Domenico Losurdo > Quotes

“[t]he freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves …”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“. . . 'science' was now called on to sanction and sanctify existing social relations. According to Malthus, it was wholly desirable that political economy be 'taught to the common people.' Thanks to it, the poor would understand that they must attribute the cause of their privations to Mother Nature or their own improvidence.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“As a communist – and not only that, but also as a philosopher and historian – I am going to fight and continue to fight the dominant ideology. For the dominant ideology is a manipulation of history and an obstacle to the process of emancipation. And we, for our part, have to rethink this process itself.”
― Domenico Losurdo

“One thing is clear: One cannot understand the Nazi vocabulary adequately if one only looks at Germany. What is the “blood disgrace” of which ‘Mein Kampf’ warns – as we have seen – if not the “miscegenation” that is condemned also by the proponents of ‘White Supremacy’? Even the key term of Nazi-ideology ‘subhuman [Untermensch]’ is a translation of the American ‘Under Man’!”
― Domenico Losurdo, Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?

“We should not respond by saying that we consider the democratic question unimportant. On the contrary: we should insist that when Bill Clinton claims that the USA was the first democracy, he’s claiming that the “first democracy” was a place where black people were enslaved and indigenous people were exterminated. We should say that Bill Clinton is a racist, because he considers that the history of black and indigenous people is a minor detail. He does not consider it important. This is white supremacy, Western supremacy. In other words, it is the opposite of democracy. I repeat: the opposite.”
― Domenico Losurdo

“The pretension of a country or group of countries to be privileged or exclusive interpreters of universal values that they would be authorized to protect even with the unilateral and sovereign use of arms serves only to sanction the law of the strongest in the international field, perpetuating war and making it even more difficult to achieve peace.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Um Mundo sem Guerras. A Ideia de Paz das Promessas do Passado as Tragedias do Presente

“There is no doubt: it was San Domingo—Haiti that gave the Creole independence movement a decisive turn. To overcome the fierce resistance of the Spanish troops, Simón Bolívar sought to secure the support of the rebel ex­-slaves of the Caribbean state, which he personally visited. The president at the time was Alexandre Pétion, who immediately received the Latin American revolutionary. He promised him the aid he requested on condition that he freed the slaves in areas as they were wrested from Spanish control. Transcending the class and caste limits of the social group he belonged to, and demonstrating intellectual and political courage, Bolívar accepted. Seven ships, 6,000 men with arms and munitions, a printing press and numerous advisors set out from the island. This was the beginning of the abolition of slavery in much of Latin America.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“How could the ‘horse’ or ‘beast of burden’ to which Locke and Mandeville compared the wage-labourer, or the ‘speaking instrument’, ‘bipedal instrument’ or ‘work machine’ that Burke and Sieyès referred to, claim to form part of it? In other words, those who continued to be defined via the categories used by Aristotle to conceptualize the figure of the slave could not enjoy political citizenship. If they were men, they were members of a different, inferior people; they were barbarians (the quintessential slaves).”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“Authors and figures committed in some way
to defending communism’s honor react, at times, by distancing themselves from the darker pages of that movement’s history and branding them as the betrayal or the degeneration of the original ideas of the Bolshevik revolution and the teachings by Lenin and Marx...A truly miserable outcome is reached by relying on the category of betrayal. The history of the communist movement as a crime in itself, triumphantly written by the ruling ideology, is simply rebranded―by those who are unable to identify with the ruling ideology―as the history of betrayal of its original ideals. Not all that different results would be reached in the reading of liberalism or Christianity if we wanted to describe their darkest chapters as the betrayal of their original ideals. To conclude, the approach criticized here commits the mistake of erasing the real and profane history, which is
substituted by a history of the unfortunate and mysterious corruption and distortion of doctrines elevated a priori to the status of purity and holiness.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda nera

“In Zarathustra to seek to separate the great fascinating moralist from the brutal theorist of aristocratic radicalism is an untenable enterprise.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico

“What is at the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated with the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, with the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacked: not by chance, in fact, the revolution called upon the ‘slaves in the colonies’ to break their fetters.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“To know how to say no to modern excitement was also the condition for the autonomous construction of one’s own personality. He that ‘does not want to be part of the masses’ and did not want to be ‘factory goods’ was to pay great heed. Certainly, to ‘“give style” to one’s character is a great and rare art’, which required an effort of self-discipline from which ‘the weak characters with no power over themselves’ flinched back. And here Nietzsche appealed to the youth: ‘Always continue to become what you are—educator and moulder of yourself’.
To achieve this result, it was necessary never to lose sight of the ‘true liberation of life’, and to swim against the stream rather than chase blindly and recklessly after the ruling ideologies and myths of an age ruled not ‘by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings’. No doubt this appeal was part of a reactionary critique of modernity, but that in no way detracted from the charm of this lesson in living and this appeal for autonomy of judgement.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico

