philosophy and politics, scholars and students of Slavic studies, and historians, as well as anyone fascinated by the nature of dissidence.

Perspectives on Science, 2024

Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers... more Scientific origins are information sources that transmit encoded information signals to receivers. Originary sciences identify information preserving receivers and decode the signals to infer their origins. Paradigmatic cases of scientific origination such as the Big Bang, the origins of species, horizontal gene transfer, the origin of the Polynesian potato, and ideational origins in the history of ideas are analyzed to discover what is common to them ontologically and epistemically. Some causes are not origins. Origination supervenes on causation, but has different properties. The unique properties of origins that causes do not share shield theories of origination from the kind of counterexamples and counterintuitive results that challenge comparable theories of causation. The epistemology of origination may serve as a basis for founding a novel epistemic and methodological division of the sciences into originary historical sciences and causal theoretical sciences.

Institutions of the Soviet Block, Manuela Ungureanu ed., 2024

Analysis of post-Communist and Post-Nazi Historiographic Revisionism

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, 2023

This paper applies Bayesian theories to critically analyse and offer reforms of intelligence anal... more This paper applies Bayesian theories to critically analyse and offer reforms of intelligence analysis, collection, analysis, and decision making on the basis of Human Intelligence, Signals Intelligence, and Communication Intelligence. The article criticises the reliabilities of existing intelligence methodologies to demonstrate the need for Bayesian reforms. The proposed epistemic reform program for intelligence analysis should generate more reliable inferences. It distinguishes the transmission of knowledge from its generation, and consists of Bayesian three stages modular model for the generation of reliable intelligence from multiple coherent and independent testimonial sources, and for the tracing and analysis of intelligence failures. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research, the development of artificial intellignce that may measure coherence and reliability of HUMINT sources and infer intelligence following the outlined general modular model.

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2022

This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous... more This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique singular events. Introspective historicism considers the epistemology of historiography to be founded on self-knowledge. Scientistic historicism considers historiography an applied psychology or social science that can expand to overtake the social sciences. Methodological historicism extends the use of historiographic methodologies to unreliable or dependent evidence. The first four historicisms are inconsistent with historiography within bounds and implode. Methodological historicism describes proper historiographic methodologies that are applied out of their proper bounds, but are used in historiography based on the epistemology of testimony and the tracing of the transmission of information from historical event to historiographic evidence.

Key terms: Historicism, philosophy of historiography, Physicalism, Scientism, Epistemology of Testimony, Idiographic science, Introspection, self-knowledge, Neo-Kantian philosophy.

Anthony Jensen & Carlotte Santini eds., Nietzsche on Memory and History: the Re-Encountered Shadow, 2020

I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of... more I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of origins. I am interested here in distinguishing what is different, and pardon the pun, original, in Nietzsche’s concepts of origins and genealogies by comparing it with the alternative mythical, rationalist, and scientific concepts of origins.
I identify four types of origins that share family relations: Mythical, Rationalist, Genealogical, and Scientific. I distinguish between them according to six criteria: The ontology of the origins and what they transfer; how they transfer what they transfer; whether what they transfer is path dependent on the origin; teleology, do origins have a manifest destiny; value judgements about the origins, positive, negative, both, or neither; and finally, the epistemology of the inference of origins.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2020

This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins. I... more This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins. It distinguishes and subjects to critical analysis thirteen interpretations of “the inference of common cause” whose conclusions do not follow from their assumptions. Instead, I introduce six types of inferences of common origins of information signals from their receivers to reduce, in the sense of supersede and replace, the thirteen inferences of common causes. I show how the paradigmatic examples of inferences of common cause, as well as a broader scope of inferences in the historical sciences, are better explained by inferences of origins.
Inferences of origins from information rich coherences between receivers of information signals both fit more closely and explain better the range of examples that have traditionally been associated with inferences of common causes, as well as a broader scope of examples from the historical sciences. Shannon’s concept of information as reduction in uncertainty, rather than physicalist concepts of information that relate it to entropy or waves, simplifies the inferences, preempts objections, and avoids the underdetermination of conclusions that challenge models of inferences of causes from information transmissions.
In the second part of the paper I model inferences of information about common origins from information preserved in their receivers. I distinguish information poor inferences that there were some common origins of receivers from the information richer inferences of ranges of possible common origins and the information transmission channels by which they transmitted signals to receivers. Lastly and most information rich, I distinguish the inference of the defining properties of common origins. The information transmission model from origins to receivers allows the reconceptualization of the concepts of independence as absence of intersections between information channels and reliability as the preservation of information from origins in receivers. Finally, I show how inferences of origins form the epistemic basis of the historical sciences.

Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, 2020

Handbook of historical musicology. Introduction and reflection on the methods of the discipline. ... more Handbook of historical musicology. Introduction and reflection on the methods of the discipline. In general the volume advocates a scientific approach towards music historiography.

