War for Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Idris
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Sayyid Qutb ◽  
The Ideal

Peace is the elimination of war, but peace also authorizes war. We are informed today that this universal ideal can only be secured by the wars that it eliminates. The paradoxical position of peace—opposed to war, authorizing war—is encapsulated by the claim that “war is for the sake of peace.” War for Peace is a genealogy of the political theoretic logics and morals of “peace.” It examines peace in political theory, as an ideal that authorizes war, in the writings of ten thinkers, from ancient to contemporary thought: Plato, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. It argues that the ideal of peace functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically. In its parasitical structure, peace is accompanied by other ideals, such as friendship, security, concord, and law, which reduces it to a politics of consensus. In its provincial structure, the universalized content of peace reflects its idealizers’ desires, fears, interests, and constructions of the globe. In its polemical structure, the idealization of peace is the product of antagonisms and it then enables hostility. As idealizations of peace are disseminated across political thought, a core that valorizes peace and necessitates war insistently remains. War for Peace uncovers the genealogical basis of peace’s moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

scholarly journals Kant, the Republican Peace, and Moral Guidance in International Law

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 39-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecelia Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Ideal

Just as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes became etched into the minds of international relations scholars as the oracles of realpolitik during the Cold War, Immanuel Kant appears to be well on his way to becoming the prophet of “progressive international reform” in the post—Cold War era. Not only has Kant's thought provided the underpinnings of one of the major traditions of international law, but there is a groundswell of interest among international relations scholars today in the question of whether contemporary events, particularly the proliferation of republican states and attempts to create them, signal the march forward to the Kantian ideal of republican peace. Yet, prior to asking what contemporary events signify for the attainment of the Kantian ideal, we should analyze the conflicting interpretions fo Kantian political thought so as to understand the meaning and implications of the ideal itself. Such a task is not merely pedantie—it is necessary to determine the utility of political philosophy for providing understanding and guidance in the real world.

No Right to Resist? Elise Reimarus's Freedom as a Kantian Response to the Problem of Violent Revolt

Hypatia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-773
Author(s):  
Lisa Curtis‐Wendlandt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
Public Expression

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.

Entangling Plato: A Guide through the Political Theory Archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172199807
Author(s):  
Liam Klein ◽  
Daniel Schillinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Athenian Democracy

Political theorists have increasingly sought to place Plato in active dialogue with democracy ancient and modern by examining what S. Sara Monoson calls “Plato’s democratic entanglements.” More precisely, Monoson, J. Peter Euben, Arlene Saxonhouse, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Jill Frank approach Plato as both an immanent critic of the Athenian democracy and a searching theorist of self-governance. In this guide through the Political Theory archive, we explore “entanglement approaches” to the study of Plato, outlining their contribution to our understanding of Plato’s political thought and to the discipline of political theory.

HOPE AND MEMORY IN THE THOUGHT OF JUDITH SHKLAR

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATRINA FORRESTER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
Judith Shklar ◽  
Exclusive Focus

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklar—as anti-totalitarian émigré thinker, or normative liberal theorist—are flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt Edited by Dana Villa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 320p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-628
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Cambridge University

This is an excellent collection of essays about the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Its editor, Dana Villa, has assembled a first-rate group of scholars, many of whom are already well known for their contributions to Arendt studies. The volume is distinguished by the high quality of its contributions and by the effort of so many of its contributors to go beyond standard lines of exegesis to raise interesting questions and to press the boundaries of Arendt commentary. Arendt's work has received a great deal of attention from political theorists in recent years. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt makes clear the richness of her thinking, the range of her concerns, and the ability of her writings to inspire creative commentary and constructive political theory.

BEYOND UNITY

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Beltrán
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Race Politics

Lawrie Balfour and Robert Gooding-Williams have given us powerful new works of scholarship on the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. Not only do these publications enrich the field of Du Bois scholarship, they exemplify the exciting possibilities at the intersection of political theory and race politics.

A Political Theory of Decolonization

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-36
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Integration ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anticolonial Nationalism

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.

The Scholastic and Conciliar Roots of Samuel Rutherford’s Political Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.

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