Thanks for the offer but I am going to order it.
The books I like I use on and off to work with. I am certain, this is going to
be one of them For example, I've already read the Golo Mann Reflections in
relation to Strauss and Arendt. GM will later become alienated from Jaspers in
a disagreement over the worth of Arendt's infamous Eichmann in Jerusalem. At
issue was that GM personally knew some of the upper crust Nazis and had known
them in school and at the point of their turn. In Arendt case that view was
mostly limited to Heidegger. But evidently this problematic knowledge was more
common than I thought.
So he disagreed with banality. He thought they had deep intellectual roots in
German history. This time I am reading him in relation to his awareness of the
presence tense. Tha analogy he gives is the frog in boiling water. There is a
threshold effect where it becomes too late.
This is a really interesting topic, because old man Mann had embraced German
nationalism in WWI and had a serious split with his brother Heinrich who
supported the French as the more civil choice. After the war, TM broke with his
nationalist elite and supported the Republic. There are all kinds of currents
behind these events.
I can see now that Trotsky was an intellectual in the literary sense with all
the complexity that implies and it will be worth looking into him much further.
The other figure I was reading about was Nicholai Bukharin who I'd heard of but
never read or studied. We (whoever that is) tend to form a political schema in
our minds about these figures but it tends to be a bare armature... The problem
is they have to be good writers so you can get to know them in retrospect
The other point to all this is that I am certain the Middle East is full of an
intellectual class that has been suppressed and hopefully we will get to hear
from them Marwan Bishara is just the tip of an iceberg
CG
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