Ian Browne

In Cioran style and substance are inextricable. What he wants to say and the manner in which he chose to say it cannot be separated. As commentators like Eugene Thacker and Susan Sontag have pointed out, Cioran's writing consists of "fragments, haphazard and incidental thoughts... the debris of contemplation." (Thacker). It is less a form of thinking than "a stream of becoming… an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future" (Sontag).

This paper examines the underlying causes of the Leave vote. The causes can be found in the issue of identity-national identity, regional identity and in the individual sense of self worth and identity. Conceptions of identity in England have changed over the last 35 years. These changes have been the result of neo-liberalism, which has brought about a shift to a new paradigm, not just in economics, but just as importantly, in the conception of what constitutes a person and in what constitutes public, social and national life. Neo-liberalism began to reshape the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and the most significant changes in the regional distribution of prosperity and poverty began around that time, with the areas in the North and Midlands where manufacturing and heavy industry had predominated experiencing poverty, unemployment and a sense of social exclusion, while London and its immediate environs in the South East experienced a period of unprecedented pros...

I examine Hayek's claim that the term 'social justice'is meaningless. Hayek does not offer an argument for this claim, but a plausible argument can be made based on his methodological individualism, which takes the form of ontological reductionism. From this it is possible to construct a philosophical semantics which would provide the necessary premise for an argument that the term 'social justice' is meaningless. However such an argument requires a version of methodological reductionism that is incapable of making sense of social behaviour. Furthermore, for Hayek's claim to be true, it would require a complete rethinking of our current understanding of meaning, deriving from Wittgenstein, and also that Aristotle's account of general justice is meaningless. Hayek has no valid argument to support the claim that the term 'social justice' is meaningless, and our understanding of both meaning and social justice remain undamaged by his claim.

An examination of the concepts of rational economic behavior and the best of all possible worlds. Drawing on the work of Mike Hill and Warren Montag on biopolitics and the economics of starvation, I look at how seventeenth century theories of providence can be reinterpreted in Hayekian terms to yield a secular vision of the best of all possible worlds - Hayek's ideal free market. Hayek's vision of the best of all possible worlds succumbs to the same kind of objections that Hume made to seventeenth and eighteenth century religious providential theory - that the real work in the theory is done by specifying initial condions which lack all plausinbility, and that once the initial conditions are changed for something more plausible the result is anything but the best of all possible worlds.

I examine Hayek's claim that the term 'social justice' is meaningless. Hayek does not offer an argument for this claim, but a plausible argument can be made based on his methodological individualism, which takes the form of ontological reductionism. From this it is possible to construct a philosophical semantics which would provide the necessary premise for an argument that the term 'social justice' is meaningless. However such an argument requires a version of methodological reductionism that is incapable of making sense of social behaviour. Furthermore, for Hayek's claim to be true, it would require a complete rethinking of our current understanding of meaning, deriving from Wittgenstein, and also that Aristotle's account of general justice is meaningless. Hayek has no valid argument to support the claim that the term 'social justice' is meaningless, and our understanding of both meaning and social justice remain undamaged by his claim.

Abstract: Orwell was a political writer who needed to see, touch, feel, smell and taste what he took to be reality, before it could affect him. Although Orwell had no interest in philosophy, his moral and political sensibility grew out of his direct experience of working class life. I suggest that this made a Orwell a more philosophical writer than he imagined himself to be, in that his moral and political attitudes arose from his moral sensibility, a combination of direct experience, sympathetic identification and moral understanding, as understood by the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular, by Adam Smith. In this sense, sitting down beside the fire, having a relaxed conversation, drinking tea, and, above all, eating a slice Mrs Searle's cake were integral to the development of Orwell's political sense.

Orwell was a political writer who needed to see, touch, feel, smell and taste what he took to be reality, before it could affect him. Although Orwell had no interest in philosophy, his moral and political sensibility grew out of his direct experience of working class life. I suggest that this made a Orwell a more philosophical writer than he imagined himself to be, in that his moral and political attitudes arose from his moral sensibility, a combination of direct experience, sympathetic identification and moral understanding, as understood by the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular, by Adam Smith. In this sense, sitting down beside the fire, having a relaxed conversation, drinking tea, and, above all, eating a slice Mrs Searle's cake were integral to the development of Orwell's political sense.

The paper examines the use of religious language in the light of Wittgenstein's two philosophies – the logical atomism of the Tractatus and the more complex approach Wittgenstein later adopted and which received its clearest formulation in the Philosophical Investigations. I use Wittgenstein's two philosophies to examine the assertions of religious fundamentalism – which the Oxford English dictionary defines as “a form of a religion, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.”  propose to examine to what extent, if at all, it is possible to uphold a belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.

