Reviews for Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project

The average rating for Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-25 00:00:00 David Ahlers Negri is an alarmingly lame philosopher, but a disarmingly sincere radical, which causes skeptical eyes to look his way, and become, at once, annoyed and enamored of him. This is, however, a general reaction one might have to the entire Marxist tradition, which refuses to see philosophers as in any way talking about what they want to talk about, but rather as talking incidentally about what they're not talking about. At least, that's Negri's thesis - that Descartes, obviously in love with the bourgeoisie because he moved to Holland, is centrally concerned with establishing bourgeois hegemony over the planet. Negri proves this thesis by citing Descartes as a young man challenging every established doctrine, and then citing Descartes as a slightly older man spouting his conservative political opinions in the Discourse on Method, and the disconnect between the two shows that Descartes realized that the birth of the bourgeois state wasn't going to bring forth utopia and that the bourgeoisie has to buckle down and exert force, rational subjective Cartesian force, onto the intellects of its subjects. Nice read, but it would've been a little more convincing if Descartes had been a Lutheran and not argued in favor of all those scholastic positions which, according to Negri's own thesis, have nothing to do with the bourgeoisie.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-05 00:00:00 Randy Witmyer Antonio Negri writes so much better as a solo author. I find most of his work in collaboration with Michael Hardt to be a bit simplistic, but of course, that is what he is most renowned for publishing (his Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth trilogy). His work during the 70's is most fascinating to me and especially the things he wrote while in prison or right before being imprisoned. This is one of the most thorough readings of Descartes I have come across, and not really being a Descartes scholar that is not saying much, but considering the detailed and revolutionary readings of Spinoza and Marx given by Negri this book definitely lives up to the measure of his other re-readings. A must read!