How Machiavelli Really Thought We Should Use Power: Two Animated Videos Provide an Introduction

in History, Philosophy, Politics | February 15th, 2017

Nice guys, so they say, fin­ish last. Many of us might instinc­tive­ly label such a world­view “Machi­avel­lian,” par­tial­ly for good rea­son and par­tial­ly not. It stands as a tes­ta­ment to the insights of the Renais­sance-era Flo­ren­tine polit­i­cal philoso­pher Nic­colò Machi­avel­li, expressed with great clar­i­ty and suc­cinct­ness in his books The Prince and the Dis­cours­es on Livy, not just that his name became an adjec­tive, but that it became one that remains in wide use near­ly 500 years after his death. But like oth­er such terms — “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” come to mind — its mod­ern usage tends to come detached from its name­sake writer’s orig­i­nal ideas.

So what did Machi­avel­li actu­al­ly have to say to human­i­ty? “Machi­avel­li’s Advice for Nice Guys,” a new ani­mat­ed video from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life, high­lights the core insight of his work: “that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advan­tage over the good: they are will­ing to act with the dark­est inge­nu­ity and cun­ning to fur­ther their cause. They are not held back by those rigid oppo­nents of change: prin­ci­ples.

They will be pre­pared to out­right lie, twist facts, threat­en or get vio­lent. They will also – when the sit­u­a­tion demands it – know how to seduc­tive­ly deceive, use charm and hon­eyed words, bedaz­zle and dis­tract. And in this way, they con­quer the world.”

This line of think­ing, put in such stark terms, can make Machi­avel­li seem like an off­putting­ly harsh (if quite intel­li­gent) char­ac­ter. But his writ­ing is more nuanced: he advo­cates not using flat-out lies and vio­lence to achieve one’s ends, but indeed to be nice — just “nev­er to be over­ly devot­ed to act­ing nice­ly,” an atti­tude he thought the West­’s pop­u­lar read­ings of the sto­ry of Jesus of Nazareth too often advo­cat­ed —  while always know­ing “how to bor­row – when need be – every sin­gle trick employed by the most cyn­i­cal, das­tard­ly, unscrupu­lous and nas­ti­est peo­ple who have ever lived.” Nice guys, in short, have no choice but to learn from their ene­mies.

You can learn more about the some­times har­row­ing expe­ri­ences that taught Machi­avel­li all this in the School of Life’s intro­duc­tion to his polit­i­cal the­o­ry just above. He reck­oned, more mem­o­rably than any oth­er, “the price of deal­ing with the world as it is, and not as we feel it should be. The world has con­tin­ued to love and hate Machi­avel­li in equal mea­sure for insist­ing on this uncom­fort­able truth.” Machi­avel­li, as Salman Rushdie put it in a clip we fea­tured a few years ago, lived in a time when Italy’s rul­ing fam­i­lies behaved “in the most ruth­less way, and he wrote this lit­tle trea­tise about not what he would like things to be like, but how pow­er actu­al­ly works, which he observed.” Rushdie calls the neg­a­tive asso­ci­a­tions with the philoso­pher’s name “a clas­sic case of shoot­ing the mes­sen­ger” — some­thing, alas, even the most good-inten­tioned ruler may find him­self forced to do once in a while.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Machi­avel­li (Boston Col­lege, 1983)

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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375+ Episodes of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line Now Online: Features Talks with Chomsky, Borges, Kerouac, Ginsberg & More

in Politics, Television | February 13th, 2017

On most issues, I’m clear about where I stand and why, and I used to find it enlight­en­ing to debate informed peo­ple who felt strong­ly about oppos­ing posi­tions. Some­times we would get each oth­er to budge a lit­tle bit, or—at the very least—sharpen the artic­u­la­tion of our views. These days, I often find myself in echo cham­bers, preach­ing to choirs, and oth­er clichés about epis­temic clo­sure. It’s a sit­u­a­tion that alarms me, and yet I find even more alarm­ing the lev­els of cyn­i­cism, invec­tive, bad faith, threats, and mis­in­for­ma­tion that per­vade so much par­ti­san debate.

