Ronald Beiner
Biographic Data
| ID | 490318 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronald Beiner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronald |
| FAMILY NAME | Beiner |
| SIGNATURE | BEINER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7955-7658 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 69 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Coerced Conscience, written by Gais Amy
Civil religion
Alexander Dugin
Transversal Racialisation
The article focuses on Domenico Losurdo’s subtle but important distinction between ‘horizontal racialisation’ and ‘transversal racialisation’. A grasp of what is at play in Nietzsche’s conception of the latter allows one to appreciate Nietzsche’s politics in its most disturbing and sinister aspect. It also uncovers revealing affinities with the decisively Nietzsche-influenced political vision of the über-fascist thinker, Julius Evola. Attention t…
What's the Matter with Liberalism?
Civil Religion in Modern Political Philosophy
In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss wrote: “We no longer understand that in spite of great disagreements among [Machiavelli and the whole series of political thinkers who succeeded him], they were united by the fact that they all fought one and the same power—the kingdom of darkness, as Hobbes called it; that fight was more important to them than any merely political issue.” That is, what eventually came to be called “the Enlightenment projec…
Dangerous minds in dangerous times
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don't simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-orien…
The Plague of Bannonism
Donald Trump’s thinking is too erratic and scattershot to count as a real system of ideas. Steve Bannon’s version of populism seems significantly more focused, more self-conscious, and hence more open to theory-based critical analysis, which this paper attempts to provide. That is not at all to say, however, that Bannon’s ideas achieve intellectual coherence or consistency. Close examination of the defining components of his worldview suggest the…
Dangerous Minds
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of…
Dialogue with Six Critics
Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I…
James Harrington on the Hebrew Commonwealth
Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical pow…
Civil religion and anticlericalism in James Harrington
In the last few years, there has been a notable surge of interest in the themes of civil religion and the battle against “priestcraft” among historians of political thought. Examples include Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic; Paul Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar; Jeffrey Collins’s The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes; Jonathan Israel’s work on the legacy of Spinoza; Justin Champion’s work on John Toland; and my own book, Civil Religion. Within the int…
Political Judgement
Kant and the Concept of Community
The concept of community plays a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, his aesthetics, and his religious thought. Kant uses community in many philosophical contexts: the category of community introduced in his table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason; the community of substances in the third analogy; the realm of ends as an ethical community; the state and the public sphere as political communities; th…
Paradoxes in Kant’s Account of Citizenship
Civil Religion
Civil Religion offers philosophical commentaries on more than twenty thinkers stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. It examines four important traditions within the history of modern political philosophy. The civil religion tradition, principally defined by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau, seeks to domesticate religion by putting it solidly in the service of politics. The liberal tradition pursues an alternative strategy of dom…
Has the Great Separation Failed
In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla illuminates why “political theology” remains relevant today, in a world we might have assumed was thoroughly secularized. Lilla suggests that political theology is the norm, and that Christianity inadvertently gave birth to an exception. But the exception—liberal theology, or a separation of church and state that would give full play to religious impulses—was doomed. Religious impulses were not satisfied by mere m…
À la recherche d’une philosophie publique postlibérale
Dans Democracy’s Discontent , Michael J. Sandel démontre, comme nul autre défenseur contemporain du républicanisme civique, l’ampleur de l’appauvrissement de la vie politique lorsque l’idéal républicain est éclipsé par le libéralisme procédural. On ne saurait douter de l’apport du républicanisme de M. Sandel comme instrument de critique sociale, grâce auquel est dévoilée l’indigence morale et civique de la société libérale moderne. Mais sa théori…
Rereading `Truth and Politics
Hannah Arendt develops an immensely attractive account of `judgment', both as a supremely important human mental capacity and with respect to its place in political life, and this account rightly draws attention from a broad array of political theorists. Her essay `Truth and Politics' is one of the texts in which she first articulates this account of judgment. However, the account of truth offered in that essay is full of both puzzles and problem…
Multiculturalism and Citizenship
What is citizenship? This question goes back to the political philosophy of Aristotle, and how one answers it will be decisive in determining one's vision of political life. In the last ten to fifteen years, the question of citizenship has aroused a renewed set of extremely lively debates within political philosophy, and Iris Marion Young has certainly occupied an important place within these theoretical debates. In particular, Young—especially i…
Politics and Vision
Modern Social Imaginaries
Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 215 The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. Bu…
Recursos cívicos en una sociedad liberal
No Disponible
Community versus citizenship
Among the theorists commonly associated with the communitarian critique of liberalism of the 1980s (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre), MacIntyre is the one who offers the most radical set of challenges to ways of thinking that typify contemporary liberalism. But does MacIntyre's thought add up to a fully worked‐out political philosophy? The specifically political implications of MacIntyre's contributions to m…
