QUESTIONS BY SPYROS KOUTROULIS (Νέα Κοινωνιολογία 25 (spring 1998), pp.17-36)
"In your work you deal with a variety of topics that are determinative of western civilisation: marxism, the European and Greek enlightenment, descriptive and normative theory, the decline of bourgeois civilisation and now the theory of war. Would you be able to present to the readership of "New Sociology" the major milestones of your thought, in conjunction with the important intellectual currents which influenced their formation?
The attempt by one to write his intellectual autobiography in an exhaustive and absolutely up-to-date manner seems to me from the beginning to be bound to fail; that applies, in any case, not only to autobiographies, but also to biographies. The autobiographer describes his intellectual progress from the overriding and often inflexible perspective of an already fixed perception of the world and of human affairs. Moreover, he has a psychologically understandable, invariably smug tendency to emphasise logical coherence and the internal necessity of this progress of his, underestimating, setting aside or most often not even becoming aware of the coincidences that determined it, the crises and the uncertainties that marked it; even less so is he in a position to trace back the fundamental forces of his existence, which pushed his thought in this rather than in another direction. Under these circumstances, an attempt at an intellectual autobiography, in so far as it wishes - just as it must - to assist the comprehension of a life's work and not to fill out and beautify the face of a creator towards the outside, ought to avoid psychologisms and personal recollections, so as to concentrate on the outlining of theoretical problems, on the re-examination of the stages and the more general logical or factual presuppositions of their investigation. " (ACS, pp.87-88)
The attempt by one to write his intellectual autobiography in an exhaustive and absolutely up-to-date manner seems to me from the beginning to be bound to fail; that applies, in any case, not only to autobiographies, but also to biographies. The autobiographer describes his intellectual progress from the overriding and often inflexible perspective of an already fixed perception of the world and of human affairs. Moreover, he has a psychologically understandable, invariably smug tendency to emphasise logical coherence and the internal necessity of this progress of his, underestimating, setting aside or most often not even becoming aware of the coincidences that determined it, the crises and the uncertainties that marked it; even less so is he in a position to trace back the fundamental forces of his existence, which pushed his thought in this rather than in another direction. Under these circumstances, an attempt at an intellectual autobiography, in so far as it wishes - just as it must - to assist the comprehension of a life's work and not to fill out and beautify the face of a creator towards the outside, ought to avoid psychologisms and personal recollections, so as to concentrate on the outlining of theoretical problems, on the re-examination of the stages and the more general logical or factual presuppositions of their investigation. " (ACS, pp.87-88)
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