The Trotsky-Stalin struggle is not one between two different personalities. It’s a struggle between two different principles of legitimizing power. [read more]

Gramsci distinguishes between, on the one hand, a dogmatic communism and, on the other, a “critical communism” that presents itself as heir of the highest summits of the bourgeois cultural tradition, parting from Hegel and classical German philosophy. [read more]

At the “World Conference against Racism” in Durban, South Africa, three thousand non-governmental organizations from all over the world fiercely condemned Israel for its national oppression and racial discrimination of Palestinians — its brutal military repression did not fall… [read more]

“Gaddafi’s death is a historic turning point!” proclaim the chorus of leaders of NATO and the West, who do not even take the trouble to put distance between themselves and the barbaric assassination of the Libyan leader or the lies deployed to that end by the leaders of the… [read more]

One cannot overstate the wisdom of that phrase attributed to Georges Clemenceau: War is too serious a business to be left to the generals! Even in his acute chauvinism and anticommunism, the French prime minister maintained a fairly lucid awareness of the fact that specialists… [read more]

Is it possible to understand the emergence of Nazism while looking only at Germany? References from two very different authors will help us to tackle this problem. A particularly useful quote is the excellent motto from Tocqueville: “whoever has seen and investigated France alone… [read more]

In the conclusion to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx summarizes his judgment of Hegel as follows: “The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness… [read more]

In this brief presentation, I will try to explain the content of my book, Liberalism: A Counter-History. This book aims to answer a key question: what is liberalism? This question may sound superfluous and provocative at the same time. Everybody knows that liberalism is… [read more]

Already in 1951, when Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was first published, the concept of totalitarianism had been debated for decades. And yet, the meaning of the term still lacks a proper definition. Is it possible to find a way through what appears to… [read more]

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was accompanied by a curious ideological phenomenon: the attempt to silence the large and unprecedented protest movement by accusing it of anti-Americanism. With still new wars on the horizon, this supposed anti-Americanism was and continues to be… [read more]

In order to avoid any arbitrary simplification, it is essential to keep in mind the fact that, during the twentieth century, the most diverse critiques of modernity flourish both in Germany and elsewhere. While underscoring the complexity of this historical framework, however… [read more]

In Lenin the critique of colonialism and imperialism plays a central role, far beyond the immediacy of politics. What is democracy? Let us see how the classics of the liberal tradition define it. [read more]

Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general. [read more]

There is no doubt about it: the guiding thread of Nietzsche’s thought is the condemnation of revolution at the political, philosophical, and epistemological level. [read more]

Since the time of Rousseau, the objective socio-political meaning of the return to the natural state has changed significantly: if before it consisted of an element in opposition to the existing order (one is reminded of the famous beginning of the Social Contract: “Man… [read more]

What is fundamentalism? One immediately thinks about the Middle East and Islam, but the term first appeared in U.S. Protestant circles, regarding a movement that developed prior to World War I whose followers occasionally referred to themselves as “fundamentalists.” Although this… [read more]

If today we analyze On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, read by Khrushchev at a closed door session during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later hailed as the Secret Report, one detail immediately draws our… [read more]

If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now… [read more]

Visiting Brazil to launch his new book War and Revolution, the Italian professor from the University of Urbino made himself available for an interview with the editor-in-chief of Opera Magazine Pedro Marin and columnist and former international correspondent… [read more]

Domenico Losurdo, at the time Professor Emeritus at the University of Urbino in Italy, answers questions on the basis of two of his works: “Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History” (2013) and “The Absent Left: Crisis, the Society of the Spectacle, War” (2014). [read more]

In 1818, in the middle of the Restoration and just at that time when the collapse of the French Revolution seemed obvious to all, some of those who had initially welcomed the events of 1789 now placed them at arms length; for them it had become a colossal misunderstanding or… [read more]