{"id":150,"date":"2013-10-22T13:52:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T13:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/canterburypolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:58:24","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T13:58:24","slug":"norman-geras-1943-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/politics\/2013\/10\/22\/norman-geras-1943-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Norman Geras (1943-2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norman Geras passed away on 18 October 2013, after a long struggle with prostate cancer \u2013 he was 70 years old.<\/a> Norman was my PhD supervisor at the University of Manchester from 1996-2000. I last saw him in Manchester in September 2012, when he gave a paper on G.A. Cohen\u2019s little book Why Not Socialism?<\/i><\/p>\n

Norman was an important Marxist thinker. Essays such as \u2018The Controversy Concerning Marx and Justice\u2019<\/a> and \u2018Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx\u2019s Capital<\/i>\u2019 <\/a>shaped the academic discussion on these themes. His polemic (in the best sense of the term) against the post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, generated one of the most obscurantist responses by the authors it is possible to image.<\/a> This did not stop Norman returning for round two! And his book on Richard Rorty\u2019s \u2018post-modern bourgeois liberalism\u2019 exposed the hollowness at the heart of Rorty\u2019s denial of human nature.<\/p>\n

Such discussions do, however, to the world outside of academe, appear as rather obscure.\u00a0 It is perhaps (or perhaps not!) ironic that it was not until he left academe that Norman\u2019s work came to be disseminated more widely to a \u2018popular\u2019 audience. For Norman\u2019s retirement as an academic brought his intellectual rebirth in cyberspace as a \u2018blogger\u2019, the author of Normblog<\/a>. (As academics we are all expected to have a social media profile \u2013 to tweet, and to give out our wisdom. Last time I spoke with Norman, I mentioned this, and he recoiled with horror! Blogging was something which he felt internally compelled to do \u2013 it should not be forced via external compulsion.)<\/p>\n

From the mass of comments following his death, it is clear that blogging brought Norman many new friends. However it also brought him new critics, and indeed enemies. His support for American intervention in Iraq for many on the left constituted a break \u2013 a rightwards lurch in Norman\u2019s ideology. I remember a conference in London at which Norman was a keynote speaker. The other keynote was Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers\u2019 Party. In the middle of his paper giving an egalitarian critique of Rawls, Callinicos went completely off at a tangent, to accuse Norman of being a war monger, and espouser of the Bush Doctrine.<\/p>\n

At first, I did not agree with Norman\u2019s position on Iraq. I have shifted further towards the interventionist argument since, in part as a result of the persuasiveness of Norman\u2019s moral arguments.<\/p>\n

Many of his critics got Norman wrong. Norman was no warmonger. And he was no friend of the barbarous agents of global capitalism.<\/p>\n

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek <\/a>recently called for a new expression of the \u2018communist idea\u2019, one which rejects the hegemonic liberal discourse of justice, rights and fairness. In its place, \u017di\u017eek calls for an \u2018egalitarian terror\u2019. The left needs a new \u2018Master\u2019. Norman rejected this sort of \u2018left-fascist\u2019 nonsense.\u00a0 Many of the failings of the left in the twentieth century resulted from its neglect for basic Kantian principles of human dignity and respect for others. A \u2018communism\u2019 which failed to acknowledge the dignity of the individual was a communism not worth having \u2013 a form of totalitarianism as awful as all the others. Norman\u2019s liberal interventionism was grounded in this basic commitment.<\/p>\n

It was with this commitment that Norman criticised those on the so-called left who seemed more concerned to demonstrate their anti-Americanism (dressed as form of anti-imperialism) than they were to speak out against those neo-fascist dictatorships across the globe who regularly tortured and murdered men, women and children.<\/p>\n

The egalitarian and democratic left may have lost one of its greatest intellectuals, but we are all the worse off for Norman\u2019s passing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One final point \u2013 \u017di\u017eek may well be the \u2018Elvis of philosophy\u2019, but Norman would \u2013 as his colleagues in Manchester knew very well \u2013 have wiped the floor with him in a karaoke contest!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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