The house that Chuck built: twenty-five years of reading Charles Beitz

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown

On the face of it, this might seem a somewhat frivolous, not to say over-familiar, title for an essay on the influence of Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations (hereafter, PTIR); Beitz, however, will recognise the implicit comparison between his work and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and will accordingly, I hope, forgive the familiarity. But, accepting that this is a title that conveys respect, it might still be argued to be inappropriate on the rather different grounds that it substantially overstates the influence of PTIR. Can it really be the case that this relatively short (under 200 pages) volume with an over-ambitious title ‘changed the subject’ in the way that A Theory of Justice certainly did a few years earlier? Obviously the subject in question – international political theory – is rather more limited than the whole world of at least Anglo-American political theory that was changed by Rawls's work, but such a claim can, I think, be defended.

Author(s):  
Gerry Simpson

This chapter probes the way in which description, prescription, and critique form a congeries of approaches that together, in turn, produce an intellectual field that might be described as the political theory of international law (though it is hardly one thing, and some of it refuses altogether the injunctions of traditional political theory). All of this will lead to an examination of two particular problems of international diplomacy to which political theories of international law appear to have responded: namely, intervention and war crimes trials, and an engagement with two interdisciplinary turns (to History and to International Relations) through which international law has enlivened its habits of thought and theoretical inclinations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown

The relationship between political theory, including the history of political thought, and International Relations theory, including the history of international thought, has been, and to some extent remains, complex and troubled. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mid-twentieth century founders of International Relations as an academic discipline drew extensively on the canon of political thought, but approached the subject in an uncritical way, while political philosophers largely disdained the international as a focus. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of the ‘justice industry’ based on critiques of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and a consequent recovering of the past history of cosmopolitan and communitarian thought. A new discourse emerged in this period – International Political Theory – bridging the gap between political thought and international relations and stimulating a far more creative and scholarly approach to the history of international thought. However, in a social science environment dominated by the methods of economics, that is, formal theory and quantification, the new discourse of International Political Theory occupies a niche rather than existing at the centre of the discipline.


2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS BROWN

‘The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.’Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book II, Chapter 12.2 [cited from John Rawls The Law of Peoples, p. 7]After presenting a brief sketch of John Rawls's theory of justice, his international political theory is outlined and evaluated. Rawls develops a classification of ‘peoples’ based on whether or not they are ‘well-ordered’. The Law of Peoples covers ‘liberal’ and ‘decent’ peoples who adhere to minimum standards of human rights and are not aggressive in their international relations. This is in the realm of ‘ideal’ theory; ‘non-ideal’ theory must cope also with societies that are not well-ordered, such as outlaw states and burdened societies. The long-term aim is that all should be part of a confederation of decent peoples. Rawls's theory has been criticized by cosmopolitan liberals for its communitarian tendencies, but has much to offer scholars of international relations, including a systematic basis for classifying states, a helpful discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and a powerful restatement of the importance of utopian thinking in international relations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 859-880 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER LEE

AbstractOver the past three decades Jean Bethke Elshtain has used her critique and application of just war as a means of engaging with multiple overlapping aspects of identity. Though Elshtain ostensibly writes about war and the justice, or lack of justice, therein, she also uses just war a site of analysis within which different strands of subjectivity are investigated and articulated as part of her broader political theory. This article explores the proposition that Elshtain's most important contribution to the just war tradition is not be found in her provision of codes or her analysis of ad bellum or in bello criteria, conformity to which adjudges war or military intervention to be just or otherwise. Rather, that she enriches just war debate because of the unique and sometimes provocative perspective she brings as political theorist and International Relations scholar who adopts, adapts, and deploys familiar but, for some, uncomfortable discursive artefacts from the history of the Christian West: suffused with her own Christian faith and theology. In so doing she continually reminds us that human lives, with all their attendant political, social, and religious complexities, should be the focus when military force is used, or even proposed, for political ends.


Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka

It has often been noted that the political claims of minorities and indigenous peoples are marginalized within traditional state-centric international political theory; but perhaps more surprisingly, they are also marginalized within much contemporary cosmopolitan political theory. In this chapter, I will argue that neither cosmopolitanism nor statism as currently theorized is well equipped to evaluate the normative claims at stake in many minority rights issues. I begin by discussing how the “minority question” arose as an issue within international relations—that is, why minorities have been seen as a problem and a threat to international order—and how international actors have historically attempted to contain the problem, often in ways that were deeply unjust to minorities. I will then consider recent efforts to advance a pro-minority agenda at the international level, and how this agenda helps reveal some of the limits of both cosmopolitan and statist approaches to IPT.


