Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2021) XXIII/1

The text aims to investigate the thesis that E. Levinas’ thinking as a whole constitutes essentially a vast anti-idolatric project, not only in terms of theology and culture, but also in a strict philosophical meaning. This would be the “law” of Levinas’ thinking.

We introduce here the Ethics and Politics Focus on the presence, role and function of ancient lawmakers in modern thought. We explain the theoretical and historiographical issues explored by the articles, describe their content and summarize the results reached by the authors. We also propose some bibliographic references to recent and less recent texts of historiography that prepare, in our opinion, the reflection on this important topic.

This paper illustrates the attempts to limit power in Russia between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the tradition of the Byzantine origins of the imperial autocracy. The direct link between the ancient authority of Byzantium and the authority of the tsars in the modern age would have made the muscovite ruler very resilient. The author argues that the characteristics of the autocratic power may have lead to the failure of the efforts to reduce it.

This essay – on the basis of the lexicological and lexicometrical evidences reconstructed in the different digital corpora with the tools of the computational linguistics – examines the polysemy of the word fraternité in the lexicon of Adrien Lamourette and in the lexicon of the French Revolution and its gradual shrinking from an expansive dimension to an identity one.

The debate on post-pandemic recovery policies revealed that the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric shocks on economic activity plays a significant role in the conventions governing the dialectics among EU political players. The representatives of individual member countries have indeed introjected a ‘rule’ according to which a member country in economic trouble has the right to receive aid from EU partners only if its trouble is caused by a symmetric disturbance, i.e. a shock simultaneously hitting all member countries. The rationale behind this lies in a sort of ‘responsibility principle’, according to which aid is justified only in the absence of negligence on the part of the recipient. Within this framework, a mere local shock would be evidence of negligence. Grounding on a very influential stream of literature, we argue that this principle conflicts with the peculiar mechanics of an economy integrated on a continental level. Local shocks are a natural consequence of a high degree of sectoral specialization of a country’s economy, and consequently no one can be blamed for them. Counterbalancing the adverse effects of asymmetric shocks is then the primary task of supranational governance institutions, when market adjustments are not enough. Furthermore, this task becomes increasingly important as time goes by, because member countries’ sectoral specialization tends to deepen as economic integration proceeds.

The paper presents the importance of cogito in the phenomenology of Levinas' Totality and Infinity. It starts with the hypothesis that the “fear of being enchanted”, as a direct consequence of the freedom of a self that has detached itself from the Whole, symbolically expresses the situation of European humanity in the face of two temptations: a) the subject can put himself at the service of Totality, affirming a will of power that will culminate paradoxically with his dissolution; b) the temptation of "paganism", that is, the nostalgia for very old "states of mind", characterized by relations with elemental forces, whose reflexes in politics and contemporary society will be tragic. The subjectivity that makes the cogito experience is situated between these two temptations. She discovers, astonished, that both can merge into a tragic complicity.

The paper aims at highlighting the role of courts in selecting facts (so called ‘facts of case’) which might be relevant in the constitutional review and, more specifically, the role and marge of discretion that the Italian constitutional Court can enjoy in evaluating the selection of facts previously made by a judge/court. The case here discussed concerns an ‘incidental’ constitutional review, i.e. a case where the question of law’s constitutionality arises as an ‘incident’ to ordinary legal proceeding. The ‘inci-dent’ arose before the Court of Appeal of Bari, in 2018, and had as an object the question of consti-tutionality of art. 3, statute n. 75/1958, foreseeing as a crime the recruitment and aiding of voluntary prostitution. In turn, the Bari legal proceeding had to do with some people accused of recruiting escorts for the former Italian Premier Berlusconi. The article focuses on the evaluation, made by both the Bari Court of Appeal and the Italian constitutional court, of the ‘harm principle’, requiring an offense to have been committed against a given legal asset. It then critically inquires the decision made by both courts of restricting the flaw of facts that have been considered relevant in the legal reasoning of the constitutional Court.

