SYMPATHY AND SEPARATION: BENJAMIN RUSH AND THE CONTAGIOUS PUBLIC

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
JASON FRANK

This essay considers Benjamin Rush's concern with the political organization of sympathy in post-Revolutionary America and how this concern shaped his response to the threat of post-Revolutionary “mobocracy.” Like many of his contemporaries, Rush worried about the contagious volatility of large public assemblies engendered by the Revolution. For Rush, regular gatherings of the people out of doors threatened to corrupt visions both of an orderly and emancipatory public sphere and of the virtuous and independent citizens required by republican government. Rush feared that the unregulated communication of passion between bodies gathered in public might unleash what Michael Meranze has called an “anarchy of reciprocal imitations.” It was in eighteenth-century theories of sympathy that this idea of contagious mimesis was most rigorously developed and most widely disseminated. Rush's medico-political understanding of sympathy, acquired during his years as a medical student in Edinburgh, provides an important framework for understanding his post-Revolutionary reform efforts, particularly those focused on the spatial choreography of the American citizenry.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Jacob

The main objective behind the parliamentary practice of Question Period is to ensure that the government is held accountable to the people. Rather than being a political accountability tool and a showcase of public discourse, these deliberations are most often displays of vitriolic political rhetoric. I will be focusing my research on the ways in which incivil political discourse permeates the political mediascape with respect to one instance in Canadian politics - the acquisition of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. I believe that incivility in the political discourse of Question Period must be understood within the mechanics of the contemporary public sphere. By interrogating the complexities of how political discourse is being mediatized, produced and consumed within the prevailing ideological paradigms, I identify some of the contemporary social, cultural and political practices that produce incivility in parliamentary discourse.


Author(s):  
T. C. Smout

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.


Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Fitts

According to the model of coalescence discussed in chapter 4, the political process of merging previously distinct communities should result in the integration of labor and collective identities. In this chapter, mid-eighteenth-century Catawba pottery and items of personal adornment are enlisted to assess whether this was the case for the people living around Nation Ford. Ceramic analysis is used to delineate constellations of practice, thereby providing information about the size of the work groups making pottery as well as the character of interaction between them. Next, patterns in the distribution of artifacts associated with mid-eighteenth-century Catawba adornment, including glass beads and metal fasteners, are examined in an effort to determine if they were being used to communicate generalized Southeastern Indian identities, matrilocal community identities, or both.


1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Smyth

ABSTRACTIreland in the 1690s was a protestant state with a majority catholic population. These protestants sometimes described themselves as ‘the king's Irish subjects’ or ‘the people of Ireland’, but rarely as ‘the Irish’, a label which they usually reserved for the catholics. In constitutional and political terms their still evolving sense of identity expressed itself in the assertion of Irish parliamentary sovereignty, most notably in William Molyneux's 1698 pamphlet, The case of Ireland's being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated. In practice, however, the Irish parliament did not enjoy legislative independence, and the political elite was powerless in the face of laws promulgated at Westminster, such as the i6gg woollen act, which were detrimental to its interests. One possible solution to the problem of inferior status lay in legislative union with England or Great Britain. Increasingly in the years before 1707 certain Irish protestant politicians elaborated the economic, constitutional and practical advantages to be gained from a union, but they also based their case upon an appeal to the shared religion and ethnicity of the sovereign's loyal subjects in the two kingdoms. In short the protestants insisted that they were English. This unionist episode thus illustrates the profoundly ambivalent character of protestant identity in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Ireland.


1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-9
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nedelsky

Most Americans take for granted the notion that the powers of government are circumscribed by individual rights. But this commonplace notion is, in fact, very complicated conceptually and poses difficult problems institutionally. This course explored both the conceptual and the institutional problems, from their origins to their contemporary manifestations. We began with the formation of the Constitution: the writing of the document in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, its ratification, the addition of the Bill of Rights in 1789, and the establishment of judicial review. As a starting point, I offered my own perspective through excerpts from my forthcoming book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy. My central argument is that the Framers' concern with protecting the rights of property distorted both their understanding of constitutionalism and the institutions they designed to implement that understanding. The Framers wanted to design a republican form of government based on the notion of consent by the governed, and thus some form of democratic (as we would call it today) representation. But the Federalists, whose views dominated the convention, also wanted to ensure that civil rights would be secure in the new republic. Property became the focus of their efforts to make the political rights implicit in republican government compatible with the security of civil rights. Unfortunately, their focus on the protection of unequal property, the property of the minority as threatened by the (future) propertyless majority, distorted their vision of the basic problem of protecting individual rights in a democracy. Their fears of the propertyless bred a focus on containing the political power of the people.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Nofriadi Nofriadi ◽  
Effendi Hasan ◽  
Ubaidullah Ubaidullah ◽  
Helmi Helmi

