Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician.
Life and career Born in Sannicandro di Bari, Italy, Losurdo obtained his doctorate in 1963 from the University of Urbino under the guidance of with a thesis on Johann Karl Rodbertus. During the 1960s, he belonged to a small group of Italian communists that sided with the People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split. Losurdo was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. From 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences), as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association."Cordoglio per la scomparsa di Domenico Losurdo" (in Italian). Il Metauro. 1 July 2018. Retrieved 20 May 2019. Losurdo died on 28 June 2018 at the age of 76, due to brain cancer.
From communist militancy, the condemnation of American imperialism,Losurdo, Domenico (2007). Il linguaggio dell'Impero. Lessico dell'ideologia americana (in Italian). Roma-Bari: Laterza. . and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also engaged concretely in national and international politics."Domenico Losurdo" (in Italian). Blogger. Retrieved 18 May 2019. Historian David Broder described Losurdo as "already among the most renowned Italian Marxists at the international level, as a richly partisan historian of philosophy ... ." Philosopher Daniel Tutt described Losurdo as "a renowned Marxist historian and philosopher" who "pioneered a distinctive method of historiography and intellectual history." Tutt wrote: "Losurdo made his scholarly mark in philosophical works as well as historical studies of important thinkers from John Locke and Hannah Arendt, to biographical and historical studies of Joseph Stalin. His scholarship on Hegel and modernity is considered an exemplary contribution to Hegel scholarship and he has published widely on topics such as conceptions of class struggle throughout history and the evolution of nonviolence in modern political life."
A HegelianAzzarà, Stefano G. (January 2019). "Domenico Losurdo 1941–2018, In Memoriam". International Critical Thought. 9 (2): 314–325. . and Marxist philosopherLiguori, Guido (1 July 2018). "Domenico Losurdo, A Marxist Philosopher Against the Current". Translated by Broder, David. Il manifesto. Retrieved 1 December 2020 – via Verso Books. as well as historian,Tutt, Daniel (2018). "Nietzsche in His Time: The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism". Historical Materialism. Retrieved 1 December 2020. Losurdo was described as a noncomformist, a heterodox Marxist, and a communist militant. Losurdo was influenced by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in contrast to the two competing Hegelian trends of Marxism, which were influenced by Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic respectively. Ross Wolfie notes that, Losurdo read the Philosophy of Right:
His work ranged from contributions to the study of Kantian philosophy (the so-called self-censorship of Immanuel Kant and his political Nicodemism)Losurdo, Domenico (1983). Autocensura e compromesso nel pensiero politico di Kant (in Italian). Naples: Bibliopolis. and the reevaluation of classical German idealism, especially by G. W. F. Hegel,Losurdo, Domenico (1992). Hegel e la libertà dei moderni (in Italian). Rome: Editori Riuniti. . in an attempt to re-propose the legacy in the wake of György Lukács in particular,Losurdo, Domenico; Salvucci, Pasquale; Sichirollo, Livio (1992). Gyorgy Lukacs nel centenario della nascita, 1885-1985 (in Italian). Urbino: Quattro venti. as well as the reaffirmation of the interpretation of German and non-German Marxism (Antonio Gramsci and the brothers Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa),Losurdo, Domenico (1997). Dai fratelli Spaventa a Gramsci. Per una storia politico-sociale della fortuna di Hegel in Italia (in Italian). Naples: La città del sole. . with incursions into the sphere of Nietzschean thought (the reading of a radical aristocratic Friedrich Nietzsche)Losurdo, Domenico (2002). Nietzsche. Il ribelle aristocratico (in Italian). and Heideggerian thought,Losurdo, Domnico (1991). La comunità, la morte, l'Occidente. Heidegger e l'ideologia della guerra (in Italian). in particular the question of Martin Heidegger's adhesion to Nazism.Losurdo, Domenico (19 March 2014). "Heidegger's black notebooks aren't that surprising". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 May 2019.
Losurdo's philosophical-political reflection, attentive to the contextualization of philosophical thought in his own historical time, moved in particular from the themes of radical criticism of liberalism, capitalism, and colonialism as well as the traditional conception of totalitarianism in the perspective of a defence of Marxist dialectics and historical materialism, devoting himself to the study of anti-revisionism in the Marxist–Leninist sphere. Losurdo included his works in the history of ideas and concerned the investigation of questions of contemporary history and politics, with constant critical attention to historical revisionism and the controversy against the interpretations of Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper, and Ernst Nolte. In particular, Losurdo has criticized a reactionary tendency among contemporary revisionist historians such as Nolte (who traced the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution) and Furet (who linked the Stalinist purges to a "disease" originating from the French Revolution). According to Losurdo, the intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition as their true motivations have little to do with the search for a greater understanding of the past but rather it lies in both the climate and ideological needs of the political classes and is most evident in the work of the English-speaking imperial revivalists, such as Niall Ferguson and Paul Johnson. His 2015 book War and Revolution, published by Verso Books, provided a new perspective on the English, American, French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions.Losurdo, Domenico (2015). War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century. Verso Books. .
