2. Definitions and justifications

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Myths ◽  
History Of

‘Definitions and justifications’ describes the history of political thought as a recent field of research. Historically, however, every society has formulated histories of political thought from the anodyne to the systematic. The past, where politics has been closely entwined with the worship of deities on whom the survival of a society depends, is also very relevant here. If national myths in culture justify combat or describe thwarted destinies in history, these beliefs will be reflected in the history of political thought. There is the perceived history of decline that can lead to the transformation of politics, which is manifested among nations that fell behind European states during the nineteenth century.

The Politics of Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Definition Of

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.

Indian and Western Political Thought: Coalescence or Clash?

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-761
Author(s):  
Norman D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Government ◽  
The Government ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Or History

American political scientists are still teaching courses labeled “Comparative Government” with little or no attention to the government and politics of the largest states of the world today, and they are still teaching something called “Political Theory” or “History of Political Thought” with no more than casual reference to the ideas underlying non-Western civilizations. The neglect of Indian polity is particularly striking and particularly serious, for apart from Western political thought it comprises probably the most extensive and most important body of political philosophy. Moreover, it is an integral part of the Hindu civilization of the past and the present. That civilization, as Radha-krishnan and Toynbee, among others, have pointed out, is alien to Western civilization, although there are many similarities; and the present encounter between the two civilizations comes at a time when both are in a period of crisis and transition. Such considerations are basic to an understanding of the stresses and strains in the relations of India with the Western world. Behind the tensions that arise between the United States and India, for example, lie differences in views of life and modes of thought and conduct, complicated by uncertainty, inner struggle, sensitivity, misunderstanding, and inexperience in playing new and difficult roles.

“ ’What’s Gone and What’s Past Help...’: Oakeshott and Strauss on Historical Explanation”

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Contemporary Practice

AbstractBecause of the public identification of both Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss as conservative political philosophers, there have been numerous comparisons of their political thought. Whatever similarities or differences that do exist between them, it is certainly true that they shared a keen interest in the history of political thought. However, they understood the character of history in widely divergent ways. In the following paper, I examine the way in which each writer understood the logic of historical explanation, and there are two primary reasons for wanting to do so. First, there have been few examinations of either writer’s arguments concerning historical understanding, despite the stature of both as historians of political theory. Second, the differences between Oakeshott and Strauss on history are central to two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the past, each of which has manifested itself in the contemporary practice of the history of political thought. I will argue that Strauss’s approach to the past is primarily a practical one and yields a concern with a legendary or mythical past constructed primarily to address contemporary political problems, and that his specific methodological propositions are either irrelevant to a specifically historical understanding of the past or inadequately argued and unconvincing. Conversely, I will suggest that Oakeshott offers a coherent and compelling account of the logic of historical understanding, which involves both a defense of the autonomy of historical explanation and an elaboration of the character of historical contextualism.

scholarly journals Liberalism's Historical Diversity

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
José María Rosales
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concept Theory ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Conceptual Research

Rooted in late seventeenth-century theories of rights, liberal ideas have brought forth since the nineteenth century a full-edged complex of traditions in moral, political, economic, social, and legal thought. Yet in historiographical debates such complexity is often blurred by presenting it under the uniform terms of a canon. Along with other methods, conceptual history is contributing to the rediscovery of liberalism's diversity. This group of articles compiles three conceptual studies on scarcely explored aspects of the history of liberalism in Denmark, Finland, and Hungary—countries whose political past has only occasionally figured in mainstream accounts of European liberalism. This introductory article is a methodological discussion of the rationale and forms in which liberalism's historical diversity is rendered through comparative conceptual research. After reflecting on the limits of the Anglophone history of political thought to grasp the plurality of liberal traditions, the article examines how transnational conceptual histories recast the understanding of liberalism as a concept, theory, ideology, and political movement.

scholarly journals In Defence of Political Parties: A Symposium on Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Bonotti ◽  
Jonathan White ◽  
Lea Leman Ypi ◽  
Gideon Calder ◽  
Mark Donovan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Single Text ◽  
History Of

