Staging Emile: Audience and Genre in Collective Self-Legislation

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-408
Author(s):  
Boris Litvin
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Collective Self

AbstractRousseau's interpreters often disagree over whether the Emile prepares its protagonist for membership in the Social Contract’s political community or presents him as an alternative to it. I argue that such attempts to determine the compatibility of Rousseau's different “projects” obscures his broader engagement with his contemporary popular audiences—particularly those associated with the theater and the novel—and the political implications therein. In contrast to the above debate, I turn to Emile to argue that in this work Rousseau attempts to shape readers in distinct and crucial ways. Emile does not simply present precepts to be embraced but intervenes into the underlying communicative dynamics that need to obtain for Rousseau's conception of collective self-legislation. It does so by shifting between the theatrical and novelistic generic conventions identified in his prior engagements with popular audiences, thus generating a reading experience that orients readers to continuously revisit their constitution as a collective audience.

Property

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Barducci
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 6 will focus primarily on the political implications of Grotius’ theory of ‘limited’ property as they concerned the relationship between the sphere of individual rights, the social contract, and the prerogatives of civil power. From the debate on the abolition of tithes in the early 1640s to the controversy between Filmer and Locke in the 1680s, the debates on property rights revolved around how much individuals could impropriate from the commons stock and, accordingly, on the limits and prerogatives of civil power in regulating private property. Grotius’ theory of property, along with his analysis of the law of war, were also components of Dutch and English expansion overseas.

The novel and the myth of the epic: Balestrini, Lukács, and the cathartic experience

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 785-805
Author(s):  
Achille Castaldo
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Gyorgy Lukacs ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
Interpretative Model ◽  
Collective Dimension

In this article, I address the critical reception of Nanni Balestrini's narrative work, focusing in particular on the novel Vogliamo tutto (1971). I compare the interpretative model, which sees this text as overcoming the novelistic form and moving toward the epic, with a similar model in György Lukács' foundational text The Theory of the Novel (1916), which sets up an opposition between the novel, understood as an expression of the irrelevance of private existence in our society, and the idea of a “rebirth” of the epic as a redemptive collective dimension. In order to investigate the textual mechanisms that generate a reading experience that has been defined resorting to the cliché of the epic, I draw on Lukács' later Aesthetics (1962). In this work, he offers a response to the impasses of his earlier thought by using the concept of catharsis, which explains the effects of a work of art on the reader/viewer through the pathetic energy generated by the dissolution of the subjective perspective. Through a close reading of key passages from Vogliamo tutto, I show how the rhetorical structure of the text is grounded in a repeated dissolution of the narrative point of view (the narrator's voice) in the collective voice of the workers. I argue that the “pathetic intensity” produced by this loss of subjectivity inscribes the communal existence of the political struggles of the time in the immediacy of the reading experience.

scholarly journals Francisco Suárez y la tradición del Contrato social

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schwartz Porzecanski
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Social Contract Theorist ◽  
Mode Of Production

RESUMENesisten importantes discrepancias entre los intérpretes acerca de si Francisco Suárez fue un teórico del contrato social. En buena medida, este desacuerdo tiene que ver con la relación entre el consentimiento constitutivo (por el cual la comunidad política es creada) y la obligación política. De acuerdo con una interpretación de Suárez, el consentimiento constitutivo no crea obligación política; más bien tal obligación corresponde a la comunidad política en virtud de la clase de entidad que es(igual que las personas tienen sus derechos de autonoía por ser personas). Argumento en contra de esta interpretación de Suárez al proponer que los efectos del consentimiento constitutivo deberían ser comprendidos a la luz del tratamiento que ofrece Suárez de "actos operativos" como votos, promesas y juramentos. Defiendo que muchos de los pasajes de Suárez han sido incorrectamente interpretados como apoyo de una lectura organicista, cuando en realidad corresponden al planteamiento que hace de la causación moral.PALABRAS CLAVEFRANCISCO SUÁREZ, CONSENTIMIENTO, OBLIGACIÓN POLÍTICA, CONTRATO SOCIAL.ABSTRACTInterpretars disagree on whether Francisco Suárez was a social contract theorist. Much of this discrepancy turns on the relation between constitutive consent (that consent by wich the political community is created) and political obligation. According to one interpretation of Suárez, it is not constitutive consent that creates political obligation. Rather, such obligation belongs to the political community by virtue of he sort of being that it is (just as persons have self-rule rights by virtue of being persons, independently from their mode of production). I argue against this interpretation of Suárez by suggesting that the effects of constitutive consent should be understood in light of Suárez's treatment of "operative acts"such vows, promises, and oaths. i establish that many of Suárez's phrases incorrectly deemed as supportive of an organicist reading, bellong, in fact, to Suárez's treatment of moral causation KEYWORDSFRANCISCO SUÁREZ, CONSENT, POLITICAL OBLIGATION, SOCIAL CONTRACT

scholarly journals Tacit consent and costs of non-entry into the political community

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 125-133
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Savanović
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Tacit Consent ◽  
Claiming Discrimination ◽  
Practical Sense

This paper offers an analysis of an issue related to the social contract theory The issue concerned is disagreement in the form of tacit consent. Namely, if we accept the model of tacit consent, then an issue of costs of this disagreement is raised. These costs cannot be treated in the same way as in the case of express consent. The reason is that, in the case of tacit consent, a person does not have same chances and opportunities as others. This offers a possibility of claiming discrimination, especially if we accept the fact that these costs can be so high so that they deny the possibility of choice. At least in a practical sense and de facto. So, this topic must be understood properly if we want the social contract theory to function well. In this paper, we will try to do that through a logical and semantic analysis of basic terms: tacit consent, disagreement, and costs of contract.

