EQUALITY - NOW OR NEVER: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ENVER HOXHA

Abstract

Students of politics know very well that Plato's perfect city in Republic is a political model of philosophico-pedagogical tyranny. For Ranciere, the political thought ofthe thinker of autocratic hierarchy, namely Plato, has much to do with what Ranciere calls the founding gesture of philosophy. In other words, since Plato, asilent majority has always been excluded from the privilege of thought and art and this has helped the construction of the implicit alliance between philosophy and there pressive order of social hierarchy. According to Ranciere, Marx, Sartre,Althusser and Bourdieu, despite their intellectual standing in the Left, are thinkers of inequality and pedagogical privilege. Each assumes, as Plato does, that the pedagogue must think for and educate those who are unable to think for themselves;only then will society change for the better. Yet, the fundamental gesture of philosophy (and even science) not only provides privileges to intellectuals but also continuously postpones the actual realization of achieving equality. If we take equality as an end rather than a presupposition or an axiomatic point of departureit would only prolong the hierarchy between "those who know" and "those who does not know". In this paper, I plan to examine Enver Hoxha's political thought from a Rancierean perspective. I mainly focus on a major concept which unifies Ranciereian thought, that being "equality".