Miguel Abensour

Miguel Abensour (, 13 February 1939 – 22 April 2017) was a French philosopher specializing in political philosophy.

Beginning his academic career as a professor of political science at Dijon, then at the University of Reims, before teaching political philosophy at the Paris Diderot University (Jussieu), where he became emeritus professor. Founder and director of the editorial collection "Critique de la politique" at Payot and president of the Collège international de philosophie from 1985 to 1987, he is generally viewed as a left-libertarian thinker and as a theoretician of radical democracy.

With thinkers such as Claude Lefort, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Marcel Gauchet, Abensour greatly contributed to the renewal of French political philosophy in the post-war period. Aware of the many controversies surrounding the legacy, history, and historiography of the French Revolution in France, he examined the contradictions of the French revolutionaries and commented their texts (especially Saint-Just). In the wake of the rediscovery of Karl Marx, notably his early writings, Abensour aimed to distinguish Marx's own thought from Marxism. After the advent of the Nazi regime and the Shoah, the Italian fascism and against Soviet totalitarianism, Abensour questioned the nature of those totalitarian experiences in which he sees the blossoming of domination and the vanishing of politics. Moreover, while several political leaders in France and worldwide have advocated for liberal democracy, Abensour emphasized the distinction between representative government and democracy.

In the same spirit of critique, Abensour has offered many studies on Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. He examined the history of utopia and identified in it a "new utopian spirit." Finally, Abensour has developed a conception of democracy that he refers to as "insurgent democracy." This complex idea, akin to other theories of radical democracy, insists on the dissolution of the State-form and political domination as the authentic democratic moment per excellence.

Whether in his work as an editor, as a thinker, or as a public intellectual, Miguel Abensour always reflected on the emancipation of the oppressed. Acting as the guiding thread of his thought, the question posed by Étienne de La Boétie never left him: "why does the majority of the oppressed not revolt?" Eventually, he reframed this fundamental question with the terms set by Baruch Spinoza: "why do men fight for their servitude as if it were for their own salvation?" Provided by Wikipedia