2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Koschut

The security community concept generally inhabits a rather small niche in the study of International Relations, as the logic of community fundamentally challenges the prevailing logic of anarchy. In this article, it is argued both on ontological and theoretical grounds that the concept’s intellectual heritage and depth transcends the boundaries of existing theories. In this sense, the concept of security community serves as a via media by linking different strands of International Relations theory together and by bridging various theoretical gaps. This argument will be developed in two steps. Firstly, it will be shown that the security community framework developed by Karl W Deutsch is deeply rooted in International Political Theory without belonging to one particular branch. By locating the concept in International Political Theory, an exercise that has been neglected by the security community literature; it will be secondly demonstrated that the concept of security community takes the middle ground between specific strands of International Relations theory, as these strands are ultimately based on concepts of moral philosophy.


2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-516
Author(s):  
John Vasquez

When the intellectual history of international relations in- quiry is written for our time, War and Peace in International Rivalry may very well be seen as a seminal book. Along with Frank Wayman, Diehl and Goertz have been at the forefront of a major conceptual breakthrough in the way peace and war are studied. This book is their major statement of the subject and presents their most important findings.


Author(s):  
Francesca Romana Ficorilli

One of the most complete definitions of Trauma describes it as an "extreme, unsustainable and inevitable threatening experience, in the face of which the individual experiences a sense of helplessness", an event outside the range of usual human experiences, which overwhelm the normal human capacity for adaptation. A modern and current understanding of the concept of Trauma occurs with Bowlby, which places it for the first time in a "relational" context. He argues that the way people react in adverse life situations, particularly to a traumatic event, depends on the type of attachment that has been established between the child and his attachment figures (AFs). The concept of "child abuse and neglect" includes different forms of violence against children, ranging from verbal abuse to rape. Law 66 of 15 February 1996 introduced specific rules on child sexual abuse, in particular the way of listening to children in order to collect good testimony. The theory that today represents the point of reference for most research on the accuracy of memory in testimony, considers memory a "reconstructive" process, and is the result of the interaction between interpretation that is given by the subject in the coding phase, recovery of clues based on the general knowledge possessed by the subject and the context in which it is in the moment in which it must remember. Loftus' studies on false memories affirm that eye witnessing, however bona fide it may be, can be completely unreliable because there are many distortions of memory. The problem of suggestibility in memory is not so much that the momentary account can be modified, but that a distortion of the original episode of what is represented in memory of the event in question takes place, which, from that moment on, will be irreversibly modified. The therapeutic crisis support is the first phase of the therapeutic work following the abuse and has as its privileged recipients the victim and the adult who takes care of them. Currently, a trauma-focused therapy such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an evidence-based psychotherapy approach, is used, recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the elective therapy for the treatment of PTSD and several psychopathologies related to traumatic events, including sexual abuse. Not only because the victims of abuse could in turn perpetrate the cycle of abuse, but also so that victimisation is not considered an unchangeable characteristic of the person.


1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

The publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1972 inaugurated a new era in Anglo-American political theory by providing a sophisticated and complex paradigm of liberal political diagnosis of and prescription for contemporary society; it resulted in a flood of detailed analyses and discussions of Rawls' proposals in the large and in the small, and also brought forth (in the form of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia) a counterblast from the libertarian Right which was of commensurate scope and vigour. In the present decade, however, the challenge to Rawlsian liberalism has taken on a new guise—one which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.


polemica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 001-021
Author(s):  
Alice Vargas Vieira Mattos ◽  
Ligia Gama e Silva Furtado Mendonça

Resumo: Este artigo se propõe a analisar a experiência da temporalidade nos dias atuais, a partir do impacto da urgência contemporânea que ocorre, principalmente, por meio dos imperativos de desempenho. Com isso, busca- se pontuar a maneira pela qual tal problemática reverbera no sujeito, hoje, e explora-se a importância de não atrelar o tempo do sujeito ao sistema de produção vigente. Inicialmente, serão discutidos os imperativos de produtividade e o consumismo para, assim, elaborar a concepção do tempo para a psicanálise, desenvolvendo o modo pelo qual ela concebe a temporalidade em seus diferentes aspectos, tais como a atemporalidade do inconsciente, o tempo próprio da pulsão e o tempo lógico. Com esse percurso, a relevância da experiência analítica hoje será investigada; questiona-se a possibilidade de adoecimento do sujeito diante desse tempo experienciado como pura pressa. Palavras-chave: Psicanálise. Temporalidade. Urgência.Abstract : This article proposes to analyze the experience of temporality nowadays from the impact of contemporary urgency, which occurs, mainly, from the imperatives of performance. With this, it seeks to point out the way in which this problem reverberates in the subject today, and explores the importance of not linking the subject's time to the current production system. Initially, the imperatives of productivity and consumerism will be discussed in order to elaborate the conception of time for psychoanalysis, developing the way in which it conceives temporality in its different aspects, such as the timelessness of the unconscious, the proper time of the drive and the logical time. With this path, the relevance of analytical experience today will be investigated, and the possibility of illness of the subject in the face of this time experienced as a pure haste is questioned. Keywords: Psychoanalysis. Temporality. Urgency. 


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