The American Interest, 2019

Storia della Storiografia, 2019

Historiography and jurisprudence are founded on the epistemology of testimony. They generate know... more Historiography and jurisprudence are founded on the epistemology of testimony. They generate knowledge mostly, though not exclusively, from testimonies. Reliance on the epistemology of testimony distinguishes jurisprudence and historiography from the empirical sciences that infer knowledge from sense data, and from mathematics and logic that infer a-priori knowledge from reason.
This article models how independent multiple coherent testimonies generate probable knowledge in historiography and jurisprudence. Individual testimonies can at most transmit their own reliabilities. Multiple independent testimonies, even unreliable but coherent and independent testimonies, can generate knowledge with higher probability than any of the testimonies. For this reason, historians, detectives, and triers search for coherent, yet independent, testimonies.
I discuss in particular the concepts of coherence between testimonies, the independence of testimonies, and their reliability. I argue that all these concepts are best understood as aspects of information flows from events to testimonies. I present a new modular model of the inference of knowledge from testimonies in three stages that fits the best practices of institutionally embedded expert historians, jurists, and detectives, who infer knowledge from multiple testimonies.

Ethical Perspectives, 2018

An application of the theories about risk distribution of Beck and risk assessments of Luhmann an... more An application of the theories about risk distribution of Beck and risk assessments of Luhmann and Giddens, and Schmidtz’ theory of justice as the internalization of externalities to understand the social and political reactions to new “unconventional” technologies for extracting natural gas and oil from shale rock discovered correlations between injustice in the distribution of risks and rewards and risk assessment and trust, reinforced by a feedback causal loop where high assessment of risk and distrust reinforce each other. The unaccountability of technocratic and political elites increased distrust and generated a feedback causal loop that increased the unaccountability of elite decision making, when elites adjusted to popular distrust by attempting to make decisions about the distribution of risk from new technologies in stealth or when the population was distracted. Geopolitical risk may balance technological risk assessment when assuming technological risks reduces geopolitical risks. The article applies this model to explain the politics and policies of unconventional energy in Europe. It further supports the model by a comparison with regulatory policies for the extraction of unconventional energy resources in the United States and by examining a case in England where the government attempted to decrease injustice in the distribution of risk.

The American Interest, 2018

How technology supercharged the spread of disinformation, and what we can do about it.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2018

I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge... more I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission from events to memory as an alternative to causal theories of memory. I derive from information theory a concept of reliability of memories as the ratio of retrieved information to transmitted information. I distinguish the generation of knowledge from reliable memories from its generation from unreliable memories. Reliable memories can generate new knowledge by forming together narratives and via colligation. Coherent, even unreliable, memories can generate knowledge if they are epistemically independent of each other and the prior probability of the knowledge they generate is sufficiently low or high. Ascertaining the epistemic independence of memories and eliminating possible confounders may be achieved through the generation of knowledge from independent memories in different minds, when memories are primary basic sources of knowledge and the testimonies that report them are trivial.

The American Interest, 2017

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2016

Historiographic Counterfactuals and the Philosophy of Historiography: An Introduction, Journal of... more Historiographic Counterfactuals and the Philosophy of Historiography: An Introduction, Journal of the Philosophy of History, special issue Vol 10 (2016) No. 3, 333-348.

