Critical International Theory in Historical Mode

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
International Theory ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Humanist Pedagogy

This chapter recovers a neglected, namely, historical mode of theorizing in an effort to reorient critical international theory. As critical international theories have become more meta-theoretical and abstract, they have lost touch with history. The chapter reconsiders R. W. Cox’s writings—in particular his abiding engagement with historicism and realism—as a means of retrieving critical intellectual resources outside of German idealism and historical materialism. The chapter then uses revisionist histories of the Enlightenment to help reorient critical international theory around historically grounded rather than philosophically grounded forms of criticism. Intellectual resources for this end are recovered from early modern European thought—particularly the historicizing and secularizing political theories of Renaissance humanism and Absolutist historiography. The final section explores the thought of Giambattista Vico, one of Cox’s professed influences, for its ‘Enlightened’ emphasis on humanist pedagogy and its historicist attention to changing forms of civil institutions.

Revisiting the Sources of Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
The World

This chapter revisits the intellectual resources marshalled by critical international theory. It starts with the Frankfurt School and Max Horkheimer’s distinction between two conceptions of theory—critical and traditional. The chapter then turns to extended discussions of German idealism and historical materialism—in particular, Kant, Hegel, and Marx—to outline the normative and dialectical forms of social philosophy inherited by the Frankfurt School. Arising out of Kant’s transcendental philosophy was a form of critique concerned with the epistemic conditions under which the reasoning subject attains a pure intelligence detached from experience. This provided the context in which Hegel and Marx introduced their dialectical social theories. The chapter’s final section revisits the Kantian Enlightenment, which has exerted such an important influence over critical international theory. Running through the chapter is the transformative role critical philosophy plays in restoring freedom and reason to the world.

Critical International Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Civil Government

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

A rival Enlightenment? Critical international theory in historical mode

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Element ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Moral Philosophies ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
International Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Robert Cox

This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory (CIT) as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CIT’s intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vico’s history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory.

The Devil's Tabernacle

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
European Thought ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Huge Variety

This is the first book to examine in depth the intellectual and cultural impact of the oracles of pagan antiquity on modern European thought. The book shows how the study of the oracles influenced, and was influenced by, some of the most significant developments in early modernity, such as the Christian humanist recovery of ancient religion, confessional polemics, Deist and libertine challenges to religion, antiquarianism and early archaeology, Romantic historiography, and spiritualism. The book examines the different views of the oracles since the Renaissance—that they were the work of the devil, or natural causes, or the fraud of priests, or finally an organic element of ancient Greek society. The range of discussion on the subject, as he demonstrates, is considerably more complex than has been realized before: hundreds of scholars, theologians, and critics commented on the oracles, drawing on a huge variety of intellectual contexts to frame their beliefs. A central chapter interrogates the landmark dispute on the oracles between Bernard de Fontenelle and Jean-François Baltus, challenging Whiggish assumptions about the mechanics of debate on the cusp of the Enlightenment. With erudition and an eye for detail, the book argues that, on both sides of the controversy, to speak of the ancient oracles in early modernity was to speak of one's own historical identity as a Christian.

Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
General Point ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity?

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-169
Author(s):  
Dragana Grbić
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
South Slavs ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western European ◽  
European Thought

This chapter situates the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović in the context of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Serbian Great Migration, which facilitated the dissemination of Western European thought throughout Serbia. Obradović’s travels typified this process. As a young man, he fled from a monastery and spent much of his life traveling through Germany, France, Italy, England and elsewhere in Europe. He paid his way by teaching languages, and when he returned home, he translated European works into the Serbian vernacular. His oeuvre brought the Enlightenment thought of Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant to Serbian literature and introduced readers to the works of Fénelon, Rousseau, and Marmontel. Obradović’s writings, particularly his autobiography, not only shaped eighteenth-century Serbian culture, but also influenced South Slavs, Greeks, and Romanians in the Balkans. .

Nothing Absolute

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
First Time ◽  
Point Of Reference

Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct and powerful framework for understanding the continuing relevance of political theology today as well as the conceptual and genealogical importance of German Idealism for its present and future. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as essentially a secularizing movement, this volume approaches it as the first speculative articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Via a set of innovative readings and critiques, the volume investigates anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, mediation, indifference, the earth, the absolute, or the world, bringing German Idealism and Romanticism into dialogue with contemporary investigations of the (Christian-)modern forms of transcendence, domination, exclusion, and world-justification. Over the course of the volume, post-Kantian German thought emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity. As a result, this volume not only rethinks the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective, but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-252
Author(s):  
Marta Celati
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Ideal

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.

scholarly journals Changes of political theories in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-41
Author(s):  
Jarosław Nocoń
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
International Program ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Real Socialism ◽  
Theoretical Condition

In the countries of Middle and Eastern Europe the collapse of „real socialism” was followed by the annulment of political and ideological supervision over scientific researches. Since then the political theory has been developing in an unembarrassed way, drawing investigative patterns with the tradition of western political sciences. Form this perspective, the expression „westernization” used with regard to political theory signifies the process of going away from Marxism and historical materialism. The article focuses on two essential trends of this process. The main consequence is the pluralization of theoretical bases of investigations, which signifies not only differentation, but also the lack of predominant theory. The international program for monitoring the development since 1990, shows that new investigative trends disclose a division between the traditional and current model of politology, which demonstrates the topicality of arguments raised in western academic debatesover the theoretical condition and status of political science discipline.

International Relations Meets Critical Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Devetak
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter provides an account of the reception of critical theory in international relations in the early 1980s. It is structured around detailed studies of four pioneering international relations theorists: R. B. J. Walker, Richard K. Ashley, Andrew Linklater, and R. W. Cox. In their different ways these international relations scholars helped fashion the critical persona on the basis of a modified philosophical reflexivity inherited from German idealism and historical materialism, and their Frankfurt School heirs. The end result of this reception was to refigure the theorist as a critical intellectual, capable of achieving higher levels of ethical comportment on the basis of Enlightenment self-reflection, and deeper insight into the latent forces of political transformation on the basis of dialectical-philosophical history.

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