Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian whose work centered on a critique of anti-communism, colonialism, and imperialism. He explored the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism, offering fresh perspectives on crucial political and philosophical inquiries. His analyses often drew from a deep study of dialectical thought, bridging Hegel and Marx. Losurdo's writings thus represent a significant contribution to understanding modern political ideologies and their historical underpinnings.
The book offers a sharp critique of Western Marxism, highlighting its alignment with imperialist ideologies. It contrasts this perspective with a growing anti-imperialist movement, arguing for a reevaluation of Marxist principles in light of contemporary global struggles. Through this analysis, the author seeks to illuminate the contradictions within Western Marxist thought and advocate for a more authentic anti-imperialist stance.
HOW AN IRON FIST DONNED DEMOCRACY'S VELVET GLOVE
Author of the acclaimed Liberalism: A Counterhistory dissects the revisionist attempts to expunge or criminalise revolutions
Available for the first time in English, this book examines and reinterprets class struggle within Marx and Engels' thought. As Losurdo argues, class struggle is often misunderstood as exclusively the struggle of the poor against the rich, of the humble against the powerful.
The book explores two centuries of non-violence history, detailing significant crises faced by the movement. It combines historical reconstruction with philosophical and psychological insights, delving into the moral dilemmas that arise during these pivotal moments. Through this dual approach, it examines the complexities and challenges inherent in advocating for non-violence across different eras.
One of Europe’s leading intellectual historians deconstructs the dark side of liberalism, sifting through 3 centuries of liberal writings by John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others. In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the 18th through to the 20th centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.
Translated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time
"In Heidegger and the Ideology of War, Domenico Losurdo reconstructs the genesis of Heidegger's philosophy in its historical context, analyzing the characteristics of the peculiar "ideology of war" developed in Germany at the outset of the First World War. In the twentieth century, conflicts between states for the first time took the form of total war, requiring the mobilization of an entire society. On the one hand, among the allied nations, this all-pervasive ideological mobilization centered on the principle of "democratic intervention," the Wilsonian idea of a holy crusade able to subvert the eternally militarist and autocratic Germany and, in this way, favor a kind of great "international democratic revolution." On the other hand, in a spiral of radicalization, the German ideology of war characterized the looming conflict as a great clash between irreconcilable civilizations, faiths, world-visions, and even races. Germans affirmed not only the superiority of their culture, but above all a political and social model that expelled from modernity every universal concept of emancipation and democratization."--Jacket