Social Epistemology, 2016

This article argues for, develops, and defends a non-reductionist model of the generation of know... more This article argues for, develops, and defends a non-reductionist model of the generation of knowledge from multiple testimonies. By knowledge I mean propositions with sufficiently high probability in a context of inquiry. In different contexts institutions and people demand different probabilistic thresholds to consider propositions true, for example, civil law requires lower “preponderance of (testimonial) evidence” threshold than criminal law that requires “beyond reasonable doubt” threshold. (Ho 2008) I explain how testimonies generate knowledge that is not reducible to the other sources of knowledge, empirical, a-priori, from memory or from introspection. Multiple testimonies can generate knowledge with considerably higher probability than the reliability of each testimony. Individual testimonies can at most transmit their own reliabilities.
Testimonial knowledge relies trivially on inference, perception and memory—and vice versa. (Strawson 1994) For example, the generation of knowledge from testimonies involves inferences, the subject of this article. But inference is not a basic source of testimonial knowledge. Likewise, we must use our senses to read or hear testimonies; but perceptions convey the testimonies; they are not their basic source. The inference of knowledge exclusively from multiple testimonies as basic sources allows a non-reductionist epistemology of testimonial knowledge. (Strawson 1994, 25)
I open the discussion with an analysis of the best formal epistemic modelling of the inference of knowledge from multiple testimonies. I criticize their conceptual analyses of coherence between testimonies, the independence of testimonies, and their reliability. I argue that instead of assuming independence by fiat, formal models should explain how to prove it. Instead of conditional and causal interpretations, I argue for tracing information flows. Then, I present a new alternative Bayesian three stages modular model that I argue fits the actual veritistic best practices of institutionally embedded experts who infer knowledge from multiple testimonies. Finally, I consider some of the broader implications of my epistemology of testimony for understanding social knowledge and the relations between social and individual epistemologies. I endorse Goldman’s (1999) designation of the epistemology of testimony as a vital link between individualist and social epistemologies to argue that much of social knowledge supervenes on multiple individual testimonies. Institutional expert knowledge follows implicitly or explicitly the use of the reliable methods of inference from multiple testimonies that I outline. The institutions that habitually infer knowledge mostly or even exclusively from multiple testimonies are intelligence agencies such as the CIA, police detective departments, the judicial system, investigative journalism, and the historical research institutions. Since the results of inferences from multiple testimonies are literally matters of life and death, war or peace, the conviction or acquittal of the guilty and innocent, the exposure of corruption and crime, and our knowledge of the past, the significance of the questions I attempt to answer here exceeds that of abstract issues in epistemology. The answers I propose, can serve as a normative regulative standard for best epistemic practices that can measure, criticize, and regulate the institutional practices that attempt to generate knowledge from multiple testimonies.
The main current methodologies of the epistemology of testimony are conceptual-using thought experiments to explicate concepts (e.g. Lackey 2008; Goldberg 2010, cf. Tucker 2012b) and formal—applying probabilistic methods to build models (Bovens and Hartmann 2003; Olsson 2005; Shogenji 2007). The absence of fruitful communications between conceptual and formal epistemology is lamentable (cf. Hendricks 2006, 151-165) particularly because the conceptual and formal approaches have reached inconsistent conclusions. Conceptual thought experiments focus on the transmission of epistemic properties by single testimonies, ignoring or even denying that multiple testimonies can generate more reliable beliefs, knowledge, than any single testimony. Most formal models show that multiple testimonies can generate knowledge that is more reliable than any single testimony and attempt to model formally this inference, but the models make often unjustified and unrealistic assumptions and their conceptual interpretations are weak. Bovens and Hartmann (2003, 129-130), for example, recognized the weakness of making implausible assumptions to facilitate model building.
My alternative methodology is to model the best practices of the experts who specialize in inferring knowledge from testimonies, following Goldman’s (1999) recommendation that social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony model veritistic, truth conducive, institutional epistemic practices because the institutionalized best practices of experts are probably close to the best possible practices. The institutional experts who generate knowledge mostly, if not exclusively, from multiple testimonies are detectives, intelligence analysts, historians, and investigative journalists. Goldman (2004) considered the institutional and epistemic practices of the FBI. Brittan (1994) and Tucker (2004), moreover, noted the close relation between the epistemology of testimony and the philosophy of historiography. Detectives as historians have been considered by philosophers at least since Collingwood. (1956, 266-274)

Alexandra Lianeri ed., Knowing Future Time In and Through Greek Historiography, Trends in Classics - Supplementary , 2016

This paper identifies the theoretical and methodological turning point that distinguishes modern ... more This paper identifies the theoretical and methodological turning point that distinguishes modern from ancient historiography. Since Thucydides is considered rightly to be the greatest ancient historian and Ranke is the founder of modern scientific historiography, the question about the difference between ancient and modern historiography can be personalized as asking for what Ranke revised or added methodologically to Thucydides’ achievements?
Krieger (1977, 3) puzzled at the consideration of Ranke as the "Copernicus" or "Kant" of historiography: The critical attitude to sources dates back to Thucydides. The crucial significance of original documents for historiographic reasoning had already been recognized in humanist scholarship since the fifteenth century and was defended systematically by Jean Mabillion and the Maurists in the seventeenth century. The theories and methods of philology developed in seminars in the early 19th and were applied "spectacularly" to Roman historiography by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, whom Ranke acknowledged as his mentor. I argue that modern “Rankean” historiography is distinguishable from its ancient predecessors by a special relation with the evidence. Around the turn of the 19th century, scholars from apparently different fields all began to use a form of probabilistic inference from multiple units of evidence like testimonies, languages, and texts that allowed them to obtain new knowledge of the past. Ranke’s attempt was the first successful application of this probabilistic method to historiography. Thucydides, though critical of his sources did not infer from multiple testimonies as Ranke and his successors did; therefore he did not mention his sources. (Kosso 1993, 9)

The American Interest, May 2015

Some Ideas from my book: The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Perspective (Cambridge Un... more Some Ideas from my book: The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2015)

Springer, 2014

in Carlo Martini & Marcel Boumans eds., Experts and Consensus in Social Science, (Dordrecht: Spr... more in Carlo Martini & Marcel Boumans eds., Experts and Consensus in Social Science, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 155-170.

