William Rasch
Biographic Data
| ID | 3664811 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Rasch |
| GIVEN NAMES | William |
| FAMILY NAME | Rasch |
| SIGNATURE | RASCH W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Carl Schmitt
This important new book places Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal political theory in a broader historical context than is usually done. His belief in the centrality of the European state since the seventeenth century derives from various sources, including medieval (Scholastic) theology and nineteenth century (post-Hegelian) social and political theory. Schmitt’s famed ‘political theology’ aims at justifying the necessity of a strong secular sta…
Carl Schmitt
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann expressed puzzlement that his work was not well or extensively received in the Anglophone world, especially because he saw himself working within an American tradition characterized by cybernetics and scientific complexity theory. Yet the late twentieth-century intellectual ground was not fertile for his brand of social theory. By and large, nonquantitative social theory was no longer welcome in sociology departments. By opposing t…
Political theology and political form
The paper argues that Carl Schmitt’s notion of political theology is descriptively concerned with elucidating structural analogies between the basal self-description of an epoch and its various social institutions, not least the political. His political theology is critically interested in positing a functional equivalence between the idea of the historic Roman Church and the modern state. To explore this posited equivalence, the paper investigat…
Carl Schmitt’s Defense of Democracy
Carl Schmitt accommodated himself to the ascendency of democratic thinking in the post–World War I world of the 1920s. No sovereign authority, he argued, could fail to acknowledge “the people” as the constituent power of an established political order. Consequently, democracy and “the political” become synonymous in his Constitutional Theory (1928). To champion democracy, however, Schmitt emphasized the historical distinction between democracy, b…
Justice, amnesty, and the strange lessons of 1945
If, as Max Weber famously argued, science in general (Wissenschaft)*that is, the focused, disciplined use of reason*cannot justify itself on its own terms, then each individual science*law is among his examples*remains without foundation. Law, Weber wrote, operates by distinguishing between legality and illegality. Whatever is brought before it by way of formally correct procedures demands and receives judgment. An action is either legal or illeg…
Enlightenment as Religion
Recent polemical and philosophical claims about modern, secular, liberal, enlightened Europe are examined from the perspective of Europe's relation, past and present, to the non-European world. The notion that Enlightenment reason and liberal institutions represent a higher level of culture because they serve as a universal, neutral medium in contrast to particular religious or ideological worldviews and most especially religious “fundamentalism”…
Tragic Choices«. Luhmann on Law and States of Exception
Introduction
In asking the question about indispensable norms, Luhmann does not look to give a normative answer, but rather explores what he sees as the »form of the problem. « This introduction places Luhmann’s discussion of undecidability and the aporias of communication media of the various function systems within the larger »form of the problem« of modernity as Luhmann sees it, in particular the dissociation of reason and moral order. This introduction th…
Kant’s Project of Perpetual Pacification
Anger Management
Anger ManagementCarl Schmitt in 1925 and the Occupation of the Rhineland William Rasch (bio) Some years ago I taught a graduate seminar on Carl Schmitt, the perceived relevance of his ideas to the contemporary global situation, and the anxious reaction to the revival of interest in his work. Schmitt’s justly famous analysis of the political uses of the term “humanity” were among the themes discussed, and within this context I pointed to a footnot…
From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty
Bombs Away!
Introduction
In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resulting collapse of the Soviet empire, and the first Gulf War, one heard much about the coming ''new world order.''The end of history had arrived, we were told; the final solution of the problem of social organization had shown itself to be the self-determination of peoples in the form of liberal parliamentary structures of government and a liberal market economy, which were rapidly and…
Lines in the Sand
Research Article| April 01 2005 Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle William Rasch William Rasch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2005) 104 (2): 253–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-104-2-253 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cit…
Sovereignty and its Discontents
Part 1 - Politics as Conflict: Conflict as a Vocation: Schmitt, Lyotard, Luhmann A Just War? Or Just a War? Schmitt vs Habermas So You Say You Want a Revolution: Brecht vs Brecht.Part 2 - Sovereignty and Original Sin: Guilt as Religion: Benjamin From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty: Agamben Persistent Sovereignty: Hardt and Negri. Part 3 - Even Unto the End of the World: 'For There is no Difference Between the Jew and the Greek': The Legacy …
Human Rights as Geopolitics
Dates, dates, dates. 1917, 1945, 1989. The wars of the world seem to have been reduced to a squabble about dates. 1 For Jürgen Habermas, the year 1945 is pivotal. As he puts it, the Allied victory "permanently discredited an array of myths which, ever since the end of the nineteenth century, had been mobilized against the heritage of 1789." The unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945, then, stands for the unconditional surrender of "all forms …
A Completely New Politics, or, Excluding the Political? Agamben's Critique of Sovereignty
The paradox of the excluded middle - namely, that the proposition »All propositions are either true or false« can itself be proven neither true nor false - is presented as the logical figure for the exception or self-exemption at the heart of the political principle of sovereignty. Whereas Carl Schmitt maintains the necessity of the sovereign exception to the rule, Giorgio Agamben wishes us to push beyond the logic of exclusion that defines the p…
Theories of Distinction
The essays in this volume by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century formulate what he considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The first two essays deal with the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition, notably the ogy of Edmund Husserl. The next four essays concern the crucial notion of observation as defined by Luhmann. They examine the history of paradox as a logical p…
Niklas Luhmann's Modernity
A note on translations Introduction: paradise lost, modernity regined 1. Theories of complexity, complexities of theory 2. Injecting noise into the system 3. Constructivism as a two-front war 4. In search of the Lyotard Archipelago 5. The limit of modernity and the logic of exclusion 6. Immanent systems, transcendental temptations, and the limits of ethics 7. Locating the political Appendix Notes Index
Conflict as a Vocation
Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitt's theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work o…
Locating the political
(1997). Locating the political: Schmitt, Mouffe, Luhmann, and the possibility of pluralism. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 103-115
The Latest Contest of the Faculties
Theory of a Different Order
T his discussion was conducted on September 21, 1994, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, Bloomington, where Niklas Luhmann was a guest Fellow for two weeks during the month of September. Both Luhmann and Katherine Hayles were participating in a conference at the university later that week, organized by William Rasch and Eva Knodt, entitled Systems Theory and the Postmodern Condition. As a basis for discussion and exchange,…
Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the Limits of Ethics
erhaps modernity-as the name given to an obsessive process of self-description-should describe itself yet again as a force field of competing anxieties. We have become distinctly suspicious of transcendental attempts to construct inviolate and panoramic levels of vision labeled God, Reason, or Truth. Yet, because of political or moral commitments, we are equally disinclined to relinquish critical perspectives from which we presume not only to see…
Conflict as a Vocation
Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitt's theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work o…
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann expressed puzzlement that his work was not well or extensively received in the Anglophone world, especially because he saw himself working within an American tradition characterized by cybernetics and scientific complexity theory. Yet the late twentieth-century intellectual ground was not fertile for his brand of social theory. By and large, nonquantitative social theory was no longer welcome in sociology departments. By opposing t…
Theory of a Different Order
T his discussion was conducted on September 21, 1994, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, Bloomington, where Niklas Luhmann was a guest Fellow for two weeks during the month of September. Both Luhmann and Katherine Hayles were participating in a conference at the university later that week, organized by William Rasch and Eva Knodt, entitled Systems Theory and the Postmodern Condition. As a basis for discussion and exchange,…
Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the Limits of Ethics
erhaps modernity-as the name given to an obsessive process of self-description-should describe itself yet again as a force field of competing anxieties. We have become distinctly suspicious of transcendental attempts to construct inviolate and panoramic levels of vision labeled God, Reason, or Truth. Yet, because of political or moral commitments, we are equally disinclined to relinquish critical perspectives from which we presume not only to see…
Introduction
n the past decade, many of the most influential and innovative theorists in the human and sciences have come to recognize that the hallmark of the postmodern moment is the waning in influence of older subject-object philosophical paradigms upon which the great traditions of Cartesian and Kantian idealism, as well as Marxist materialism, were constructed. From the remains of transcendental philosophy and the materialist dialectic, a new philosophi…
In Search of the Lyotard Archipelago, or
L'A. examine les paradoxes autoreferentiels dans l'oeuvre de J.-F. Lyotard en s'appuyant, dans une large mesure, sur certains aspects des ecrits de N. Luhmann
Enlightenment as Religion
Recent polemical and philosophical claims about modern, secular, liberal, enlightened Europe are examined from the perspective of Europe's relation, past and present, to the non-European world. The notion that Enlightenment reason and liberal institutions represent a higher level of culture because they serve as a universal, neutral medium in contrast to particular religious or ideological worldviews and most especially religious “fundamentalism”…
Anger Management
Anger ManagementCarl Schmitt in 1925 and the Occupation of the Rhineland William Rasch (bio) Some years ago I taught a graduate seminar on Carl Schmitt, the perceived relevance of his ideas to the contemporary global situation, and the anxious reaction to the revival of interest in his work. Schmitt’s justly famous analysis of the political uses of the term “humanity” were among the themes discussed, and within this context I pointed to a footnot…
Introduction
In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resulting collapse of the Soviet empire, and the first Gulf War, one heard much about the coming ''new world order.''The end of history had arrived, we were told; the final solution of the problem of social organization had shown itself to be the self-determination of peoples in the form of liberal parliamentary structures of government and a liberal market economy, which were rapidly and…
Locating the political
(1997). Locating the political: Schmitt, Mouffe, Luhmann, and the possibility of pluralism. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 103-115
Systems Theory and the System of Theory
La theorie de Luhmann des systemes sociales rompt non seulement avec toute forme de transcendantalisme, mais aussi avec la philosophie de l'histoire
Theories of Complexity, Complexities of Theory
ing a set of rules or laws that will allow for the accurate prediction of actual, empirical events. Chomsky therefore makes a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) (1965, 4). Ideally, performance perfectly reflects what the reconstructed rules of linguistic competence dictates, and when it deviates from normatively derived pre…
Injecting Noise into the System
IN HIS DISCUSSION OF BILDUNG in the opening section of Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer explicitly confirms the Hegelian structure of theoretical knowledge. The basic movement of Geist, in his view, consists of two distinct moments, initial self-distancing followed by the eventual return to the Self. He writes, To recognize one's own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning…
Mensch, Burger, Weib
William Rasch, Mensch, Bürger, Weib: Gender and the Limitations of Late 18th-Century Neohumanist Discourse, The German Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1, From Mid-18th-Century to Romanticism (Winter, 1993), pp. 20-33
Systems Theory and the System of Theory
La theorie de Luhmann des systemes sociales rompt non seulement avec toute forme de transcendantalisme, mais aussi avec la philosophie de l'histoire
In Search of the Lyotard Archipelago, or
L'A. examine les paradoxes autoreferentiels dans l'oeuvre de J.-F. Lyotard en s'appuyant, dans une large mesure, sur certains aspects des ecrits de N. Luhmann
Theory of a Different Order
T his discussion was conducted on September 21, 1994, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, Bloomington, where Niklas Luhmann was a guest Fellow for two weeks during the month of September. Both Luhmann and Katherine Hayles were participating in a conference at the university later that week, organized by William Rasch and Eva Knodt, entitled Systems Theory and the Postmodern Condition. As a basis for discussion and exchange,…
Immanent Systems, Transcendental Temptations, and the Limits of Ethics
erhaps modernity-as the name given to an obsessive process of self-description-should describe itself yet again as a force field of competing anxieties. We have become distinctly suspicious of transcendental attempts to construct inviolate and panoramic levels of vision labeled God, Reason, or Truth. Yet, because of political or moral commitments, we are equally disinclined to relinquish critical perspectives from which we presume not only to see…
Introduction
