New Issue: By Theory Possessed

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Announcing Our New Issue: Our new spring issue is now live on HedgehogReview.com! Look for a full slate of reviews and essays from familiar favorites and new authors, including Mary Townsend, Ohad Reiss-Sorokin, Phil Christman, Jennifer Frey, Blake Smith, Lily Meyer, Joseph E. Davis, and many others—all available to subscribers.

If you are a print subscriber, expect a physical copy in the mail sometime in the coming days or weeks. Also, look for the new issue on newsstands at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and other retailers.

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From the editor: "While it is tempting to quip that theory is the opiate of the intellectuals, the addiction extends well beyond that single class. Yes, intellectuals have a professional stake in formulating, challenging, and overthrowing theories. And, yes, ever since the comic playwright Aristophanes pilloried philosophers by placing them in the clouds, we tend to associate theorizing with that particular subset of humanity. But today so much of the general population is caught up in theory making and theory mongering that it is altogether justified to call ours a theory-besotted age.

"We see this not only in the ongoing production and consumption of outlandish conspiracy theories but in the spread and popularization of ideological fashions emanating from the academy, including assorted nationalist and communitarian postliberalisms on the right and various expressions of progressive identitarianism on the left. If the theory-based ideologies that gave rise to the horrors of the last century have been either diluted or supplanted by new ones, we are possibly even more the creatures of theories that purport to provide the totalizing explanations and meanings that religions once did. (Indeed, it could be argued that religions themselves have been theoretically repurposed as ideologies.)

"It was some time in coming, this possession by theory."

Continue reading "From the Editor."

From the new issue's theme: Professional thinking has caused all kinds of trouble. Hannah Arendt would know. She saw it happen firsthand—how theorizing could drive people inward and lose the kind of common sense we can truly share in common. In "Hannah Arendt and the Loss of a Common World," Michael Weinman, senior fellow at the Institute and professor of philosophy and politics at Bard College Berlin, examines Arendt's acute understanding of the social and political dangers that have attended forms of critical thinking in the twentieth century that have inadvertently diminished real engagement with public life. According to Arendt, the way of repair, Weinman argues, lies not in avoiding conflicts but rather in facing our disagreements head on—together.

"There is a possible answer to the mass democratic inclination toward (what we call today) post-truth politics and the loss of a common world, an answer to the opposed tendencies toward loneliness in our (increasingly online) silos or aggregation into masses that can easily be mobilized as mobs. This answer, inspired by Arendt's exercises in political thinking, is the enactment of democratic citizenship as the exercising of judgment. While we tend to believe that we are being good pluralists by refraining from expressing our judgments about controversial matters with neighbors with whom we might disagree, Arendt challenges us to do exactly that, and precisely with those who are least likely to see things just as we do.

"Consensus is unlikely to result from entering into an exchange of conflicting judgments about, say, the proper role of government in reproductive health, the prudence of affirmative action in university admissions, or the best way to administer local elections. Such engagement, however, might do something to restore the conviction that members of our society with whom we have deep differences at least live in the same, common, world."

Hedgehog Noontime Discussion

The human search for understanding our world and ourselves is propelled by a powerful experience of desire—whether we are professional scientists, academic philosophers, or everyday students. What is the relationship between desire and knowledge? How does our understanding, in turn, shape, direct, or even suppress our longings? And is there anything dangerous about desire?

Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, March 8 at 12-1:30 EDT for a Hedgehog Noontime Discussion, "What's Desire Got to Do With It?" Moderated by Hedgehog Review senior editor Kyle Edward Williams, the event will feature three contributors to the new spring issue:

Mary Townsend, assistant professor of philosophy at St. John's University, Queens, New York. Her most recent book is The Woman Question in Plato's Republic.
Ohad Reiss-Sorokin, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is writing a book on intellectual circles and the intellectual life of interwar Vienna.
Blake Smith, historian of modern France and a literary translator. Currently a Fulbright Scholar in North Macedonia, he is writing a book on Roland Barthes.

Please register for the event beforehand.

The essays of these three contributors to "By Theory Possessed" are now available to subscribers.