Review of Metaphysics, 2023

The American Purpose, 2022

Once upon a time a Sumerian chieftain might have looked at the newly designed grid of irrigation ... more Once upon a time a Sumerian chieftain might have looked at the newly designed grid of irrigation canals and asked himself what it meant for the future of politics. In his new book, Startup founder, investor, and former Stanford professor Balaji Srinivasan looks at the internet today and ponders its political implications. He concludes that nation states and territorial sovereignty are becoming as obsolete as those empires founded on upriver control of irrigation: Networks that connect nodes in the “cloud” are becoming “startup societies” that may evolve into “network states.” Conversely, technology could be facilitating a more perfect totalitarianism.

American Purpose, 2021

A philosophical review of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy

The American Interest, 2020

Journal of Philosophy of History, 2021

Review of: Adrian Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (C... more Review of: Adrian Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2018).

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2019

2016 has led to the renewed political popularity of the verb " to happen, " especially in the ind... more 2016 has led to the renewed political popularity of the verb " to happen, " especially in the indefinite passive voice. Politicians, commentators, and social scientists reacted as if a meteor had stricken the global body politic. Nobody quite understood what hit them. Nobody was responsible. Everybody became anxious. A telling example is Hillary Clinton's electoral self-postmortem, entitled What Happened? Two kinds of responsibilities have been missing from the discussion of post-2016 politics: political responsibility for policy mistakes that led to unintended consequences and moral responsibility for the guilt of nations. In comparison, in the aftermath of the far greater tragedy of the Second World War, Western leaders recognized that they made a series of economic and political policy mistakes that deepened the Great Depression and encouraged totalitarian aggression. They devised policies and institutions, the infrastructure of the liberal world order, to preempt a recurrence and prevent the expansion of the form of totalitarianism that survived the War victorious. Philosophers like Karl Jaspers and Benedetto Croce, though they had little to be ashamed of personally, explored the guilt of their nations to try to understand the moral failure that carried their nations from Kant to Hitler and from Renaissance humanism to the black shirts. Americans have hardly faced the question how a nation weaned on Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch ended up tearing children from their parents and bringing a toddler in front of an immigration judge to answer for his crimes. Denial of responsibility assumes two historical inevitabilities: Obviously, the watershed that led to the current political crisis was the economic recession of 2008 and the unemployment, austerity and very slow recovery that followed it. This primary cause affected different societies through different paths and to different degrees. But arguably there was no antidote against this lethal economic poison. When policy makers attempted to regulate the banking sector in the aftermath of the recession it was too much too late. Secondly, there are disturbing similarities between the map of populism in Europe today and the map of the authoritarian regimes allied with the Axis powers in the Second World War (minus NorthWestern Germany and plus Poland that was authoritarian but did not ally itself with Hitler), just as there is similar disturbing similarity between the map of the Confederacy in the American Civil War and the map of states that gave Trump the presidency (plus Pennsylvania, minus Virginia). Perhaps political cultures that change very slowly are destiny. Democracy happens there rarely, usually during economic peaks between economic recessions. Authoritarianism may resemble alcoholism. An alcoholic may abstain with great effort and social assistance and pressure when everything goes well, but an alcoholic never really bits the addiction. We may bemoan that the American south failed to overcome its native racism and legacy of slavery and that Austro-Hungarians beyond the cosmopolitan Vienna and

The American Interest, 2018

Review of How Democracies Die Steven by Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

The American Historical Review, 2018

Originally published in French in 2012, Henry Rousso’s The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Prese... more Originally published in French in 2012, Henry Rousso’s The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary is a polemical apologia in defense of contemporary history (or history of the present time or immediate history). It answers arguments against the feasibility, legitimacy, methodologies, and scope of contemporary history, originating especially in the Annales School and pre–World War II French historiography.

The American Interest, 2017

Review of Adam Sisman, John Le Carre The Biography, The American Interest Vol. 12, No. 3, January... more Review of Adam Sisman, John Le Carre The Biography, The American Interest Vol. 12, No. 3, January 2017, 88-96.

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2016

Review of: Costica Bradatan, Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. London: Bl... more Review of:
Costica Bradatan, Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
From the Aspen Review

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The American Interest, 2016

Review of Snyder's Black Earth, long, raw, and unedited version of the edited version that was pu... more Review of Snyder's Black Earth, long, raw, and unedited version of the edited version that was published in the American Interest

