Peter Gratton

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have, I would admit, a most unlikely case study for use in a business ethics classroom. The story of Eichmann is already some sixty years old, and his activities in his career as a Nazi were far beyond the pale of even the most egregious cases found in the typical business ethics case books. No doubt, there is some truth to the fact that introducing Eichmann’s story into an applied ethics class would inevitably depict an unseemly analogy between the practices of latter day corporations and the bureaucracy of the Nazi era. My argument here, though, is that the story of Adolf Eichmann, as depicted in Hannah Arendt’s well-known Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers a philosophically cogent account of judgment and ethical decision-making that future business managers and employees would do well to heed. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally a series of press accounts for New Yorker magazine, deserves consideration alongside the Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and other classic ethics texts in a business ethics syllabus. This is not to say that Arendt’s work is uncontroversial; there are serious questions to be raised about both her depiction of Eichmann and her conclusions about “the banality of evil.” Nevertheless, her account of ethics, which, with its account of ethical duties and its case study of Eichmann’s character, shows both its Aristotelian and Kantian influences, is a warning to readers who would conflate morality with state laws and their duties with the needs of superiors. In short, I argue that, despite her well-known critique of modern large scale economies and her general avoidance of discussions of post-industrial corporations, Arendt may be a business ethicist of the first order.

Much has been written about biopolitical sovereignty in the wake of Agamben's work, which relies, at least in the first volume of Homo Sacer, on Carl Schmitt's transcendental account of sovereignty. This article argues, however, that Foucault and Arendt rightly identify what Derrida once called the “changing shape and place of sovereignty” in modernity, which for them is horizontal and disseminated within a presupposed nation. For this reason, we will look to the source of modern philosophical immanentism, Spinoza, to show that he is not extrinsic to this modern biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign exception and its nationalized version work hand-in-glove in the era of which he was a part – and thus is part of all thinking that would take this to form a new communitas. In this way, we argue that it is Spinoza's political theology, not Schmitt's, that is the better pass-key to what Foucault and Arendt identify as biopolitical. By doing so, we put in tension two trends in recent Continental philosophy: philosophical vitalism and the critique of biopolitics at the heart at any contemporary thinking of community.

At the time of his death in 1984, Foucault’s late career forays into Stoicism and other sets of ancient texts were often little understood, except as part of a larger project on the history of sexuality. Indeed, outside of France and outside of an incipient queer theory, Foucault was often taken up in terms of debates over post-structuralism and postmodernism—themes all but absent from his writings. More than thirty years later, after the publication of all of his lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1970-1984 as well as his collected writings, we have gained a better understanding of the deep continuities in his set of concerns from Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique to the third volume of his history of sexuality series, Le Souci de soi. Yet many Foucault scholars continue to see momentous shifts in his writings, e.g., from knowledge to power to ethics, and the almost bewildering range of texts he covered in the years after finishing the first volume of his history of sexuality series, La Volonté de savoir, lead to very different interpretations concerning what Foucault was attempting to do and how much his rendering of ancient texts differed from his own claims. Stuart Elden’s Foucault’s Last Decade steps into this breach, using archival work to fill in many of the details of this period, from when and on what Foucault was lecturing to listing those with him in that amusing late photo of a beaming Foucault in an ill-fitting cowboy hat. The publication of Elden’s book marks a good time to assess this often misunderstood period in Foucault’s work, and we have gathered Stuart Elden and two more of Foucault’s best interpreters, Eduardo Mendieta and Dianna Taylor, to do so.

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher