Tag: locke

THE ILLIBERALISM OF THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIBERALISM

September 9, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and the meaning of tolerance, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on politics as drama.) It was published on 8 September 2019, under the headline ‘Why western liberals have long picked the wrong historical hero’. Lost in the library of a small American college has lain a text by one of England’s foremost philosophers that no one knew he had written. ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: catholicism, enlightenment, free speech, jonathan israel, liberalism, locke, radical enlightenment, religious freedom, spinoza, tolerance

IN SEARCH OF THE COMMON GOOD

November 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of the RICS Harris lecture that I gave on 14 November 2017 on ‘The public interest and the common good’. The public interest. The public advantage. The public good. The common good. These are all phrases that seem indispensible, phrases which we all use, and of which we have an instinctive understanding, yet the meanings of which are all contested and seemingly impossible to define. These phrases are often used interchangeably. Many philosophers and political thinkers would […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, common good, enlightenment, ethics, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, individualism, liberalism, locke, mo tzu, public interest, social contract

DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?

February 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including Plato and Descartes be dropped from university syllabus’. ‘Great thinkers too male and pale, students declare’, declared the Times. The Daily Telegraph, too, was outraged: ‘They are said to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy, whose ideas underpin civilised society. But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that […]

Categories: Academia, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: decolonising, diversity, enlightenment, frantz fanon, identity politics, jonathan israel, kant, kwame anthony appiah, locke, racism, radical enlightenment, soas, toussaint l'ouverture, university, whiteness

ON FENCES AND FRACTURES

September 26, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my Stephen Lissenburgh Memorial Lecture that I gave on 23 September at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. It was entitled ‘What’s wrong with multiculturalism?’ It is inevitable that my starting point for this talk will be the refugee crisis that now engulfs Europe. For many, the crisis is a crisis because of the numbers coming to Europe. But large though they may be, the numbers are not unprecedented, either comparatively or historically. […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, assimilationism, british politics, britishness, culture, danish cartoons, diversity, fortress europe, france, handsworth riots, immigration, islam, locke, multiculturalism, muslims, racism

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

JOHN LOCKE AND THE NOT-QUITE-GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

August 25, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have been publishing on Pandaemonium a series of ‘lost pages’ from The Quest for a Moral Compass, my forthcoming book on the history of moral thought. In completing the book, I had to cut the original manuscript quite considerably. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. Previous excerpts were on Machiavelli, Descartes and Greek cynics, atomists, skeptics and relativists. This extract is about John Locke and the […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought • Tags: catholicism, english history, free speech, glorious revolution, locke, religious freedom, spinoza

TO CAST THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN A RADICAL LIGHT

June 20, 2013 by Kenan Malik

There is no period of history that has been more analysed, debated, celebrated and disparaged than the Enlightenment. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. From the role of science to the war on terror, from free speech to racism, there are few contemporary debates that do not engage with the Enlightenment, or, at least, with what we imagine the […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: christianity, descartes, dualism, enlightenment, ernst cassirer, hobbes, jonathan israel, kant, locke, max horkenheimer, monism, peter gay, radical enlightenment, reformation, religion, religious freedom, spinoza, theodor adorno

EQUALITY AND THE GODLESS

May 16, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have been in Brussels to attend a conference on the Radical Enlightenment, and to interview Jonathan Israel, the keynote speaker, for an essay I am writing about his work and argument. Israel has transformed our understanding of the Enlightenment with his superlative trilogy published over the past decade: Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested, and Democratic Enlightenment. At the heart of his argument is his insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the […]

Categories: History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: enlightenment, equality, jonathan israel, locke, radical enlightenment, religion

ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT’S ‘RACE PROBLEM’

February 13, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In an essay this week in New York Times, the philosopher Justin Smith tells the story of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former slave who defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled On the Impassivity of the Human Mind. A dedicatory letter was attached to the dissertation from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who, Smith observes, ‘praised the “natural genius” of Africa, its […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: blumenbach, buffon, enlightenment, hume, linnaeus, locke, race, racial categories, racial science

IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY

November 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau has responded to my review of his book How to Be Secular. He thinks that, unlike his conservative Christian critics, I have not ‘take[n] the time to understand what [his] arguments actually are’ and have made instead a series of ‘misleading claims’ about them. I disagree with most of Berlinerblau’s list of what he regards as my misleading claims. I don’t want to go line by line through that list refuting each and every claim. I do, however, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: democracy, jacques berlinerblau, locke, religion, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR? PERHAPS NOT

October 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back at the beginning of the US Presidential campaign Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of launching ‘a war on religion’ and of wanting ‘to establish a religion in America known as secularism’. The irony is that Obama himself, even before entering the White House, had made clear his own disdain for secularism. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama had chided fellow Democrats for equating ‘tolerance with secularism’. In embracing secularism, he wrote, Democrats ‘forfeit the moral language that […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, locke, new atheism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

NOTES ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

June 17, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Given the degree of fractious debate recently over ‘religious freedom’ – from questions of blasphemy and ‘defamation’ to the storm over gay marriage, from the controversy over the banning of the burqa to the hostility directed at the ‘Obamacare’ plan to include contraception in health insurance cover – I have been rethinking the question of freedom of religion. These notes are a starting point for debate, not a fully-fleshed out argument. 1 Religious freedom occupies a special place in contemporary political […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: christianity, equality, ethics, free speech, gay rights, locke, religion, religious freedom, secularism, spinoza

LIBERATING FREE SPEECH FROM THE SHACKLES OF BAD FAITH

April 2, 2012 by Kenan Malik

‘I have definitely become a free speech fundamentalist,’ says Flemming Rose. Perhaps that should not be surprising. It was, after all, Rose who, as culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005. He had picked up on a story about the difficulties that children’s author Kåre Bluitgen had faced in finding an illustrator for a book he was writing on Islam. Every illustrator that Bluitgen had contacted had been worried that he would end […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: behzti, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, index on censorship, islamism, islamophobia, jytte klausen, kenan malik's books, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, locke, racism, rushdie affair

FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

February 22, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I have written an essay for the upcoming 40th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship that explores the changing character of the free speech debate in recent decades. It includes an interview with Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, whose challenge to cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy. I will publish the essay in full when the new issue of Index comes out in March. But here is a short extract that probes the question […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: ayaan hirsi ali, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, islam, islamism, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, locke, martin amis, milton, muslims

SOME ARGUMENTS NEVER DIE

December 15, 2011 by Kenan Malik

‘That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country, and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own government.’ Who wrote […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech, Justice & Liberties • Tags: catholicism, free speech, jews, liberties, locke, muslims, racism, spinoza