History and Theory, 2016

The Bayesian perspective on historiography is commonsensical: If historiography is not certain li... more The Bayesian perspective on historiography is commonsensical: If historiography is not certain like a priori knowledge or sense data, and it is not fiction, historiography is probable. Richard Carrier's book argues for a Bayesian, probabilistic interpretation of historiography in general and of the debate about the historicity of Jesus in particular. Jesus can be interpreted as a historically transmitted reference of “Jesus,” as a bundle of properties, or literally. Carrier devotes too much energy to debating literalism that confuses evidence with hypotheses. But evidence preserves information to different degrees; it is true or not. Carrier proposes to apply objective, frequentist Bayesianism in historiography despite the difficulties in assigning values. He argues that ranges of values can determine historiographical hypotheses. Carrier does not analyze in Bayesian terms the main method for Bayesian determination of posterior probabilities in historiography: inference from multiple independent sources. When the prior probability of a hypothesis is low, but at least two independent evidential sources, such as testimonies, support it, however unreliable each of the testimonies is, the posterior probability leaps. The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere. Carrier's explanation of some the evidence in the Gospels is fascinating as the first Bayesian reconstruction of structuralism and mimesis. Historians attempted to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to find more reliable parts of the Gospels, parts that are more likely to have preserved older information. Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence. I leave open questions about the degree of scholarly consensus and the possible reasons for it.

The American Interest, 2015

Havel: A Life Michael Žantovský Grove Press, 2014, 512 pp., $30 Václav Havel, the diss... more Havel: A Life

Michael Žantovský

Grove Press, 2014, 512 pp., $30

Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, was loved and admired more than understood. His admirers squeezed him into boxes that did not quite fit him. An absurd playwright in the tradition of Ionesco and Becket, Havel would have appreciated the irony of ending up as the main character in somebody else’s funeral.

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2015

Review of Jeremy Adelman, Worldly philosopher: the odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton: Pr... more Review of Jeremy Adelman, Worldly philosopher: the odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Aspen Review Central Europe

Aspen Review Central Europe,, 2015

Review of Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, ethics, and Social Renewal in Central E... more Review of Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe. (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2014). Aspen Review Central Europe, 2015, issue 1.

Political Studies Review, 2015

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2014

Review of Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution. ... more Review of Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.

The Unpopulist, 2023

Tucker details how intellectual acolytes of today’s populists have in effect deployed “philosophi... more Tucker details how intellectual acolytes of today’s populists have in effect deployed “philosophical ideas in the Nietzschean tradition” to empower “the populist’s authentic passions” and promote “the emotive populist concept of truth.” This subtle act of intellectual smuggling for unsubtle ends is the harsh reality we face, Tucker suggests, and his learned and wide-ranging essay signals that clear-eyed intellectual defiance is necessary in an era when strongman politicians see the reality under the narratives better than the philosophers who’ve enabled them.

The Unpopulist, 2022

Since being elected president of Russia, Vladimir Putin has adopted many of the trappings and sym... more Since being elected president of Russia, Vladimir Putin has adopted many of the trappings and symbols of the former Russian czars, while his neo-czarist “vertical of power” has concentrated Russia’s political and police powers in his own autocratic hands. Indeed, Putin may have succeeded in becoming the new czar of all the Russians—in the sense, however, of being a new Nicholas II, the ruler who was Russia’s last real czar and who was deposed in 1917 during World War I.

One imagines Nicholas II is not the role model Putin sought to emulate.

Regardless, the two autocrats’ strategic choices on the European geopolitical map may have entangled their destinies. The current crisis in Ukraine may be Putin’s 1917.

Two Possible Futures for Putin, Russia and Ukraine

The UnPopulist, 2022

Putin has been directing a gradual totalitarian restoration in Russia since his ascent to power m... more Putin has been directing a gradual totalitarian restoration in Russia since his ascent to power more than two decades ago. We are now witnessing the denouement of this process. Understanding the totalitarian — not authoritarian — nature of Putin’s restoration is vitally important for understanding not just Russia’s present state, but also its future and the various ways in which Putin’s regime might be susceptible to collapse.

The UnPopulist, 2022

The last time Soviet tanks rolled into the capital of a sovereign European nation was in Prague, ... more The last time Soviet tanks rolled into the capital of a sovereign European nation was in Prague, 1968. But that invasion had an unintended consequence for the Soviet Union: The end of communism as an ideology. It took another 20 years for the regime to tip over and fall, but as an ideology, it ended that year. Something similar is likely to happen now to what can be called "Putinism," the inchoate ideological alliance between political authoritarianism, xenophobic nationalism, and reactionary social values that has exerted significant "soft power" since Putin became Russia's president for the second time in 2012.

Polity Books Blog, 2020

The failures of populist leaders in the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom to control ... more The failures of populist leaders in the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom to control the outbreak of the COVID 19 plague stand out against successes of some Western European countries in reducing infection, hospitalization and death rates. Populists waited for too long before they closed their economies and then impatiently opened them too early. Even now, populist politicians continue to resist and deplore simple methods for mitigating the spread of the pandemic such as wearing masks and social distancing. The correlation between populism and mishandling of the corona crisis begs for an explanation.

Since the ancient Greeks Populism has been associated with political passions that demagogues manipulate. Passions can trump people’s own best interests. As La Bruyere put it back in the 17th century: “Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer one’s own interest.”

Liberal constitutions were designed or evolved to constrain political passions. This has been the purpose of the separation of powers, checks and balances, and institutions like the judiciary, the professional civil service, and the central bank. Populist governments must conduct interminable wars of attrition against these liberal institution. Populist governments strive for absolute powers that can unleash unconstrained passions.

Bubínek Revolveru, 2019

Grave concerns about the current and future direction of the Czech Institute for the Study of Tot... more Grave concerns about the current and future direction of the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR), the evisceration of its mission. and its transformation into an institute of national forgetfulness and neo-Totalitarian apologetics and revisionism. A letter addressed to the Czech Senate, and a document where I outline my evaluation of the institute and recommendations for reforms.

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2018

Poland is ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogeneous, without minorities to scapegoa... more Poland is ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogeneous, without minorities to scapegoat. It may be necessary then to resort to scape-ghosting, blaming ghosts to maintain social cohesion.

The American Interest, 2017

Panarchy - Panarchie - Panarchia - Panarquia - Παναρχία - “汎統治主義 A Gateway to Selected Documents and Web Sites, 2017

Il est temps de passer à de nouvelles formes d'organisations fondées sur des États dé-territorial... more Il est temps de passer à de nouvelles formes d'organisations fondées sur des États dé-territorialisés et sur la liberté de chacun de choisir et d'adhérer à la communauté qui représente et met en œuvre au mieux ses souhaits et aspirations.

Unsere zeit, 2017

The dominant “Westphalian” model of the state, based on sovereignty over territory with borders a... more The dominant “Westphalian” model of the state, based on sovereignty over territory with borders and monopoly of violence over the people who happen to live in the territory, is obsolete. It fits seventeenth-century technology and pre-global societies when geographical distances could not be traversed easily and information took months to travel the globe. Instead, states may be founded on social contracts rather than sovereignty, service to citizens instead of monopoly over the use of violence in a territory. Panarchy, a political theory of non-territorial states founded on social contracts, introduced in 1860 by Belgian botanist and economist Paul Émile de Puydt, offers an alternative. It proposes that citizens may literally sign a social contract, a constitution, with a state, and may change their states without moving, just as customers can change their insurance policies. Explicit and voluntary social contracts have several advantages over standard social contract theories: They are neither mythical nor hypothetical, but explicit and actual, voluntary and reversible.

The American Interest, 2016

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the Harvard philosopher George ... more “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the Harvard philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in his 1905 book The Life of Reason. Santayana thought that historical progress and personal maturity result from learning from experience, to wit: When individuals or nations remember their mistakes, they do not repeat them. When we consider what we could have done better in the past, we do things better in the future. There is even an intellectual down-market version of Santayana’s point, possibly more familiar to country than to city folk: “Learn from the mistakes of others, because you can’t live long enough to make all of them yourself.”
When experience is not retained in memory, the results are permanent political and personal infancy. We make then the kind of mistakes children do, because they have little experience to instruct them—and it is therefore no coincidence that much of current populist politics, in Europe and the United States both, appears infantile.
Populists appear childish not just in their impetuous mannerisms, but because they display no historical depth, no learning from experience.

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2015

One of the hallmarks of the neutral liberal state is the independence of higher education, just l... more One of the hallmarks of the neutral liberal state is the independence of higher education, just like religion, the judiciary, and the Central Bank. If there is no separation of the state from the universities, they become instruments for state control of social stratification and mobility and an inefficient tool for socially-engineering society and its culture and ideology

Forbes, 2014

When Communism ended, there were only two alternatives: Either the dissidents assumed power, or t... more When Communism ended, there were only two alternatives: Either the dissidents assumed power, or the younger second or third rows of the Communist Party and Secret Police establishments replaced their elders.

Aspen Review Central Europe, 2014

The current crisis in Ukraine focused attention on Europe’s 25–30% dependence on Russian natural ... more The current crisis in Ukraine focused attention on Europe’s 25–30% dependence on Russian natural gas. Europeans pay three to seven times more for their natural gas than Americans. Prices vary according to level of dependency on Russia and the discounts it grants for political loyalty or denies for disobedience. The recent agreement between China and Russia will not release Russia from dependence on exporting to the European market. The Putin regime will continue to depend on exporting energy to Europe for paying for the Russian state and the patronage “vertical of power” that sustains it, since the Chinese would not have agreed to pay Russia anything approaching the European price, and Russia will have to make massive investment in infrastructure (to which it is necessary to add the costs of the inevitable embezzlements and corruption) in the short term before reaping any profits.

