Tag: universalism

FREE SPEECH IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

August 13, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my TB Davie Memorial lecture that I gave at the University of Cape Town on Thursday 13 August. It is truly an honour and pleasure to be able to deliver this lecture, and to be able to follow the speakers who have gone before me, speakers such as Walter Sisulu, Wole Soyinke, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. It is an honour, too, to be the fiftieth speaker in this great series. But being the fiftieth speaker raises […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, black identity, censorship, free speech, identity politics, left, moral autonomy, offence, pluralism, racism, therapeutic society, trigger warnings, universalism, universities

HISTORY, MORALITY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

April 19, 2015 by Kenan Malik

The Quest for a Moral Compass is now out in paperback. And, to accompany the new edition. I am publishing a number of extracts from the book. This extract, from Chapter 19, ‘Confucianism, Communism and the Clash of Civilizations’, sets out many of the themes of the book against the background of the changing balance of power between China and the West. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass in most bookshops, through Amazon or from my Pandaemonium bookstore. From […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: china, chinese philosophy, clash of civilizations, confucianism, herder, history of moral thought, jiang qing, martin jacques, morality, romanticism, samuel huntington, universalism, west

ASSIMILATIONISM VS MULTICULTURALISM

January 12, 2015 by Kenan Malik

One of the key debates in European social policy has been that between multiculturalism and assimilationism. French ‘assimilationist’ policies are generally seen as the polar opposite of British-style multiculturalism. French politicians pride themselves in having rejected the divisive consequences of multiculturalism. Unlike in the rest of Europe, they insist, in France every individual is treated as a citizen, not as a member of a particular racial or cultural group. The question of French social policy, and of social divisions, has […]

Categories: International, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: assimilationism, bernard-henri levy, britain, burqa bans, charlie hebdo, enlightenment, france, islam, jihadism, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, universalism

A SNIPPET FROM THE QUEST: MO TZU, LOST IN HISTORY

September 14, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The North American edition of The Quest for a Moral Compass is published this week by Melville House. I am in New York and Toronto to talk about it. While I am away, I am publishing on Pandaemonium short extracts from the book. This first snippet on Monday was from Chapter 1, and discussed Aeschylus’ Oresteia. This second snippet is from Chapter 6 and explores the ideas of Mo Tzu, a Chinese philosopher lost in history but whose significance is […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: china, chinese philosophy, confucianism, history of moral thought, mo tzu, mohism, universalism, utilitarianism

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ORNAMENTALISM

August 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a couple of weeks, so the next few posts will be from the archives – old material that I have not previously published on Pandaemonium. All will, in fact, be book reviews that explore themes of race, difference and identity. This first is a review of David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism, first published in the New Statesman, 7 May 2001. . Review of David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Allen Lane, 2001) In October 1865, […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, History • Tags: british empire, david cannadine, edward said, equality, imperialism, orientalism, racism, universalism

THE MANY ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE

March 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a I talk I gave yesterday at the LSE Literary Festival. My thanks to Arthur Bradley who also took part and responded to many of the themes I raised here and to Danielle Sands of the Forum for European Philosophy for organising the discussion. ‘If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?’ That is the arresting final line […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: augustine, christian europe, christianity, clash of civilizations, enlightenment, equality, greek philosophy, human agency, ibn rushd, islam, larry siedentop, original sin, pelagius, religion, stoicism, universalism

THE ENLIGHTENMENT – AND WHY IT STILL MATTERS

May 30, 2013 by Kenan Malik

‘If I knew something useful to me, and harmful to my family, I would reject it from my mind’, the French Enlightenment philosophe Montesquieu famously wrote. ‘If I knew something useful to my family and not to my country, I would try to forget it. If I knew something useful to my country, and harmful to Europe, or useful to Europe and harmful to Mankind, I would look upon it as a crime’. Montesquieu’s sentiment expresses, for Anthony Pagden, the […]

Categories: History • Tags: aquinas, cosmopolitanism, democracy, enlightenment, european union, hobbes, human nature, jonathan israel, morality, radical enlightenment, universalism

FROM THE VAULTS: A DEBATE ON ‘WHO SPEAKS FOR ME?’

