Reviews for European Existentialism

The average rating for European Existentialism based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-14 00:00:00 Christopher Muscarella I sympathize strongly with connecting up free will/-action/-self/-what-have-you debates with freedom as a political concept. The book contains a helpful review of some of the dominant themes in debates about freedom within analytical philosophy. I think Pettit heads in the right direction when he points to something inherently social and human about the nature of freedom, but where he advocates a return to the republican ideals advocated as ideological justification for the American Revolution, things begin to go awry. Among other problems, it's hard to see what force in society today exists to push through the ideals of 1776. The bourgeoisie which was progressive at the time and carried through the French and American Revolutions now exists only as a reactionary class force. There is precious little evidence that the bourgeoisie is any less loathe to "inflame expectations" or "disturb the public content with complaints" than it was in 1825, the year in which William Paley issued the warnings against construing freedom as non-domination that Pettit quotes to support his argument that the best thinkers of the time were all for freedom as non-domination--unless it started to give people funny ideas about substantial equality. (These quotes, far from making the case that Paley was really for the right kind of freedom although he endorsed the wrong one, show a kind of naked cynicism in his refusal to endorse philosophical positions which would lend ideological support to the struggles of the oppressed.) Pettit calls this a paradox, and it is true that there is something contradictory here. The contradiction, however, is not a mere accident of unexplained bigotries and resentments, but arises from the friction between the republican ideals of the day that guided the bourgeoisie in overthrowing feudalism (which we are all quite happy about!) and the real material interests of that class once its revolution had been carried through and the task remained to contain the liberatory aspirations of the classes below it. The way Pettit tells the story, it appears a mere unfortunate accident that the bourgeois class did not fully live up to its republican ideals. Things are different now, we're told, because now the bourgeoisie can stomach the idea of treating women and servants fully as persons. But things remain mysterious: why do they have better ideas now than they did then? What's the evidence that they do? In fact, that the ideals of republicanism were eventually betrayed is no accident of the vicissitudes of ruling class opinion, but in fact the necessary side effect of the pursuit of the bourgeoisie's material interests and the need for new ideological justifications to match these interests (a process that the quotes from Paley's letters clearly illustrate). As the bourgeoisie has even less interest now in substantial human freedom than it did in 1825, there's little reason to hope that all we need to do is remind it of the good ideas it's simply managed to have "forgotten" by the wayside of history. Instead, we should look to the struggles that have won concessions from the bourgeoisie such as the struggle for women's reproductive freedom, for the eight-hour day, and for the abolition of slavery as examples of the kinds of class struggle that can move the pursuit of human freedom forward, and understand human freedom in connection with the sort of political freedom you would find in a society where everyone's needs as human beings were fully met.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-29 00:00:00 Bruce Dodds Hardest book ever.