*Book review by Albena Azmanova published on socialeurope.eu (4 May 2018) Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power (Polity, 2017) carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). The latter is penned by a state official turned humanist philosopher; the former by a humanist philosopher turned an accidental state official. Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics […]
by Boaventura de Sousa Santos / Critical Legal Thinking, 28 September 2017 The Catalonia referendum this Sunday will become part of the history of Europe, possibly for the worst of reasons. I will not discuss here the substantive questions, which can be interpreted as being historical, territorial, respecting internal colonialism or self-determination. These are the […]
by Costas Douzinas Were the four successive electoral victories of Syriza a historic event? Have we reached the point at which the ancien regime had reached its natural end? Can philosophy help us in this respect? The belief that we can predict the movement of history is relatively recent. In its strict version, it constitutes […]
A common premise of recent Cif debates [ref to Porter, Gearty and any number of others] is that liberty and security must be balanced. Like all clichés, the rhetoric of ‘balancing’ combines truism with mild inaccuracy to mean all things to all men. In a further twist of historical amnesia, liberty is presented as individualist or right wing while security as state-centred or socialist.
