Totalitarians of Western Philosophy
Little Crispy
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About This Podcast
Running through some of the most beloved texts in Western political philosophy. They are loved for their ingenuity and beauty. But they are respected and believed for their screeching authoritarianism. You might see episodes on...Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau. Hegel, Nietzsche, Zizek, Pettit, etc.
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Recent Episodes
S1E20 The End!
Trying to summarize the vast terrain we traversed on this podcast. Final episode.
S1E19 Our Boy Slavoj: Totalitarian Fun With Žižek!
A vast and wild oeuvre it is, but the non-stop flirtation with extreme authoritarianism, even "terrorism" and "war communism," is hard to miss. Plato, Hegel, Marx: so much of what we've talked about…
S1E18 Western Political Philosophy is a Tissue of Fictions
Summing up many of the developments seen in this podcast, we can say that Western political philosophy consists primarily of mere fictions. It's romantasy. from Plato to Rawls. It's cute! It's sweet!…
S1E17 Philip Pettit: Strictly Fictional Totalitarianism
Pettit's astonishingly evil and entirely fictional political philosophy, which might be termed "classical liberal totalitarianism".Previous attacks on Pettit:…
S1E16 Left and Right Totalitarianisms and the Real Political Spectrum
The spectrum of positions from left to right is not much of anything. The spectrum of positions from authoritarianism to anti-authoritarianism is real, man. +! the case of Barack Obama and Donald…
S1E15 Pierre Bourdieu: Descriptive and Normative Totalitarianism
I have some misgivings about including Bourdieu's On the State, but it shows the extension of the Hegelian total state toward the 21st century.
Frederic Jameson and Authoritarian Postmodernism
Jameson's An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, edited and endorsed by Žižek constitutes a casual, whimsical, half-assed and utterly disgusting totalitarianism, greeted as a…
Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects Human Freedom
in all its pernicious forms, and (according to Merleau), advocates "ultra-Bolshevism." The grotesque contradiction between Sartre's existentialist and his Stalinist conceptions of freedom makes me…
S1E12 Classical Liberalism 2: The magnificent absurdity of it all
It takes 10 minutes to destroy classical liberalism, as it turns out. Wait! 11.Resorting again to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Brandom and the conception of freedom as being "the author of the laws" or…
S1E11 A Totalitarian Strand of Classical Liberalism
'You are free when you are the lawgiver of yourself". That's Rousseau, but then it's also Kant, Hegel, Habermas, Brandom etc. By an amazing coincidence, the laws you give yourself are word-for-word…
S1E10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Cheering for Show Trials and Liquidations
(One of) the most disturbing book(s) I've ever read is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror. "To tell the truth and act out of conscience are nothing but alibis of a false morality." (Humanism…
S1E9 Martin Heidegger: Our Philosophical Führer
He was [one of] the most influential philosopher[s] of the 20th century (the golden age of totalitarianism) and a real, genuine, bona fide Nazi.Somehow I blanked on the fact that the letters I'm…
S1E8 Friedrich Nietzsche: Edging Toward the Abyss
I love Nietzsche the writer and thinker. That is a dark and dangerous politics in various ways, however. Let's talk about Nietzsche and the Nazis.
S1E7 Let's Take Stock
of what we've done so far (namely Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx) and where we might go from here (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jameson). 'But what about the collective?' These people think we…
S1E6 Karl Marx: Total Eclipse of the Heart
I talk about my own history here a bit: I come from Marxist folks. Here we swing into reality in a different way.
S1E5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Origin of Communism and Fascism
You'll be relieved to hear that Hegel's amazing political philosophy of the Prussian state as freedom and God is here to annihilate your individuality once and for all.
S1E4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Mess at the Heart of Left and Right
Rousseau, with his concept of the 'general will,' moves us fundamentally toward the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, which depend on collective identities: on the left, classes, on the…
S1E3 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan of Oppression
Hobbes (1588-1679) was the origin of social contract theory and classical liberalism as well as a totalitarian, which should get you worried about the whole subsequent history of sct and cl.Hobbes…
S1E2 Plato's Republic as a Totalitarian Manifesto
Some passages mentioned:definition of 'justice' as staying in your place: marginal pages 433-435ruling by lies ('noble' lies): 414-15marriage lottery: eugenics and endorsement of infanticide: around…
S1E1 What is Totalitarianism?
Is it different than authoritarianism, despotism, absolutism? Rough clarification of central concepts, before we launch on specific texts.
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Totalitarians of Western Philosophy has published 20 episodes since January 2025, covering topics in Philosophy, Society & Culture.
Totalitarians of Western Philosophy is currently dormant with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 26m.
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