Analytical Fascism: What Stares Back When One Stares into the De-Enlightenment. 15 May, 2025, 17:00-18:30 (CEST)

About the session: While it is clear what those attracted to fascism today are against, it is less clear what they are for. Not in the sense of how they want to remake society—this is usually clear enough. What is less clear is the fundamental values that are driving their desire to create a different kind of order. Compounding this difficulty, too many liberals are stubbornly sticking to some conventional beliefs: that human nature is as liberals think it is, not something that is fundamentally disputed; that facts are what liberals think they are, even if some people choose to ignore them; and that everybody is pursuing basically the same conception of the good, even if some of them are deluded as to where we are now and how to get where we want to go.

But this move to the right is not being driven simply by mistakes; it is a principled move, backed by a coherent, consistent, and historically well-sourced value system, even if this value system is perverse. Fascism has its own conception of the moral subject; of the need for a rigid social hierarchy of men; of the nature of individual rights; and of the importance of purity in blood, soil, and ideology. It believes in the unity of the people, the leader, and the state; it embraces very different and (to liberals) often disturbing moral ends; and it employs starkly different rules of social interaction. And it believes, in the end, that this all leads to the greatest expression of democracy ever invented.

About the speaker: Mark R. Reiff is the author of six books: Analytical Fascism: What Stares Back When One Stares into the De-Enlightenment (George Washington University Illiberalism Studies, 2024); In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization (Cambridge University Press, 2020); On Unemployment, Volume I: A Micro-Theory of Economic Justice and Volume II: Achieving Economic Justice after the Great Recession (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Punishment, Compensation, and Law: A Theory of Enforceability (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  His papers on issues within political, legal, and moral philosophy have appeared in leading academic journals in the US, the UK, France, and Canada, and his work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. Dr. Reiff has taught political, legal, and moral philosophy at the University of Manchester, the University of Durham, The Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, and the University of California at Davis. In 2008-09, Dr Reiff was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.  

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Any additional questions about the Vision Speaker Series, please email Catarina Neves at a.c.moiteirodasneves@uu.nl.