n the past decade, many of the most influential and innovative theorists in the human and sciences have come to recognize that the hallmark of the postmodern moment is the waning in influence of older subject-object philosophical paradigms upon which the great traditions of Cartesian and Kantian idealism, as well as Marxist materialism, were constructed. From the remains of transcendental philosophy and the materialist dialectic, a new philosophi…
The Latest Contest of the Faculties
Locating the political
(1997). Locating the political: Schmitt, Mouffe, Luhmann, and the possibility of pluralism. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 103-115
Conflict as a Vocation
Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitt's theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work o…
Niklas Luhmann's Modernity
A note on translations Introduction: paradise lost, modernity regined 1. Theories of complexity, complexities of theory 2. Injecting noise into the system 3. Constructivism as a two-front war 4. In search of the Lyotard Archipelago 5. The limit of modernity and the logic of exclusion 6. Immanent systems, transcendental temptations, and the limits of ethics 7. Locating the political Appendix Notes Index
A Completely New Politics, or, Excluding the Political? Agamben's Critique of Sovereignty
The paradox of the excluded middle - namely, that the proposition »All propositions are either true or false« can itself be proven neither true nor false - is presented as the logical figure for the exception or self-exemption at the heart of the political principle of sovereignty. Whereas Carl Schmitt maintains the necessity of the sovereign exception to the rule, Giorgio Agamben wishes us to push beyond the logic of exclusion that defines the p…
Theories of Distinction
The essays in this volume by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century formulate what he considered to be the preconditions for an adequate theory of modern society. The first two essays deal with the modern European philosophical and scientific tradition, notably the ogy of Edmund Husserl. The next four essays concern the crucial notion of observation as defined by Luhmann. They examine the history of paradox as a logical p…
Human Rights as Geopolitics
Dates, dates, dates. 1917, 1945, 1989. The wars of the world seem to have been reduced to a squabble about dates. 1 For Jürgen Habermas, the year 1945 is pivotal. As he puts it, the Allied victory "permanently discredited an array of myths which, ever since the end of the nineteenth century, had been mobilized against the heritage of 1789." The unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945, then, stands for the unconditional surrender of "all forms …
Sovereignty and its Discontents
Part 1 - Politics as Conflict: Conflict as a Vocation: Schmitt, Lyotard, Luhmann A Just War? Or Just a War? Schmitt vs Habermas So You Say You Want a Revolution: Brecht vs Brecht.Part 2 - Sovereignty and Original Sin: Guilt as Religion: Benjamin From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty: Agamben Persistent Sovereignty: Hardt and Negri. Part 3 - Even Unto the End of the World: 'For There is no Difference Between the Jew and the Greek': The Legacy …
Introduction
In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resulting collapse of the Soviet empire, and the first Gulf War, one heard much about the coming ''new world order.''The end of history had arrived, we were told; the final solution of the problem of social organization had shown itself to be the self-determination of peoples in the form of liberal parliamentary structures of government and a liberal market economy, which were rapidly and…
Lines in the Sand
Research Article| April 01 2005 Lines in the Sand: Enmity as a Structuring Principle William Rasch William Rasch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2005) 104 (2): 253–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-104-2-253 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cit…
Bombs Away!
From Sovereign Ban to Banning Sovereignty
Tragic Choices«. Luhmann on Law and States of Exception
Introduction
In asking the question about indispensable norms, Luhmann does not look to give a normative answer, but rather explores what he sees as the »form of the problem. « This introduction places Luhmann’s discussion of undecidability and the aporias of communication media of the various function systems within the larger »form of the problem« of modernity as Luhmann sees it, in particular the dissociation of reason and moral order. This introduction th…
Kant’s Project of Perpetual Pacification
Anger Management
Anger ManagementCarl Schmitt in 1925 and the Occupation of the Rhineland William Rasch (bio) Some years ago I taught a graduate seminar on Carl Schmitt, the perceived relevance of his ideas to the contemporary global situation, and the anxious reaction to the revival of interest in his work. Schmitt’s justly famous analysis of the political uses of the term “humanity” were among the themes discussed, and within this context I pointed to a footnot…
Enlightenment as Religion
Recent polemical and philosophical claims about modern, secular, liberal, enlightened Europe are examined from the perspective of Europe's relation, past and present, to the non-European world. The notion that Enlightenment reason and liberal institutions represent a higher level of culture because they serve as a universal, neutral medium in contrast to particular religious or ideological worldviews and most especially religious “fundamentalism”…
Sociology (22 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (9 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy (6 works)