PLEASE NOTE this is a 2014-15 reading list—the precise content may change in future
years.
Week 2. Negatives: The camps
The concentration and labour camps of the 30s, 40 s and 50s have been described as
the quintessential 20th century institutions, or anti-institutions. Here we look at some
classic accounts of the organisation and experience of such places.
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Arendt, Hannah (1979) ‘Total Domination’, in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace, 1979.
H. G. Adler, ‘Ideas toward a Sociology of the concentration camp’, The
American Journal of Sociology LXIII No. 5 (1958), 513-522
Borowski, Tadeusz, [1959] 1976, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen
Buber-Neumann, M. Under Two Dictators.
Herling Gustav, 1951, A World Apart, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Langbein, Hermann, [1975] 2004, People in Auschwitz, London: University
of North Carolina Press
Levi, Primo, [1958] 1987 If This is a Man, London: Abacus
Semprun, Jorge, [1963] 1964, The Long Voyage, New York: Grove Press
Sofsky, Wolfgang The order of terror: the concentration camp. Princeton
University Press, 1977.
Todorov, Tzvetan, [1986], 2000, Facing the Extreme: moral life in
Concentration Camps, London: Phoenix
Aleksander Wat, My Century
Zsolt, B. Nine Suitcases.
Week 3: Negatives: Technology and the Loss of Human Purpose
One large scale not to say grandiose explanation for the camps has to do with the idea
of human overreach, the unleashing of a Promethean ambition in which human
beings, having conquered nature, find themselves in a world of seemingly endless
possibilities. One famous reflection on this was Martin Heidegger’s essay on
technology. The ambivalences it contains both make it a resource for a critique of
national socialism, and express some of the romanticism that lay at its heart. Herf’s
phrase, ‘reactionary modernism’, captures something of this.
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Zimmerman, D., Heidegger and the Critique of Technology
* Heidegger, M., ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper Torchbooks
Martins, H., ‘Hegel, Texas’, in H. Martins (ed) Knowledge and Passion.
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McCormick, J. (ed) Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology:
Political and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas, Duke Univ. Press
Herf, Jeffrey (1984 ) Reactionary Modernism: Technology Culture and
Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich Cambridge University Press.
Week 4. Negatives: History as a Legitimation for Anything
After World War II a number of scholars whose lives had been severely disrupted and
who had been forced into exile, sought a background to Heidegger’s concerns not so
much in our attitude to nature as in our view of history. Lowith’s Meaning in History
saw modern beliefs in progress, particularly of the teleological sort, as the inheritance
of a basically anti-Greek, Judeo-Christian conception of time. In particular, he
believed he had found a pattern of thought that echoed, or rather was the modern form
of, Christian eschatology, the belief that history has a meaning by virtue of a final
outcome. Such an idea, he thought, makes it possible to treat human beings as
dispensable, tools in a grander historical design.
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Löwith, K., Meaning in History, Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1958
Voegelin, E., The New Science of Politics, chs. 4, 6
Niethammer, Posthistoire.
Eliade, M. Cosmos and History
Week 5: positives: modernity redeemed through science
For Hans Blumenberg, Lowith’s claim that progress was secularised eschatology was
understandable, but he was mistaken about the significance of the philosophy of
history for modernity. For Blumenberg, the key to the distinctiveness of modernity is
science and the unleashing of scientific curisosity, and the way in which scientific
method has been institutionalised. For modern science, and this is its success,
progress is not finite (leading to some future goal) but infinite, meaning that the quest
for truth is never ending. This infinite progress is the opposite of human presumption:
it presupposes human modesty.
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Blumenberg, H., The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Part I, Cambridge,
Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1982 [1970]
Wallace, R., ‘Introduction to Blumenberg’, New German Critique 11, no. 2
(1984): 93-108
----, ‘Progress, Secularisation and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg
Debate’, New German Critique 8, no. 1 (1981): 63-79
Turner, C., ‘Liberalism and the Limits of Science: Weber and Blumenberg’,
History of the Human Sciences, Nov. 1993
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R. Pippin, ‘Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem’, Review of Metaphysics
40, 1987, 535-557
M. Jay, ‘The Legitimacy of the Modern Age’, History and Theory 24, 1985,
183-196
L. Dickey, ‘Blumenberg and Secularisation’, New German Critique 41, 1987,
151-165
Week 6. Reading Week
Week 7. Positives: The Promise of Civil society
During the 1970s and 80s, regimes that continued to claim that history was on their
side were facing challenges from social movements one of whose most distinct
rallying cries was ‘civil society’. The idea of civil society was said to have triumphed
when communism collapsed in 1989. Here we look at a distinctive account of the
positive claims to be made on its behalf.
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Gellner, Ernest, 1994. Conditions of Liberty: the promise of civil society
Havel, Vaclav, 1985. ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in John Keane (ed). The
Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe.
London: Hutchinson
[http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_eseje.html&t
yp=HTML]
Week 8. Ambivalences: science and the politics of expertise
Contrary to Blumenberg’s optimism about science, by the 1980s concern among
intellectuals and commentators about the role of ‘expert systems’ was widespread.
Rather that the sheer destructiveness of technology unleashed, the theme here was the
role of experts in political decision making.
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Rich, A. 2005. Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise
Schutz, A. ‘The Well-Informed Citizen’, in Collected Papers Vol. II.
Turner, S.P. 2004. Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts
----, 2013. The Politics of Expertise. Routledge.
Week 9. Ambivalences: civil society, democracy and religious fanaticism
If civil society can be a counterweight to an overbearing or repressive state, it may
also be the source of movements and ideas that threaten the integrity of liberal states,
which challenge the framework of civil governance. Non-state groups in liberal
states may be anti-liberal, seeking not merely to find a place within the society but to
challenge the way in which the society is organised.
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Colas, D. 2003. Civil Society and Fanaticism
Fukuyama, F. The end of History and the Last Man
Gellner, Ernest, ‘The Civil and the Sacred’ (pdf online)
----, 1991. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (pdf online).
Kepel 1994. The Revenge of God. Cambridge: Polity.
Olivier Roy http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-05-03-roy-en.html
Week 10: Looking Back
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Applebaum, Anne 2007. Gulag.
Finkielkraut, Alain (1992) Remembering in Vain, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Furet, F. 1995. The Passing of an Illusion.
Judt, Tony (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 ‘Epilogue: From
the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’ Penguin.
Rose Gillian (1996) Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and
Representation, Cambridge University Press, ch.2
Lipstadt, Deborah (1994) Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory, New York: Plume 1994
Novick, Peter (1999) The Holocaust and Collective Memory, London:
Bloomsbury
Semprun, Jorge (1998) Literature or Life. Penguin.
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