The present essay explores Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Rousseau’s Contrat social in his early works. The essay aims at investigating the role of concepts such as dictatorship, democracy, general will and homogeneity of the people in Carl Schmitt’s political theory. In particular, the essay will be focused on three texts: Diktatur und Belagerungszustand (1916), Die Diktatur (1921) and Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1923), where Rousseau’s theory is vigorously discussed by Schmitt, although in a partial and sometimes ideological way. In the end of the paper, some critical remarks on Schmitt’s interpretation and his proble-matic theory of “identitarian” democracy are provided.

In contemporary bioethics, feminism is a relevant and authoritative source. De facto, sexual dif-ference represents the main issue in the different strands of this theoretical movement. On the one side, some feminists consider this argument to be pointless. On the other side, for others, sexual difference is a crucial issue: it has not yet been thought about. This paper intends to frame the theory of Donna Haraway, a California-based philosopher, trying to clarify its interpretive coordinates and its philosophical problems. At the same time, the cyborg theory will be compared with the italian theory of sexual difference and with the theoretical model of Adriana Cavarero, in particular.

The present 'excursus' from Spinoza to Kant intends to show that with Kant starts a different way of secularization of the divine. Through Kant's moral reflection, the secularization of the divine doesn’t borrow from divine love the moral ideas of community benevolence and the harmonious composition of the instances of individuals, as it happened in Spinoza and in Leibniz. In Kant takes places something more radical because God isn't a model of secularization anymore, he doesn't exhibit exempla that the human being must emulate or apply by acting virtuously in the community. Rather, God is himself secularized, God is the object of secularization.The triad human being-divine law-community, typical of the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz, is replaced by Kant through the triad human being-intelligible community-God. It is no longer divine law or divine wise to mediate between human being and community, in their place takes over the acknowledgment’s dynamic of intelligible beings (Intelligible Community). It is based on three moments (humanity-autonomy-dignity).These three moments can become a effectively secularized model for the realization of human rights in the political-liberal communities.

The topic of the article is the definition of the concept of "privacy" in the digital age. My aim is to show how this concept can be interpreted through the Lukácsian category of "reification". At first I will analyze the difficulties of defining a general concept of privacy. I will argue that privacy cannot be understood through general theoretical categories, which try to capture the totality of real cases. For this reason, as a second step, the concept of privacy will be analyzed specifically in the real digital reality, i.e. as "property of personal data". This specific determination of the concept of "privacy" could be read as the expression of three different notions: a) deprivation; b) bureaucracy; c) reification. We will see how the last one includes the other two notions. If "privacy" is considered as a synonym of "property", then we can interpret it as a manifestation of a society, based on the reification of relationships between human beings. If the problem of privacy is a problem of reification, then we will rethink our digital dimension in terms of different participation and collective determination of new platforms.

After presenting some of Cerovac's theses (2020), the article explains some challenges to the criticism of all forms of epistocracy that he developed. The objections are expressed through the employment of some elements of Rawls's conception of public justification, more precisely of public reason. It is remarked that Rawls's theory of public reason has two sides. One is rep-resented by the characterization of reasonable disagreement. The other side is represented by the fact that disagreement is not reasonable in all cases. In such situations, limited forms of so-phisticated epistocracy are justified.

This paper discusses the influence and role of Aristotelian ethics in two contemporary ethical theories stemming from different traditions, those put forward by Elizabeth Anscombe and Paul Ricœur. In different ways, these accounts of ethics can be considered “virtue theories”. First, we focus on Anscombe’s recovery of Aristotelian “virtue ethics” in the context of her criticism of the standpoint of moral philosophy. We discuss the reception that her 1958 “Modern Moral Philosophy” has had, leading to contradicting interpretations of the role she ascribes to Aristotelian ethics and the problems raised by modern moral philosophy. Second, we discuss the status of the Aristotelian standpoint in Paul Ricœur’s “little ethics”, focusing on the primacy given to the ethical aim over moral obligation, and the role of Aristotelian practical wisdom (phronesis) in the overcoming of the difficulties of a modern deontological standpoint. Drawing on these two readings of Aristotelian ethics, we discuss issues such as the prospects of “human flourishing”, the conception of the subject underlying these accounts and the extent to which the context-dependent traits of human experience – as against an essentialist standpoint – should be taken into account in these theories.

