Vainglory, Modesty, and Political Agency in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie E. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Right

AbstractHistories of political theory have framed the story of the emergence of sovereign states and sovereign selves as a story about secularization—specifically, a story that equates secularization with self-deification. Thomas Hobbes's investment in modesty and humility demonstrates the need for, and the possibility of, an alternative secularization narrative. Scholars have long insisted that “vainglory” is a key term for the interpretation of Leviathan. But Hobbes's task is not complete once he has discredited vainglory. Hobbes must also envision, and cultivate, contrary virtues—and modesty is one virtue that Hobbes would cultivate. An analysis of Hobbes's attempt to redefine and rehabilitate the virtues of modesty shows that Hobbes warns against the temptation to self-deification. In Leviathan, the political task is not to enthrone humans in sovereign invulnerability, but rather to achieve the right balance between bodily security and consciousness of finitude.

Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arash Abizadeh
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Many ◽  
Treat All ◽  
Legislative Review ◽  
Political Turn

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude?

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Nine
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Property Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Hard Time ◽  
Territorial Rights ◽  
The Right

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude? This claim is often assumed to be true in territorial rights theory. And if this claim is justified, a state may have a prima facie right to unilaterally exclude aliens from state territory. But is this claim justifiable? I examine the version of territorial rights that has the most compelling story to support the right to exclude: territorial rights as a kind of property right, where ‘territory’ refers to the public and common spaces included in the domain of state jurisdiction. I analyse the work of A. J. Simmons, who develops the political theory of John Locke into one of the most well-articulated and defended theories of territorial rights as a kind of property right. My main argument is that Simmons’ justification for rights of exclusion, which are derived from individual rights of self-government, does not apply to many kinds of public spaces. An upshot of this analysis is that most Lockean-based theories of territorial rights will have a hard time justifying the right to exclude as a prima facie right held by states against aliens.

Thomas Hobbes and the external relations of states

1979 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Forsyth
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Realist Approach ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
External Relations

Hobbes' conception of relations between states has attracted attention from two directions. Students of political theory who have focused on Hobbes have from time to time looked beyond their central preoccupations and noted briefly the relevance of his doctrine for the international arena. The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes' theory. Students of international relations on the other hand invoke Hobbes' name frequently as a kind of shorthand for a particular approach to the international world, one that is also associated with Machiavelli, and usually called the ‘realist’ approach. By contrast with the political theorists, they tend to look from the outside into Hobbes’ theory and to ask whether and how far the ‘domestic’ situation of individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature bears an analogy with the ‘external’ situation of states in relationship to one another.

Rethinking the sexual contract: The case of Thomas Hobbes

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-301
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Sexual Contract ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
Novel Concept ◽  
Mother Child Relationship

Feminist scholars have long debated on a key contradiction in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes: While he sees women as free and equal to men in the state of nature, he postulates their subjection to male rule in the civil state without any apparent explanation. Focusing on Hobbes’s construction of the mother–child relationship, this article suggests that the subjugation of the mother to the father epitomizes the neutralization of the ancient principle of ‘governance’, which he replaces with a novel concept of ‘power’ as formally authorized command. This scrutiny leads to three main conclusions: (1) a radicalization of Pateman’s concept of ‘sexual contract'; (2) the acknowledgement that patriarchy is inseparable from the logic of political authority constructed by Hobbes; and (3) the claim that criticism of patriarchal rule requires an overall problematization of the mainstream conception of political participation we have inherited from modern political science.

War for Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Idris
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Sayyid Qutb ◽  
The Ideal

Peace is the elimination of war, but peace also authorizes war. We are informed today that this universal ideal can only be secured by the wars that it eliminates. The paradoxical position of peace—opposed to war, authorizing war—is encapsulated by the claim that “war is for the sake of peace.” War for Peace is a genealogy of the political theoretic logics and morals of “peace.” It examines peace in political theory, as an ideal that authorizes war, in the writings of ten thinkers, from ancient to contemporary thought: Plato, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. It argues that the ideal of peace functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically. In its parasitical structure, peace is accompanied by other ideals, such as friendship, security, concord, and law, which reduces it to a politics of consensus. In its provincial structure, the universalized content of peace reflects its idealizers’ desires, fears, interests, and constructions of the globe. In its polemical structure, the idealization of peace is the product of antagonisms and it then enables hostility. As idealizations of peace are disseminated across political thought, a core that valorizes peace and necessitates war insistently remains. War for Peace uncovers the genealogical basis of peace’s moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present.

From Hobbes to Shaftesbury

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.

Mutual Benefit, Property, and the Conceptual Foundations of Trust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrique Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mutual Benefit ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

This chapter builds on the discussion initiated in the previous chapter, contrasting the political theory of Thomas Hobbes with that of John Locke in order to argue that the same insecurity found in Hobbes’s account of criminal law and punishment is preserved in Locke’s model of society. It provides a rarely seen analysis of Locke’s account of crime and punishment, as well as the role which these concepts play in his broader political theory. This theoretical examination is used as an analogy through which to understand the tensions and contradictions found in the liberal model of criminal law, as well as its vulnerability to conditions of socio-political insecurity.

scholarly journals Zur Legitimität von Staatlichkeit: Eine kosmopolitische Kritik offener Grenzen

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Nida-Rümelin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Commodity Markets ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Aspects ◽  
Institutional Governance ◽  
Location Factor ◽  
Migratory Movements ◽  
Institutional Order

AbstractBorders are a constitutive feature of states. Political agency would, therefore, come into conflict with a practice of open borders. This is equally true for the dynamics of unleashed global financial and commodity markets as well as for a global labour market. An unregulated mobility of capital, goods, and people would erode the agency of states and diminish politics to a mere location factor. In the following, I argue in favor of the legitimacy of (state) borders and political control over migratory movements, however, not from a communitarian or even nationalist perspective, but from a cosmopolitan one. Political cosmopolitanism differs from sociological, economic, or cultural variants with regard to the role of politics. While other kinds of cosmopolitanism generally understand globalisation as weakening the agency of states, political cosmopolitanism strives for the establishment of a global institutional order, which allows for democratically legitimised political agency beyond the nation-state. The question is what institutional governance of migration is legitimate in a cosmopolitan framework. The following text discusses the political theory (part 1) and some preliminary philosophical-ethical aspects (part 2) of this topic.

scholarly journals Framing the Refugee

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Phil Cole
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
International Economic Order ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Free Form ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

‘Framing the Refugee’ looks at the power of representation of liberal political theory with regard to refugees. In the author’s view, legal and political arbitrariness lies in the representing of refugees as lacking agency. His key point is that liberalism fails to conceive of refugees as politically capable actors, and he is thus complicit in the arbitrary neutralisation of their emancipatory potential and participatory powers. This paper emphasises the moral justifiability of that state of affairs by seeking some answers to the question of why liberal political theory construes a concept of the refugee that does not contain any element of political agency. Most obviously, the author acknowledges that refugees perform a significant social role in contemporary societies and are hence active members in them. Nonetheless, they remain neglected in their political role by most political theory. What does it mean to have political agency for the author? It means to have the power of self-representation, that is, of being allowed and even enabled by a given legal system to bring about change in the political order, or at least to participate in that change. But the author also calls attention to the role of ‘theory’ in addressing this downside of the contemporary liberal democratic order. Theory becomes even more crucial at times of urgency, that is, when theorists have a moral responsibility to deepen their philosophical imagination, as Hannah Arendt so forcefully noted. The theoretical task of ‘re-framing’ the refugee entails reconfiguring political philosophy and its traditional categories of sovereignty, citizenship and nationality. The liberal inability to accommodate the political agency of many members of the political community – especially of non-nationals – is a sign of the historical contingency of the current rules of political membership. This inability makes evident the imperative of rethinking politics in ways that avoid the arbitrariness of treatment and aim instead at equality and justice. If political leaders can re-write the rules of membership to suit their own ideological agendas, the same demand should be addressed by – indeed demanded from – political and legal theorists. However, this is not as easy as it seems, according to the author. In his view, political theory is confronted with fundamental challenges, the most obvious one being that ‘theory’ is usually unequipped to defeat its own ‘topology’. Note that in saying this the author is raising a more pressing concern about arbitrary law-making: it may be that arbitrariness – especially the arbitrary treatment of aliens by the sovereign state and by liberal democracies in particular – is inscribed in the very DNA of liberalism. No matter how odd this may seem, the author advances the view that ideas, however creative of a new order, or transformative of a given status quo, never appear in "free form", and are instead deeply rooted in a structure that constrains our imagination. The challenge is thus to develop a meta-theory that reconceptualises the very way liberal political theory frames marginalised sectors of society – such as the "poor" – as a product of an international economic order that robs those sectors of their agency as the very condition of its internal functioning. We must therefore question how the very idea of the refugee is produced, because it symbolises the construction of an inside and an outside that is complicit with the arbitrary play of legal statuses involved in migration policy. The author’s main point regarding this is that certain groups are sidelined by economic, political and social systems because they are already excluded from theoretical systems to start with. Keywords: refugees, agency, political theory, migration

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