Jacob Burckhardt: The Cultural Historian as Political Thinker

1990 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Sigurdson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Thinker

This article argues, contrary to the analyses of many scholars, that the political thought of the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is neither frivolous nor irrelevant. More specifically, this essay combines biographical information about Burckhardt with an analysis of his major writings in order to challenge the notion that Burckhardt was simply a cultural historian and not a serious political thinker. The central teaching of Burckhardt's life is that the intellectual in mass society can best serve the community, not by direct political participation, but by working for the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral cultivation of the individual. The central teachings of his political writings are that “great men” often rule but unjustly, that successful leaders approach politics as a “work of art” and master the devices necessary to shape their subjects, that culture should not be subordinated to the state, and finally that individualism, class conflict, mass democracy, and the erosion of culture are both unfortunate and inevitable aspects of modernity.

Egerton Ryerson's Canadian Liberalism

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 771-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin D. Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Political ◽  
Upper Canada ◽  
Liberal Society ◽  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Public Spirit

AbstractThis article seeks to provide an overview of the political thought of Egerton Ryerson (1803–1882), the influential political controversialist and educational reformer of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. It attempts to unravel Ryerson's thought in such a way as to go beyond earlier interpretations which have insisted that, despite the presence of certain countervailing reformist tendencies in his politics, Ryerson was at bottom a thorough conservative. In contrast to this view it is argued here that Ryerson was a thoroughly modernist thinker who accepted the basic teachings of the liberal tradition. It is also suggested that Ryerson was aware of certain key problems which a society premised on these teachings must inevitably face, problems such as narrow selfishness, private individualism and vulgar materialism. The article concludes that it was Ryerson's intention to correct these strong tendencies in liberal society by emphasizing the centrality of public spirit, moral cultivation and religious belief to a free polity's well-being.

Comment: Overcoming His-story? Ms. Hughes's Treatment of Mr. Mill

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-554
Author(s):  
George Feaver
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Right ◽  
Contemporary Liberalism

There is something intrepidly parochial in Patricia Hughes's account of Mill's views. Her very opening statement, with its new vision of society, its “emerging social forces,” its principals “trapped by traditional influences,” sets the tone for the enterprise which follows—an historical melodrama with J. S. Mill, the patron saint of contemporary liberalism, reborn in Canada without his aspergillum, an affable enough character, a sort of Bruno Gerussi of the political thought set, his do-gooder's heart generally in the right place but his head usually muddled: an admirably earnest figure, even, who some how always misses the point but, up to now, has gotten away with it. Our aspiring script-writer intends to set things right, to show how we can redo the storyline (which may require substituting another nineteenth century great in the leading role), so as to combine passion and theory in a really radical vision of a fully liberated society.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

3. Critical theory and modernism

2017 ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Stephen Eric Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Individual

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of an international avant-garde that focused upon alienation, standardization, and the liberation of the individual from constrictive social norms. Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and representatives from many other styles provided a blizzard of philosophical–aesthetic manifestos that blended political with cultural resistance to mass society. The Frankfurt School’s inner circle was sympathetic from the start; modernism provided a response to the ontology of false conditions and, indeed, an avant-garde opposition to mass culture provided inspiration and cohesion. ‘Critical theory and modernism’ explains how the unflinching support of modernism and experimental art by the Frankfurt School confirmed both its cultural radicalism and contempt for totalitarianism.

The Political Science Discipline in Argentina: The Political Scientist's National Association's Role

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Science Discipline ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

The Bureaucracy and the Nazi Party

1966 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. N. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Individual Resistance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Failure Life ◽  
Group Resistance

THE individual in the twentieth century finds himself dwarfed by two giant institutions which decide his political destiny: the state, with its efficient bureaucrat methodically signing papers that may mean success or failure, life or death, for everyman and his world; the other is the political party, which aspires to control the state by mobilizing the masses. Nineteenth-century bureaucracy tended to be rigid and authoritarian, yet unrelated to popular support and limited in its impact on daily life. The nineteenth- century liberal, suspicious of the state, attempted to protect the individual by further limiting the bureaucrat; the twentiethcentury liberal hopes to use the bureaucrat to limit the privately powerful, whereas the totalitarian party hopes to dominate the state and therewith to dominate everyman. When a monopolistic party controls a monolithic state, the individual seems to have no choice but to flee, to obey or to disappear into a concentration camp. Overt individual resistance appears senseless; overt group resistance extremely dangerous and almost certainly doomed to failure.

Military Morality Transformed: Weapons and Soldiers on the Nineteenth-Century Battlefield

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Human Aggression ◽  
Close Supervision ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The increased lethality of nineteenth-century “arms of precision” caused military formations to disperse in combat, transforming the ordinary soldier from a near automaton, drilled to deliver random fire under close supervision, into a moral agent who exercised a degree of choice about where, when, and how to fire his weapon. The emerging autonomy of the soldier became a central theme in contemporary tactical debates, which struggled to reconcile the desire for discipline with the individual initiative necessary on the battlefield. This tactical conundrum offers revealing insights about human aggression and mass violence. Its dark legacy was the propagation of military values into civilian society, thus paving the way for the political soldiers of the twentieth century.

Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2016 ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Amanda Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, consciousness, agency, and embodiment are not always in concert. Legal personification serves as the backdrop of my discussion of Bottom’s metamorphosis, which I see as evocative of developments within common law around the creation of artificial persons. In early modern jurisprudence, disembodiment offered an occasion for incorporation, such that the non-consensual human could be transformed into an artificial entity with agentic capacity. Through the staging of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream elaborates the surreal transformation of the human into the non-human as a theatrical effect with political implications, insofar as personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual. The play’s sensitivity to artificial assemblage puts it in conversation with a strand of contemporary political thought interested in the complexity of the will beyond the human body.

Public and Private Citizenship: From Gender Invisibility to Feminist Inclusiveness

1998 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raia Prokhovnik
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Specific Activity ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
The Individual

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms.

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