The aim of this article is to investigate the problem of the religious legislator in Marsilus of Padua’s political thought. Focusing on examples that are drawn from both Christian and non-Christian religions (Muhammad, the philosophers, the Council), it is shown that Marsilius’ perspective on the religious legislator reflects an instrumental interpretation of the social and political functions of religion as a public cult. Marsilius’ presentation of the religious legislators overturns Augustine’s theory of the two mystical cities and draws on ideas of “civil religion” that are similar to those of John of Jandun and have their roots in Greek and Jewish-Islamic thought.

This essay seeks to elucidate if and to what extent Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in his 1978-1979 Collège de France lecture series can justifiably be used to come to a critical understanding of present-day neoliberalism(s). This has been a hotly debated issue among Foucault scholars based on what they consider to be ambiguities related to the normative status as well as the methodology of these lectures. In an attempt to contribute to this debate and to settle some of these concerns, I start by explicating how neoliberalism has variously been interpreted and specify what I understand “neoliberalism” to mean. Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and his analyses of the mid-20th C versions of German and American neoliberal governmentalities presented in these lectures are contextualized in terms of his general thinking in the late 70s and early 80s specifically his insistence on the critical attitude as virtue and his methodological specifications of philosophical-historical research. I contend that although Foucault’s neoliberal governmentality lectures might be valueneutral, methodologically they remain a strategics of power/knowledge configurations imbued with the “critical attitude” that asserts the right not to be governed like that. It is therefore both justifiable and instructive to critically engage contemporary neoliberalisms through the lens of governmentality.

In this article, I analyse the presence and the role played by the mythical legislator Lycurgus in Machiavelli's economic and political thought. I focus in particular on the issue of the redistribution of land in Sparta and the anti-aristocratic character that this measure takes on in Machiavelli. I assign central importance to the sources used by Machiavelli implicitly and explicitly. My thesis is that not only do the examples of Sparta and Rome not have to be opposed, but that one sheds light on and helps to understand the other, particularly through the extension of Spartan themes into the actions of the Gracchi in the Agrarian Reform.

The figure of Moses is marked in Freud's work by doubles and duplication: Freud's doppelganger, Moses reappears significantly in two instances more than twenty years apart (« Michelangelo's Moses », 1914 and Moses and Monotheism, 1938). What dazzles or fascinates in Moses is related to the mark of a paternal transmission, a transmission that is largely unconscious and whose meaning and valence are less obvious than one might think. The biblical and even more historical character of Moses exerts on Freud a powerful and complex attraction for reasons that this article attempts to bring to light: Moses is the name of a specific renunciation, understood as a factor of civilization, but even more so, because Freud considers him Egyptian, Moses is the very figure of the unknown from within, the unconscious.

The article shows how the significations that give meaning to the normative political dimension as such are not the outcome resulting of transposing an a priori a-historical set of ideals deductively applied into each concrete historical situation. For the political dimension has its own autonomy and it finds its meaning in itself, without the necessity of referring itself to an external instance of validation. However, it becomes clear how through a necessary immanent historical mediation result an initial intersubjective and practical-linguistic intrigue that links both dimensions, the ethical one and the political, including its practical implications. In this way, it is shown how the praxis of speech, as conceived by Levinas but also as it was already implicitly envisioned in the ancient rhetoric, constitutes the form of mediation par excellence from which the significations that confer sense to the political are instituted.

The following contribution deals with the question of a possible articulation of the connection between the soteriological and hamartiological dimension of the event of revelation in the Jewish-Christian tradition. In contrast to the classical Lutheran distinction between law and gospel, a proposal will be made instead, based on Levinas’ Talmud readings, as to how the connection between the soteriological and hamartiological dimensions of the event of revelation can be ar-ticulated in a systematic-theological way. For this purpose, Levinas’ elaboration on the connec-tion between Tora and revelation as well as the motif of the ‘an-economy of the Tora’ will be taken into focus and supplemented by his phenomenological-philosophical writings, Derrida’s reflections on event and testimony and Bernhard Waldenfels’ reflections on a phenomenology of the alien.