Jus Tempus in the Magna Carta: The Sovereignty of Time in Modern Politics and Citizenship

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 463-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Cohen

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectivelyjus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through whichjus tempusbecame a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points aboutjus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle ofjus tempusis applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA BECKER

AbstractIn the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-225
Author(s):  
Fabien Montcher

The trajectory of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) demonstrates how an Iberian intellectual who was well attuned to the composite governmental structure of the Iberian empire (c.1580–c.1640) strengthened the ties between state communication systems and learned communities during the Late Renaissance. This article highlights the political valence of historical knowledge that was gathered and distributed throughout the Republic of Letters with emphasis on the code-switching of a scholar who styled himself differently across learned communities depending on his political circumstances, interests, and interlocutors. The study of Nogueira’s itinerary demonstrates the need for a history of early modern scholarship that takes into account the ways that early modern politics and state communication systems were connected by learned networks.


Author(s):  
Carolyn James

Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, this book analyses the marriage of Isabella d’Este, one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance, and her less well-known husband, Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of the small northern Italian principality of Mantua (r. 1484–1519). It offers fresh insights into the nature of political marriages during the early modern period by investigating the forces which shaped the lives of an aristocratic couple who, within several years of their wedding, had to deal with the political challenges posed by the first conflicts of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) and, later, the scourge of the Great Pox. The study humanizes a relationship that was organized for entirely strategic reasons, but had to be inhabited emotionally if it was to produce the political and dynastic advantages that had inspired the match. The letter exchanges of Isabella and Francesco over twenty-nine years, as well as their correspondence with relatives and courtiers, show how their personal rapport evolved and how they cooperated in the governance of a princely state. Hitherto examined mainly from literary and religious perspectives and on the basis of legal evidence and prescriptive literature, early modern marriage emerges here in vivid detail, offering the reader access to aspects of the lived experience of an elite Renaissance spousal relationship. The book also contributes to our understanding of the history of emotions, of politics and military conflict, of childbirth, childhood, and family life, and of the history of disease and medicine.


Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marinozzi

In the early 1980s a systematic investigation was begun by G. Fornaciari and his staff of a series of mummies from central and southern Italy, and in particular of important Renaissance remains. The study of a substantial number of artificial mummies has shed light on the human embalming techniques connected with the methods and procedures described by medical and non-medical authors in the early modern period. This has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the art of mummification, from the ‘clyster’ techniques to the partial or total evisceration of the corpse, to the intravascular injection of drying and preserving liquors. In addition to the bodies of Aragonese princes and members of the Neapolitan nobility, interred in the Basilica of San Domenico in Naples are the remains of important French personages dating to the modern age. Among the tombs arranged in two parallel rows to the right of the balcony are four sarcophagi containing the bodies of the wife and three children of Jean Antoine Michel Agar, who served as the Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples from 1809 to 1815. The type of wrapping used for the corpses of the children presents strong analogies to those of ancient Egyptian mummies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Piotr Kuligowski

This article presents a conceptual history of representation in the political debates of the Polish émigré community in the period 1832–1846/48. As I argue, while the concept was present in the output of all political environments of the Polish Great Emigration, there were more discrepancies than similarities about how to understand it. As a result of debates about what the Polish diaspora in exile actually was and who had the right to represent it, the concept became a part and parcel of political frays. In this way, the right to use it—and consequently to represent the whole Polish community and Polish nation as well—occupied a central place in the evolution of the concept of representation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Irvan Setiawan

Tradisi lisan Maca Syekh di Kabupaten Pandeglang Provinsi Banten merupakan salah satu bentuk pengajaran yang memiliki tujuan untuk mendengar dan memahami riwayat hidup sosok Syekh Abdul Qadir Jaelani sebagai salah satu tokoh penyebar agama Islam. Hal menarik untuk diteliti dari tradisi lisan Maca Syekh adalah adanya sebuah proses akulturasi dengan melibatkan unsur budaya, agama, dan unsur politik untuk kemudian menghasilkan sebuah produk akulturasi yang dapat bertahan hingga kini. Penelitian deskriptif dengan mengacu pada data kualitatif merupakan pilihan tepat mengingat sumber data yang dicari adalah informasi essay yang banyak membutuhkan analisa kualitatif. Dari hasil analisa diketahui bahwa akulturasi dari tradisi lisan Maca Syekh di Kabupaten Pandeglang Provinsi Banten terbagi menjadi dua yaitu akulturasi tradisi dan akulturasi kebahasaan. Unsur politik dideskripsikan secara singkat karena hanya melibatkan penggunaan huruf Arab dalam penulisan Maca Syekh yang pada masa Penjajahan menjadi sebuah hal yang dianggap mewakili kalangan modernis. Maca Syekh oral tradition in Pandeglang Regency, Banten Province, is one form of teaching that aims to hear and understand the life history of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jaelani. An interesting thing to examine from Maca Shaykh's oral tradition is the existence of an acculturation process involving elements of culture, religion, and political elements to then produce an acculturation product that can survive until now. Descriptive research with reference to qualitative data is the right choice considering the source of the data sought is essay information which requires a lot of qualitative analysis. From the results of the analysis, it is known that the acculturation of the Maca Shaykh oral tradition in Pandeglang Regency, Banten Province, is divided into two: traditional acculturation and linguistic acculturation. The political element is described briefly because it only involves the use of Arabic letters in the Maca Syekh writing which in the colonial period became something considered to represent modernists.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavel Karabuschenko

This paper presents the history of the development of the Russophobic tradition of the collective West, which it used in its political and ideological interests. Russophobia is a chimera of Western propaganda, based on myths about the superiority of Western civilization and the chronic backwardness of Russians. The tradition indicated by the author is assessed as a kind of pseudo-ideological chimera, which permanently arises in the national enemies and geopolitical competitors of Russia as the main ideological means in the general mechanism of deterring the imaginary "Russian threat". It is known that Russia itself has improved the political space of Eastern Europe and Asia, in accordance with the understanding of its goals and objectives. And most often, it was this independence that caused discontent and indignation of her opponents. It is intended for all those who are interested in the political history and modern politics of Russia.


Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.


Author(s):  
Barbara Henry

Francesco De Sanctis was a literary critic and historian of Italian literature. He is best remembered for his major work, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), and as a Hegel scholar, reformer and professor at the University of Naples, politician and militant patriot. Commentators are unanimous that De Sanctis’s biographical and intellectual life comprised two inseparable strands, the literary and the political. For this reason all his writings, even the more narrowly literary critical ones, must be read from the point of view of his commitment to promoting the moral and institutional renewal of Italian society. His Storia della letteratura italiana is the ‘civil history’ of Italy. De Sanctis, actively militant on both the Right and Left, defined his position as ‘moderate left-wing, in politics as in art’.


Grotiana ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Laetitia Ramelet

Grotius (1583–1645) is now widely acknowledged as an important figure in early modern contractual and consensual theories of political authority and legitimacy. However, as his thoughts on these debates are disseminated throughout his works rather than systematically ordained, it remains difficult to assess what, if anything, constitutes his distinctive mark. In the present paper, I will argue that his works contain a combination of two conceptual elements that have come to constitute a salient characteristic of early modern contract and consent theories: first, a strong obligation to keep one’s promises, and second, an account of perfect promises as transferrals of rights. In the political sphere, this means that citizens who have promised their obedience to the authorities are obligated to keep faith, which provides a solid foundation for political obligations. In addition, their promise implies that authorities receive the right to rule over them, which accounts for the legitimacy of these authorities’ power.


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