Losurdo turned his attention to the political history of modern German philosophy from Kant to Karl Marx and the debate that developed in Germany in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century as well as a reinterpretation of the tradition of liberalism, in particular starting from the criticism and accusations of hypocrisy addressed to John Locke for his financial participation in the Atlantic slave trade.Losurdo, Domenico (2003). Dalla teoria della dittatura del proletariato al gulag? (in Italian). In Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto del partito comunista. Translation and introduction by Losurdo. Bari: Editori Laterza. p. XL. Taking up what Arendt stated in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Losurdo argued that the 20th century's true original sin was the New Imperialism in the form of colonial empire of the late 19th century, where totalitarianism and internment manifested for the first time. Diego Pautasso wrote that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo "devoted himself to four areas of research: 1) critique of liberalism and the fight against the belief that liberals were at the forefront of democratic struggles; 2) balance of socialist experiences (USSR, China); 3) criticism of colonialism, imperialism and 'the various forms of subjugation of peoples to Washington and its allies'; 4) the critique of the contemporary left, in particular of 'Western Marxism', which would have 'neglected the great problems of its time', abandoned the 'class struggle and the struggle against imperialism' and embraced 'the narratives of globalization.'"
Upon Losurdo's death in 2018, Gianni Fresu wrote that "from the classics of philosophy to the debate around the figure of Stalin; from the analysis of the role of China to historical revisionism; from liberal thinking to the issues of Bonapartism and modern democracy; from the history of Western thought to the problems of colonialism and imperialism ... Losurdo's studies of historical materialism, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche, are a fundamental milestone in the history of ideas and events of human societies, such is their scientific seriousness and intellectual autonomy, their problematic richness and interpretative complexity."Fresu, Gianni (27 September 2018). "Morre, em 28/06/18, o filósofo marxista Domenico Losurdo" (in Portuguese). Federal University of Uberlândia. Retrieved 26 December 2020 – vua Instituto de Filosofia UFU.
Ideas and research According to Losurdo, despecification is the exclusion of an individual or group from the civilian community. There are two types of despecification: Political and moral despecification in which the exclusion is due to political or moral factors. Naturalistic despecification in which the exclusion is due to biological factors.
For Losurdo, naturalistic despecification is qualitatively worse than the political-moral. While the latter offers at least one escape through the change of ideology, this is not possible in the case of naturalistic despecification since it is irreversible because it refers to biological factors that are in themselves unchangeable.Brignoli, Maurizio (1 May 2005). "Losurdo, Domenico, Il linguaggio dell'impero. Lessico dell'ideologia" (in Italian). Unlike many other thinkers, Losurdo thought that the Holocaust of the Jewish people is not incomparable, though he was willing to admit its tragic specificity. Losurdo stated that the comparisons he offers about this did not seek to be a relativisation or a belittlement of the Holocaust, but that to consider the Jewish Holocaust as incomparable meant to lose historical perspective and to overlook the Black Holocaust (i.e. the genocide of black people) or the American Holocaust (i.e. the genocide of Native Americans in the United States through the continued deportation to the west with the Indian removal and diffusion of smallpox), as well as other mass exterminations such as the Armenian genocide.
Losurdo was a strong critic of the equation of Nazism and communism, made by scholars like François Furet and Ernst Nolte but also by Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. Similarly, Losurdo criticized the concept of a Red Holocaust. He argued that in the Nazi concentration camps there was an explicit homicidal intention because the Jew who entered one was destined not to get out of it (as there is a naturalistic despecification) while in the Gulag there was not (as it is political-moral despecification). In the first case, the Nazis imprisoned those whom they regarded as and called Untermensch (subhuman), while in the second case (in which, he claimed, only a part of the dissidents ended up) dissidents were locked up to be re-educated and not to be killed. Despite being a practice to be condemned, Losurdo stated that "the prisoner in the Gulag is a potential 'comrade' [the guard was required to call him this] ... and after 1937 [the beginning of the two-year long Great Purge following the murder of Sergey Kirov] he is ... a potential 'citizen.'"Klinestiver, Matthew. "Excerpts from Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Criticism of a Black Legend".