Domenico Losurdo: Liberalism: A Counter-History (2006/2011)

One of Europe’s leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism’s dark side.

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

First published in Italian as Controstoria del Liberalismo, Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2006
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2011
ISBN 1844676935, 9781844676934
375 pages

interview with the author, video (Pam Nogales and Ross Wolfe, The Platypus Review)

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)

Boris Groys: The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1988–) [EN, IT]

“As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single “artistic” whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an “art for the masses.” Groys argues instead that the “total art” proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin’s death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing “sots art,” a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.”

Originally published in German as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, Carl Hanser, Munich and Vienna, 1988.

English edition
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1992
ISBN 0691055963, 9780691055961
126 pages

Reviews: Alla Efimova (Art Bulletin, 1992), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Slavic Review, 1993), Mary A. Nicholas (Slavic and East European Journal, 1993), Ross Wolfe (Situations, c2011), Giuliano Vivaldi (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2013).

Publisher (EN)

The Total Art of Stalinism (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1992, updated on 2012-7-18)
Lo stalinismo ovvero l’opera d’arte totale (Italian, trans. Emanuela Guercetti, 1992, added on 2019-12-14)

Mik journal, Nr. 3: Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe (2007) [English/Lithuanian]

“The third volume of the Art History & Criticism journal includes articles based on the proceedings of the international conference Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe organised by the Art Institute, Vytautas Magnus University in 26-27 October 2006. Thirty scholars – from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA – presented papers focused upon one aspect of the European history and culture, namely the former Eastern bloc and its Soviet past as well as quotidian post-Soviet reality. Participants of the Kaunas conference discussed one of the most challenging issues of the field – art and politics.” (from Preface)

Meno istorija ir kritika / Art History & Criticism journal
Issue: Menas ir politika: Rytų Europos atvejai / Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe, 2007
Editor-in-chief: Vytautas Levandauskas
Publisher: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas / Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania
ISSN 1822-4555
232 pages

conference programme (PDF)
publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-9-1)
Other issues