Raymond Geuss

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Raymond Geuss

Many contemporary political thinkers are gripped by the belief that their task is to develop an ideal theory of rights or justice for guiding and judging political actions. This book argues that philosophers should first try to understand why real political actors behave as they actually do.

Philosophy and Real Politics

Thomas Nagel

Bernard Williams

Christine M. Korsgaard

Gerald Allan Cohen

Christine Marion Korsgaard

Korsgaard, Christine Marion Korsgaard

Korsgaard's discussion of the source of normativity is followed by commentary from four distinguished philosophers.

The Sources of Normativity

Who Needs a World View?

In a compelling meditation on the ideas that shape our lives, one of the world's most provocative and creative philosophers explains how his eccentric early years influenced his lifelong critique of liberalism. Liberalism is so amorphous and pervasive that for most people in the West it is background noise, the natural state of affairs. But there are nooks and crannies in every society where the prevailing winds don't blow. Raymond Geuss grew up some distance from the cultural mainstream and recounts here the unusual perspective he absorbed: one in which liberal capitalism was synonymous with moral emptiness and political complacency. Not Thinking like a Liberal is a concise tour of diverse intellectual currents--from the Counter-Reformation and communism to pragmatism and critical theory--that shaped Geuss's skeptical stance toward liberalism. The bright young son of a deeply Catholic steelworker, Geuss was admitted in 1959 to an unusual boarding school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Outside was Eisenhower's America. Inside Geuss was schooled by Hungarian priests who tried to immunize students against the twin dangers of oppressive communism and vapid liberal capitalism. From there Geuss went on to university in New York in the early days of the Vietnam War and to West Germany, where critical theory was experiencing a major revival. This is not a repeatable journey. In tracing it, Geuss reminds us of the futility of abstracting lessons from context and of seeking a universal view from nowhere. At the same time, he examines the rise and fall of major political theories of the past sixty years. An incisive thinker attuned to both the history and the future of ideas, Geuss looks beyond the horrors of authoritarianism and the shallow freedom of liberalism to glimpse a world of genuinely new possibilities.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal

The purpose of this series is to help make contemporary European philosophy intelligible to a wider audience in the English-speaking world, and to suggest its interest and importance in particular to those trained in analytical philosophy.

Habermas and the Frankfurt School

The Idea of a Critical Theory

Introduction: A game of chess in times of plague -- Socrates -- Plato -- Lucretius -- Augustine -- Montaigne -- Hobbes -- Hegel -- Nietzsche -- Lukacs -- Heidegger -- Wittgenstein -- Adorno -- Conclusion: The end and the future

Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

Changing the Subject

This title records the story of a wandering German cleric's encounter with the limited hospitality of a 10th-century Parisian monastery. It was originally written in Latin and Old High German.

At Cross Purposes (Paris AD 950)

A collection of essays on ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history.

Essays on German Philosophy

Morality, Culture, and History

Ende der 1980er Jahre schloss nördlich von Philadelphia das Stahlwerk seine Tore, in dem Raymond Geuss' Vater lange Zeit gearbeitet hatte. Sein Onkel, ein Landwirt in Indiana, brauchte bald einen zweiten Job, um seinen Lebensunterhalt bestreiten zu können. Auch anhand seiner Familiengeschichte zeigt der Philosoph in seinem neuen Buch, dass Arbeit, wie wir sie in westlichen Gesellschaften kannten, verschwindet. Automatisierung und Outsourcing haben einen tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Wandel in Gang gesetzt, und Geuss führt seine Leserinnen und Leser durch diese Umbrüche bis zur die Gegenwart dominierenden Amazonifizierung. Was ist Arbeit? Wie ist sie organisiert? Und wie wird Arbeit in Zukunft aussehen? In seinem hellsichtigen Essay verbindet Raymond Geuss philosophische Überlegungen mit ökonomischen und historischen Reflexionen. Auch mit der Arbeitsethik und dem Unbehagen an der Arbeit befasst er sich, das so alt ist wie die Arbeit selbst. Wir sollten uns, so Geuss, von den Pathologien unendlichen Wachstums befreien. Das bedeutet auch, Arbeit endlich nicht mehr als Konzept stetig steigender menschlicher Produktivkraft und Anstrengung zu begreifen.

Ein Essay

Über die Arbeit

Outside Ethics brings together some of the most important and provocative works by one of the most creative philosophers writing today. Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, knowledge, and restrictions on actions that affect other people (restrictions often construed as ahistorical laws). He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics. Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have "gaps"--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure.

Outside Ethics

One of political philosophy’s most trenchant and inventive critics challenges the field’s normative turn, arguing that the study of politics should focus on real politics, where normative judgments arise from concrete configurations of power. Raymond Geuss shows how this can be done without succumbing to a toxic relativism or abandoning utopianism.

