Plato's Treatment of Callicles in the ‘Gorgias’

1974 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 48-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kerferd
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
English Speaking World

Three main views have been put forward as attempts to answer the question what were the political affiliations of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. According to one view Callicles is seen as the very archetype of the tyrant and the oligarch, a man prepared to indulge in himself an unbridled lust for power, the absolute antithesis of the democrat and all that democracy stands for, giving expression to a doctrine, in the words of Grote, ‘not simply anti-popular – not simply despotic – but the drunken extravagance of despotism’. This view was associated with repeated attempts to identify Callicles with one or other of the known oligarchs in the fifth century – Critias being the favourite. Such attempts are now generally abandoned. But the overall view of Callicles' doctrine probably remains the orthodox one, at least in the English-speaking world, and the comparison with Nietzsche and Carlyle has become commonplace.According to a second view, however, the opposite is the case – Callicles was not aristocratic, oligarchic or tyrannical in his views, rather he was a democrat, indeed even ‘the typical Athenian democrat’. Finally it is possible to distinguish a third view, according to which initially Callicles is presented as a champion of absolutism but is shown as undergoing ‘a strange transformation’ in the course of the dialogue to a position more in accord with ‘the growing love of equality’.

Dialogues

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 55-60
Author(s):  
Barbara E. Mundy
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
The Political ◽  
Section Deal ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Central Claim

This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important art historian of Latin America of the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. Often greeted with indifference or hostility, Kubler’s central claim of extinction is still a highly contested one. The essays in this section deal with Kubler’s reception in Mexico, the political stakes of his claim in relation to indigeneity, as well as the utility of Kubler’s categories and objects of “extinction” beyond their original framing paradigm.

scholarly journals Interview with David McLellan July 2018

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Larry Ray ◽  
Iain Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

David McLellan, interviewed here, is a Fellow of Goldsmiths College, University of London and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, University of Kent. Since the 1970s he has been one of the leading biographers, translators and commentators on Marx in the English-speaking world. He is the author of several books on Marx and Marxism, including The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx; Karl Marx: His Life and Thought; Karl Marx: Selected Writings; Marx before Marxism; and Marxism and Religion. He has also published a biography of Simone Weil, books on the political implications of Christianity, and a lengthy article on contract law and marriage. He lectures widely around the world on these topics, frequently in China, and in 2018 addressed a conference in Nairobi on religion and world peace. In this interview, or conversation, with Larry Ray and Iain Wilkinson, in July 2018, David discusses the origins of his interest in Marx, the development Marx’s thought and his critique of the Hegelians, Marx’s critical method, Marx and religion, Marx on Russia, the role of violence in social change, the relevance of Marx’s work today, and offers comments on some recent biographies. David has spent much of his intellectual career engaging with the meaning and legacy of Marxism and these reflections should generate reflection and debate on the significance of Marx and the possibilities of radical political change today.

Degrowth, political acceptability and the Green New Deal

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Claire O'Manique ◽  
James K Rowe ◽  
Karena Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Political Realm

Endless economic growth on a finite planet is impossible. This is the premise behind the degrowth movement. Despite this sound rationale, the degrowth movement has struggled to gain political acceptability. We have sought to understand this limited uptake of degrowth discourse in the English-speaking world by interviewing Canadian activists. Activists have a proximity to the political realm – both with its barriers and openings – that scholars working primarily in academic institutions sometimes lack. Our interviews reveal that class interests – particularly those of fossil fuel companies – are a substantial barrier to realizing degrowth goals. Interviewees highlighted the importance of centring class-conscious environmentalism, ‘anti-purity’ politics, and decolonization as essential parts of a degrowth agenda capable of overcoming these class interests. We conclude by unpacking how the Green New Deal – a discourse and movement that gained considerable traction after we completed our interviews – addresses the obstacles shared by our interviewees, thus making it a promising ‘non-reformist reform’ for the degrowth movement to pursue.

Degrowth, political acceptability and the Green New Deal

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-276
Author(s):  
Claire O’Manique ◽  
James K Rowe ◽  
Karena Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Political Realm

Endless economic growth on a finite planet is impossible. This is the premise behind the degrowth movement. Despite this sound rationale, the degrowth movement has struggled to gain political acceptability. We have sought to understand this limited uptake of degrowth discourse in the English-speaking world by interviewing Canadian activists. Activists have a proximity to the political realm – both with its barriers and openings – that scholars working primarily in academic institutions sometimes lack. Our interviews reveal that class interests – particularly those of fossil fuel companies – are a substantial barrier to realizing degrowth goals. Interviewees highlighted the importance of centring class-conscious environmentalism, ‘anti-purity’ politics, and decolonization as essential parts of a degrowth agenda capable of overcoming these class interests. We conclude by unpacking how the Green New Deal – a discourse and movement that gained considerable traction after we completed our interviews – addresses the obstacles shared by our interviewees, thus making it a promising ‘non-reformist reform’ for the degrowth movement to pursue.

