REPUBLICANISM AND CIVIC VIRTUE IN TREATYITE POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1921–3

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
pp. 1257-1280
Author(s):  
SEÁN DONNELLY
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Free State ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Sinn Fein ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Irish People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Revolutionary Period

AbstractRepublicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.

From Lore to Law

Rough Beasts ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Jack Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Spiritual Warfare ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The Common

This chapter considers the tension between magic and law: when legal structures are assumed (correctly or incorrectly) to safeguard the rights of individual citizens and punish transgressors against the common good, magic-users become ‘monsters’ for their ability to do harm at a distance, anonymously and without accountability. Beginning with an outline of the transitional moment in Irish history where scientific legal codes started to supplant the de facto belief in folk magic, this chapter looks at ‘spiritual warfare’ narratives and conspiracy tales alike to discuss how malevolent witches, wizards and sorcerers disrupt established norms of legitimacy and authority. The works considered here range from 19th-century depictions of witches as heroic figures standing up to bullying clerics, to 20th-century texts where the magically-inclined are ignorant throwbacks at best and sinister cultists at worst.

Radical democracy

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Paul Spicker
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Civic Republicanism ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
The Common

The model of civic republicanism is associated with a range of principles: a concept of the common good, citizenship, a presumption of civic virtue and freedom. The idea of radical democracy is strongly associated with a sense of active citizenship, engagement in a political community and collective action. At times, however, it tips into populism, which claims to pit a virtuous people against a corrupt elite, but risks bringing radical democracy into disrepute.

Changing Ethical Frameworks: From Individual Rights to the Common Good?

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARGIT SUTROP
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Conceptual Base ◽  
Ethical Frameworks ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Relationship

Whereas in the 1970s early bioethicists believed that bioethics is an arena for the application of philosophical theories of utilitarianism, deontology, and natural law thinking, contemporary policy-oriented bioethicists seem rather to be keen on framing ethical issues through political ideologies. Bioethicists today are often labeled “liberal” or “communitarian,” referring to their different understandings of the relationship between the individual and society. Liberal individualism, with its conceptual base of autonomy, dignity, and privacy, enjoyed a long period of dominance in bioethics, but it has increasingly come under attack from ideologies promoting a more salient role for concepts of solidarity, community, and public interest.

Corruption and Partisanship: Rousseau, Ferguson and Two Competing Models of Republican Revival

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Sparling
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
The Common

AbstractPartisanship inspires a degree of ambivalence. There is a widespread tendency—which has a long history in republican political thought—to decry division and partisanship as corrupting, undermining individual judgment, and promoting clientelism, dependencies and loyalties antithetical to the common good. Yet there is an equally widespread intuition that excessive unity is corrupting, undermining the vigour of civic life. Contemporary political theory remains divided on the normative implications of division and unity—witness the battles between agonistic and consensus-oriented schools of democratic theory. In this article I examine the thought of two eighteenth-century writers who, while often treated as contributing to a common intellectual project of reinvigorating classical civic virtue, took opposite positions on the desirability of division. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson offered competing accounts of what corrupts civic virtue, one decrying party divisions and the other lauding them. The article examines the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Rousseau and Ferguson's competing claims and suggests, ultimately, that both positions suffer from neglecting to attend to an important distinction between salutary and harmful divisions.

Virtue, Ambition, and the Balanced Constitution

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Carlo Sigonio ◽  
The Common ◽  
New Research

The turmoil in Europe in the early sixteenth century revealed some of the weaknesses of princely power and imperial authority; it was clear that the much-needed reform and rebalancing could not be enacted solely from above. This chapter focuses on works which called for the promotion of civic virtue and the strengthening of institutions, especially in a time of rapid social, economic, and political upheaval. In Venice, Gasparo Contarini set out an idealized model of mixed government while in the Holy Roman Empire magistrates and officials were encouraged to uphold the common good—often a common good shaped by Protestant thinking. However, the case of Miguel Servetus in Geneva sparked further discussion of the role of the magistrate in upholding religious truth and generated new arguments for toleration. Meanwhile, many writers looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration and advice, and new research by men like Carlo Sigonio revealed that Rome’s political system had itself been affected by social and economic change. In England Sir Thomas Smith drew on some of this research to advocate a broadly based citizenry in which wealth, lineage, and merit were all seen as important qualifications for office-holding.

The Citizenship Status of Criminal Offenders

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-125
Author(s):  
Milena Tripkovic
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Citizenship Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
Sense Of Justice ◽  
Number Of Individuals

This chapter aims to translate the three models into tangible citizenship conditions, allowing us to establish whether criminal offenders ought to retain their citizenship rights post-conviction. It is argued that—under the first model—most criminals remain citizens since episodic violations do not signal a lack of capacity for a “sense of justice.” Similarly, most criminal offenders are not without “civic virtue”—they remain self-governing subjects whose civic qualities can be enhanced. Finally, while criminals certainly act against the “common good,” most remain valuable members of the community who bring forward a specific vision of the good life, which prevents the community from excluding them. All three models, however, equally point toward the existence of a small number of individuals who are without crucial citizenship requirements, and the chapter concludes that—regardless of differences between the three models—all of them similarly permit exclusions of persons with strong, incorrigible anti-social inclinations.

PUBLIC SERVICE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
A.M. VAFIN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Normative Documents ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Common

The article analyzes the normative documents of the European Union concerning the phenomenon of public service. The analysis is built not as a strict legal interpretation, but as a qualitative political analysis. The legal side of this work is only a descriptive form, while the political content concerns the question of values, first of all, the value of serving the common good, the dogma that an official should and must serve society. The author concerns that even in non-ideological states there are ideologies (non-political ideologies) that, in the case of officialdom, bureaucracy, manifest themselves as an ideology of service, service to society and the common good. The codes of European officials are also analyzed in the article, the norms regulating corruption issues, the political participation of officials, their education and cultural level.

Corruption

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Philp
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Ethical Conduct ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Common ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Normal Standard

Corruption denotes decay or perversion. The term implies that there is a natural or normal standard of functioning or conduct from which the corrupt state of affairs or action deviates. When we talk of a person becoming corrupt, we mean not just that they have broken a rule, but that the basic norms of ethical conduct no longer have any force for them. Corruption strikes at the root of a thing. Political corruption involves the decay or perversion of political rule. Broadly, this occurs when a group or individual subverts a society’s publicly endorsed practices for conciliating conflicts and pursuing the common good so as to gain illegitimate advantage for their interests in the political process. The precise specification of the nature and dynamics of corruption is inherently controversial. Classical accounts associate it with a collapse of civic virtue and the eventual destruction of the state. Modern theories focus more narrowly on the misuse of public office for private gain.

3. The theorist of liberty

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Quentin Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Free State ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Civic Religion ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

‘The theorist of liberty’ examines Machiavelli’s Discourses, which discuss the constitution of a free state, maintenance of military power, and good leadership. Examining Livy to find the roots of Rome’s success, Machiavelli argues that a city state must be self-governing and able to pursue the common good. The civic body must also possess virtù. Cities only grow quickly and manage to acquire greatness if the people are in control, so that the city and its citizens are living in liberty. But if liberty is the key to greatness, how can it be acquired and kept safe? Machiavelli admits that an element of luck is always involved, but he chiefly focuses on the role of civic religion and mixed forms of government.

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