scholarly journals Building power to change the world: The political thought of the German council movement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Klein
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World

Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evonne Levy
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Art History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Central Argument

<P>This study in intellectual history places the art historical concept of the Baroque amidst world events, political thought, and the political views of art historians themselves. Exploring the political biographies and writings on the Baroque (primarily its architecture) of five prominent Germanophone figures, Levy gives a face to art history, showing its concepts arising in the world. From Jacob Burckhardt’s still debated "Jesuit style" to Hans Sedlmayr’s <I>Reichsstil</I>, the Baroque concepts of these German, Swiss and Austrian art historians, all politically conservative, and two of whom joined the Nazi party, were all took shape in reaction to immediate social and political circumstances. </P> <P>A central argument of the book is that basic terms of architectural history drew from a long established language of political thought. This vocabulary, applied in the formalisms of Wölfflin and Gurlitt, has endured as art history’s unacknowledged political substrate for generations. Classic works, like Wölfflin’s <I>Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe</I> are interpreted anew here, supported by new documents from the papers of each figure.</P>

History, Politics, Law

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Order ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Many

Historians of political thought and international lawyers have both expanded their interest in the formation of the present global order. History, Politics, Law is the first express encounter between the two disciplines, juxtaposing their perspectives on questions of method and substance. The essays throw light on their approaches to the role of politics and the political in the history of the world beyond the single polity. They discuss the contrast between practice and theory as well as the role of conceptual and contextual analyses in both fields. Specific themes raised for both disciplines include statehood, empires and the role of international institutions, as well as the roles of economics, innovation and gender. The result is a vibrant cross-section of contrasts and parallels between the methods and practices of the two disciplines, demonstrating the many ways in which both can learn from each other.

John Adams's Machiavellian Moment

1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Bradley Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Epistemology

John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

Prophet of a Partitioned World: Ferdinand Fried, “Great Spaces,” and the Dialectics of Deglobalization, 1929–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Joshua Derman
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Nationalism ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
The World

Historical scholarship on “great spaces,” a central concept in the political thought of Nazi Germany, has previously focused on legal debates while neglecting important economic contexts. The journalist Ferdinand Fried deserves to be considered one of the major economic theorists of “great spaces” in the Weimar, Nazi, and early postwar eras. Fried argued that the world economy was inexorably passing from globalization through economic nationalism to a reconstituted “world economy of great spaces.” Deglobalization, as he depicted it, was a global experience that produced similar economic and political outcomes around the world. His writings anticipated and inspired Nazi propaganda aimed at legitimizing German hegemony in Europe. His ideas, and their reception, illustrate how dialectical and global visions of history have resonated with conservative intellectuals during crises of the world economy.

scholarly journals ‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 28-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Thiele
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constructive Approach ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The World

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that ‘[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.’ What are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze's political thought and for a most timely conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze's rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari's demand for a ‘belief in this world’ the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after this ‘empiricist conversion’ can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics that does justice to a plane of immanence ‘immanent only to itself’.

scholarly journals Youth Movements, Civil Disobedience, and the Skandalon of the Ecological Crisis

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. e38231
Author(s):  
Nuno Pereira Castanheira
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Youth Movements ◽  
Current State ◽  
The World ◽  
Refusal To Participate ◽  
Life On Earth

The ecological crisis is endangering life on Earth as we know it, giving rise to multiple protests, strikes and marches around the world, most of them lead by children and teenagers. The aim of this paper is to argue for the legitimacy of the presence of children and teenagers in political life in the current state of the ecological crisis through a seemingly paradoxical kind of participation: civil disobedience, i.e. refusal to participate. The paper will start by addressing the need to think the ecological crisis and analyze its origins; it will then consider the significance of the role performed by children and teenagers in the political stances regarding the crisis on the basis of Hannah Arendt’s ontological-political thought.

International Society in Victorian Political Thought

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
International Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
The Press ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
The World

This chapter analyzes the overlapping ideas about international society to be found in the political thought of three leading late Victorian liberal thinkers: T. H. Green (1836–82), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). In so doing it focuses on what Stefan Collini has labeled the world of the “public moralists”—the world, that is, of influential and well-connected British intellectuals who flourished in the universities, in Parliament, and in the press. Despite their manifold political and philosophical differences, Green, Spencer, and Sidgwick shared and articulated complementary visions of the past, present, and future of international society. This was not simply a happy coincidence of views—it was an understanding of international politics generated from within their distinctive intellectual systems. They simultaneously reflected and contributed to late Victorian liberal thinking about international affairs.

Politics and Interstate Relations in the World of Early GreekPoleis: Homer and Beyond

Antichthon ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt A. Raaflaub
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
The World ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Do So

This essay is part of a larger project concerned with determining how historians today can use the evidence of the Homeric epics in order to gain a better understanding of the evolution of early Greek society—but do so responsibly, that is, in ways that are adequate to the epics' nature as poetic and cultural documents surviving from a specific time and social context. Elsewhere I have discussed Homer and history, the role of thepolis, warfare and military organisation, and political thought in Homer, as well as ‘Homeric society’ in general and the problem of its historicity. Here I want to take a close look at interstate relations (sections I and III) and the political sphere (section II). I choose as my point of departure some of the views which M.I. Finley expressed inThe World of Odysseus—a book that is now more than forty years old, still illuminating and indispensable but partly outdated.

The Political Significance of Luck: A Thucydidean Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292095214
Author(s):  
Daniel Schillinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
The Political ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Ronald Dworkin ◽  
The World ◽  
Constitutive Principle ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Final Speech

Contemporary authorities invoke luck to explain the arbitrariness of economic success, to emphasize our shared vulnerability to disaster, and to urge more generous policy, legislation, and governance. According to Robert Frank, Martha Nussbaum, and Ronald Dworkin, for example, extreme bad luck can befall individuals no matter what they know or do. By redefining luck as a psychological phenomenon (rather than as a constitutive principle of the world), this article challenges the contemporary consensus. My approach to luck arises out of my engagement with the political thought of Thucydides. Whereas influential interpreters present Thucydides as a witness to the crushing power of bad luck, and whereas they criticize Thucydides’ Pericles for being insufficiently deferential to luck, I revisit and defend Pericles’ skeptical and psychological approach to luck, and I argue that Thucydides shares this approach, at least in the main. The pathological intellectual and emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck diagnosed by Pericles in his final speech recur throughout the History and influence the evolution of the whole war. Going beyond Pericles, Thucydides shows that the appeal of luck arises out of a human need to explain, beautify, or lament what is merely natural necessity, haphazard coincidence, or awful suffering.

The new nomos of the earth and the channelling of violence

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignas Kalpokas
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Direct Violence

This article develops a theoretical explanation of the patterns of violence and distribution of conflict in contemporary world. It combines the international political thought of Carl Schmitt with an exploration of the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and tensions over the South China Sea in order to envisage a new spatialisation of the world (‘nomos’ in Schmittian parlance) based around Großräume – ‘large spaces’, that is, powerful agglomerations of states – and peripheral lands in-between. It is thereby stipulated that while direct violence between Großräume is limited (or nonexistent), inter- Großraum competition is channelled towards the periphery, and the three cases presented in this article demonstrate how the exact nature and means of conflict depend on a particular inter- Großraum alignment. This reconceptualisation of the international order is presented in the wider context of Schmitt’s political thought, particularly his notions of the political, sovereignty and the exception in order to elucidate the latent processes behind the formation of state groupings and their willingness to engage in conflict beyond their borders.

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