April 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a week, so I thought I would unearth some more old material from the vaults, this time debates in which I have been involved. This first is an exchange of letters with the human rights activist Tanuka Loha, currently the Human Right to Housing Program Director at America’s National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, on questions of race, identity and political representation. It is a debate that touches on many of the themes in the contemporary discussion […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-racism, black, black identity, british politics, democracy, mult, muslims, racism, universalism

FROM THE VAULTS: CLR JAMES AND THE BLACK JACOBINS

March 7, 2013 by Kenan Malik

As I continue my life in purdah, trying to complete my book, here is the second book review drawn from the vaults. The review is of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins; it was originally published in August 2010 on Norman Geras’ normblog, as part of his Writer’s Choice series. The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot […]

Categories: History • Tags: anti-imperialism, clr james, enlightenment, haitian revolution, toussaint l'ouverture, universalism

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 20]: TWO CHINESE PHILOSOPHERS, TWO HISTORICAL FATES

February 28, 2013 by Kenan Malik

This is the penultimate extract from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought. This is from chapter 6 – another of the chapters I am publishing out of sync – which explores early Chinese philosophy. This extract is about two philosophers, one of whom is well known as China’s most famous thinker – Kongzi, or Confucius as he is known in the West – and the other who has been almost forgotten, even in China, but who should not be […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: china, chinese philosophy, confucianism, equality, ethics, history of moral thought, kong zu, universalism, utilitarianism

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 NUANCE AND ITS BAGGAGE

October 10, 2012 by Kenan Malik

On Monday I chaired an illuminating discussion called ‘Inside the Mind of the Taliban’ with Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn and Jason Elliot. Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, who until recently lived in Kandahar, have written a series of outstanding books on Afghanistan, including An Enemy We Created, which tells the story of how the American insistence that al Qaeda and the Taliban were in effect a single, unified enemy, and Washington’s view of the Taliban as just another […]

Categories: International • Tags: afghanistan, alex strick von lindschoeten, felix kuehn, jason elliot, relativism, taliban, universalism, war on terror

CLR JAMES, FRANTZ FANON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERATION

April 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 – is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was […]

Categories: Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-imperialism, black politics, claude levi-strauss, clr james, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, herder, imperialism, negritude, racism, sartre, separatism, universalism

RETHINKING THE IDEA OF ‘CHRISTIAN EUROPE’

August 19, 2011 by Kenan Malik

UPDATE: this post won the 2011 3QD Politics and Social Sciences Prize. In the warped mind of Anders Behring Breivik, his murderous rampage in Oslo and Utoøya were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. Not a religious war but a cultural one. Breivik acknowledged that he was not religious but, he wrote in his manifesto in a section entitled ‘Distinguishing between cultural Christendom and religious Christendom’: Myself and many more like me do not necessarily […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, christianity, christopher caldwell, clash of civilizations, dante, dark ages, enlightenment, ethics, eurabia, god, greek philosophy, jesus, jonathan israel, judaism, judeo-christian tradition, liberalism, modernity, muslim rationalism, muslims, original sin, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, stoicism, universalism, western civilization

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 3]: ON STOICISM, FREE WILL & FATE

April 5, 2011 by Kenan Malik

My book on the history of moral thought, due to be published next year by Atlantic, is beginning to take shape (I should hopefully have finished writing it by late summer / early autumn). Every month I am posting small sections from the book. This excerpt is from the conclusion of Chapter 3, which begins in Aristotle’s moral thought and ends in Stoicism. THE PHILOSOPHER ZENO WAS ONCE FLOGGING A SLAVE WHO HAD STOLEN SOME goods. ‘But I was fated to […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, cosmopolitanism, ethics, eudaimonia, fate, free will, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, kenan malik's books, socrates, stoicism, universalism, virtue ethics