Europe wants a free trade agreement with the United States to allow exports of unconventionally produced American liquefied natural gas and crude oil from shale to substitute for Russian imports. But Europe has another route to energy security: follow the United States in developing domestic shale gas and tight oil resources.

Houston Chronicle, 2013

To believe press releases, the Eurasian landmass is undergoing an explosion in the construction o... more To believe press releases, the Eurasian landmass is undergoing an explosion in the construction of gas and oil pipelines comparable to the building of railways in the nineteenth century. Russia is completing Nordstream to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Russia plans to construct Southstream to connect directly to Southern Europe, under the Black Sea and into Bulgaria and through Serbia to Austria and Southern Europe. To prevent Russian monopoly on energy supplies to Southern Europe a competing consortium offers to build an alternative pipeline, nicknamed Nabucco, to deliver gas from Central Asia. Another planned route to Europe from Central Asia is via the Trans Adriatic Pipeline. More recently, Russia announced a plan for a new pipeline from Eastern Siberia to China.

These plans are reminiscent of the last stage of the arms race during the Cold War in the eighties. Today’s pipeline wars are quickly becoming obsolete because of new economic and technological realities.

Washington Times, 2012

Russia inflames environmental fears to dominate energy market

The Prague Post, 2011

Egypt's transitional gov't needs democrats even before it gets democracy

The Prague Post, 2010

Expats everywhere face the same question: Where is home?

Prague Post, 2010

One Czech tradition has ties to Islam, Moses, Taoism and good old-fashioned philandering

Prague Post, 2009

Raising an infant in the Czech Republic is, for a foreigner, an eye-opening experience

"Neo-illiberalism, Populism and Democracy". Instituto Empresa y Humanismo Universidad de Navarra

University of Poznan, 2018

Conference at the University of Poznan, Poland, June 21 2018.

Santayana’s revenge: The Return of History and the Philosophy of History (abstract) The purview ... more Santayana’s revenge: The Return of History and the Philosophy of History (abstract)

The purview of the philosophy of history in the middle of the previous century included problems such as: Is history inevitable? Is history cyclical, progressive, regressive, or directionless? What is the role of the individual, or “hero,” in history? Does history repeat itself? Can we learn from history? Totalitarian ideologies held that history is inevitable. Large impersonal forces such as race and class determine history, reduced to pseudo-scientific caricatures of biology or economics. The totalitarian concept of history was cyclical. History repeats itself as the continuous drama of class or racial conflict. If history is necessary, there is nothing to learn from it; it will happen anyway whether we understand the process or not. At most, the birth pangs of history will be shorter. Liberals retorted that history is contingent. Individual choices matter. Modernization pushes history in a progressive direction and though history does not repeat itself (“some people believe that history repeats itself, others read the Economist”), there is much that can be learned from history, especially from its mistakes and wrong turns. They set out to construct a political, social and global order that would intuitionally prevent the repetitions of the mistakes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Liberal philosophy of history entered a “post-historical” phase when it came to believe that historical progress is inevitable, individuals do not matter for history, and history does not repeat itself and therefore there is nothing to learn from it. Studying history and the philosophy of history were perceived as redundant at best and regressive if they get in the way of the modernizing agenda of constructing a modern world of technology and progress by studying computer science, engineering, and business.

The economic 2007/8 and political 2016/7 mark “Santayana’s revenge,” the return of history to those who denied it. Contemporary populism is entirely ahistorical, not just in its total ignorance of the mistakes of the past that it attempts to reproduce Sisyphus-like, but in an apparent absence of historical consciousness. The rhetoric implies that they believe recent history was regressive yet contingent on the actions of individual leaders. On the other political extreme, a cyclical and inevitable view of history spreads that foresees cycles of economic freedom, prosperity and globalization, followed by crisis and authoritarian and nationalist backlash for the past couple of hundred years. Accordingly, contemporary populism cannot be resisted by individuals, but at best be moderated of incorporated in a populist leftist agenda to imitate the populist right.

I argue for contingent and directionless history. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Following Santayana, I argue for a virtue of ethics of historical knowledge. Though I still believe in the value of the epistemic inquiry into our knowledge of the past, in the philosophy of historiography, to which I have devoted most of my past efforts, I believe that our moral engagement as philosophers of history warrants a reexamination of the questions I mentioned above that were largely abandoned in the fifties of the previous century.

Filmed lecture on the philosophy of historiography and origins at the University of Sao Paulo, Br... more Filmed lecture on the philosophy of historiography and origins at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 18 November 2016.

Why Europe does not have an unconventional energy revolution?

Talk Eastern Europe, 2022

In the main of this episode, Maciek sits down with Aviezer Tucker, a philosopher specializing in ... more In the main of this episode, Maciek sits down with Aviezer Tucker, a philosopher specializing in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, a political theorist, and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. They discuss Tucker’s recent book on illiberalism and how to respond to it.

