American and European Leftist Academia through the Prism of Paul Berman’s <i>A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968</i>


Abstract

In his book, Paul Berman outlines a productive framework for a further interpretation of ideas of the leftist thinkers in North America and Europe. This article tries to follow Berman’s approach and to provide a critical stance towards the views of a number of Western social and political philosophers who write after 1968 and even after 1989. My findings confirm Berman’s light irony to this trend of thought but emphasize that some of the works discussed seem to be realistic in avoiding unjustified optimism concerning the leftist position.


Keywords

leftist thought; social and political philosophy; political left; global predicament; subject fetishism; commodification of subjects; simulacrum; global surplus recycling mechanism; sin of the Left

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007.

Berman, Paul. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Corjescu, Dan. “The 1989 Gangster Revolution, Revisited”, Counterpunch, September 13, 2018, https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/13/the-1989-gangster-revolution-revisited/ (last accessed on October 20, 2018).

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York, Penguin Press, 2004.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1997.

Katsiaficas, George. The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution, Oakland, PM Press, 2018 .

Losurdo, Domenico. La sinistra assente. Crisi, società dello spettacolo, guerra (Compliant Left. Crises, Society of Spectacle, War), Roma, Carocci editore, 2014

Matuštík, Martin Joseph. Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order, Albany, SUNY Press, 1998.

Radical Philosophy Association (RPA), http://www.radicalphilosophyassociation.org/mission.html (last accessed on October 20, 2018).

Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998.

Sarantis, Eleftherios. Book review of Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (Zed Books, second edition, 2013), 296. Sofia Philosophical Review, vol. IX, no. 1, 2016.

Sarantis, Eleftherios. Book review of Yanis Varoufakis, Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat, editors, What Does Europe Want? - The Union and its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 240pp. Sofia Philosophical Review, vol. IX, no. 1, 2016.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Imagination in discourse and in action” in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, London and New York, Routledge, 1994.

Zizek, Slavoj. “The West's Crisis is One of Democracy as Much as Finance”, The Guardian (January 2013).


Published : 2019-12-23


GungovA. (2019). American and European Leftist Academia through the Prism of Paul Berman’s <i>A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968</i&gt;. Review of International American Studies, 12(2), 89-102. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.7374

Alexander L. Gungov  agungov@protonmail.com
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”  Bulgaria
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9078-1573

Alexander L. Gungov is Professor of Philosophy at University of Sofia. He has published on philosophy of Giambattista Vico, philosophical critique of manipulation in the public discourse, and logic in medicine. He is the Editor of Sofia Philosophical Review and Director of the Graduate Studies in Philosophy. Taught in English at the University of Sofia.






Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.