The New Barbarism and the Modern West: Recognizing an Ethic of Difference

Toivo Koivukoski

doi:10.5771/9780739190005

Summary

Liberalism is being called into question both in practice and in principle, from insurgencies at its bloody hinterlands and from the illiberal responses those insurgencies engender within the so-called civilized world, with technological integration creating the conditions for new forms of barbarism.

What then are the chances of progress towards a substantial equality of freedoms within this new context of retrograde attitudes framed by the occlusion of others as somehow essentially different? How can we register the significances of cultural distinctions without letting those ‘we's’ and ‘they's’ split an emergent global civil society into parochial retro-nations, where belonging knows itself only by exclusion? What is it that is being called out of the spirit of modernity in our seemingly backward-moving age of essentialized others and self-righteous rage? And to the end of inter-cultural understanding, how can we come to know the other, both through the care of others and in ourselves?

This work of political theory reflects on how cultures imagine their barbarians in the form of essentialized others, focusing specifically on the kinds of barbarism associated with a civilization devoted to technological progress. In response to the excesses of modernity, the author looks to advances an ethic of difference, inverting the golden rule so as to do unto others as those others would do unto themselves.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2014
Copyright year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7391-8999-3
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7391-9000-5
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 143
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
1. An ethical proposition No access
2. An ethic of difference No access
3. In defense of late modern liberalism No access
4. Barbarism in its cultural specificity No access
5. On the identity: barbarism = nature No access
6. Sentience of nature No access
7. On the Delphic Oracle No access
8. Profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries No access
9. Myth in modernity No access
10. Big Others and other Others No access
11. Applied barbarism No access
12. The barbarian as vanishing subject No access
13. Notes No access
1. Alterity or nothing! No access
2. An interruption and reason for love No access
3. A handbook of inward culture for outward barbarians No access
4. Love and duty No access
5. From familial love to the fear of others No access
6. Negation and self-knowledge No access
7. On love lost and getting it back No access
8. Eros as search for the other half No access
9. Divided love, the broken circle, and origins of world alienation No access
10. Love is relational No access
11. Love begins with difference No access
12. Notes No access
1. The new savagery No access
2. An ontology of difference No access
3. Knowledge by proxy No access
4. The limits of idealism No access
5. Other than reason No access
6. Being is interdependency No access
7. Reading for perspective No access
8. Notes No access
1. On our barbarism toward nature No access
2. Is nature normal? No access
3. Nature in its absence No access
4. Civilization as conspiracy No access
5. A world without barbarians No access
6. On what is missing No access
7. On the barbarism of reflection No access
8. On exclusion No access
9. Notes No access
Bibliography No access Pages 131 - 134
Index No access Pages 135 - 142
About the Author No access Pages 143 - 143