The English Crisis of 1297 in the Light of French Experience

1979 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Wood

Among the familiar sights crowding the landscape of English history from the dooms of Ine to that crown plucked from a hawthorn bush at Bosworth, none is more deeply cherished than the crisis of 1297 and the “Confirmation of the Charters” to which it gave rise. For, despite all the sharp differences over detail that the documentation for this crisis has engendered, scholars have shown remarkable agreement in seeing it as the one defeat suffered by Edward I in a long and notably successful reign. And to that defeat they have attributed great constitutional significance. Stubbs set the pattern, calling the “result singularly in harmony with what seems from history and experience to be the natural direction of English progress,” and Wilkinson is only one among the many who have recently elaborated on that theme:The crisis of 1297 … placed a definite check on the tendencies which Edward I had shown, to ignore the deep principles of the constitution under stress of the necessities which confronted the nation … It was a landmark in the advance of the knights … toward political maturity. It helped to establish the tradition of co-operation and political alliance between the knights and the magnates, on which a good deal of the political future of England was to depend …. What the opposition achieved, in 1297, was a great vindication of the ancient political principle of government by consent ….

Semiotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (224) ◽  
pp. 313-336
Author(s):  
Pietro Restaneo

AbstractThroughout his life, Jurij Lotman lived at the crossroad between different worlds, ages, and cultures. The many authors, cultures, and ideas that shaped his thought and influenced his theories are scattered at either side of countless geographical, political, and cultural borders, beginning with the one that separates “Russian culture” from “European culture,” porous and ambiguous as any boundary.The task of reconstructing how Lotman’s ideas came to being, how they shifted their meaning as their context shifted, is more and more a crucial task not only for the historian. Many Lotmanian concepts, first and foremost that of semiosphere, are acquiring major relevance not only for semiotics itself and its branches, such as the rising political semiotics, but also for many neighboring disciplines, such as cultural studies and political sciences. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of the meaning of Lotman’s ideas could be of value also for the applied semiotician or the political analyst.The present paper is the result of research started in the Lotman Archives in Tallin, Estonia. Through an analysis of archival material, it aims at reconstructing the origins and meaning of the most political tropes of Lotman’s theories, especially what I will call his theory of the political subject. In the first part, I will argue that, in order to understand this political aspect of Lotman, it is necessary to take into consideration the intellectual debates inside which the author started his intellectual journey in 1930s–1940s Soviet Russia, and how he sought answers to those debates in the works of G. W. Leibniz.In the final part of the paper, I will try to show how this reconstruction of Lotman’s history could contribute to the contemporary debate in semiotics and other connected disciplines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
Arjun Tremblay

Jacob Levy describes three variants of the separation of powers in the 31st Annual McDonald Lecture in Constitutional Studies, only one of which is germane to this reflection. The first variant he describes is based solely on the independence of the judiciary from both the executive and legislative branches of governments; consequently, this variant encompasses both presidential and parliamentary systems under its conceptual ambit. Another variant, which Levy attributes to Montesquieu, envisages the separation of powers between executive, judicial, and legislative branches as a way of allowing for the “pooled”1 rule of “the one” (i.e. monarch), “the few” (i.e. aristocrats), and “the many” (i.e. the people). Levy also describes a distinctly American variant of the separation of powers undergirded by a system of checks and balances. This variant was designed to ensure “mutual monitoring between executive and legislative”2 and it vests the legislative branch with the power to impeach the executive in order to “maintain effective limits on the political power and the political ambition of the president.”3


Author(s):  
Jaime Rodríguez Matos

This chapter focuses on the concept of time at the heart of political modernity, particularly as it is embodied in various phases of the Cuban Revolution. It sets out a way of understanding a perhaps unexpected continuity in the concept of politics underwriting the Revolutionary State across different moments in its history. The chapter shows to what extent the opposition of the one and the many, the one hegemonic time of Capitalist modernity and the multiple peripheral temporalities that confront and fracture it, only serves to occlude the metaphysical structure of modern political time as a whole. The chapter is concerned, on the one hand, with the retroactive changes that obtain in our image of politics once we take into account recent developments such as the period that follows the fall of the USSR and the contemporary moment of “normalizing” relations between the US and Cuba. On the other hand, the chapter is concerned with the various theoretical models available to think the political temporalities at issue.