The particular example of Christian fundamentalism I use is taken from Thelyphthora, published between 1780-1 and written by Martin Madan, an English Christian theologian. The reason for using this rather obscure work is not so much becasue I want to examine Madan's specific concerns, but because Madan actually makes some very clear remarks about what he takes the meaning of the language of the Bible to be. He makes explicit, so to speak, his theory of meaning. And in doing that, I think he makes clear what kind of theory of meaning must underpin the idea that we can uphold a belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.

The Romanian language version of the paper Wittgenstein and Religious Discourse, given on 8 November 2014 in Sibiu at the Conference Text Si Discours Religios.

În prezenta lucrare doresc să examinez anumite înțelesuri ale limbajului religios în lumina celor două filosofii ale lui Wittgenstein – atomismul logic al Tractatus-ului și abordul mai complex pe care Wittgenstein l-a  adoptat ulterior și care a fost formulat cel mai clar în Investigațiile Filosofice. 
Aș dori să mă concentrez asupra conceptului de fundamentalism – pe care Dicționarul Englez Oxford îl definește ca „o formă de religie ce afirmă cu tărie existența credinței doar în sensul unei interpretări stricte, ad-litteram a scripturii”.
De asemenea, voi examina conceptul conform căruia fiecare dintre noi, ca persoane fizice, suntem capabili să ne asumăm un crez în sensul unei interpretări stricte, literale a scripturilor.


Exemplul particular de fundamentalism creștin pe care doresc să îl analizez provine din Thelyphthora - o lucrare publicată între anii 1780 – 1781, scrisă de Martin Madan, teolog creștin englez. Motivul pentru care voi recurge la această operă destul de obscură nu este atât studierea problemelor specifice care îl preocupau pe Madan, ci mai degrabă faptul că el avansează câteva observații foarte critice despre ceea ce consideră a fi limbajul Bibliei, explicând în mod clar propria teorie a sensurilor .
Astfel se clarifică în mod obiectiv ce fel de teorie a sensului ar trebui să se afle la temelia ideii care ne permite să ne susținem convingerile religioase în sensul strict al interpretării scripturilor.

This paper examines Agamben's claims, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and State of Exception, that the opposition of  the simple fact of living, zōē, to politically qualified life, bios, is canonical for the political tradition of the West, and that the limiting case of this opposition is the state of exception, which privileges the violence of the state over other forms of violence and involves the creation of and exclusion of homo sacer.  Agamben further asserts that the state of exception rests upon “a fictio iuris par excellence which claims to maintain the law in its very suspension”1, the result of which is that the state can claim to be acting with a type of legal violence, but this form of legalized violence has “shed any relation to the law”2. A careful examination and analysis of the events of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in 1865 and the subsequent legal arguments concerning the legality of martial law and the execution of George William Gordon reveals that although Agamben's theoretical structures help us to understand the events in Morant Bay, there are aspects of the case that do not conform to Agamben's theory. Furthermore, Agamben's approach can at best offer only a partial understanding of what happened at Morant Bay and in the subsequent legal events in London, and that other, more familiar ways of thinking about power are more fruitful. Some suggestions are made about about how a recognition of the internal tensions within liberal political theory may serve to elucidate the events of Morant Bay.

Heritage is not history, it is history used to create unifying national myths. The acceptance of national myths that affirm the virtues of a united nation relies upon the forging of a collective national memory based on strong emotional connections with the past. This sort of connection is a nostalgic connection, and the predominant emotion is a form of sentimentality. This emotional relationship with the past is typically forged by the use of metonymic chains of association, which serve to muddy the waters, to impede rather than assist the dispassionate examination of the past, which is the domain of history. Whatever militates against the forging of a collective national memory, whatever undermines the myth or cannot be incorporated into the myth, is emended to facilitate its inclusion into the myth or excluded. Thus the past is falsified and the emotions involved are both unearned and unexamined. Where heritage serves to create and endorse unifying national myths and values by finding positive continuities between the past and the present, it serves a way of endorsing and validating not just the past, but also the present. And just as the myths embodied in heritage rely upon the avoidance of the careful scrutiny of the past, so questioning these myths and the continuities embodied in these myths becomes associated with the rejection of one's national identity. Heritage therefore serves a distinctly political function, of a Burkian kind, serving to endorse the present and protect it from divisive forms of scrutiny.

This is the Romanian text of Memory, Heritage and Nostalgia - Metonomy and Localism, which was given at the Conference on Patrimony and Local Identity (Patrimoniu şi identitate locală) in Valea Verde, Romania in 2014. It differs slightly from the English text. Comments are most welcome.

