scholarly journals Law’s Comprehensiveness and Sovereign Leadership: On the Juridico-political Thinking of Ayatollah Khomeini and Carl Schmitt

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Leila Brännström
2020 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-234
Author(s):  
Vincent Seminck

Abstract Nietzsche versus Schmitt. Agonal versus political thinkingThis article concerns the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche by Carl Schmitt with regard to the concept of the agon. In the 1933 edition of Der Begriff des Politischen Schmitt states that there is a ‘great metaphysical opposition’ (große metaphysische Gegensatz) between his political thinking and agonal thinking, the latter of which is associated with Nietzscheans like Alfred Baeumler and Ernst Jünger. It is argued that this metaphysical opposition is best explained in light of Schmitt’s intellectual development from decisionist to concrete order thinker. Moreover, it is argued that the reception of Nietzsche’s concept of the agon by Schmitt took place through Baeumler. Nietzsche’s concept of the agon is best described as a measured productive struggle between opponents who are approximately equal to each other. In the reception of Nietzsche’s concept of the agon a shift of focus occurs from a struggle between individuals to a struggle between collectives. At the same time the social character of the agon is lost, which was expressed in the thought that the individual could only develop his talents in a struggle with others.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 46-63
Author(s):  
Vidar Thorsteinsson

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 438-473
Author(s):  
M. Heri Fadoil

Abstract: Abdul Karim Soroush judges that religious rule is incorrect assessment of the application of Islamic jurisprudence. In a religious society, Islamic jurisprudence obtains the right to govern. It is, of course, necessary to establish a kind of Islamic jurisprudence-based religious rule. Soroush firmly rejects it because such interpretation is too narrow. As for democracy, Soroush argues that the system used is not necessarily equal to that of the Western. On the contrary, Ayatollah Khomeini’s thoughts on religious rule are reflected in the so called wilayat al-faqih. It is a religious scholar-based government. Democracy, according to him, is the values of Islam itself, which is able to represent the level of a system to bring to the country’s progress. Principally, there are some similarities between the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini and those of Abdul Karim Soroush in term of religiosity. They assume that it is able to sustain the religious system of government. The difference between both lies on the application of religiosity itself. Ayatollah Khomeini applies the concept of a religious scholar-based government, while Abdul Karim Soroush rejects the institutionalization of religion in the government or state.Keywords: Governance, democracy, Abdul Karim Soroush, Ayatollah Khomeini


Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.


Author(s):  
Ethan Taubes ◽  
Tanaquil Taubes ◽  
Florian Meinel
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 1827-1833
Author(s):  
Blagica Kotovchevska ◽  
Blagoj Conev

Critical geopolitics examines geopolitical practices in order to understand geographical and political thinking and how the global policy practices are affected. It examines the geopolitical tradition, referring to the historical and geographical context of ideas about geography and politics. In a wider sense, it aims to critically examine everything related to geography and politics. It gives us an idea how the practice of world politics is implemented through different geopolitical arrangements and how our worldview is based on these premises. The analyzes presented through the research of critical geopolitics aimed to create a complex and accurate geopolitical picture, that is, a geopolitical mirror in the function of an essential deconstruction of the geopolitical discourses that create stereotypes for the actors involved in a certain conflict, for the states and the regions where the conflict takes place, that is, a creation of afalse geopolitical picture or a geopolitical mosaic.


Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter

The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.


Author(s):  
David Boucher

The aim of this book is not to trace the changing fortunes of the interpretation of one of the most sophisticated and famous political philosophers who ever lived, but to glimpse here and there his place in different contexts, and how his interpreters see their own images reflected in him, or how they define themselves in contrast to him. The main claim is that there is no Hobbes independent of the interpretations that arise from his appropriation in these various contexts and which serve to present him to the world. There is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes ‘really meant’, despite the numerous claims to the contrary. He is almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read. This contention is justified with reference to hermeneutics, and particularly the theories of Gadamer, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, contending that through a process of ‘distanciation’ Hobbes’s writings have been appropriated and commandeered to do service in divergent contexts such as philosophical idealism; debates over the philosophical versus historical understanding of texts; and in ideological disputations, and emblematic characterizations of him by various disciplines such as law, politics, and international relations. The book illustrates the capacity of a text to take on the colouration of its surroundings by exploring and explicating the importance of contexts in reading and understanding how and why particular interpretations of Hobbes have emerged, such as those of Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott, or the international jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.


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