Hegel's Political Philosophy in Italy

1983 ◽  
Vol 4 (01) ◽  
pp. 28-32
Author(s):  
Gianni Magazzeni
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past

The political philosophy of Hegel, in particular his concept of the state, acquired new impulse early in the 1930a. The crisis of the perlimentary system in Italy or rather of its liberal cultural tradition was apparently the reason for it. Yet this return to Hegel also brought about an improved ability of Italian philosophers to face the mushrooming trends of historical materialism, sociology, socialism and, of course, nationalism. They were all legacies of the very end of the past century which became realities to be deal with just afterwards. They demanded a more appropriate hermeneutic than could be provided by the spiritualism of Platonic origin or by the neo-Kantism previously dominant. Quite simply, Hegel came to be the answer of the Italian academia to a period of intense change and crisis in both political and cultural spheres. Hegel supplied a systematic rational framework within which experience could find the deeper understanding that the time seemed to require. Nonetheless his philosophy unified and internationalised the Italian cultural scene. Unification here does not imply a homogeneity of interpretation. Hegel's system had not been thoroughly mastered and so a ‘true’ understanding could not be possible. Single parts of Hegel's philosophy were not read or interpreted in keeping with the whole system, and connection, when realised, coincided more with the belief of the reader than with the intentions of the author.

Pierre Charron: Precursor to Hobbes

1963 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Grendler
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The State ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past

The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is rightly considered as marking the end of one era in political theory and the beginning of a new one. Formerly, men had sought and found a guide to political conduct in a basic principle upon which the order of well-being of the state depended. Hobbes broke with the past by postulating the state as simply a rationalization of the needs of men. He analyzed man's psychology and relied on his own observation and ratiocination to establish the best possible state commensurate with mankind's situation, but his supreme emphasis on force and authority left no room for the older constitutional, religious, and traditional safeguards of the citizen. This was the price that Hobbes willingly paid to achieve a secure state during the English Civil War.

The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Newly Industrialized Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Third World

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.

Rethinking Kant as a public intellectual

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Sofie Møller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon.

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Teubner Texts

1961 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-171
Author(s):  
Bruno Doer
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
The Past ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Future ◽  
Do So ◽  
A Share

It is always agreeable to offer congratulations to someone who is celebrating a jubilee. It is a particular pleasure to do so when the ‘child’ whose birthday it is can look back over 150 years of existence, and all those who have a share in the jubilee may reflect that the thanks for the achievements of the past and wishes for the future serve the cause of publicity. For no one who sets out to discuss the state of classical studies in Germany can, or should, fail to mention the Leipzig publishing firm of B. G. Teubner. Here publishing and scholarship have in the past century and a half formed an indissoluble partnership which has made it its duty to provide the best texts for use in the study of classical antiquity.

The Exile of Political Theory: The Lost Homeland of Legitimation

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Simons
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
Implicit Definitions ◽  
Recurrent Theme

A sense of distance or exile is a recurrent theme of the literature in which the state of the political theory is either lamented or acclaimed. A review of these tales suggests that implicit definitions of the homeland of the sub-discipline as philosophical, practical or interpretive are inadequate, leading to mistaken diagnoses of the reasons for the ills or recovery of political philosophy. This paper argues that political theory has been exiled from its previous role or homeland of legitimation of political orders. Under contemporary conditions in the advanced liberal capitalist political order, in which a media-generated imagology of society as a communicative system fills the role of a legitimating discourse, political theory faces a legitimation crisis.

Teaching in Vain

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
State Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
German State ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with particular reference to Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.

The Political Perversion of Art

1941 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-249
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
William Langland ◽  
The State ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
The Political ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Twentieth Century America

MOST MEN are content to believe that politics deals with the practical problems of the administration of the state. But the term can have a greater and wider significance. It can also mean, as it meant for Aristotle, the whole character of men's life in society. In the past as well as in the present, poets and novelists of every country have often devoted themselves not merely to the good of their art but directly and especially, in varying degrees, to the problem of the good of the state and of society. In an older England, for example, William Langland, Skelton, Dryden, Samuel Butler, Shelley, and William Morris, to mention only a few, have struck into political themes and preoccupations; and today the problem, from manifold aspects, of the relation of the individual to society has not been ignored by T. S. Eliot, J. M. Murry, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and even Mrs. Virginia Woolf, among others. And the “reform” of an afflicted twentieth-century America has engaged talents and humors as dissimilar as those of, say, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Maxwell Anderson. The seriousness of such people no one would question, although the agitations of a few, particularly in periods of crisis, for a specific good polity or a specific good economy sometimes interferes gravely with what should be their chief end: good art.