Citizenship For Sale?

2017 ◽  
pp. 788-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayelet Shachar
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

“There are some things that money can’t buy.” Is citizenship among them? This chapter explores this question by highlighting the core legal and ethical puzzles associated with the surge in cash-for-passport programs. The spread of these new programs is one of the most significant developments in citizenship practice in the past few decades. It tests our deepest intuitions about the meaning and attributes of the relationship between the individual and the political community to which she belongs. This chapter identifies the main strategies employed by a growing number of states putting their visas and passports “for sale,” selectively opening their otherwise bolted gates of admission to the high-net-worth individuals of the world. Moving from the positive to the normative, the discussion then elaborates the main arguments in favor of, as well as against, citizenship-for-sale. The discussion draws attention to the distributive and political implications of these developments, both locally and globally, and identifies the deeper forces at work that contribute to the perpetual testing, blurring, and erosion of the state-market boundary regulating access to membership.

scholarly journals Rousseau's Conception of Government in the work Discourse on Political Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61
Author(s):  
Petar Jakopec
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Will ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Right

In this article the author problematizes Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy and his conception of government in the political community. Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy was chronologically written seven years before his major work The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Regardless of the fact that the Discourse on Political Economy was published earlier, it left a remarkable trace in Rousseau‘s philosophical opus. In this work, which was published as part of the fifth volume of Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Rousseau indicated his direction in political philosophy. This philosophical and political direction began with the Discourse on Political Economy and culminated in the philosophical and political conception of republicanism, elaborated in detail in The Social Contract. In this article the author uses critical analysis and reconstruction to establish Rousseau‘s fundamental ideas about his political philosophy present in the Discourse on Political Economy, with a focus on observing and studying the role of a sovereign and the public economy in the function of the government by general will within the political community.

scholarly journals “The Dark Unaccompanied Moment”: Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife and the Problem of the Origin

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 573-590
Author(s):  
KENNETH MILLARD
Keyword(s):  
Critical Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Authenticity ◽  
Political Implications

This paper is a critical examination of Louise Erdrich's novel The Antelope Wife, one that has a particular focus in conceptualizations of origins. That is to say, it is an analysis of the novel that scrutinizes the various ways in which “origins” are a vitally important aspect, both of the narrative and of the conceptual paradigms that might be used to interpret it. The Antelope Wife thus problematizes the ways that historical and epistemological foundations are predicated on certain crucial moments of origin, which are then used to legitimate particular interpretations. A concept of a definitive origin is also used to underwrite ideas about cultural authenticity which are then placed in the service of social and political perspectives, with wide-ranging consequences. Such origins concern the beginning of narrative, the politics of ethnicity, and the original innocence of a fall from grace. In each case, the novel is notable for its subtle examination of where such concepts begin, and of the political implications of the very concept of beginnings.

From Security to Peace and Concord

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Stefano Visentin
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Original Position ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Collective Self

The aim of this article is to discuss how Spinoza’s Theological- Political Treatise and Political Treatise deal with the development of a free and pacific commonwealth, taking into account both a comparison with the irenic tradition of Erasmus and the original position of Spinoza’s republicanism within the Dutch context of that period. To approach this issue, comparing Spinoza’s idea of security with the Hobbesian one can also be useful in order to demonstrate that security and freedom are not antithetical in Spinoza (differently from Hobbes) but rather support each other. Consequently, the role of peace and concord within the Political Treatise shall be considered the result of a collective self-emendation process of social interactions and political institutions. In this perspective, Spinoza’s concept of peace seems a very original attempt to build a free political community, where democratic institutions are both the cause and effect of pacific (i.e., rational and harmonious, although not necessarily irenic) relationships among citizens.

scholarly journals Rousseauist foundations of Schmitt's concept of (total) state

Sociologija ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Will ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Total State

In this paper the author discusses Carl Schmitt's concept of 'the political' (das Politische), and his constitutional teaching (Verfassungslehre). He is trying to explain that the logic of Schmitt's argument against liberal democracy and in favor of populist democracy follows all the important conclusions made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract, with only one exception. Schmitt was, namely, reluctant to accept that the social contract ever occurred in any historical society and he believed that it could not be used even as a methodological tool, because it has no meaning in the very foundations of political community. Rousseau's statements on 'general will', 'people', and immediate democracy Schmitt found more attractive for his purposes of designing the model of total state.

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