This paper examines the underlying causes of the Leave vote. The causes can be found in the issue of identity – national identity, regional identity and in the individual sense of self worth and identity. Conceptions of identity in England have changed over the last 35 years. These changes have been the result of neo-liberalism, which has brought about a shift to a new paradigm, not just in economics, but just as importantly, in the conception of what constitutes a person and in what constitutes public, social and national life. Neo-liberalism began to reshape the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and the most significant changes in the regional distribution of prosperity and poverty began around that time, with the areas in the North and Midlands where manufacturing and heavy industry had predominated experiencing poverty, unemployment and a sense of social exclusion, while London and its immediate environs in the South East experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity, creating a group of people who saw themselves as having been " left behind " by 21 st century Britain. Conceptions of identity depend as much upon material circumstances, on how prosperity and inequality are distributed in a society, as they do upon ideas and values. As a result of the economic changes wrought by neo-liberalism, the old conceptions of identity, incorporating the ideal of the English gentleman, did not survive. Although the Leave vote was ostensibly about immigration and loss of sovereignty, what lay behind these concerns were a sense of dissatisfaction with what was seen as the damage done, both to the material basis of people's lives and to the old values and ideas of what it was to be English. The Leave vote was a response to the feeling of exclusion and powerlessness, and an awareness of regional inequality, that those groups who did not share in the prosperity of London and the South East felt, and to the sense that they had been ignored by politicians and left behind by the forces of globalisation. They identified this sense of exclusion and having been left behind with the EU, because the EU appeared to them to be the most obvious manifestation of those international and transnational forces which had reshaped their lives in negative ways. The forced choice nature of the referendum, a simple in or out vote, gave these voters the chance to either accept or to reject what they saw as everything that had gone wrong over the past 35 years, an opportunity which the conventional political choice offered in General Elections had not provided. In this sense, rejecting the EU served in part as a proxy for a more fundamental rejection, that of the identities which had been foisted upon them by the neo-liberal policies which had been the dominant paradigm since 1979, and which were the result of factors that were global as much as European, and which owed their character to the actions of British politicians as much as to the decisions made by the EU.

This is a chapter in English from the book 'Orwell, un bestiar socialist al capitalismului' (Orwell - A Socialist Bestiary of Capitalism), which I co-wrote with Viorella Manolache. The book appeared in Romanian in 2020, published by editura ISPRI, and this is an English translation of one of the chapters.

It is an attempt to answer the question, why did Orwell insist that the villains in Animal Farm are pigs? What is it about pigs that made them eminently suitable to play the role of comminist exploiters. It looks at the history of the imagery and symbolic meaning of pigs in English political and popular discourse, and at the idea of a Carnival, inversion of roles and a world turned upside down.

This is an English translation of a chapter I wrote, which appeared in a book in Romanian I co-authored with Viorella Manolache, Orwell Intelectual Anti-Intelectual. It isn't available in English, which is why I have put the translation up here.

One of the aims of the chaptyer is to show how Orwell returned in his life to themse that had exercised him at the begining of his literary career, when his political understanding was still taking shape. His emotional and intellectual concerns showed a remarkable degree of continuity, and in some ways it is unfortunate that readers of 1984 are generally unaware that the theme of individual freedom he addressd in 1984 was dealt with from a very perspective in his earliest novel, in which he addresses the way conservative and imperial thinking can be just as destructive of individuality as the Thought Police of 1984.

The chapter is about the nature of how power shapes what it is possible for people to do, both power as physical compulsion and power as ideology, Lukes third face of power, power as ideology. It deals with Mill's conception of the individual and what Mill would regard as a damaged and diminished life looks like from Lukes perspective. And it sees Orwell as finding affinities in 1984 and Burmese Days between the exercise of naked power as force and power as ideology.

It explains some of Orwell's hostility to intellectuals and his ability to see both Leftist intellectuals and Conservatives as sharing certain traits, related to the denial of individual freedom and freedom of thought.

As always, comments and suggestions are always welcome

Three ways of understanding 1984 are discussed. The first considers Orwell's preoccupations and intentions when writing the book. The second looks at how the book was understood in the context of the Cold War. It is argued that these ways of reading 1984 involve ways of understanding that were important in their historical context but which are now less relevant to contemporary readers. A third way of reading 1984 is proposed which shows that 1984 still has contemporary relevance. This proposed reading locates Orwell in the tradition of political satirists, particularly Jonathan Swift. I suggest that we can read Orwell as raising important questions about the 'real' nature of humanity, the imposition of a conception of freedom based on an idealised conception of humanity, and its relation to the freedom that people actually want.