The Skeptical Utopianism of György Konrád (on Taxis Mag)

In this paper I critically engage with a methodological approach in contemporary political theory – unconstrained utopianism – which holds that we can only determine how we should live by first giving an account of the principles that would govern society if people were perfectly morally motivated. I provide reasons for being skeptical of this claim. To begin with I query the robustness of the principles unconstrained utopianism purportedly delivers. While the method can be understood as offering existence proofs, because we can devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, I argue that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live in general. Drawing on this point, I contend that normative models that wish away certain phenomena which are uncontroversially central to any account of politics cannot plausibly claim to tell us how we should live in political society. I conclude by offering a more positive sketch of why avoiding this brand of utopianism might not represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal and suggest that theorizing in light of certain constraints may be a precondition of good normative theorizing itself.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s political thought., 2018

In this lecture, I would like to sum up the principal ideas of one of the 20th century’s brightest conservative political theorists, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. I will consider how Kuehnelt-Leddihn assessed the great political doctrines of the 20th century – Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, Fascism, and liberal democracy as political philosophies – from a specific point of view which is, – as I will call it – a position of a Christian philosopher, who deal with political modernity, as an ultimate and fundamental utopianism.

Perspectives on Politics , 2019

A common complaint about pacifism says that it is utopian, in a pejorative sense. The worry can take various forms and directions, but when it is couched in terms of Just War theory it usually includes accusations of pacifism’s immorality, inconsistency and impracticality. Contemporary defenders of pacifism have responded to this complaint by delineating a highly sophisticated, empirically informed account of pacifism that foregrounds its real-world effectiveness. This paper takes a different route towards vindicating pacifism: via a more nuanced picture of what is specifically utopian about it. I propose that peace, in at least some of its guises, can be described as a minor, grounded utopia; a desire for an alternative future without war and violence, whose pursuit blurs the boundaries between thought and action. Reconstructing both prefiguration and testimony as practical modes of this kind of pacifism, the paper maintains that minor, grounded utopias are sites rife with conflict and contestation.

Los Angeles Review of Books (March 26, 2014), https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/center-margins/, 2014

Review of Joshua Cherniss’s book on Isaiah Berlin, A Mind and Its Time (Oxford UP, 2013)

Constellations, 2018

This paper takes up the question of utopia in the work of third- and fourth-generation critical theorists Seyla Benhabib, Raymond Geuss, Rainer Forst, Maeve Cooke, and Amy Allen, each of whom conceives of utopia as a moment or dimension of critical theory, complementing the latter’s normative foundations and/or commitment to political realism. Realism and normativity act as limits built into critical theory to a more robust conception of utopianism. Part 1 gives a critical overview of their perspectives on utopia, which largely derive from those of Ernst Bloch and Michel Foucault. Problematic, in particular, is their reliance on a thin version of Bloch’s project or else on a passive version in Foucault’s contributions. The French philosophers Miguel Abensour and Étienne Tassin who, while also indebted to Bloch and T.W. Adorno, understand utopia as an impulse moderating normative and realist concerns and feeding into transformative democratic politics, provide a point of contrast and corrective (Part 2). Seeking to remedy the identified shortcomings of existing critical-theoretical approaches to utopianism—including the weakness of hope in orienting social normativity—I then defend a distinctive account of utopia as play (Part 3). Adorno’s notion of play offers the figure for a distinct version of utopianism in the critical theory tradition. Pursuing a more practical emancipatory orientation, the article thus contributes an alternative model of utopianism for the purposes of critical theory. Bringing out utopia’s relationship to hope, democratic practices of contestation, and political efficacy, an account of utopia as “conceptual play” strengthens the political purchase of utopia in a way that does not translate it into a particular version of emancipatory politics. The account represents less a “solution” than a different and underexposed way of conceptualizing utopia that addresses the internal limitations on contemporary critical theory’s emancipatory goals. While drawing on a thread in Adorno, it accentuates dialectics over negativity to advance a more robust, ludic utopianism, latent in his work, as an active modality of anticipatory thinking.

