Unexpected (?) affinities. Weber and the founders of Socialisme ou Barbarie
– a conversation between Yannis Ktennas (Athens) and Pedro T. Magalhães (Minho), moderated by Victor Strazzeri (São Paulo).
21 May – 6pm (CET)
Paradoxically or not, Max Weber’s work has always been a source of inspiration for philosophers who support radical emancipatory projects and defend political values Weber himself did not seem to share. In this session, we focus on his direct and indirect influence on the founding figures of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a political and philosophical review which became a leading outlet of the anti-Stalinist French Left during the first decades after World War II. In their early years, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis drew upon Weber’s writings in order to criticize bureaucracy in the USSR and the West. They subsequently continued to engage critically with Weber’s work in an effort to form their own (sometimes converging, sometimes diverging) concepts of society, democracy, politics and modernity.
In preparation of the event our two speakers made the following texts available for download:
- C. Lefort (1960) «Qu’est-ce que la bureaucratie?»/«What is bureaucracy?» (In French and English)
- C. Castoriadis (1990). Individual, Society, Rationality, History. Thesis Eleven, 25(1), 59-90.
- Y. Ktenas (2021), Weber and Castoriadis. Society as a world of meaning and the anti-speculative stance towards history, Sociétés politiques comparées 53, janvier/avril 2021.
Pedro T. Magalhães earned his PhD in Political Science from NOVA University Lisbon. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Minho. His research interests cover the fields of democratic theory, modern political ideologies and twentieth-century intellectual history. His book The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy: A Study on the Political Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen was published by Routledge in 2021.
Yannis Ktennas is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. He teaches philosophy at the University of Thessaly. He has published on issues related to the epistemology of the social sciences and the problems of value-foundation and, more recently, the pandemic. His main publications in English include the paper “Weber and Castoriadis. Society as a World of Meaning and the Anti-Speculative Stance towards History” (2021) and the (upcoming) paper “Autonomy and Reflexivity. On the Significance and Limitations of Castoriadis’s Concept of an Autonomous Society”.
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