Reality and Its Dreams

Raymond Geuss is the author of The Idea of a Critical Theory (CUP 1981), a now classic study of the philosophy of the Frankfurt School, and has been a distinctive contributor to the analysis and evaluation of German philosophy and to recent debates in ethics. In this new collection he treats a variety of topics in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history with special reference to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno.

Much political thinking today, particularly that influenced by liberalism, assumes a clear distinction between the public and the private, and holds that the correct understanding of this should weigh heavily in our attitude to human goods. It is, for instance, widely held that the state may address human action in the ''public'' realm but not in the ''private.'' In Public Goods, Private Goods Raymond Geuss exposes the profound flaws of such thinking and calls for a more nuanced approach. Drawing on a series of colorful examples from the ancient world, he illustrates some of the many ways in which actions can in fact be understood as public or private. The first chapter discusses Diogenes the Cynic, who flouted conventions about what should be public and what should be private by, among other things, masturbating in the Athenian marketplace. Next comes an analysis of Julius Caesar's decision to defy the Senate by crossing the Rubicon with his army; in doing so, Caesar asserted his dignity as a private person while acting in a public capacity. The third chapter considers St. Augustine's retreat from public life to contemplate his own, private spiritual condition. In the fourth, Geuss goes on to examine recent liberal views, questioning, in particular, common assumptions about the importance of public dialogue and the purportedly unlimited possibilities humans have for reaching consensus. He suggests that the liberal concern to maintain and protect, even at a very high cost, an inviolable ''private sphere'' for each individual is confused. Geuss concludes that a view of politics and morality derived from Hobbes and Nietzsche is a more realistic and enlightening way than modern liberalism to think about human goods. Ultimately, he cautions, a simplistic understanding of privacy leads to simplistic ideas about what the state is and is not justified in doing.

Public Goods, Private Goods

The distinguished political philosopher Raymond Geuss examines critically the central topics in Western political thought. In a series of analytic chapters he discusses the state, authority, violence and coercion, the concept of legitmacy, liberalism, toleration, freedom, democracy, and human rights. He argues that the liberal democratic state committed to the defense of human rights is in fact a confused conjunction of disparate elements. This is a profound and concise essay on the basic structure of contemporary politics, written throughout in voice that is skeptical, engaged, and clear.

History and Illusion in Politics

Frederick C. Beiser

Quentin Skinner

Frederick C Beiser

The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics contains all the essential political writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Novalis during the formative period of romantic thought (1797 to 1803). While the political thought of the German romantics has been generally recognised as important, it has been little studied, and most of the texts have been until now unavailable in English. The early romantics had an ambition still relevant to contemporary political thought: how to find a middle path between conservatism and liberalism, between an ethic of community and the freedom of the individual. Frederick C. Beiser's edition comprises all kinds of texts relevant for understanding the political ideas of the early romantic circles in Berlin and Jena - essays, lectures, aphorisms, chapters from books, and jottings from notebooks. All have been translated anew, many for the first time.

The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics

Cambridge University Press

Michael Gagarin

Paul Woodruff

Professor Emeritus of Classics Michael Gagarin

Including the works of more than thirty authors, this edition of early Greek writings on social and political issues includes the origin of human society and law; the nature of justice and good government; the distribution of power among genders and social classes.

Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists

In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.

Politics and the Imagination

Richard Bourke

Leading scholars re-examine political judgement, attempting to understand the relationship between political theory and political practice.

Essays for John Dunn

Political Judgement

A survey on the nature of work, integrating conceptual analysis, historical reflection, autobiography and social commentary.

A Philosopher Looks at Work

Why the human and natural world is not as intelligible to us as we think it is Wishful thinking is a deeply ingrained human trait that has had a long-term distorting effect on ethical thinking. Many influential ethical views depend on the optimistic assumption that, despite appearances to the contrary, the human and natural world in which we live could, eventually, be made to make sense to us. In A World without Why, Raymond Geuss challenges this assumption. The essays in this collection—several of which are published here for the first time—explore the genesis and historical development of this optimistic configuration in ethical thought and the ways in which it has shown itself to be unfounded and misguided. Discussions of Greco-Roman antiquity and of the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno play a central role in many of these essays. Geuss also ranges over such topics as the concepts of intelligibility, authority, democracy, and criticism; the role of lying in politics; architecture; the place of theology in ethics; tragedy and comedy; and the struggle between realism and our search for meaning. Characterized by Geuss's wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy, and history, and by his political commitment and trenchant style, A World without Why raises fundamental questions about the viability not just of specific ethical concepts and theses, but of our most basic assumptions about what ethics could and must be.

Raymond Geuss

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