I know I’m not alone in this lament. What we’ve lost—among oth­er human­ist virtues—is what philoso­phers and rhetori­cians call the “prin­ci­ple of char­i­ty,” gen­er­al­ly defined as mak­ing the clear­est, most intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est inter­pre­ta­tion we can of an opponent’s views and argu­ing against them on those mer­its. The prin­ci­ple of char­i­ty allows us to have civ­il dis­agree­ments with peo­ple whose ethics we may dis­like, and it there­by fur­thers dis­cus­sion rather than sti­fles it.

We may all have our own sto­ry about who is to blame for the break­down of the dis­course, but before we start yelling at each oth­er all over again, we could per­haps take some time to learn from exam­ples of polit­i­cal debate done well. One long-run­ning exam­ple involves a fig­ure whose views I’ve usu­al­ly found abhor­rent (and some of which he him­self lat­er called “rep­re­hen­si­ble”), but whose abil­i­ty to defend them in char­i­ta­ble spar­ring match­es with peo­ple from every pos­si­ble place on the spec­trum (or horse­shoe), I’ve found very com­pelling.

I write here of William F. Buck­ley, the well-heeled, Ivy League-edu­cat­ed (many have said elit­ist) founder of the Nation­al Review. What­ev­er per­son­al strengths or flaws we wish to ascribe to Buck­ley, we should agree on a few facts: Dur­ing his tenure as the host of Fir­ing Line—an often oppo­si­tion­al inter­view pro­gram in which Buck­ley chat­ted up con­ser­v­a­tive fel­low trav­el­ers and sparred with left­ist intel­lec­tu­als, artists, and activists—we see over and over again that he made an effort to actu­al­ly read his oppo­nents’ views first­hand; to clar­i­fy his under­stand­ing of them; and to base his dis­agree­ment on the the argu­ments rather than the real or imag­ined moti­va­tions of the mes­sen­ger.

Over 375 episodes of Fir­ing Line have been made avail­able on YouTube by the Hoover Insti­tu­tion at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. You can find com­plete episodes on Hoover’s YouTube chan­nel here (there are prob­a­bly more to come), and see their web site for an archive of full pro­grams and tran­scripts avail­able online.

Buck­ley did­n’t always engage in rea­soned debate: he issued many ugly per­son­al and racial attacks in print. He threat­ened to punch both Gore Vidal and Noam Chom­sky (jok­ing­ly, per­haps). But Fir­ing Line wasn’t only about its host: its suc­cess depend­ed also on the for­mat, the audi­ence, and the qual­i­ty of the dis­cus­sion and the guests. Take the few exam­ples here. At the top of the post, Buck­ley dis­cuss­es the Viet­nam War with Chom­sky. The lat­ter may be inca­pable of rais­ing his voice, but notice also Buckley’s cool exte­ri­or. While his gen­teel man­ner­isms rubbed many the wrong way, whether or not we like his demeanor, he con­sis­tent­ly employs meth­ods of clar­i­fi­ca­tion and argu­men­ta­tion rather than per­son­al attack (stray threats of punch­ing aside).

Nowhere in evi­dence is the cur­rent style of scream­ing over guests with whom the host dis­agrees. We find  sim­i­lar recep­tive­ness in Buck­ley’s inter­view with Allen Gins­berg, and even with Black Pan­ther Eldridge Cleaver, whom Buck­ley obvi­ous finds dis­taste­ful, and whose vio­lent rhetoric and vio­lent past may war­rant the reac­tion in many peo­ple’s esti­ma­tion. Nev­er­the­less, even in this extreme case, we see how the dis­cus­sion tracks along in such a way that view­ers actu­al­ly learn some­thing about the views on offer. Some may be unable to coun­te­nance either par­tic­i­pan­t’s ideas, and yet may come still away from the exchange exam­in­ing the basis of their own posi­tion.

Buck­ley didn’t only debate pol­i­tics. As in his inter­view with Gins­berg, many of his foils were lit­er­ary fig­ures, and many of them pri­mar­i­ly dis­cussed writ­ing. Fir­ing Line brought us great tele­vi­sion like the dis­cus­sions fur­ther up with Jorge Luis Borges, with Eudo­ra Wel­ty and Walk­er Per­cy above, and, below, with Nor­man Mail­er. The show ran from 1966 to 1999 and owed much of its pres­tige to the two pub­lic tele­vi­sion stations—from New Jer­sey and South Car­oli­na, respectively—who host­ed it and allowed for its rar­i­fied audi­ence.

