British Literature and the Life of Institutions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State

Speculative States pursues two related goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual. First, the book restores to view literature’s engagements with the slow politics of reform by linking the development of the institutional forms of the state to the aesthetic forms of literary writing. In doing so, it maps out a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain that spans the late Victorian and modernist periods. Second, the book also makes visible an ambitious reformist idiom which insists that we think about the state as an aspirational (speculative) figure—as a form of life in its own right rather than as a set of detached administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. Placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, Speculative States marks a major contribution to current debates about literature and the state, but it also centrally intervenes in conversations in critical theory by urging a fuller engagement with the critical and speculative dimensions of the dialectical imagination.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
The Welfare State

The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.

Staat und Zivilgesellschaft

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Path Dependencies ◽  
Contextual Dependence ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Tension ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between the state and civil society can be characterised as complex, disharmonious and dynamic. The complexity results from the historical conditions of its origin and the different ways of thinking, grasping and structuring the relationship. The relationship is disharmonious because although it can theoretically be thought of as equal, this equality, in fact, hardly exists. The relationship is dynamic because it is in a permanent state of tension between the path dependencies of the history of ideas, and therefore can and must be constantly rethought. This anthology attempts to grasp and illuminate the relationship between the state and civil society in all its complexity by paying special attention to the contextual dependence of the genesis of this complicated relationship. With the emergence of the modern state based on sovereignty, the state entered into opposition with civil society. Modern political theory has devoted much of its energy to reflecting this antagonism and bridging the gap between the two. With contributions by Nelson Chacón, Julian Dörr, Christopher Gohl, Oliver Hidalgo, Heinz Kleger, Alexander Kruska, Antoine Lévy, Andreas Nix, Edwin QuirogaMolano and Michael Zantke.

Bergson and the Politics of Intuition

1958 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 634-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Intellectuals ◽  
Metaphysical Position

Politicaltheory is not an independent realm of thought. Ultimately it must always refer back to some metaphysical presuppositions ofWeltanschauungthat is not in itself political. This does not imply that every metaphysical position entails logically necessary political consequences. But it does mean that implicitly or explicitly political theories depend on more general religious, epistemological, and moral considerations. This condition of political thinking serves to explain much of the narrowness of contemporary political theory. For the dominant currents of philosophy neither can, nor wish, to provide a basis for political speculation, which is increasingly regarded as an undisciplined form of self-expression. On the other hand, the naive hope that political studies might fruitfully emulate the methods of the natural sciences, and so share their success, has all but evaporated. The result is that political theory is now concerned to insist on its own limitations, to be critical and even negative in character. This is not a new thing. The lack of philosophical inspiration combined with the decline of “scientific” aspirations has plagued politically sensitive minds at least since the very beginning of the present century. And, from the first, one of the responses to this frustration has been the effort to escape philosophical difficulties by grasping at intuitive short-cuts to truth. The most remarkable of these flights to intuition was political Bergsonism. Moreover, this is not an entirely closed chapter in the history of ideas. Even if Bergson no longer enjoys his earlier popularity, he is still widely read, especially in America. Again, the recent vogue of existentialist “politics” points to an analogous trend, while the penchant for “action,” which is inherent in intuitive politics, is as strong as ever among French intellectuals.

The Identity of the History of Ideas

Philosophy ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 43 (164) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
History Of

Two types of criticism are frequently levelled at the history of ideas in general and the history of political theory in particular. The first is very much that of historians practising in other fields; that it is written as a saga in which all the great deeds are done by entities which could not, in principle, do anything. In it, Science is always wrestling with Theology, Empiricism with Rationalism, monism with dualism, evolution with the Great Chain of Being, artifice with nature, Politik with political moralism. Its protagonists are never humans, but only reified abstractions—or, if humans by inadvertence, humans only as the loci of these abstractions. The other charge, one more frequently levelled by philosophers, is that it is insensitive to the distinctive features of ideas, unconcerned with, or more often ineffectual in its concern with, truth and falsehood, its products more like intellectual seed-catalogues than adequate studies of thought In short it is characterised by a persistent tension between the threats of falsity in its history and incompetence in its philosophy.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
James Schleifer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

Die Macht der Institution

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

This volume examines Arnold Gehlen’s theory of the state from his philosophy of the state in the 1920s via his political and cultural anthropology to his impressive critique of the post-war welfare state. The systematic analyses the book contains by leading scholars in the social sciences and the humanities examine the interplay between the theory and history of the state with reference to the broader context of the history of ideas. Students and researchers as well as other readers interested in this subject will find this book offers an informative overview of how one of the most wide-ranging and profound thinkers of the twentieth century understands the state. With contributions by Oliver Agard, Heike Delitz, Joachim Fischer, Andreas Höntsch, Tim Huyeng, Rastko Jovanov, Frank Kannetzky, Christine Magerski, Zeljko Radinkovic, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Christian Steuerwald.

Litigating Honor, Defamation, and Shame in Southern Rhodesia

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Allison K. Shutt
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Court Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
Special Protection

Abstract:This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

scholarly journals Historia rozwoju Republiki Rzymskiej według Polibiusza

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Anna Ceglarska ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The State ◽  
Mixed System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mutual Relation ◽  
Perfect System ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

History of the rise of the Roman Republic as described by Polybius The aim of this article is to refer Polybius’s political theory, included in Book VI of The Histories, to the history of the rise of the Roman Republic. This theme must have been particularly significant for Polybius. For him, Rome was the most perfect example of a mixed government system, and the aim of describing its history was to show the development of this perfect system. The article presents the mutual relation of theory and history, starting with the period of kingship, up to the emergence of the democratic element, i.e. the moment when Rome acquired the mixed system of government. Both the political and social contexts of the changes are outlined. The analysis suggests that Polybius related his political theory to the history of the state he admired, thus providing the theory with actual foundations. Reconstructing his analysis makes it possible to see the history of Rome in a different light, and to ponder the system itself and its decline, even though the main objective of both Polybius and this article is to present its development.

scholarly journals Macintyre on identity of ethics and politics

2006 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michal Sládecek
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Ethics And Politics

In first chapters of this article MacIntyre?s view of ethics is analyzed, together with his critics of liberalism as philosophical and political theory, as well as dominant ideological conception. In last chapters MacIntyre?s view of the relation between politics and ethics is considered, along with the critical review of his theoretical positions. Macintyre?s conception is regarded on the one hand as very broad, because the entire morality is identified with ethical life, while on the other hand it is regarded as too narrow since it excludes certain essential aspects of deliberation which refers to the sphere of individual rights, the relations between communities, as well as distribution of goods within the state.

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