Plot.online, 02.03.2019, Online-Publication, 2019

How does contemporary art remind us of the ruined utopias of the past? And how do the universalist claims of modernist architecture reappear in the light of contemporaneity? A postutopian perspective is not retrogressive per se but rather holds true to the emancipatory claims of modernity by criticizing its problematic aspects. URL: http://plot.online/plot/points/notes-on-utopia-history-and-architectural-form/

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2019

Leo Strauss has been read as the author of a paradoxically nonpolitical political philosophy. This reading finds extensive support in Strauss's work, notably in the claim that political life leads beyond itself to contemplation and in the limits this imposes on politics. Yet the space of the nonpolitical in Strauss remains elusive. The "nonpolitical" understood as the natural, Strauss suggests, is the "foun-dation of the political". But the meaning of "nature" in Strauss is an enigma: it may refer either to the "natural understanding" of commonsense, or to nature "as intended by natural science," or to "unchangeable and knowable necessity." As a student of Husserl, Strauss sought both to retrieve and radically critique both the "natural understanding" and the "naturalistic" worldview of natural science. He also cast doubt on the very existence of an unchangeable nature. The true sense of the nonpolit-ical in Strauss, I shall argue, must rather be sought in his embrace of the trans-finite goals of philosophy understood as rigorous science. Nature may be the nonpolitical foundation of the political, but we can only ever approximate nature asymptotically. The nonpolitical remains as elusive in Strauss as the ordinary. To approximate both we need to delve deeper into his understanding of Husserl.

Rethinking Marxism, 2007

This essay explores the resources that religious Utopianism, especially Christian visions of the reign of God, might offer to the project of reclaiming and revising a politically effective left Utopianism. It looks both at various efforts to revise and reclaim Utopian theory and imagery by left analysts today and at the historical experiences of a particular Utopian movement, the Catholic peasant left in Central America. It also critiques the unacknowledged Utopianism of self-proclaimed ''realists'' on the right. The article concludes with an affirmation of both the continuing significance of a critical Utopianism for left thinking and activism today, and the distinctive potential of religious Utopianism as a resource for both theory and practice.

DAKAM - 2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference on Future and Foresight Studies, Istanbul, Turkey, 2017

One of the problematique that contemporary urbanism suffers from is that design thinking is highly limited with the restorative search with partial solutions stuck in the existing trends and tendencies. New life forms and patterns of urban societies and their reflections in urban space are not primary issues as they were before. In need of fresh outlooks to the problems of urban spaces in the current condition, the faculty of urbanism once again calls for a glimpse into the future from a new perspective. In this sense, METU Urban Design Studio (2015-2016) revisited the idea of envisioning the future city forms and structures. As it is not an unprecedented approach to seek for alternate futures of spatial forms, the initial traces of the precursors of utopian and avant-garde thinking in the context of urbanism dates back to the 19 th and early 20 th century. As a solution to the handicaps brought by the industrialized way of life, future forms of urban spaces were depicted in the works of Ebenezer Howard in England, Le Corbusier in France, Frank Lloyd Wright in USA, and Arturo Soria y Mata in Spain. Their attempts to shape the future did not lost in the haze; on the contrary, their designs shaped today's modern and post-modern urban spaces. Although the early utopians' contribution is non-negligible in that sense; fully defined, monolithic, and static nature found in the finished image in their projects fails to correspond today's rapidly altering and dynamic conditions. Emerging disciplinary framework and practice necessitate the search for dynamic, alternative, and plural future scenarios for ever-changing spatial needs. In that context, this paper quests for the possibility of envisioning future urban forms through speculative design explorations and concepts adjusting to ever-changing conditions. This approach will be put forward by reviewing a series of future oriented works produced by the two writers collaboratively in METU Urban Design Studio. In that sense, key design concepts and their spatial reflections as a tool to generate a vision and an image for possible future urban formations will be discussed, in what ways these concepts are integrated in the design process will be revealed, the recombinant use of concepts and outcomes will be demonstrated over the design projects, digital and solid models and exhibition installations. As a result of the research, it is expected to demonstrate the role of speculative design concepts as an effective way of design thinking to challenge our conventional perspectives by manipulating current conditions in a creative way and envision future forms and structures of urban spaces.