The Experience of Personal Government between the Factions and the Popolo

Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, two new actors made their appearance in the political life of the communes: the factions and the Societas Populi. This chapter focuses on the political language and culture of these two elements, highlighting the tendency of various social actors to consistently represent the unity of the political body. This was the supreme value which neither the factions nor the Popolo would renounce, even when they were alone in power: on the contrary, in fact, it was very much in that kind of situation that the parties tended to represent themselves as ‘the whole’. The chapter then goes on to examine the role that both the factions and the Societas Populi played in fostering the first experiences of lordly government in the city.

Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

This chapter focuses on the immense work of refoundation of political language and culture carried out by two groups in the communal age: the experts of the Ars dictandi and the jurists. The former, through the reworking of materials from the distant past (ancient republicanism, Cicero, then, from the end of the thirteenth century, also Aristotle), came to identify the essence of politics in the government of the community through justice, which alone could guarantee peace and collective profit. The latter, meanwhile, developed the instruments to affirm the primacy of the commune both within and outside the city. The effect was twofold: to legitimize the efforts of the commune, committed to promoting itself as a public power, and to lay the foundations for a relationship with the jurists that would become osmotic and pregnant with consequences.


1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Guedea

Beginning in 1808 the people started to play a prominent role in the political life of Mexico. This article examines the significant growth of popular political participation in the City of Mexico during the period 1808-1812. In particular, it analyzes the substantial role that the people played in the elections of 1812, a role they would continue to play in the early years of the new nation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


2009 ◽  
pp. 155-175
Author(s):  
Steven Forti

- Nicola Bombacci was an important PSI's leader during the First World War and the biennio rosso (1919-1920). After his expulsion from the PCd'I, of which was one of the founders, he approached fascism and became one of the last supporters of it since he had been shooted by partisans and died in Como Lake, and had been exposed in Loreto Square beside to Mussolini. After a short historical mention of the Bombacci's political life, these pages will analyse deeper the question of the passage from the left to fascism in interwar Italy, through the analyse of his political language. The method executed in order to analyse the question foresees the use of a biography by dates and the identification of the political interpretation's categories, which permit to carry out a comparison between the social-communist and fascist period. In conclusions, the article proposes a thesis of interpretation: the political passion.Parole chiave: Fascismo, Nazione, Rivoluzione, Classe, Guerra, Passione politica Fascism, Nation, Revolution, Class, War, Political passion


Author(s):  
Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune

April 24th 1998, a two-meter-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. Following the organization’s initial success of hijacking the inauguration, the statue was vandalized. It soon became a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest, and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. This essay reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of this commemoration debate. With both the pressure of citizens on the political body, and the triple practice of diversion, subversion, and taking hostage of (public) space, the association thwarts the writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer not only resists official discourse but subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whitened pages of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies, and defining new lieux de parole.


2021 ◽  
pp. 98-130
Author(s):  
Richard Martin

The Policing Board sits at the heart of the intersection between human rights law and politics. As a corporate body, the Policing Board has a statutory duty to monitor police compliance with the HRA. This chapter argues that regardless of the Policing Board’s statutory duty to monitor policing based on the standards of the HRA, for the political members on the Policing Board, human rights are a vessel harbouring deep sentiments and concerns at the heart of which are competing histories of the conflict, legacies of policing and understandings of Northern Ireland’s imperfect peace. These narratives swirl around, and at times directly contradict, the official police voice, further demonstrating the elasticity of human rights to stretch to fit the visions of different actors. The examination of alternative official narratives by political parties in Northern Ireland is developed across three sections, inspired by the dimensions of the ‘political life’ of human rights set out in Chapter 1. These three dimensions are: the role historical context plays in structuring the ambit and style of human rights contestation involving social actors; human rights as an articulation of a much wider array of interests, fears and aspirations that find expression through rights narratives; and how human rights can be used by groups to actively construct claims with the hope of achieving legal gains in specific fields


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvain Piron

This chapter considers fourteenth-century Italian debates about the costs of marriage to the work of a philosopher. Following Heloise’s famous injunction against the idea of marriage to Abelard, when she railed against the impact it would have upon his work, this chapter investigates how the terms of this conversation were transformed by the insights of lay intellectuals of cities like Arezzo, Bologna, and Florence, who were grappling with the implications of fatherhood as part of the economic unit of the household, and its role in the political life of the city.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Ambroziak

This review analyses The Political Discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Terms and Ideas, a monograph written by Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz. The work describes the main concepts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s political language between 1569 and 1795. The study is mostly based on political literature, i. e. theoretical treatises and works devoted to relevant issues of the political life of the state. The author makes an attempt to create her own methodological approach, which consists of describing the political discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by analysing its basic concepts, i. e. “Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth”, “law”, “freedom”, “forma mixta” and “separation of powers”, “consent”, “virtue”, “patriotism”, and “ancientry”. The scholar notes the small role that the concepts of “sovereignty”, “state”, and “property” played in political discourse. The reviewer compliments the wide range of literature used by the author and the high level of generalisations, due to which the work is a successful attempt at synthesising existing historiographic knowledge. At the same time, the reviewer points out further prospects for studying the issue: the application of a comparative approach, consideration of the context of ancient thought, analysis of differences in the political language in various parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the evolution of political discourse, as well as a significant expansion of the research base.


Author(s):  
David R. Como

The creation of the New Model Army in 1645 brought unprecedented polarization to parliament’s cause. Common ground between “presbyterians” and “independents” eroded and, increasingly, Roundheads were driven into competing camps. This polarization was exacerbated by the polemical interventions of the most extreme independents, most notably the clique associated with Richard Overton’s secret press. The resulting political battles were conducted using the full range of techniques and practices outlined in previous chapters. Parliamentary maneuver was complemented by grass-roots mobilization, including petitioning, co-optation of the city government, sermons and countermeasures, rumors, street placarding, and calculated print campaigns, hinting at significant transformations in the conduct of political life. Paradoxically, these conflicts worsened with parliament’s victory at Naseby, as the competing sides gathered strength to struggle over the final settlement. The chapter concludes by examining the political rise of John Lilburne, with his controversial claims for the supremacy of the House of Commons.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Krauss

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable.


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