Can anything be done about the “glottophagy” of English?

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Chiti-Batelli
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
World Language ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

Recent literature reviewed by the author, particularly in German and English, leads him to conclude that there is a growing awareness, primarily in Europe, that the progressive establishment of English in the medium term as an international auxiliary language increasingly endangers the very survival of languages and cultures other than English, with the progressive effect of increasing political domination. On the other hand, it is not at all clear to any of the authors of these studies that the phenomenon is a necessary consequence of the political weight of international domination by the United States and the English-language world, and that accordingly a remedy must be found — above all the creation of a political power with a consistency at least comparable to that of the English-speaking world, and, secondarily, the adoption of a European federal language — and future world language — in the form of a planned language (Esperanto is the only one that is ready to use), which, not being the native language of any single people, nor the official tongue of a great power, would not have the “glottophagic” effect of English. Entirely utopian are those alternatives — merely apparent alternatives — currently being proposed in the face of the hegemony of English, such as mass multilingualism, which is neither realizable in practice nor capable of constituting a valid substitute for a single, worldwide language of communication. Such alternatives, almost certainly doomed to failure, will only confirm the conclusive victory of English and the progressive disappearance of other languages.

scholarly journals David D. Hall. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 233 p. ISBN 978-0812241020. $49.95

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-58
Author(s):  
Wade Garrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collaborative Culture ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
English Speaking World

Expanded from a series of three lectures given in 2007, Hall describes the political, social, and cultural forces that influenced modes of authorship, publishing, and dissemination in 17th-century New England. Separate, but not wholly apart, Hall delineates how writing in New England developed along a different trajectory from the center of the English-speaking world in London. Hall begins by asserting that two keys to understanding New England’s text-making culture have been undervalued. The first is the essentially collaborative culture of how texts were written, spoken, shared, transcribed, annotated, and rewritten. The second is the fundamentally handwritten or scribal practices that . . .

‘Race’ in Britain and the Politics of Difference

1996 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 177-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tariq Modood
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Universal Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Political World ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

It was only a few years ago that the central topic of academic political philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, was distributive justice. The focus was very much on economic or material goods; the question being whether people were entitled to have what they had, or did justice require that someone else should have some of it. That the arguments about justice led to investigating the conceptions of self, rationality and community that underpinned them meant that the debate was far from governed by economics and welfare, and was capable of moving in many directions and far from its starting-point. Yet that many of the leading participants in the ‘liberalism v. communitarianism’ debate should now have come to place diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism at the centre of their theorising, with the emphasis being on the justness of cultural rather than economic transactions, is surely not just a product of ‘following the argument to where it leads’. The change in philosophical focus is also determined by changes in the political world; by the challenges of feminism, the growing recognition that most Western societies are, partly because of movements of populations, increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-racial, and the growing questioning of whether the pursuit of a universal theory of justice may not itself be an example of a Western cultural imperialism. The politics I am pointing to is various and by no means harmonious, but a common feature perhaps is the insistence that there are forms of inequality and domination beyond those of economics and material distributions.

Hegel's Attempt to Forge a Logic for Spirit

Dialogue ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Mount Parnassus ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Do So

If Hegel's philosophy were to be characterized by a phrase, it might be “The Dialectical System of Absolute Spirit.” The phrase would seem formidable to some but merely pretentious to others. There are recent signs of an exhumation of the systematic features of Hegel's philosophy in the English-speaking world, and it is to be hoped that the durable clichés of an earlier English period will not prevent a fresh look at Hegel's philosophy. There is, of course, no denying his systematic ambitions, nor any wish on my part to do so. It is just these that I find fascinating. He sought to bring within a comprehensive intellectual order the whole of reality—and a little more besides, say his detractors. In the Phenomenology of Spirit by a turbulent dialectic he scrabblesup to the top of Mount Parnassus in order to clutch the petticoats of the Absolute. In the Science of Logic and in the first part of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences he lays out the logical paradigm of intellectual necessities which are subsequently exhibited in the philosophy of nature and of concrete spirit.

Waiting for Grace: Philosophy and Politics in Plato's Republic

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Christian
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The City

AbstractThe traditional interpretation of Plato's Republic in the English-speaking world, expressed most sharply by Sir Karl Popper, was that it represented a serious proposal for political rule. However, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom have argued that Plato's real concern was to protect the position of philosophy within the city. Influenced by Simone Weil, this article argues that even Strauss and Bloom do not express the extent of Plato's rejection of the political life. By examining Plato's handling of such themes as gold and nakedness, the article concludes that Plato's central concern in the Republic was to explore how a soul could strive for the Good, given that the human condition inescapably required social life.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document