Totalitarians of Western Philosophy

Trying to summarize the vast terrain we traversed on this podcast. Final episode.

A vast and wild oeuvre it is, but the non-stop flirtation with extreme authoritarianism, even "terrorism" and "war communism," is hard to miss. Plato, Hegel, Marx: so much of what we've talked about runs together here, in revival. SZ seeks to inspire whole newish or newesque totalitarian movements."One of the mantras of the postmodern left is that one should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist' paradigm of centralized and dictatorial power. Perhaps, the time has come to turn this mantra around and admit that a dose of this 'Jacobin-Leninist' paradigm is precisely what the left needs today." (Idea of Communism 1 p. 217)

Summing up many of the developments seen in this podcast, we can say that Western political philosophy consists primarily of mere fictions. It's romantasy. from Plato to Rawls. It's cute! It's sweet! If you deleted the fiction, you'd have deleted political philosophy.

Pettit's astonishingly evil and entirely fictional political philosophy, which might be termed "classical liberal totalitarianism".Previous attacks on Pettit: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUz6jqVz4W1LUHFMNemTIGVcPECivNvYC

The spectrum of positions from left to right is not much of anything. The spectrum of positions from authoritarianism to anti-authoritarianism is real, man. +! the case of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

I have some misgivings about including Bourdieu's On the State, but it shows the extension of the Hegelian total state toward the 21st century.

Jameson's An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited and endorsed by Žižek constitutes a casual, whimsical, half-assed and utterly disgusting totalitarianism, greeted as a beautiful expression of hope. This should make you wonder about all of Jameson's work.Which is later: capitalism or Jameson? And which is less plausible, Frederic Jameson or Frederic Jameson as such?https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/nostalgic-futurism

in all its pernicious forms, and (according to Merleau), advocates "ultra-Bolshevism." The grotesque contradiction between Sartre's existentialist and his Stalinist conceptions of freedom makes me want to sob. 

It takes 10 minutes to destroy classical liberalism, as it turns out. Wait! 11.Resorting again to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Brandom and the conception of freedom as being "the author of the laws" or "the lawgiver of onerself."

'You are free when you are the lawgiver of yourself". That's Rousseau, but then it's also Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Brandom etc. By an amazing coincidence, the laws you give yourself are word-for-word the laws we've given you. This approach amounts to a disingenuous disinformation program. videos on conceptions of freedom in western philosophy:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUz6jqVz4W1LtmhTkTejFtyTMn9ZRMGx_