Though it may not have been wide­ly viewed, Fir­ing Line’s influ­ence res­onat­ed wide­ly in its impact on oth­er cul­tur­al fig­ures and venues. Grant­ed, we see Buck­ley’s bias­es on dis­play. Make what you will of the fact that—although the peri­od of the show’s air­ing saw at least two waves of feminism—Buckley rarely inter­viewed women unless they already agreed with him. On the whole, how­ev­er, through­out the show’s 33-year run its host lis­tened to, engaged hon­est­ly with, and attempt­ed to under­stand oth­er points of view.

h/t Emer­son

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

William F. Buck­ley v. Gore Vidal – 1968

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hunter S. Thompson Gets in a Gunfight with His Neighbor & Dispenses Political Wisdom: “In a Democracy, You Have to Be a Player”

in Life, Politics | February 9th, 2017

What would Hunter S. Thomp­son, in many ways the ulti­mate Amer­i­can, have made of his coun­try’s polit­i­cal scene today? Hav­ing lived, in the words of his 2005 sui­cide note, “17 years past 50. 17 more than I need­ed or want­ed,” the self-styled and always uncom­pro­mis­ing “gonzo jour­nal­ist” did­n’t stick around to observe much of the 21st cen­tu­ry, and even as grim­ly vivid a polit­i­cal imag­i­na­tion as his could hard­ly have fore­seen many of its devel­op­ments. Yet like the longer-gone Alex­is de Toc­queville, also very much a man of his own time, Thomp­son’s per­spec­tive on democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca has in some sense only grown more rel­e­vant over the years with­out him.

Thomp­son would, in life, offer this per­spec­tive on any and all occa­sions, includ­ing dur­ing a shootout with his neigh­bor. In his final decades, his bio­graph­i­cal blurbs ref­er­enced both a love of firearms and a 42.5‑acre “for­ti­fied com­pound,” known as Owl Farm, in Woody Creek, Col­orado.

One might assume that such a remote and seclud­ed loca­tion would rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­flicts with neigh­bors, but Thomp­son’s expe­ri­ence (as often it did) proved an excep­tion. In the recent­ly released footage above, we see him exchang­ing gun­fire with a new­ly arrived res­i­dent in a dis­pute hav­ing some­thing to do with live­stock. “If this son of a bitch wants to bitch about his cows over here and shoot at me, well… it’s our coun­try. It’s not theirs. It’s not a bunch of used car deal­ers from south­ern Cal­i­for­nia.”

No mat­ter how impul­sive or reck­less it might seem, Thomp­son’s behav­ior arose organ­i­cal­ly, from a foun­da­tion­al polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. “The peo­ple who did this Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the Con­sti­tu­tion were, uh, good peo­ple,” he says in voiceover as we watch him assume a com­bat stance and fire off a few rounds. “And it’s a good place. Here we are in the mid­dle of it, up on the moun­tain,” from his perch on which he came to see him­self as a kind of ultra-lib­er­tar­i­an defend­er of the mis­sion of the Found­ing Fathers, or at least the mis­sion of the Found­ing Fathers as he inter­pret­ed it. The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ends by remind­ing Amer­i­cans of some­thing they tend to for­get until plunged into one cri­sis or anoth­er: “In a democ­ra­cy, you have to be a play­er.”

via red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thomp­son Sets His Christ­mas Tree on Fire, Near­ly Burns His House Down (1990)

Play­ing Golf on LSD With Hunter S. Thomp­son: Esquire Edi­tor Remem­bers the Odd­est Game of Golf

