The Tradition of Southern Thinking

Abstract

The study discusses certain common features of an ideologically diverse but philosphically well describable strain of political thinking, what we call after Albert Camus the „southern thinking”. Under this name we refer to a rather anti-authoritarian, anti-statist and anti-hierarchical way of left-wing political philosophy, which became dominant politically quite rarely but it had a huge impact on our understanding of contamporary culture and without it the history of the past eighty years is not understandable.

The writing focusses on three main tendencies of this sort: Albert Camus’ philosophical humanism and anti-totalitarianism, the radical leftist Marxism of the Situationist International and Murray Bookchin’s eco-anarchism. I tried to provide a critical analysis of these directions, and also laid stress on some common misinterpretations of them.