Gustav Landauer, Philosopher of Utopia

Gustav Landauer, Philosopher of Utopia

Author: Ruth Link-Salinger Hyman

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 9780915144266

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Collects the lecture notes of Kant's students providing a view into his theories on ethics.


Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew

Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew

Author: Paul Mendes-Flohr

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-12-16

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 3110395606

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For Gustav Landauer, literary critic and anarchist, scholar of mysticism and participant of the Bavarian revolution, culture and politics occupied the same spiritual space. While identifying with ethical socialism, his Jewish sensibility increasingly gained over the years, not only, but in great measure due to Buber’s influence. This volume brings together leading scholars to assess Landauer’s ramified literary and political activities, his life as a Jew and anarchist, paying particular attention to his impact on Martin Buber.


Political Uses of Utopia

Political Uses of Utopia

Author: S. D. Chrostowska

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0231544316

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Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.


Redemption and Utopia

Redemption and Utopia

Author: Michael Löwy

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1786630869

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the "tikkoun": redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of "elective affinity" to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukcs.


Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer

Skepsis and Antipolitics: The Alternative of Gustav Landauer

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-12-12

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 9004534571

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One century after Gustav Landauer’s death, in a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, the volume proposes a fascinating overview of the articulation between skepsis and antipolitics in his multifaceted unconventional anarchism.


Picture Imperfect

Picture Imperfect

Author: Russell Jacoby

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780231128940

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Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. As Jacoby demonstrates, iconoclastic utopianism, shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, revives society's dormant political imagination and suggests new and more imaginative ideas of the future.


Utopia of Understanding

Utopia of Understanding

Author: Donatella Ester Di Cesare

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-06-28

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1438442548

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Speaking and understanding can both be thought of as forms of translation, and in this way every speaker is an exile in language—even in one's mother tongue. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the testimonies of the German Jews and their relation with the German language, Jacques Derrida's confrontation with Hannah Arendt, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Donatella Ester Di Cesare proclaims Auschwitz the Babel of the twentieth century. She argues that the globalized world is one in which there no longer remains any intimate place or stable dwelling. Understanding becomes a kind of shibboleth that grounds nothing, but opens messianically to a utopia yet to come.


Paths in Utopia

Paths in Utopia

Author: Martin Buber

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 1996-11-01

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9780815604211

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In this work, Buber expounds upon and defends the Zionist experiment - a federal system of communities on a co-operative basis. He looks to the anarchists Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, but selects only that part of their doctrines appropriate to his case.


Interim Judaism

Interim Judaism

Author: Michael L. Morgan

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2001-06-22

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780253108517

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Interim Judaism Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis Michael L. Morgan Probes the impact of the 20th century on Jewish belief and practice. Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking -- on topics such as transcendence, redemption, revelation, and politics -- were reinterpreted in an atmosphere of increasing disillusion and fragmentation. In Interim Judaism, Michael L. Morgan traces the evolution of this shift in values, as expressed in the work of social thinkers, novelists, artists, and poets as well as philosophers and theologians at the beginning and end of the century. Focusing on the problem of objectivity, the experience of the transcendent, and the relationship between redemption and politics, he argues that the outcome for contemporary Jews is a pragmatic style of religiosity that has abandoned traditional conceptions of Judaism and is searching and waiting for new ones, a condition that he describes as "interim Judaism." Michael L. Morgan is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Platonic Piety and Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought (Indiana University Press). He has edited The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim; Classics in Moral and Political Theory; Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University Press); and A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination. With Paul Franks, he has translated and edited Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings. Published with the generous support of Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati July 2001 128 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 cloth 0-253-33856-5 $35.00 L / £26.50 paper 0-253-21441-6 $15.95 s / £12.50