The Eastern Front, 2022

Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia welcome Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Center Associate at Harvard University’s ... more Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia welcome Dr. Aviezer Tucker, Center Associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Dr. Tucker discusses the themes of his piece in the UnPopulist, “Along with Ukraine, Putin is Destroying Putinism.” He draws a parallel between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, arguing that similarly to how the 1968 invasion lead to the end of communism as an ideology, the invasion of Ukraine will lead to the end of “Putinism,” what he describes as a “witches’ brew of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, nationalism, reactionary social values, illiberalism, anti-internationalism and anti-Americanism.”

University of Ostrava, 2020

The paper investigates the meaning of historical revisionism from an epistemic philosophical pers... more The paper investigates the meaning of historical revisionism from an epistemic philosophical perspective according to its relation with the evidence rather than political underpinning, seeking to distinguish historiographic revision, which makes historiography into a progressive science that advances and improves, from revisionism which goes beyond and against the evidence. The examples for revisionism will be drawn from the historiography of totalitarianism.
Recorded June 15 2020.

Paper delivered at the conference of the Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien in the ... more Paper delivered at the conference of the Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien in the (former) home of Bruno Kreisky in Vienna June 16 2016. My presentation begins around 45 minutes from the start.

Struck as a PhD student by the philosophical language used by Václav Havel in his famous 1990 spe... more Struck as a PhD student by the philosophical language used by Václav Havel in his famous 1990 speech to the US Congress, Aviezer Tucker went on to write The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel. More recently Tucker, whose wife is Czech, has turned his attention to what really happened when communism fell at the end of the 1980s. We discussed his latest book The Legacies of Totalitarianism – and his call for a new kind of dissident today – when the Israeli-born political philosopher visited our studios recently. But first I asked him to outline the ideas of Jan Patočka, the great Czech philosopher and Charter 77 spokesman, who died after a lengthy StB interrogation.

Event Date: 23 -25 May 2013 Christopher Ingold Lecture Theatre, Christopher Ingold Chemistry ... more Event Date: 23 -25 May 2013
Christopher Ingold Lecture Theatre,
Christopher Ingold Chemistry Building,
20 Gordon Street,
University College London,
London WC1H 0AJ

The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies presents:

THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE: CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY AND DISSENT FROM HAVEL TO THE PRESENT

We have an excellent episode for you this week as host Richard Aldous talks with Stephen Sestanov... more We have an excellent episode for you this week as host Richard Aldous talks with Stephen Sestanovich about the state of Russian-American relations, and asks Aviezer Tucker why we need a more refined understanding of totalitarianism.

Exchange about Knowledge from Multiple Testimonies (my reply to Frank Zenker)

Frank's reply to my paper

Part II of interview with Josef Sima about The Legacies of Totalitarianism

part I of interview about my book The Legacies of Totalitarianism

The Galilean Library → Resources → Interviews → Article: Aviezer Tucker: Our Knowledge of ... more The Galilean Library
→ Resources
→ Interviews
→ Article: Aviezer Tucker: Our Knowledge of the Past
Hugo Holbling in Interviews

A conversation I had with Below at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in 1990. The lan... more A conversation I had with Below at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in 1990. The language may be a bit of a challenge for some readers.

Central European Journal of International and Security Studies , Mar 31, 2019

The symposium on the book "Legacies of Totalitarianism" by Aviezer Tucker was part of the confere... more The symposium on the book "Legacies of Totalitarianism" by Aviezer Tucker was part of the conference "Between Enslavement and Resistance: Attitudes toward Communism in East European Societies (1945-1989)" held in Poznań, Poland (June 15-16, 2018). The conference and the symposium was organized by the Institute of National Remembrance, Poznań Division, the Institute of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, The Centre for Culture and the Arts at Leeds Beckett University, and the Poznań Division of Polish Philosophical Society. The organizational and editorial work of the symposium was realized within the framework of the Branch Research Project of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poznań: "The Methodological and Theoretical Problems of Research on the Current History of Poland."
Content:
Krzysztof Brzechczyn, A Transformation of the Privileges of the Authorities into Property Rights or a Transformation of the Types of Class Rule?"
Dragoş Petrescu, "Limits of democratic consolidation: Subversion of reason as a post-totalitarian syndrome"
Michał Kwiecień, " The Hereditary Diseases of Post-Totalitarianism"
Cristina Petrescu, "Simulated Change: Totalitarianism and what Comes Next"
Grzegorz Greg Lewicki, Legacies, zombies and the need of long-term basis for short-term foresight"
Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski , "Dissidents and Nomads in [not only] Post-Totalitarian Countries – Why Are There so Many Problems If Things Are Going so Well?"
Aviezer Tucker Harvard University)," Why 'Legacies' Matter: Reply to readings of 'Legacies;"