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Did Plato’s Republic Predict the Rise of Donald Trump?: A Chilling Animated Video Narrated by Andrew Sullivan

in Philosophy, Politics | February 8th, 2017

We stand, per­haps, at the thresh­old of the sin­gu­lar­i­ty, that great event when machine intel­li­gence over­takes our own. The writhing of late cap­i­tal­ism may in fact be the death throes of West­ern moder­ni­ty and, for both good and ill, much of its Enlight­en­ment lega­cy. Insti­tu­tions like the press and the polling indus­try have stum­bled bad­ly. No amount of denial­ism will stop the cli­mate cri­sis. Some­thing entire­ly new seems poised for its emer­gence into the world, though what it might be no one seems ful­ly equipped to say. Why, then, should we look back to Pla­to to explain our epoch, a philoso­pher who had no famil­iar­i­ty with mod­ern weapon­ry, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, or infor­ma­tion sys­tems?

Per­haps a bet­ter ques­tion is: do we and should we still val­ue the con­tri­bu­tions of Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy in con­tem­po­rary life? If so, then we must allow that Pla­to may be per­pet­u­al­ly rel­e­vant to learned dis­course. Alfred North White­head famous­ly char­ac­ter­ized “the Euro­pean philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion” as “a series of foot­notes to Pla­to.” Sug­gest­ing his agree­ment with the sen­ti­ment, Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci titled his reg­u­lar col­umn at The Philosopher’s Mag­a­zine, “Foot­notes to Pla­to.” Though he did not invent his mode of inquiry, and often got it very wrong, Pla­to, he writes, “is a tow­er­ing fig­ure for an entire way of think­ing about fun­da­men­tal ques­tions.”

There may be few ques­tions more fun­da­men­tal than those we now ask in the U.S. about tyran­ny, its ori­gins and remedy—about how we arrived at where we are and what eth­i­cal and prac­ti­cal mat­ters lie in the hands of the cit­i­zen­ry. These ques­tions were cen­tral to the thought of Socrates, Plato’s men­tor and pri­ma­ry char­ac­ter in his dia­logues, who had some sur­pris­ing­ly con­trar­i­an ideas on the mat­ter in The Repub­lic. Here, as Andrew Sul­li­van tells us in the BBC News­night video above, Socrates the­o­rizes that “Tyran­ny is prob­a­bly estab­lished out of no oth­er regime than democ­ra­cy.”

The state­ment shocks us, but it also ran counter to the Athen­ian sen­ti­ments of Plato’s day. The pic­ture Socrates paints of democracy’s ills finds its echo in the con­tem­po­rary conservative’s world­view, but we should point out that Sul­li­van mis­rep­re­sents the text he reads as one con­tin­u­ous pas­sage, when it is actu­al­ly a series of excerpt­ed quo­ta­tions. And as always, we should be care­ful not to try and see our own par­ti­san divides in ancient thought. Socrates also had many oth­er things to say the mod­ern right finds tru­ly objec­tion­able.

The prob­lem with democ­ra­cy, Socrates thought, was too much free­dom. Its “free­doms mul­ti­ply,” he says,

until it becomes a many-col­ored clock dec­o­rat­ed in all hues. Men are inter­change­able with women, and all their nat­ur­al dif­fer­ences for­got­ten. Ani­mals have rights. For­eign­ers can come and work just like cit­i­zens. Chil­dren boss their par­ents around. Teach­ers are afraid of their stu­dents. The rich try to look just like the poor.

Soon every kind of inequal­i­ty is despised. The wealthy are par­tic­u­lar­ly loathed. And elites in gen­er­al are treat­ed as sus­pect, per­pet­u­at­ing inequal­i­ty and rep­re­sent­ing injus­tice.

Under such pre­sum­ably deca­dent con­di­tions, “a would-be tyrant would seize his moment”:

He is usu­al­ly of the elite but is in tune with the time. Giv­en over to ran­dom plea­sures and whims. Feast­ing on food, and espe­cial­ly sex.

He makes his move by tak­ing over a par­tic­u­lar­ly obe­di­ent mob, and attack­ing his wealthy peers as cor­rupt. He is a trai­tor to his class, and soon his elite ene­mies find a way to appease him or are forced to flee.

Even­tu­al­ly he stands alone, offer­ing the addled, dis­tract­ed, self-indul­gent cit­i­zens a kind of relief from democ­ra­cy’s end­less choic­es and inse­cu­ri­ties.

