Bøker av Sean Noah Walsh

Counterrevolution and Repression in the Politics of Education revisits the ideas of Herbert Marcuse in order to examine how his observations on counterrevolution are applicable to present conditions in politics, particularly those pertaining to the politics of education. While Marcuse's influence in the academy has noticeably waned since its zenith in the late 1960's, his observations seem more relevant than ever, especially in the current context of economic crises, ideological polarization, and a heightened disaffection with capitalism. In particular, this book focuses on how counterrevolution functions within the field of ideology, manipulating the acquisition, representation, and exercise of reason in order to diminish the faculties of dissent and render utopian projects as the paramount political obscenity. While we are most familiar with counterrevolution in its guise of bloodstained battlefields and ditches filled with the bodies of dissidents, Marcuse alerts us to the decidedly ideological character of counterrevolution in late capitalism. In advanced industrial society, counterrevolution functions by converting the needs of the working class, turning a potentially revolutionary segment of society into clients and supporters of the very system that oppresses them. Furthermore, the counterrevolution in the advanced industrial society is purely preemptivethere is no revolution to be undone or turned back. Starting from the foundation provided by Marcuse, this book demonstrates how the tactics of counterrevolution have been applied in the present for the purpose of undermining criticism and dissent and how counterrevolution has intervened within the politics of reason. In the last several years alone, we have witnessed attempts by state powers to reorganize college and university curricula, a heightened denigration of intellectuals and academics within political discourse, pervasive encroachment of consumerism in the collegiate experience, and the rapid expansion of online teaching. By using Marcuse's ideas, this book demonstrates that rather than unconnected and isolated, these phenomena are unified by the counterrevolutionary strategy of limiting and obstructing the acquisition of reason for the final aim of narrowing the possibilities for dissent.

In this critical work on the political thought of Leo Strauss, Sean Noah Walsh addresses Leo Strauss's claims about esotericism in the philosophic texts of Plato. He challenges Strauss's understanding of esoteric writing as an attempt by Plato to secretly encode the highest truths ';exclusively between the lines' in order to avoid persecution. Indeed, through the character of Socrates, the speaker with whom Plato is inextricably associated, Walsh asserts that Plato's exoteric writings were sufficiently incendiary and provocative to demonstrate that a fear of persecution was not his highest priority. The politics that follow from Strauss's thought depend on the interpretation of these Platonic philosophical bases and by analyzing how the problem of fear has been confronted in the works of Plato and Leo Strauss, Walsh offers a direct and thorough account of the politics that emerge from Strauss's esoteric reading of political philosophy. Applying Lacanian psychoanalysis, Walsh investigates the discourse of Straussian esotericism. and examines Plato's writing for examples of exoteric risk, subjecting both Plato and Strauss's writings to Lacans psychoanalytic technique for interpreting the function of desire in discourse. Given the continuing influence of Strauss's ideas on contemporary politics, particularly within American foreign policy, Walsh's examination of this Straussian esotericism for these effects will prove an interesting read for political theorists, international relations scholars, and philosophers alike.