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The State ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Interpretative Approach

Of all the major episodes in Hegel's Rezeptionsgeschichte, British Hegelianism can seem the most foreign and outmoded, to have the least relevance to our current understanding of Hegel's thought. Even today, we are lead back to the Young Hegelians for the problems they pose in reading his work; we can sympathise with the concerns of Peirce, Royce and Dewey that drew them to him, and the interpretative picture they developed; we can take seriously the attempts by Croce and Gentile to bring about their “reforms”, given our contemporary ambivalence to his project; and we can see how in different ways the influence of Hegel on Kojève, Sartre, Lukács and the Frankfurt School have made some of his ideas central to our times. But few feel this sense of identification and illumination on encountering the work of Hegel's British interpreters from the turn of the century; rather, in their writings we seem to find a Hegel that is darker, more distant, more difficult for us to relate to contemporary concerns. This is not true in every respect, of course. In particular, several recent commentators have stressed how far it is possible to find here a reading and assessment of Hegel's political thought that does connect directly with many current issues, and that in this respect the thought of T H Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Henry Jones is not dead, either as a tradition within political philosophy, or as an interpretative approach to Hegel's theory of the state. Nonetheless, even those who seek to defend the importance of British Hegelianism in this regard clearly recognize that this is a fairly modest claim: for it fails to resurrect and revitalize the more fundamental aspect of the their encounter with Hegel, which was with his metaphysics – on which, as for Hegel, their political theories were based, rather than being primary in themselves. Those concerned with the political thought of the British Hegelians have not tried to take on this wider issue, leaving unchallenged the assumption that in their appropriation of his metaphysics, the British Hegelians have little to offer us either interpretatively or philosophically.

State and Society in Nineteenth-Century China

1955 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Michael
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Military Force ◽  
The Past ◽  
Official Position ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Strong Control ◽  
Imperial State

Communist China has broken with the Chinese cultural tradition, which it attacks and condemns. This break was prepared in part by the transformation of China during the declining years of imperial rule and in Republican times. But whereas this period was marked by the disintegration and disappearance of old institutions and some uncertainty about things to come, a new, rigid doctrine and social structure are now being introduced to integrate a new society within a totalitarian state. The old values have been discarded, but some of the organizational patterns of the past have been carried over, or have reappeared in the new system. The Communists are attempting to impose their system on Chinese society through the agency of an ideologically oriented elite which not only holds official position in government but also controls society itself. The degree of success which this system achieves may depend in part on the extent to which Chinese society has been prepared by its tradition to accept a centralized bureaucratic state working through a trained elite. In addition to helping us to assess the degree of preconditioning in China for Communist rule, an analytical study of imperial China may provide us with a greater understanding of the social and political techniques which a bureaucratic state employs, and which become of such special importance for a totalitarian government. What, then, were the key features of the imperial state and society which the Communists have retained or replaced in their own way, and what was the role played by the educated elite of the past?The imperial state aimed at a strong control over Chinese society. The struggle to keep an all-powerful central rule was the dominant concern of every Chinese dynasty. The center of all authority was the emperor and the court, the embodiment of the interests of the state. Serving the emperor was a group of officials, small in number compared with the size of the country and the population, and with the importance of the functions to be carried out. These officials represented the interests of the state as a whole—its concern with the well-being or acquiescence of all groups of the population. The last Chinese dynasty had in addition special support from a group which served the state without being a part of Chinese society. The Manchus had come as conquerors from the frontier of the Chinese empire, with their forces militarily organized into units known as “banners.” When the Manchu dynasty was set up, the Manchu banners were kept apart from the Chinese people and the bannermen remained an inner core of dynastic supporters used both as a military force and in key official positions. But these bannermen were only a small group, largely unqualified for the complex tasks of Chinese administration, and thus the Manchu dynasty, like its predecessors, had to recruit its state administration from Chinese society.

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