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

Fortescue and the Political Theory of dominium

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

After more than five hundred years the political ideas of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) retain the potency which has ensured that they have seldom suffered total neglect, even if much of the interest they have aroused has been ideological in character. It was perhaps only in the 1930s that Fortescue first received appropriate attention in the context of the history of political thought; and the varied consideration devoted to him by scholars over the past quarter of a century suggests that the process of appraisal is by no means complete. Despite much discussion of Fortescue's basic political categories, it will be argued here, important dimensions of his thought have been fore-shortened – notably in regard to origins, basis, and character of political society as such. Again, some of the perspectives in which the fundamental concept of dominium has been presented may be misleading if they are applied to Fortescue's use of that concept without full recognition of his specific political purposes.

scholarly journals State Failure and Successful Leadership in Medieval India

2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110019
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
State Failure ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Successful Leadership ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medieval India

State failure has been an enduring topic in the history of political thought. This article will revisit modern debates on the characteristics of state failure and the factors conducive to successful leadership by focusing on political ideas that evolved in fourteenth-century India. I will discuss two works with the same title, i.e., Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī ( The History of Fīrūz Shāh) of the distinguished historians of the Delhi Sultanate period Ziyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 1285–1357) and Shams Sirāj ‘Afīf (d. 1399) about Sultans Muḥammad b. Tughluq and (his successor) Fīrūz Shāh as instantiations of state failure and good governance, respectively. The deployment of the concept of state failure has often been construed as an effort to impose a political straitjacket; the examination of authors like Baranī and ‘Afīf demonstrates the value of reflecting on lessons from history and exploring how societies in the past evolved their own patterns of thinking about effective or failed leadership.

"If you’re not a liberal when you’re young": to the political biography of Đorđe Stratimirović

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-69
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Novoseltseva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Biography ◽  
National Movement ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Revolution Of 1848

Đorđe Stratimirović (1822-1908) is a romantic fgure in the history of the Serbian national movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. A born leader and inspirer, he played an important role in the Revolution of 1848-1849 and remained in the memory of generations as People’s General. However, his further activities were thrown out of the history of political thought of the Serbs of the Austrian monarchy as altering from his earlier views. As a mature man, he - under the infuence of political circumstances - turned from a young active liberal into a leader of the conservative direction. In 1872, he developed a program of the future moderate party, which included cooperation with the government of the Kingdom of Hungary. Given the Serbs were rather rallying around the liberals, uncompromising fghters for national rights, Stratimirović’s choice was a wrong move.

The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cambridge School

‘A History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction’ explores the core concerns and questions in the history of political thought, considering the field as a branch of political philosophy and political science. The approaches of core theorists, such as Reinhart Koselleck, Leo Strauss, Michel Foucault, and the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock are important to this topic. There is ongoing relevance for current politics which can be seen by assessing the current relationship between political history, theory, and action. There are some areas of political thinking that tend to draw on history because of the comparisons and contrasts that the past can offer to contemporary dilemmas.

Urgent History

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Morefield
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Relations ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Radical Ideas

This article argues for the recovery and re-incorporation of lost voices and debates into the history of political thought by focusing on the issue of sovereignty. It begins by examining why such a narrow understanding of the canon has come to dominate the sub-discipline and argues for critical approaches that treat the past as a “contested terrain” rather than an unfolding plot. It then turns to early twentieth-century Britain as an example of an era when thinkers who have been largely forgotten by today’s political theorists argued loudly about the future of state sovereignty. It next focuses on a 1916 exchange of essays entitled “The Nature of the State in View of Its External Relations” by Delisle Burns, Bertrand Russell, and G.D.H. Cole, as an example of some of the most innovative and radical ideas to emerge from the period. The article concludes by arguing that re-engaging the work of these forgotten thinkers can broaden our conceptual horizons about sovereignty, speak to some of the most urgent issues of our time, and force open the concept of “the political” to radical reinterpretation.

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