Essential Communities, Demonic Legions: Dostoevsky, the Revolutionary Multitude and Modern Pessimism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2317-2096.24.3.53-68Keywords:
community, multitude, socialism, modern pessimism, commonwealth, DostoevskyAbstract
This article seeks to shed light on some substrates of Dostoevsky’s criticism concerning the revolutionary movements in Russia in the second half of the 19th century and their occidentalist demands. To this end, we analyze the author’s pessimism in relation to Western modernity by an ethical, ontological, and political angle. Our thesis is that for Dostoevsky the civil society which descends from Rousseau’s social contract corrupts the realization of Russia as an orthodoxy based on the love of all by all and the love of the Czar by all. We establish, on the one hand, a critique of this harmonious and unified idealization of the Slavic people, while, on the other, we recognize the relevance of Dostoevsky’s suspicion for the examination of modern political philosophy. Dostoevsky seems to demand a reversal without which there could be no real politics: not politics as rational utilitarianism dictating life, but life – the shared essence and the original constituent practice of love – to continuously write politics.
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Copyright (c) 2014 Alemar Rena (Autor)
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