He rides a back­lash to suc­cess. Too much free­dom seems to change into noth­ing but too much slav­ery. He offers him­self as the per­son­i­fied answer to all prob­lems. To replace the elites, and rule alone on behalf of the mass­es. And as the peo­ple thrill to him as a kind of solu­tion, a democ­ra­cy will­ing­ly, impetu­ous­ly, repeals itself.

The grim, dra­mat­ic ani­mat­ed video that accom­pa­nies Sullivan’s nar­ra­tion of this chill­ing­ly pre­scient ancient text is not sub­tle about the mod­ern par­al­lels. We can hearti­ly debate the diag­no­sis of “too much free­dom” as the cause of democracy’s yield­ing to tyran­ny. But what­ev­er democ­ra­cy’s fail­ings, the effects Pla­to describes above are as evi­dent today as they were almost 2300 years ago, though we may flat­ter our­selves in think­ing that the mechan­ics of our polit­i­cal sys­tems have evolved since then. In any case, our tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion means that unlike in Pla­to’s day, the rise of a tyrant like Don­ald Trump, as Sul­li­van wrote last year, may be “an extinc­tion-lev­el event.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Socrates Hat­ed Democ­ra­cies: An Ani­mat­ed Case for Why Self-Gov­ern­ment Requires Wis­dom & Edu­ca­tion

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course 

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Yale Course

in Online Courses, Philosophy, Politics | February 8th, 2017

Taught by pro­fes­sor Steven B. Smith, this course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty offers an Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy, and cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

This course is intend­ed as an intro­duc­tion to polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy as seen through an exam­i­na­tion of some of the major texts and thinkers of the West­ern polit­i­cal tra­di­tion. Three broad themes that are cen­tral to under­stand­ing polit­i­cal life are focused upon: the polis expe­ri­ence (Pla­to, Aris­to­tle), the sov­er­eign state (Machi­avel­li, Hobbes), con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­ern­ment (Locke), and democ­ra­cy (Rousseau, Toc­queville). The way in which dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal philoso­phies have giv­en expres­sion to var­i­ous forms of polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions and our ways of life are exam­ined through­out the course.

You can watch the 24 lec­tures from the course above, or find them on YouTube. To get more infor­ma­tion on the course, includ­ing the syl­labus, vis­it this Yale web­site.

The main texts used in this course include the fol­low­ing. You can find them in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. There you can find a spe­cial­ized list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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An Introduction to the Life & Thought of Hannah Arendt: Presented by the BBC Radio’s In Our Time

in Philosophy, Politics, Radio | February 8th, 2017

Unset­tling his­tor­i­cal par­al­lels between the new­ly-devel­op­ing world order and the ter­rors that scourged Europe in the 1930s and 40s now seem unde­ni­able to most informed observers of con­tem­po­rary geopol­i­tics. Euro­peans have their own polit­i­cal crises to weath­er, but all eyes cur­rent­ly seem trained on the mil­i­tary behe­moth that is my own coun­try. “These are not nor­mal times,” admits Jane Chong at Law­fare. Though she cri­tiques Nazi com­par­isons as need­less­ly alarmist, she “sees no rea­son for opti­mism.” While ref­er­ences to his­to­ry’s great­est vil­lain abound, we’ve also seen Aus­tralian sci­en­tist Alan Finkel com­pare the U.S. leader to Joseph Stal­in for the sup­pres­sion and cen­sor­ship of envi­ron­men­tal data.

The dev­as­ta­tion Hitler and Stal­in vis­it­ed upon West­ern and East­ern Europe can hard­ly be overstated—and we still find it near­ly impos­si­ble to com­pre­hend. But not soon after the end of World War II, one of the 20th century’s most prob­ing ana­lysts of polit­i­cal thought attempt­ed to do just that.

Han­nah Arendt’s 1951 The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism remains one of “sev­er­al sem­i­nal works on tyran­ny and oppres­sion that have recent­ly gained pop­u­lar­i­ty among read­ers,” notes Ali­son Gris­wold at Quartz. And Arendt’s 1963 clas­sic Eich­mann in Jerusalem also con­tin­ues to inform the moment, offer­ing a “sober­ing reflec­tion,” writes Maria Popo­va, on what Arendt called “the fear­some, word-and-thought-defy­ing banal­i­ty of evil.”