2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 199-218
Author(s):  
Gerhard Van Den Heever

AbstractIn this essay an overview of the theoretical issues pertaining to the collection of essays assembled is given. Addressing the issue of dizversity in religions and in the study of religion the argument is made that religions as lived phenomena constitute discursive formations in which diversity as a problem is an index of encounter. However it is especially the way this strategy of reducing the many to the one in the history of theorising religion that comes in view. In this context, the political nature of religion as discourse and the discourse of the study of religion is discussed with particular reference to the history of Christianisation of South Africa, religion in education, and the history of theorising religion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard R. John

What is the relationship between the corporation and American democracy? This provocative and timely question informs the ten essays that Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak have assembled in a tightly edited volume that has attracted a good deal of attention from specialists in the history of U.S. public policy. In an age in which the political influence of big business has once again thrust itself onto the political agenda, this collection should also prove to be of great interest to the many historians, legal scholars, and jurists who are trying to understand the long and complex relationship between business, law, and the state.


Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

The introduction gives a critical rereading of the historiographical debate regarding the processes of state building at the end of the Middle Ages, highlighting its limitations in the lack of interest shown in the ideal reasons for the political conflict. This then gives rise to the interpretative proposal that forms the basis of the present work, which aims to shed light on the many conflicts that, in relation to legitimacy of power, tore medieval society apart. With this in mind, the introduction focuses on an analysis of the sources that are potentially useful for the study of these particular aspects, on the risks underlying their use, and on the expected results. The last part discusses the structure of the work and justifies the decision to divide it into two, clearly divided parts, dedicated to the communal age on the one hand and the post-communal era on the other.


Itinerario ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Heesterman

When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.


Polar Record ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rip Bulkeley

Like many great institutions, the Antarctic Treaty system has its own creation myth, according to which it was brought into being by the Antarctic science programme of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). As myths are prone to do, this one combines both an important truth and a good deal of misinformation. After fifty years in which it has shamelessly flattered the earth scientists, who are understandably rather fond of it, and undervalued the many non-scientists who advocated the internationalisation of Antarctica from 1910 onwards, it is time to lay it to rest. But before summarising the intermeshing contributions of private citizens, diplomats and other officials, and scientists, we should first take note of a different factor altogether, political geography.


Author(s):  
Richard Conway

When the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff proposed a new definition of Mesoamerica in a landmark study from 1943, the first common characteristics he identified were technological and agricultural: the use of the digging-stick (coa) and “the construction of gardens by reclaiming land from lakes (chinampas).” For thousands of years, Native peoples across Mesoamerica drew on their technological innovations to devise bountiful kinds of farming that have been as diverse as the environments in which they were created. All of their farming systems required some degree of intervention in nature, be it through domesticating plants, tilling the soil, or altering the physical environment by making terraces and harnessing water supplies. On an essential level, then, technology and agriculture went hand in hand. Of the many kinds of Mesoamerican farming, the one that arguably modified the environment the most was a distinctive kind of wetland agriculture in which Nahuas—or Aztecs, the speakers of the Nahuatl language—constructed raised garden beds, known as chinampas, in the shallow, freshwater lakes of the Basin of Mexico. At the heart of this zone of wetland agriculture was the ancient city of Xochimilco. There the raised gardens filled the surrounding lake of the same name, and eventually came to cover a vast area of some 120 square kilometers. The construction and the intensive cultivation of the chinampas required a considerable investment of time and effort, a good deal of technical expertise, and the mastery of specialist skills and knowledge, including hydrology and engineering so as to manage water levels in the lakes through complex irrigation works. The intensive farming of the fertile, well-irrigated gardens, which could be cultivated year round, yielded sizable harvests of maize and other crops. So productive was chinampa agriculture that scholars have considered it one of the most abundant kinds of farming ever devised. As a technological innovation and environmental adaptation, the chinampas were crucial to changes in Mexican history: they generated surpluses sufficient for urbanization and the rise of Tenochtitlan, one of the early modern world’s great cities, as well as the expansion of the Aztec Empire. The chinampas remained important for the provisioning of the capital long after the Spanish conquest, and in spite of the desiccation of the Basin of Mexico, they are still cultivated in a few places today.


Author(s):  
Adam T. Smith

In the Late Bronze Age, the polities in the South Caucasus developed a new assemblage directed toward transforming charismatic authority into formal sovereignty. This chapter examines the assembling of this political machine, which drew the civilization and war machines into an extensive apparatus of rule, one that resolved the paradox at the heart of the joint operation of both. This novel political machine did not supersede the war and civilization machines. Rather, the political machine cloaked their contradictions, allowing the relation of the one to the many to persist as a “mystery” of sovereignty. The political machine not only provided the instruments of judicial ordering and bureaucratic regulation but it also transformed the polity itself into an object of devotion, securing not simply the surrender of subjects but their active commitment to the reproduction of sovereignty.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document