marx | Pandaemonium

MARX AND MORALITY

April 26, 2015 by Kenan Malik

To accompany the newly-published paperback edition of The Quest for a Moral Compass, I am running a series of extracts from the book. Previous extracts were on Joshua Greene’s idea of two modes of moral thinking and on whether universalism is merely a form of Western particularism. This extract, from Chapter 13, ‘The challenge of history’, examines Marx’s claim to be a moral thinker. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass in most bookshops, through Amazon or from […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: anti-capitalism, capitalism, communism, hegel, history of moral thought, left, marx, marxism, morality, working class

THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE FALL OF MAN

July 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week to the Academy, a conference organised by the Institute of Ideas. ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. And yet, misattributed it may be, it is nevertheless a sentiment that runs through much of Dostoevsky’s work, including his greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov. And it does so because […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aristotle, christianity, death of god, elizabeth anscombe, emotivism, enlightenment, greek philosophy, harriet martineau, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris, sartre, telos

HUMANISM, ANTIHUMANISM AND THE RADICAL TRADITION

November 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back in September, I wrote an essay about Judith Butler and the controversy over her winning the Adorno Prize. It touched off a debate in Pandaemonium, less because of my defence of Butler’s right to win the prize than my criticism of her work and, in particular, of her poststructuralism. I noted then that I have written little directly on Butler’s main theme, gender, but much, in the context of the debate about race, on poststructuralist / postmodernist conceptions of […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, antihumanism, claude levi-strauss, enlightenment, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, holocaust, humanism, imperialism, liberalism, lukacs, marx, marxism, nazism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, race, sartre, theodor adorno, tzvetan todorov, universalism, zygmunt bauman

ON THE SECOND COMING OF RELIGION

October 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My essay on ‘The Myths of Muslim Rage’ sparked a debate about the relationship between religion and politics. Many challenged the idea that the conflicts over The Satanic Verses two decades ago, and over the Innocence of Muslims now, find their roots as much in political conflict as in religious belief. ‘Regardless of who may have been “pulling the strings” and for what reasons’, as one critic put it in commenting on the essay, ‘the fact that those strings can […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, charles taylor, darwin, fundamentalism, identity politics, islam, islamism, linda woodhead, marx, nietzsche, nilufer gole, olivier, paul heelas, religion, return of religion, secularism

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

March 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre

THE SEARCH FOR ETHICAL CONCRETE

March 29, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk last week at a conference on ‘The Lust for Certainty’, organized by the Sea of Faith network. I enjoyed the event, especially Julian Baggini’s challenge to the very idea that the principal problem we face today is a lust for certainty. As troublesome as dogmatism, he suggested, if not not more so, is relativism and the refusal to be judgmental. In other words, the problem of lust not for certainty but for uncertainty (an argument with which […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: aquinas, darwin, death of god, enlightenment, ethics, god, julian baggini, julian savulescu, marc hauser, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris