The Reasoning of Unreason - by John Roberts (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics.

Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally.

The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.

Review Quotes

John Roberts' The Reasoning of Unreason impressively shows how a contemporary critique of oppression must proceed: It must understand oppression in its own rationality. Roberts therefore analyzes in detail and with a broad historical perspective how the regimes of oppression think - how they reason against reason. Oppression thus becomes recognizable as the oppression of thinking itself: of its emancipatory power of radical universality. A remarkable example of Marx's "true philosophical criticism."

Where standard left critiques of reactionary politics view these as symptoms of irrational attachments, John Roberts shows how reactionaries lay claim to a universal reason to legitimize differences of race, culture, class, and caste. Robert's book is not only a brilliant analysis, but also a timely reminder that today's most urgent political contrast is not between universalism and particularism but between a reactionary reason dedicated to shoring up limits and an emancipatory reason working to undo them.

About the Author

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His books include The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine.