Shakespeare and Politics in the Time of the Gunpowder Plot

2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-588
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Usual Practice ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractShakespeare's plays are best studied in clusters if we want to understand the political thought and preoccupations which inform their action rather than, as has been more usual practice, their generic identity. Plays written around the time of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the subsequent imposition of the Oath of Allegiance share common concerns regarding the swearing of oaths, honest speech, trustworthiness, and loyalty—issues that transcend distinctions between tragedies, comedies, histories and Roman Plays. I explore the relationship between political language and ideas inCoriolanusandAll's Well That Ends Well, plays that are rarely analyzed together yet which use similar language, represent related issues, and address similar anxieties. Both are part of a larger group—includingOthelloandMacbeth—which engage a contemporary audience of London citizens, representing the difficulty of life in times of acute paranoia.

Political thought in Central and Eastern Europe: The open society, its friends, and enemies*

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110496
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu ◽  
Stefan Kolev
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Relationship

A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.

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.

Compassion as a Political Virtue

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Whitebrook
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The place of compassion in political thought and practice is debatable. This debate can be clarified by stipulating ‘compassion’ as referring to the practice of acting on the feeling of ‘pity’; in addition, compassion might best be understood politically speaking as properly exercised towards vulnerability rather than suffering. Working with these understandings, I contrast Martha Nussbaum's account of the criteria for the exercise of compassion in modern democracies with the treatment of compassion in Toni Morrison's novels in order to suggest how compassion can be viewed politically. In respect of distributive justice and public policy, in both cases compassion might modify the strict application of principles in the light of knowledge of particulars, suggesting an enlarged role for discretion in the implementation of social justice. More generally, compassion's focus on particulars and the interpersonal draws attention to the importance of imagination and judgement. The latter returns a consideration of compassion to the question of the relationship of compassion to justice. In the political context, although strict criteria for compassion are inappropriate, principles of justice might work as modifying compassion (rather than vice-versa, as might be expected).

Ideology and the Intellectuals

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Berry ◽  
Michael Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences.

Conscience and Empire: Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 473-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Marcocci
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Vocabulary

This article presents the first reconstruction of the relationship between conscience and empire in the Portuguese World between 1500 and 1650. It shows to what extent the foundation of the Mesa da Consciência (“Board of Conscience”), a royal council of theologians devoted to issues like war, commerce, conversion, and slavery, shaped the imperial ideology. In this context, “conscience” emerged as a keyword in the political vocabulary, reflecting the importance of moral theology for the political language in which the empire was conceived. It not only bolstered the hegemony of theologians but also encouraged the emergence of a missionary casuistry, which became increasingly independent of the central authorities in the kingdom and in Rome. Under the Habsburg domination (1580-1640) this system was dismantled and theologians lost their centrality at court. After the Restoration of 1640 some of the old institutions were recovered in name, but the old interconnection between politics and moral theology was not re-installed.

Philip Jaisohn, the Political Evangelist, 1896–98

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-113
Author(s):  
Young-Chan Choi
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
The West ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Conceptual Aspect ◽  
Ideological Resources ◽  
The Right

Abstract The objective of this article is twofold: first to argue that Philip Jaisohn, upon his return from the United States to Korea in 1896, sought to subvert, if not overthrow, the monarchical government, and second, to argue that Jaisohn drew on specifically Christian intellectual and ideological resources to articulate his arguments. The rhetoric of loyalty, love, lawful resistance, private property, and slavery are, as such, in need of analysis through the Protestant conceptual prism. Previous studies analyzing modern political thought have focused on the nature of translation from the West; this study focuses on the conceptual aspect of the political language Jaisohn introduced in order to effect revolutionary changes in the popular vernacular. His goal was not just to present resistance against the incumbent governing authority as morally defensible, but to frame it in terms of the right of individual property. Finally the article suggests avenues through which religious thinking affected the reception and dissemination of Western political thought in Korea, and concludes by reflecting on the relevance of religious thought in the analysis of modern Korean political thought.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Analysis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

scholarly journals Within the heart’s darkness: The role of emotions in Arendt’s political thought

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Degerman
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Relationship

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In light of my discussion, I then reinterpret the role of compassion and pity in On Revolution, concluding that Arendt’s insights can help us avoid the potential pitfalls of the contemporary project to recuperate the emotions in politics.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book and the approach taken. It characterizes political thought as the analysis and examination of how earthly communities flourish, as distinct from other kinds of communities like churches or households. It argues that although the period began with the consolidation of large empires, there was a growing concern to understand and to defend local or regional political communities, and that these developments were shaped by social and economic change. It emphasizes the need to see the political ideas and aspirations of early modern people within the context of their other desires and aspirations, and the context of their specific historical situations. It shows how the approach taken in this book builds upon the existing work of scholars and historians. It also sets out the distinctive features of the book: the inclusion of lands beyond Europe, the emphasis on natural law, and the relationship between political thought and social change.

Colonial Exchanges

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

Scholars of political thought have given a great deal of attention to the relationship between European political ideas and colonialism, especially to whether prominent thinkers supported or opposed colonialism. But little attention has so far been given to the reactions of those in the colonies to European ideas, where intellectuals actively sought to transform those ideas, deploying them strategically or adopting them as their own. A full reckoning of colonialism's effects requires attention to their intellectual choices and the political efforts that accompanied them, which sometimes produced surprising political successes. The contributors to this volume include a mix of political theorists and intellectual historians who seek to grapple with specific thinkers or contexts. Contributors focus on colonised societies including India, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, and the settler countries of North America and Oceana, in times ranging from the French Revolution to the modern day.

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