A political party is a political organization that adheres to and is based on a certain ideology or can also be interpreted as an organization that accommodates the interests and voices of the people who want their interests to be heard by the authorities. Political marketing and political strategy are the most important part of selling and getting a positive response from the community so that people support certain parties or certain candidates. The research method with a qualitative approach, this strategy or method of winning has been thought out and also planned long before the election day arrives, but this strategy is also inseparable from the cooperation and contribution of the political parties it carries in achieving common goals. there are several ways and strategies carried out by the PDI-P party in the 2019-2024 period and it became one of the extraordinary events so that the PDI-P party won with the most votes. The strategy carried out by the PDI-P party in Central Aceh Regency is the collaboration between legislative candidates and the community. Cooperation carried out by the PDI-P party legislative candidates is one very good way to do it, so that work plans through the voice of the community can be carried out easily because of this collaboration. The next strategy is to improve good communication with the community, increase socialization, and have a competition event held by the PDI-P party to the community. With the competition event held by the PDI-P party legislative candidates to the community, so that people know more about the nature, character, behavior and know more about who the legislative candidates are. As well as improving the system and the way the PDI-P party's legislative candidates campaign openly and privately


Author(s):  
Yair Mintzker

This introductory chapter discusses how the historical figure of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer—also known as Jew Süss—is incredibly elusive, and any understanding of him must begin with the political and legal regimes under which he lived and died. Oppenheimer spent almost his entire life in the southwest corner of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In the eighteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was the general political organization that connected the hundreds of more or less sovereign polities in German-speaking central Europe. Especially important for understanding Oppenheimer's case is the fact that the Empire's members shared a common legal system scholars term “inquisitorial.”


Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Fitts

In the mid-eighteenth century, the towns of the Catawba Nation were located near Nation Ford, where the main trading path that traversed the southern Appalachian Piedmont crossed the Catawba River. By serving as auxiliaries for the English colonies—particularly South Carolina—Catawba men from these communities had achieved notoriety and helped maintain the political autonomy of the Nation. However, this militaristic strategy precipitated a set of processes that transformed the conditions of daily life near Nation Ford. Two of these processes were settlement aggregation and the incorporation of native refugee communities. This book examines whether the political process of centralization through which refugees were incorporated into the Catawba Nation was accompanied by parallel changes in economic organization, particularly with regard to foodways. It also examines the impacts of settlement aggregation on the formulation of community identities. By combining information from historic documents and previously unpublished data from Catawba archaeological sites, this study provides access to the daily lives of the people living around Nation Ford during the mid-eighteenth century. Archaeological materials provide details concerning the activities of Catawba women, who played a large role in making pottery, farming, and collecting wild foods. When a food security crisis struck the Nation between 1755 and 1759, it was these women who worked to overcome the long-term effects of Catawba militarism. Ultimately, this study highlights the double-edged nature of strategies available to American Indian groups seeking to maintain political autonomy in early colonial period contexts.


Author(s):  
Benson Eluma ◽  
Yinka Olarinmoye

For democracy to become the political culture in Nigeria, the discourse of politics has to be conducted through expressive mechanisms owned by the people. In the absence of popular ownership of political language, the road to disconnect, apathy and disenfranchisement lies wide open. We take the view that the problem of politics is located squarely in the public sphere and that discourse is the activity that characterizes the public sphere. We raise the point that the sociolinguistic environment in the country does not encourage whole masses of Nigerians to talk politics in languages in which they can freely articulate their positions and present their aspirations. We posit that citizens are disenfranchised and rendered inaudible and invisible to the extent to which they cannot undertake political discourse with an appreciable measure of linguistic ease. The benefits of diversity are endangered as many people and entire groups in Nigeria lose the means of expressing their political views and opinions, let alone political projects and programmes. Invoking Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, we make a blanket case for the viability of each and every extant language in Nigeria for political discourse if such usage is actively promoted among their respective communities of users.


Author(s):  
E. B. Saktaganova ◽  
◽  
Y. Y. Sailaubai ◽  
N. D. Chetin ◽  
◽  
...  

This article examines activities of a lawyer, translator Seidazym Kulmukhameduly Kadyrbayev and his training and academic performance under the tsarist government. He received a pedagogical education but began his career as a translator in the legal system. And this is no accident, as at that time the traditional way of life of the Kazakh people was undergoing changes. His career advancement was studied with the help of archival data. A review of the scientific literature was made for a more detailed study of the topic of the sociopolitical life and Seidazym Kadyrbayev’s activities. There was carried out a comparative analysis of information from archives and scientific literature of Russia and Kazakhstan. The results of the analysis reveal facts from Seidazym Kadyrbayev’s life that have been unknown to the public. It was also revealed that friendship with Kazakh intelligence was the basis for his further development and cooperation with political forces aimed at protecting the political and civil interests of the people at the beginning of the XX century, during the revival of political activity in the empire. The article assesses S. Kadyrbayev’s role as an active member of the political organization «Alash-Orda» and his ability to advance in the legal field, to be a competent and qualified employee, despite the lack of special legal knowledge. Seidazym Kadyrbayev contributed to the legal protection of the illiterate population by translating several laws from Russian into Kazakh and adapting them to the Kazakh way of life. He also translated into Kazakh several works in the field of jurisprudence.


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