Arendt’s renewed rel­e­vance recent­ly prompt­ed Melvyn Bragg, host of the excel­lent BBC Radio pro­gram In Our Time, to bring three guest phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors—Robert Eagle­stone, Fris­bee Sheffield, and Lyn­d­sey Stone­bridge—on air to dis­cuss her ideas and influ­ence. Bragg begins with a brief out­line of Arendt’s biog­ra­phy, then turns to Sheffield, a lec­tur­er at Gir­ton Col­lege, Cam­bridge, for elab­o­ra­tion. They imme­di­ate­ly address one of the most con­tro­ver­sial aspects of Arendt’s young life, her affair with her men­tor, Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, who joined the Nazi par­ty and remained a true believ­er in its ide­ol­o­gy.

But the con­ver­sa­tion quick­ly moves on from there to encom­pass Arendt’s mul­ti-dimen­sion­al thought. “There’s a great range to her writ­ings,” says Sheffield. A trained clas­si­cist, Arendt wrote her dis­ser­ta­tion on the idea of love in St. Augus­tine. Her most philo­soph­i­cal work, The Human Con­di­tion, drew on clas­si­cal con­cepts to rank human activ­i­ty into a hier­ar­chy of labor, work, and action. She “wrote on a great range of top­ics,” Sheffield notes, though “there is a con­sis­tent inter­est in pol­i­tics and polit­i­cal themes through­out her work.”

Yet Arendt reject­ed the label of polit­i­cal philoso­pher and is her­self “hard to pin down” polit­i­cal­ly. Her 1963 book On Rev­o­lu­tion, cri­tiqued left­ist and Marx­ist thought and praised the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion for its con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism. She was skep­ti­cal of the notion of uni­ver­sal human rights, and her essay On Vio­lence made the argu­ment that vio­lence appears only in the absence of polit­i­cal pow­er, not its ascen­den­cy. As we learn from lis­ten­ing to Bragg’s assem­bled pan­el of guests, Arendt con­sis­tent­ly empha­sized two clas­si­cal con­cepts: the val­ue of a civic and polit­i­cal order and the impor­tance of the “life of the mind,” also the title of a two-vol­ume work pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1978.

In Our Time’s short, live­ly con­ver­sa­tion pro­vides an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to Arendt’s life and work. To dive more deeply into the Arendt cor­pus, vis­it Bard College’s Han­nah Arendt Cen­ter for Pol­i­tics and Human­i­ties, browse the Library of Congress’s Han­nah Arendt Papers, and read Lyn­d­sey Stonebridge’s short online essay “Han­nah Arendt’s Refugee His­to­ry.” You’ll also find an exten­sive read­ing list of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sources at the In Our Time BBC page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg & More

in Music, Politics | February 6th, 2017

When I was grow­ing up, protest music meant Pub­lic Ene­my, Rage Against the Machine, and—for some few Amer­i­cans and very many Brits—Billy Bragg: an artist “at home with both social­ist pol­i­tics and heart­break,” writes All­mu­sic, “styled on the solo attack of ear­ly Dylan and the pas­sion of the Clash.” Known for his pro-labor, anti-Thatch­er, anti-war, pro “Sex­u­al­i­ty” stances, Bragg has been a stal­wart cam­paign­er for peace and jus­tice since the 1980s.

A vet­er­an activist who made appear­ances at Occu­py Wall Street and the recent Women’s March in Lon­don, Bragg late­ly lament­ed the state of protest music. “Look at what’s hap­pen­ing in the world,” he told The Guardian in 2011, “When I was first ply­ing my trade, peo­ple were will­ing to talk about these issues. Now they’d rather write about get­ting blast­ed than chang­ing the world.”

