The West Removed. Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization

86 Pages·2016·0.487 MB·English

by  Paolo Ercolani

MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
POLITICS
n. 3
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
P E
aolo rcolani
THE WEST REMOVED
Economics, Democracy, Freedom:
A Counter-History of Our Civilization
Foreword by
Santiago Zabala
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
© 2016 – MiMEsis intErnational
www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: [email protected]
Book series: Politics, n. 3
Isbn: 9788869770678
© MIM Edizioni Srl
P.I. C.F. 02419370305
CONTENTS
ForEword 9
by Santiago Zabala
1. Myths to discrEdit 13
2. FroM J.s. Mill to hayEk:
thE swinging FrEEdoM 21
3. thE Myth oF FrEE MarkEt
and thE riFt oF libEralisM 27
4. F.a. hayEk: a ProPhEt oF our tiME 35
5. two libEralisMs 43
6. thE dEnial oF thE 20th cEntury 51
7. Marx and PoPPEr: why wE can’t but
dEFinE oursElvEs as Marxists, too 59
notEs 67
rEFErEncEs 77

“The seeds burgeon once more, and talk is
silenced by the solemn recurrences of history“
(G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of
Right: § 324 A)
“The problem of the history as a whole is
unanswerable within its own perspective […]
History as such has not outcome”
(K. Löwith, Meaning in History: 191)
“Such a perfect democracy constructs its own
inconceivable foe, terrorism.
Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather
than by its results“
(G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the
Spectacle: § IX)

FOREWORD
by
Santiago Zabala
There are few young philosophers in Europe who
are also public intellectuals. Paolo Ercolani is one of
them. He belongs to a generation of thinkers who be-
lieve intellectuals must return to the engagement in
social and public matters that they had in the 1950s
and 1960s. The fact that today there are fewer think-
ers willing to engage in public matters is a product
of the specialization and compartmentalization of
knowledge that Martin Heidegger predicted. Our re-
sponsibility in the twenty-first century is not simply to
criticize the discrimination inherent in contemporary
institutions and invite others to think differently but
also to preserve the right to be a public intellectual.
Ercolani is a professor of the history of philoso-
phy and the theory of new media at the University
of Urbino and the author of several books on Hayek,
Tocqueville, and Marx, but he also writes opinion
articles for major Italian newspapers (Corriere della
Sera, Il Manifesto) and journals (MicroMega, Critica
Liberale). In these articles he does not simply engage
in political and cultural debates but he also encour-
ages them because he believes that we are living in
an age dominated by a neoliberal logic that demands
that political differences and social alternatives be
avoided. This is evident in the EU’s constant rhetoric
against the rise of populist parties throughout Europe,
as if they were all alike,1 and in the West’s so-called
war on terror, which has recently found a new impe-
tus with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Against these simple, one-sided, and politically cor-
rect accounts of our world, Ercolani believes we must
make an effort to question philosophical truths, his-
torical myths, and social prejudices, regardless what
unpopular territory this might lead to. For example,
as he recently pointed out,2 supporters of ISIS are not
simple Islamic fundamentalists but the result of social,
economic, and cultural degradation created by decades
of Western constraints. In line with his former tutor,
distinguished historian Domenico Losurdo, Ercolani
presents counter-histories of what Simone Weil once
called the “Americanization of the world.”
The seven chapters of this book cover a variety of
concepts (liberalism, freedom, Marxism) and classic
thinkers (Mill, Hayek, Marx, Popper) in order to dis-
close several myths we have become accustomed to
take for granted in the West. He posits that explora-
tion of these myths is crucial to understanding the es-
sence of the West or, better, to seeing what has been
1 S. Zabala, “In Europe, Not All Populist Parties Are the
Same” Al Jazeera America, 2 December 2014, http://
america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/podemos-spain-
politicspopulismeurope.html.
2 P. Ercolani, “Isis: guerra mondiale o miopia globale?”
Il Manifesto, 22 November 2015, http://ilmanifesto.info/
storia/isis-guerra-mondiale-o-miopia-globale/.
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