Beyond Origins

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Common View ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Common

From classical stories of divine lawgivers to contemporary ones of Founding Fathers and constitutional beginnings, foundings have long been synonymous with singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. In constitutional democracies, this common view is particularly attractive, with original founding events, actors, and ideals invoked time and again in everyday politics as well as in times of crisis to remake the state and unify citizens. Beyond Origins challenges this view of foundings, explaining how it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Engaging with cases of founding through a series of “travels” across political traditions and historical time, this book evaluates the uses and abuses of this view to expose in its links among foundings, origins, and authority a troubling political foundationalism. It argues that by ascribing to foundings a universally binding, unifying, and transcendent authority, the common view works to obscure the fraught political struggles involved in actual foundings and refoundings. In the wake of this challenge, the book develops an alternate approach. Centered on a political view of foundings, this framework recasts foundations as far from authoritatively settled or grounded and redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. It looks to actors whose complicated relations to pure origins both reveal and capitalize on the underauthorized and contingent nature of foundations to enact foundational change. By examining such actors—from Haitian revolutionaries to Latin American presidents and social movements—the book prods a reconsideration of foundings on different terms: as a contestatory, ongoing dimension of political life.

Spirited Motivation and the Novelty of Reason

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-138
Author(s):  
Josh Wilburn
Keyword(s):  
Moral Education ◽  
Early Treatment ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Common View ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The Common

Chapter 5 examines “early” works that anticipate the Republic’s account of the role of spirited motivations in social and political life and the related challenges of promoting proper moral education and civic unity. It surveys Plato’s early depictions of traditional moral education and popular values, as well as his early treatment of political unity, civic strife, and the ethics of helping friends and harming enemies. The chapter also argues against the common view that the spirited part of the soul represented the main innovation of Plato’s tripartite theory. Rather, it suggests, the reasoning part was his contribution to received folk psychology and ethics, and that is why “early” dialogues focus so heavily on intellectual and rational aspects of human psychology.

Discussant

1992 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-51
Author(s):  
Natalia Sadomskaya
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Interesting Article ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Prague Spring ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Problems

I'll start with culture. Today we have been speaking principally about culture in the republics. I would like to address the common problems facing the post-Soviet republics. I agree with Edward Allworth that there is a crisis or trauma not only for the national intellectuals, but for intellectuals as a whole. This is especially a trauma for intellectuals who were supported by the state. They had very comfortable lives inside the institutes and the cultural unions. Now these privileges are disappearing. Previously intellectuals’ lives were characterized by a kind of self-adoration of their positions, of their purity, of their disengagement from political life, and this stance is now also in crisis. Recently, I read a very interesting article which said that today nobody wants to engage in the escapist literature that was once so popular. Nobody wants to hear about themes of history, of Egypt, the Silver Age, and so on because politics is now the hot topic in cultural life. A similar situation occurred in the Prague Spring, and we know that the results in this case were very fruitful. Havel, who was a very sophisticated journal writer, became a very contemporary, very active, and essential writer. And I consider this crisis, this struggle of intellectuals, a good sign. The people who will survive will be those whom other people read. Conversely, Chengiz Aitmatov, who was long a friend of the national struggle, who made a name for himself as a writer concerned with conditions in Kirgizia, and who was a defender of the national traditions, now prefers to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. While I was very surprised by this, this is also typical of the struggle to which I refer. Secondly, as Professor Allworth noted, it is true that Kazakh leaders

Indigenous Political Representation in Latin America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Rice
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indigenous Movements

Indigenous peoples have become important social and political actors in contemporary Latin America. The politicization of ethnic identities in the region has divided analysts into those who view it as a threat to democratic stability versus those who welcome it as an opportunity to improve the quality of democracy. Throughout much of Latin America’s history, Indigenous peoples’ demands have been oppressed, ignored, and silenced. Latin American states did not just exclude Indigenous peoples’ interests; they were built in opposition to or even against them. The shift to democracy in the 1980s presented Indigenous groups with a dilemma: to participate in elections and submit themselves to the rules of a largely alien political system that had long served as an instrument of their domination or seek a measure of representation through social movements while putting pressure on the political system from the outside. In a handful of countries, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous movements have successfully overcome this tension by forming their own political parties and contesting elections on their own terms. The emergence of Indigenous peoples’ movements and parties has opened up new spaces for collective action and transformed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Indigenous movements have reinvigorated Latin America’s democracies. The political exclusion of Indigenous peoples, especially in countries with substantial Indigenous populations, has undoubtedly contributed to the weakness of party systems and the lack of accountability, representation, and responsiveness of democracies in the region. In Bolivia, the election of the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales (2006–present) of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, has resulted in new forms of political participation that are, at least in part, inspired by Indigenous traditions. A principal consequence of the broadening of the democratic process is that Indigenous activists are no longer forced to choose between party politics and social movements. Instead, participatory mechanisms allow civil society actors and their organizations to increasingly become a part of the state. New forms of civil society participation such as Indigenous self-rule broaden and deepen democracy by making it more inclusive and government more responsive and representative. Indigenous political representation is democratizing democracy in the region by pushing the limits of representative democracy in some of the most challenging socio-economic and institutional environments.

Intentional Citizenship and Historical Wrongs

2021 ◽  
pp. 185-209
Author(s):  
Avia Pasternak
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
The State ◽  
Common View ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 7 examines the problem of the distributive effect with regard to historical wrongdoings. It is commonly thought that present-day states have remedial obligations to the descendants of victims of their historical wrongs. But should present-day citizens pay for wrongs committed by their state in the past? The chapter examines how the intentional participation framework can address this challenge. It shows that citizens who are intentional participants in their state can be expected to accept a nonproportional share of the burdens of their state remedial responsibilities, even for historical wrongs that were committed before their lifetime. However, it also suggests that the state’s internal regime structure affects the scope of intentional citizenship in the state. As it shows, this restriction challenges the common view in public international law, according to which internal regime change does not affect the compensatory liabilities of a state for its past wrongdoings.

The Machiavellian Budgeter

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew T. Cowart
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Niccolo Machiavelli ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
The Common ◽  
As If

Some political theorists maintain that Niccolò Machiavelli was a rather immoral sort. His exhortations to guile, perfidy, deception and opportunism were numerous, his scruples few. Others, in a more revisionist vein, suggest that his preferred tactics were only meant for the common good. Yet, whether Machiavelli was a scientist, a descriptivist, a technician, a moralist or an immoralist is immaterial from one standpoint: he taught us something about the nature of human interaction in the State. Machiavellian interpretations of human events underlie many of our personal impressions of political life. We speak of strategy, tactics, morality, honesty as if the locations of political leaders along those dimensions determine what governments do for us or to us.

The Individual, the State, and Ethnic Communities in Political Theory

1977 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Common View ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

Liberal political theory and contemporary expositions of human rights focus largely on the individual. Some liberal theorists even deny that ethnic communities and other groups, as collective entities, can have moral rights at all. The outlook is narrow and unfortunate. It reflects a preoccupation with domestic politics and a model of domestic politics that neglects the common fact of heterogeneity. It ignores widespread practices and urgent problems, for in many countries groups identified by race, language, or religion make moral claims, and their claims are sometimes conceded. It ignores the common view that nations or “peoples” have a (moral) right of self-determination, and it even leaves the state itself without justification. If theory is to give adequate guidance, its focus must be broadened. The question of group rights needs to be explored, and interrelationships between the rights of individuals, of groups, and of the state need to be clarified.

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