Domenico Losurdo

Domenico Losurdo is an Italian philosopher, historian, political theorist and marxist intellectual.

Contents

Life

Thought

Losurdo criticizes the concept of totalitarism, especially in the works of Hannah Arendt. Losurdo's argument is that totalitarism is a polysemic concept, with origins in christian theology, and that the change to a political sense is an operation of abstract schematism that forces isolated elements of historical reality to enter in an implicit comparition between fascist regimes and the URSS, which serves the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals more than it reflects authentic intellectual research.

Losurdo says that the origins of fascism and Nazism were in the colonialist and imperialist policies of the West, where administrative genocides and political control over entire populations were carried out for the first time, as well as in the traditions of racism and anti-semitism, including slavery and racism at USA, where the Ku Klux Klan and the juridical exclusions of black population were important influences on Nazi leaders.

Losurdo studied the intellectual and political positions of intellectuals on modernity. In that case, Kant and Hegel were the greater thinkers of modernity, while Nietzsche was the great critic of modernity, followed by Marxist thinkers as Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch. Marx and Gramsci were at the same time critics and defenders of modernity.

Works

  • Autocensura e compromesso nel pensiero politico di Kant, Napoli, 1984
  • Hegel und das deutsche Erbe. Philosophie und nationale Frage zwischen Revolution und Reaktion, Köln, 1989
  • La comunità, la morte, l'Occidente. Heidegger e l' "ideologia della guerra", Torino, 1991. Traducido al castellano como La comunidad, la muerte, Occidente : Heidegger y la "ideología de la guerra" Buenos Aires : Losada, 2003
  • Hegel e la libertà dei moderni, Roma, 1992
  • Democrazia o bonapartismo: trionfo e decadenza del suffragio universale, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1993;
  • La Seconda Repubblica. Liberismo, federalismo, postfascismo, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1994.
  • Controstoria del liberalismo, Roma-Bari : Laterza, 2005. Traducido al castellamo como Contrahistoria del liberalismo Mataró (Barcelona)] : El Viejo Topo, D.L. 2007
  • Il linguaggio dell'Impero : lessico dell'ideologia americana Roma- Bari : Laterza, 2007

External links

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