Much has changed since 2011, I don’t need to tell you. And the protest song has returned, from Anohni’s beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing 2016 album Hope­less (see “Drone Bomb Me” above) to Pussy Riot’s fright­en­ing­ly pre­scient “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again,” released just before the elec­tion. We’ve heard it said that “protest songs are point­less,” but they’ve car­ried many a move­ment through many a seem­ing­ly hope­less moment. Bragg him­self, still ply­ing his trade, rewrote the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s clas­sic “The Times They Are A‑Changing” as “The Times They Are A‑Changing Back” (at the top), just thir­ty min­utes after the inau­gur­al speech, and “with apolo­gies” to Dylan.

Bragg clear­ly has deep roots in the genre, but are Anohni and Pussy Riot’s melod­ic provo­ca­tions protest music? What about the empow­er­ing anthems of Bey­on­cé or the poet­ic rumi­na­tions of Solange? Just what makes a protest song? Every gen­er­a­tion will have their own cri­te­ria, and their own pan­theon of polit­i­cal artists. Whether you look back to the wry folk songs of Woody Guthrie, to the Gold­en Age of Dylan, Odet­ta, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger; to the Bea­t­les or Neil Young; or to punk rock, hip-hop, reg­gae, or the funk soul of Mar­vin Gaye, you will find a few favorites on the Spo­ti­fy playlist above. It fea­tures 58 tracks and runs about 4 hours and 15 min­utes. If you want a direct link to the playlist, click here. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, please down­load it here.

To pro­duce the playlist, we culled through best-of lists from Radio X, Rolling Stone, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, and the blog Music to Die For, who in 2007 cre­at­ed some strict def­i­n­i­tions of a protest song:

– A piece of music that is a great song in its own right. Good words and fine sen­ti­ments are not enough. The music must move us.

– A song that has a pur­pose. A song that doesn’t con­fine itself to com­ment­ing on or bemoan­ing the ills of the world, but seeks in some small way to change things. It may do this by call­ing direct­ly for some­thing to hap­pen – “free Nel­son Man­dela”, by inform­ing us, by appeal­ing to our hearts and our emo­tions, or by chal­leng­ing com­mon­ly held ideas.

– It fol­lows from this that a true protest song should address a spe­cif­ic issue or issues that are cur­rent. Songs about wars and rev­o­lu­tions in days long gone are not includ­ed here.

– Final­ly the song should pro­voke the lis­ten­er : shock us, unset­tle us, amaze us, inspire us, make us angry, make us sad or make us opti­mistic. If it doesn’t do any of these things, it hard­ly deserves to be called a protest song. So be warned : there’s a lot of anger and a lot of emo­tion in these songs.

I’ll admit, I take issue with some of these criteria—I’d argue, for exam­ple, that Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is a time­less protest song that doesn’t ref­er­ence any spe­cif­ic event or offer a solu­tion (except “judg­ment day”). But you are free to dis­agree. Some of the songs on our playlist came from read­er sug­ges­tions. We’d love to hear some oth­ers. What would you add to the list? And how do you define a “protest song”? Feel free to add your thoughts and sug­ges­tions in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

Bob Dylan Plays First Live Per­for­mance of “Hur­ri­cane,” His Song Defend­ing Rubin “Hur­ri­cane” Carter (RIP) in 1975

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam Protests

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Albert Camus, Editor of the French Resistance Newspaper Combat, Writes Movingly About Life, Politics & War (1944–47)

in History, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | January 31st, 2017

Image by Unit­ed Press Inter­na­tion­al, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When total­i­tar­i­an regimes around the world are in pow­er, writ­ing that tells the truth—whether lit­er­ary, jour­nal­is­tic, sci­en­tif­ic, or legal—effectively serves as counter-pro­pa­gan­da. To write hon­est­ly is to expose: to uncov­er what is hid­den, stand apart from it, and observe. These actions are anath­e­ma to dic­ta­tor­ships. But they are inte­gral to resis­tance move­ments, which must devel­op their own press in order to dis­sem­i­nate ideas oth­er than offi­cial state dog­ma.