“Heroes are necessary for the transition from exceptional conditions to normalcy, and are heroes only insofar as they guarantee the transition from exceptional conditions to normalcy, which is to say they are heroes to the extent to which they are willing to make themselves superfluous.”
― Domenico Losurdo

“More even than trade-union activity in the strict sense—that is, action aimed at raising wages and improving working conditions—the very attempt by servants to escape their isolation and communicate with one another was viewed with dismay. They (thundered Mandeville in alarm) ‘assemble when they please with Impunity’. They even developed relations of mutual solidarity; they sought to aid a colleague dismissed or flogged by his master. Simply by virtue of not confining themselves to the vertical, subaltern relationship with their superiors, but seeking to develop horizontal relations with one another, servants were to be considered culpable of unacceptable subversion:”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“The intervention of John Millar, prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment, was especially stinging: It affords a curious spectacle to observe, that the same people who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the inalienable rights of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune perhaps never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the bottom directed by any philosophical principles.48 Millar was a disciple of Adam Smith. The master seems to have seen things in the same way. When he declared that to a ‘free government’ controlled by slaveowners, he preferred a ‘despotic government’ capable of erasing the infamy of slavery, he made explicit reference to America. Translated into directly political terms, the great economist’s words signify: the despotism the Crown is criticized for is preferable to the liberty demanded by the slave-owners, from which only a small class of planters and absolute masters benefits.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History

“On the other hand, in forging his weapons for struggle, Hitler did not limit himself to observing the socialist and Communist parties. As he denounced the incapacity of traditional bourgeois parties to influence the people, who were thus helplessly exposed to subversive influence and uprisings, Hitler resolved to learn not only from social democracy, but also from the Catholic Church which, in spite of everything, he admired for its ability to sweep up the masses and for recruiting cadres even from the poorest social classes”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“The rout in Stalingrad of Hitler’s project to build the “German Indies" in Eastern Europe was the beginning of the decline of the British Indies too and of the world colonial system in general.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?

“What is at the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated with the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, with the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacked: not by chance, in fact, the revolution called upon the ‘slaves in the colonies’ to break their fetters. The common theory of totalitarianism concentrates exclusively upon the similar methods attributed to the two antagonists and, besides, claims that they derive univocally from a supposed ideological affinity, without making any reference to the actual situation or to the geopolitical context.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“During the passage from the first two parts of the book, [The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt], which still possess the vehemence of the struggle against Nazism, to the third, which is instead tied to the outbreak of the Cold War, the category of imperialism (a category subsuming first of all Great Britain and the Third Reich as a sort of highest stage of imperialism) is replaced by the category of totalitarianism (which subsumes Stalin’s USSR and the Third Reich). The species of the genus of imperialism do not coincide with the species of the genus of totalitarianism. Even the species that apparently remains unchanged, that is Germany, is described in the first case as originating with Wilhelm II at the earliest, and in the second case it appears as late as 1933. At least with regard to formal coherence, the initial plan appears to be more rigorous. After clarifying the genus of ‘imperialism’, in tracing the specific differences of this phenomenon, the initial plan moved on to analyse the species of ‘racial imperialism’. But how could the categories of totalitarianism and imperialism now blend together into a coherent whole? And what relationship connected them both to the category of antisemitism? Arendt’s answers to these questions seem to seek an artificial harmonisation between two levels that continue to be scarcely compatible.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“The Western Marxists, by contrast, were intellectuals who opposed these efforts to construct socialism, rejecting the quest for power in favor of diverse forms of critical theory, while sometimes presenting their distance from power as an epistemological advantage for discovering so-called authentic Marxism.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn

“In the best of hypotheses, to insist on explaining totalitarianism through organicism or through the sacrifice of morals for the sake of the philosophy of history is equal to explaining the soporiferous effect of opium by referring to its vis dormitiva.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“To know how to say no to modern excitement was also the condition for the autonomous construction of one’s own personality. He that ‘does not want to be part of the masses’ and did not want to be ‘factory goods’ was to pay great heed. Certainly, to ‘“give style” to one’s character [is] a great and
rare art’, which required an effort of self-discipline from which ‘the weak characters
with no power over themselves’ flinched back. And here Nietzsche appealed to the youth: ‘Always continue to become what you are – educator and moulder of yourself’.
To achieve this result, it was necessary never to lose sight of the ‘true liberation of life’, and to swim against the stream rather than chase blindly and recklessly after the ruling ideologies and myths of an age ruled not ‘by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings’. No doubt this appeal was part of a reactionary critique of modernity, but that in no way detracted from the charm of this lesson in living and this appeal for autonomy of judgement.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico