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The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy Of Western Ethical Experience
Author(s): Mika Ojakangas (Author)
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publication Date: 29 Jan. 2015
- Language: English
- Print length: 264 pages
- ISBN-10: 1474218180
- ISBN-13: 9781474218184
Book Description
The work opens with a discussion of the ambiguous role of conscience in politics, contesting the claim that it is the best defense against totalitarianism. It then look back at canonical authors, from the Church Fathers and Luther to Rousseau and Derrida, to show how the experience of conscience constitutes the foundation of Western ethics and politics.
This unique work not only synthesizes philosophical and political insights, but also pays attention to political theology to provide a compelling and innovative argument that the experience of conscience has always been at the core of the political Western tradition. An engaging and accessible text, it will appeal to political theorists and philosophers as well as theologians and those interested in the critique of the Western civilization.
Editorial Reviews
Review
If you have ever been troubled, ever so slightly, by the resort to conscience at crucial moments of politics and life; if you have ever harboured a suspicion that the conscience is not quite revealing its true colours, then
Voice of Conscience is the book for you. Tracing a radical continuity in theories and practices of the conscience, from Aristotle to Obama, this work outdoes Foucault for insight and Agamben for meticulous care with sources, to propose an arresting and extraordinary rereading of the function of conscience at the core of Western ethics and politics. The climax of the book, in which the basis of Western sovereignty is precisely the abandoned outcast, cut free from all ties that bind, reveals both the promise and subtle snares of the conscience itself. –Roland Boer, Faculty Research Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia. Author of Criticism of Heaven (2007), of Criticism of Earth (2012), and of Lenin, Religion, and Theology (2013)Why has the metaphor of the voice of conscience been such a determining and persistent guide for the entire Western ethical thought? Mika Ojakangas considers it as ‘the fundamental dogma of the Western tradition in ethics’, its ‘anti-dogmatic dogmatics’, constituting the inner autonomy, conviction and faith beyond all external laws. This comprehensive and meticulously researched work provides an astounding and far-reaching genealogy of this enigma, reaching back to pre-Socratic times, encompassing the Socratic foundational moment, Christianity from church fathers through scholastics to Luther, scrutinizing the modern foundational moment in natural law, Rousseau and Kant, and reaching forth to Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Levinas and Agamben. The voice of conscience, introducing a ‘measureless measure’ beyond social and political laws, ultimately aims at the void at the heart of being, yet far from being the firm support it purports to be, there is an agenda of political theology to be unraveled at its core. The most comprehensive account so far, a quintessential reading. –Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana, the author of A Voice and Nothing More