Modern Liberty and Its DiscontentsPierre Manent Edited and translated by Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton Lanham
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion
Book 4, chapter 8, of the Social Contract, on civil religion, presents a puzzle. According to Rousseau, no state has ever been founded that did not have religion as its base. But which religion? Christianity is not an option. Paganism is not an option. Monotheistic theocracy is not an option. What does that leave? By a process of elimination, we are left with an Enlightenment religion of tolerance and mutual forbearance, which even readers sympat…
Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History
What is Walter Benjamin's intention in his enigmatic on Philosophy of History'?' According to Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem, Theses he accomplished his awakening from shock of pact.2 According to Scholem, Theses mark Benjamin's decisive break with materialism and a return to metaphysical-theological concerns of his early thought: What Theses have left in common with materialism is only ironic relation of termini technici'; frequently nothing …
Multiculturalism and Citizenship
What is citizenship? This question goes back to the political philosophy of Aristotle, and how one answers it will be decisive in determining one's vision of political life. In the last ten to fifteen years, the question of citizenship has aroused a renewed set of extremely lively debates within political philosophy, and Iris Marion Young has certainly occupied an important place within these theoretical debates. In particular, Young—especially i…
Rereading `Truth and Politics
Hannah Arendt develops an immensely attractive account of `judgment', both as a supremely important human mental capacity and with respect to its place in political life, and this account rightly draws attention from a broad array of political theorists. Her essay `Truth and Politics' is one of the texts in which she first articulates this account of judgment. However, the account of truth offered in that essay is full of both puzzles and problem…
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss
The Plague of Bannonism
Donald Trump’s thinking is too erratic and scattershot to count as a real system of ideas. Steve Bannon’s version of populism seems significantly more focused, more self-conscious, and hence more open to theory-based critical analysis, which this paper attempts to provide. That is not at all to say, however, that Bannon’s ideas achieve intellectual coherence or consistency. Close examination of the defining components of his worldview suggest the…
James Harrington on the Hebrew Commonwealth
Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical pow…
Modern Social Imaginaries
Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 215 The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. Bu…
Foucault's hyper‐liberalism
In the last years of his life, Michel Foucault sought to address "ethical" questions, having to do with the self's relation to itself, by trying to locate in the Roman Stoics and other philosophers of antiquity what he called "an aesthetics of existence." By this Foucault meant "the idea of a self which has to be created as a work of art." This article aims at a critical dialogue with the texts that compose this last phase of Foucault's thought, …
Civil religion and anticlericalism in James Harrington
In the last few years, there has been a notable surge of interest in the themes of civil religion and the battle against “priestcraft” among historians of political thought. Examples include Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic; Paul Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar; Jeffrey Collins’s The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes; Jonathan Israel’s work on the legacy of Spinoza; Justin Champion’s work on John Toland; and my own book, Civil Religion. Within the int…
Rereading Hannah Arendt's Kant Lectures
This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a ph…
Hermeneutical generosity and social criticism
According to one model of social theory, the social theorist seeks to give as rich an account as possible of a society's own self‐understanding or self‐interpretation. The second model, by contrast, involves challenging the society's self‐understanding on the basis of a radical vision of ultimate standards of. judgment. Charles Taylor claims that neither of these models should be privileged over the other, that both are equiprimordial ways of the…
Books in Review
Dangerous minds in dangerous times
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don't simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-orien…
Politics and Vision
Revising the self
The liberal political morality developed in Will Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community and Culture is in various respects stronger and more coherent than many theories of Kymlicka's liberal predecessors and contemporaries, but it still suffers from important weaknesses that characterize other liberalisms. By ridding liberal theory of unnecessary defects, Kymlicka helps to clarify why even a liberalism capable of repelling the communitarian challenge w…
Richard Rorty's liberalism
Richard Rorty, with his tendency to shock, to provoke, and to seize on Continental fashions, might be thought an unlikely liberal. Nevertheless, Rorty illustrates very well some of the characteristic weaknesses of contemporary liberalism. To the extent that he draws upon postmodern and deconstructionist sources, he highlights, and radicalizes, the liberal urge to break out of frozen identities and to destabilize static roles and fixed stations in…
Hannah Arendt on Capitalism and Socialism
the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false — not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing a different hat.So you ask me where I am. I am nowhere. I am really not in the mainstream of present or any other political thought. But not because I want to be so original — it so happens that I somehow don't fit. For instance, this business between capitalism and socialism s…
The Classical Method of Political Science, and its Relation to the Study of Contemporary Politics
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CLASSICAL POLITICAL SCIENCE AND its modern counterpart may help to illuminate certain serious deficiencies in the contemporar study of politics. It will wide diversity of research under the rubric of ‘contemporary political science’; nonetheless, it is possible to delineate a characteristic set of features inherent in a prevailing understanding of politics that is indeed recognizable, and is deserving of deep critical scrutin…
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled Life of Mind. Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only first two parts, Thinking and Willing. Of third, Judging, only title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to three Critiques of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on Life of Mind, Arendt lectured …
Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History
What is Walter Benjamin's intention in his enigmatic on Philosophy of History'?' According to Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem, Theses he accomplished his awakening from shock of pact.2 According to Scholem, Theses mark Benjamin's decisive break with materialism and a return to metaphysical-theological concerns of his early thought: What Theses have left in common with materialism is only ironic relation of termini technici'; frequently nothing …
The Classical Method of Political Science, and its Relation to the Study of Contemporary Politics
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CLASSICAL POLITICAL SCIENCE AND its modern counterpart may help to illuminate certain serious deficiencies in the contemporar study of politics. It will wide diversity of research under the rubric of ‘contemporary political science’; nonetheless, it is possible to delineate a characteristic set of features inherent in a prevailing understanding of politics that is indeed recognizable, and is deserving of deep critical scrutin…
Books in Review
Toleration and the Constitution
Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic RadicalismBruce Detwiler Chicago
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss
Hannah Arendt on Capitalism and Socialism
the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false — not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing a different hat.So you ask me where I am. I am nowhere. I am really not in the mainstream of present or any other political thought. But not because I want to be so original — it so happens that I somehow don't fit. For instance, this business between capitalism and socialism s…
What’s the Matter with Liberalism?
In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists? Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable 'values' and 'rights,' but no principles. To Beiner, this neu…
Thin ice
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion
Book 4, chapter 8, of the Social Contract, on civil religion, presents a puzzle. According to Rousseau, no state has ever been founded that did not have religion as its base. But which religion? Christianity is not an option. Paganism is not an option. Monotheistic theocracy is not an option. What does that leave? By a process of elimination, we are left with an Enlightenment religion of tolerance and mutual forbearance, which even readers sympat…
Richard Rorty's liberalism
Richard Rorty, with his tendency to shock, to provoke, and to seize on Continental fashions, might be thought an unlikely liberal. Nevertheless, Rorty illustrates very well some of the characteristic weaknesses of contemporary liberalism. To the extent that he draws upon postmodern and deconstructionist sources, he highlights, and radicalizes, the liberal urge to break out of frozen identities and to destabilize static roles and fixed stations in…
Books in Review
Revising the self
The liberal political morality developed in Will Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community and Culture is in various respects stronger and more coherent than many theories of Kymlicka's liberal predecessors and contemporaries, but it still suffers from important weaknesses that characterize other liberalisms. By ridding liberal theory of unnecessary defects, Kymlicka helps to clarify why even a liberalism capable of repelling the communitarian challenge w…
What's the Matter with Liberalism
Foucault's hyper‐liberalism
In the last years of his life, Michel Foucault sought to address "ethical" questions, having to do with the self's relation to itself, by trying to locate in the Roman Stoics and other philosophers of antiquity what he called "an aesthetics of existence." By this Foucault meant "the idea of a self which has to be created as a work of art." This article aims at a critical dialogue with the texts that compose this last phase of Foucault's thought, …
Hermeneutical generosity and social criticism
According to one model of social theory, the social theorist seeks to give as rich an account as possible of a society's own self‐understanding or self‐interpretation. The second model, by contrast, involves challenging the society's self‐understanding on the basis of a radical vision of ultimate standards of. judgment. Charles Taylor claims that neither of these models should be privileged over the other, that both are equiprimordial ways of the…
The Macpherson Prize
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Le Prix Macpherson
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Liberalism
Rereading Hannah Arendt's Kant Lectures
This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a ph…
Augustine and the Limits of PoliticsJean Bethke Elshtain Notre Dame
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Modern Liberty and Its DiscontentsPierre Manent Edited and translated by Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton Lanham
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Nairn-Hobsbawm Debate
With the astonishing resurgence of nationalism in various parts of Europe subsequent of the end of the Cold War, attention has once again been focused on the normative issues posed by the politics of nationalism. This article wresdes with some of these normative issues by reviewing a profund theoretical dialogue conducted between two British neo-Marxists, Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm, going back to the 1970s. The article also gives some attention …
Community versus citizenship
Among the theorists commonly associated with the communitarian critique of liberalism of the 1980s (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre), MacIntyre is the one who offers the most radical set of challenges to ways of thinking that typify contemporary liberalism. But does MacIntyre's thought add up to a fully worked‐out political philosophy? The specifically political implications of MacIntyre's contributions to m…
Political science (36 works) · Philosophy (35 works) · Politics (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Political philosophy (13 works) · Liberalism (9 works)