Probing the limits of Crocean historicism

This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought—and in particular to Crocean historicism—than has often been argued. Like their predecessors in previous generations, post-war Italian intellectuals positioned themselves dialogically, in constant conversation with Croce’s hegemonic philosophy. The antecedents of their reaction against Crocean historicism can therefore be identified in earlier responses to Croce’s thought, and in this essay I examine two such responses: those of Antonio Gramsci and Renato Serra. I also examine the contemporary resonances of the (partial) anti-Crocean turn, exemplified by a consequential 1992 debate over Holocaust historiography pitting Carlo Ginzburg against Hayden White. Comparing these various assaults on the ‘Crocean citadel of historicist idealism’, I argue that the challenge to Croce has been posed most cogently by those whose dissent from his dominant intellectual paradigm was inspired not by outright opposition but rather by doubt and scepticism. In the essay’s conclusion, I explore the significance of such scepticism, exemplified by the post-war critique of Crocean historicism, for the ongoing debates over ‘probing the limits of representation’

Postmarxism and Postsocialism: A Theoretical and Historical Critique

This thesis aims to critically examine the relationship between post-socialism and post-Marxism, between a historical context opened by the collapse of 'really existing' socialist states in Eastern Europe, and a theoretical shift fashioned upon the idea of the immanent demise and overcoming of Marxist theory. The thesis is split into two parts. In the first part, my aim is to trace, through a detailed assessment of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser - and also via the examination of the relationship between the two thinkers - a specific development of the problem of the 'superstructures' in Marxist theory, of questions of politics, the State and ideology. If Gramsci, in his conceptualisation of the politics of hegemony, and in his attempt to reformulate Marxism as a 'philosophy of praxis', pushes the issues of the theoretical and practical autonomy of revolutionary politics to the very limits of Marxism, then Althusser represents a further radicalisation of Gramsci. Arguing against a post-Marxist call for a 'return from Althusser back to Gramsci', and especially against the attempt, such as can be found with Laclau and Mouffe, to reinterpret the Gramscian problematic through a revalorisation of the fundamental concepts of the liberal-democratic tradition, I argue for a need to reassess the singularity of Althusser's philosophical contributions to Marxism, and for their importance for a contemporary reinvigoration of Marxism. In this sense, I place particular stress on two moments in the theoretical apparatus of Althusser: a) his conception of philosophy as an act, or an intervention - which seems as a powerful solution to the question of 'practicality of thought', to the injunction to 'change the world' philosophically, without a reduction of philosophy to a simple servant of political practice and its immediate ideological objectives; and b) his theorisation of politics, or, more exactly, of the specificity of revolutionary politics, which Althusser is at pains to extract and separate from the 'autonomy of the political', that is, to render heterogeneous to the general, 'autonomous', sphere of the Law, of the State and of ideology. With Althusser, the true question of the autonomy of politics can only come via a radical negation of the 'autonomy of the political', and, at the same time, through an affirmation of an irreducible singular dimension of political practice. In the second part of the thesis, I focus more concretely on the historical context of post-socialism, whilst drawing from the field of theoretical problems opened by the previous discussions of Althusser, Gramsci and post-Marxism. In this, I attempt to demonstrate that a certain rethinking and revitalisation of Marxism, and namely, of Althusser's contributions, seems as a necessary part of a critical confrontation with the post-socialist political, ideological and socio-economic realities. In the three analyses of the second part, I focus on some of the symptomatic moments of what I call the post-socialist political reason: a) the precise historical role of post-Marxist theory in the genesis of post-socialist reality, which I read via an examination of the political significance of Laclau and Mouffe's notion of hegemony in the context of the Slovenian Spring of the late 1980s; b) the relationship between liberal-democracy and nationalism, and in this, the specific structural dialectic of violence internal to the liberal State as a historical form, which I read against the paradoxes of 'democratisation' in the context of the break-up of Yugoslavia; and c) the effects of the fetishism of legal categories and of the general tendency to reduce politics to Law in the post-socialist ideological spectrum, which I contrast to the singularity of the revolutionary politics of Yugoslavia

The Play and Place of Criticism

Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others

Works on Giambattista Vico in English from 1710 to 2024

This is a comprehensive bibliography of all works on Giambattista Vico available in English. It includes not only monographs and articles, but also a substantial list of scholarly works that mention Vico, as well as a section of literary works mentioning Vico. It has been made available gratis by New Vico Studies and Philosophy Documentation Center

Words about Words about Words

Originally published in 1987. In Words about Words about Words, Murray Krieger advances his ongoing dialogue with the rich diversity of contemporary literary theory and elaborates on his own position as it grows out of an opposing relation to much of current criticism. Krieger examines the kinds of ideologies and ontologies smuggled into literary theory that purports to be anti-ideological and anti-ontological. He explores the extent to which critical fashions dictate the development of theory and the reasons why particular theories exclude certain kinds of literary works in favor of others. Under such circumstances, Krieger asks, What becomes of the critic's task of evaluation? Further, what is the relation of the idea of progress to criticism and the arts, and what is the effect of these notions on cultural and intellectual institutions? He seeks an alternative to the deterministic tendencies of the new historicism in viewing the relations of literature and literary criticism to society. Progressing from broad questions to more focused critical problems and close readings, Krieger reviews the aesthetic tradition as it has evolved from Kant. He engages in debate with deconstructionist critics about the role of symbol and allegory as descriptions of ways in which poems succeed or fail in constructing their verbal universe. And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct

Thucydides in the 'Age of Extremes' and Beyond. Academia and Politics

The essays collected in this volume explore over a century of readings of Thucydides, from the years immediately preceding the First World War up to the present day. Our purpose is to reflect on some underexplored areas of Thucydidean reception within different academic traditions and political contexts, as well as reconsidering the more recent and controversial developments in the Fortleben of the Athenian historian in the fields of Strategic Studies and International Relations. The interaction between politics and academic practice is the thread that connects our collective efforts. We seek to adopt an approach that is less confined to the reuse of an ancient text in a merely political vein, but opens up to investigate wider issues concerning the history of classical scholarship and the process of consolidation of the social sciences in the academic systems