For the French Resis­tance dur­ing World War II, one such pub­li­ca­tion that served the pur­pose came from a cell called “Com­bat,” which gave its name to the under­ground news­pa­per to which Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus both con­tributed dur­ing and after the war. Camus became Com­bat’s edi­tor and edi­to­r­i­al writer between 1944 and 1947. Dur­ing his tenure, he “was sus­pi­cious,” writes Michael McDon­ald, and he urged his read­ers to “be sus­pi­cious of those who speak the loud­est in defense of demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and absolutes but whose goal is to instill fear in oppo­nents and to silence dis­sent.”

Camus wit­nessed and record­ed the lib­er­a­tion of France from the Nazi occu­pa­tion in mov­ing pas­sages like this one:

Paris is fir­ing all its ammu­ni­tion into the August night. Against a vast back­drop of water and stone, on both sides of a riv­er awash with his­to­ry, free­dom’s bar­ri­cades are once again being erect­ed. Once again jus­tice must be redeemed with men’s blood.

After the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able event that end­ed the war in the Pacif­ic, the 1945 bomb­ings of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki, Camus explic­it­ly cri­tiqued the “for­mi­da­ble con­cert” of opin­ion impressed with fact that “any aver­age city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a foot­ball.” Against these “elo­quent essays,” he wrote dark­ly,

We can sum it up in one sen­tence: our tech­ni­cal civ­i­liza­tion has just reached its great­est lev­el of sav­agery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between col­lec­tive sui­cide and the intel­li­gent use of our sci­en­tif­ic con­quests.

Camus heav­i­ly doc­u­ment­ed the ear­ly post-war years in France, as the coun­try slow­ly recon­sti­tut­ed itself, and as coali­tions for­mer­ly unit­ed in resis­tance col­lapsed into com­pet­ing fac­tions. He was alarmed by not only by the fas­cists on the right, but by the many French social­ists seduced by Stal­in­ism. The very next month after the lib­er­a­tion of Paris, Camus began address­ing the “prob­lem of gov­ern­ment” in an essay titled “To Make Democ­ra­cy.” Gov­ern­ment, writes Camus, “is, to a great extent our prob­lem, as it is indeed the prob­lem of every­one,” but he pref­aced his own posi­tion with, “we do not believe in pol­i­tics with­out clear lan­guage.”

By Decem­ber of 1944, a few months before the fall of Berlin, Camus had grown deeply reflec­tive, express­ing atti­tudes found in many eye­wit­ness accounts. “France has lived through many tragedies,” he wrote, and “will live through many more.” The tragedy of the war, he wrote, was “the tragedy of sep­a­ra­tion.”

Who would dare speak the word “hap­pi­ness” in these tor­tured times? Yet mil­lions today con­tin­ue to seek hap­pi­ness. These years have been for them only a pro­longed post­pone­ment, at the end of which they hope to find that the pos­si­bil­i­ty for hap­pi­ness has been renewed. Who could blame them? … We entered this war not because of any love of con­quest, but to defend a cer­tain notion of hap­pi­ness. Our desire for hap­pi­ness was so fierce and pure that it seemed to jus­ti­fy all the years of unhap­pi­ness. Let us retain the mem­o­ry of this hap­pi­ness and of those who have lost it.

These lucid, pas­sion­ate essays “include lit­tle that is obso­lete,” wrote Stan­ley Hoff­man at For­eign Affairs in 2006. “Indeed it is shock­ing to find how cur­rent Camus’ fears, exhor­ta­tions, and aspi­ra­tions still are.” Hoff­man par­tic­u­lar­ly found Camus’ demand “for moral­i­ty in pol­i­tics” com­pelling. Though “deemed naïve… [by] many oth­er philoso­phers and writ­ers of his time,” Camus’ insis­tence on clar­i­ty of thought and eth­i­cal choice made for what he called “a mod­est polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy… free of all mes­sian­ic ele­ments and devoid of any nos­tal­gia for an earth­ly par­adise.” How sober­ing those words sound in our cur­rent moment.

Camus’ Com­bat essays have been col­lect­ed in Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s Camus at Com­bat: Writ­ing 1944–1947 and in Between Hell and Rea­son: Essays from the Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, 1944–1947 from Wes­leyan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty — 1997 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its the Philosopher’s Life & Work

Albert Camus Talks About Nihilism & Adapt­ing Dostoyevsky’s The Pos­sessed for the The­atre, 1959

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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