The Crafting of Identity and the Division of Political Labour

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-72
Author(s):  
Carolyn James

The use of gender as a category of historical analysis has prompted historians to rethink the modalities of politics during the Renaissance period. While women were rarely rulers in their own right, they sometimes exercised a political authority drawn from cultural influence, or directly assigned to their person by virtue of deputizing for absent husbands. This chapter explores the extent to which the political collaboration of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga emulated precedents established by their parents and grandparents. The ways in which Isabella exploited gender tropes, or submitted to them, is considered alongside Francesco Gonzaga’s projection of a virile masculine identity, through an analysis of how the pair used art and other forms of cultural patronage to shape their respective identities and political qualities.

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Neophitos Economides

Abstract The theory of social contract has played - and still plays - an important role in the central stage of political philosophy. The social contract answers the question of the origin of the society. The history of the theory originates in the ancient Greece political philosophy and extends to the recent years. However, the foundation of the theory resulted in the Renaissance period through the treatises of classical contractarians Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The manuscript describes the main arguments regarding the theory of social contract and suggests the main similarities and differences among them. Finally, the manuscript, according to the main description of the theories, suggests the main categorization of their results in legitimizing the political authority. In the final section, the article proposes the contribution of the theory of the social contract to the modern era and summarizes the positive aspects of its arguments to the legitimization of the political authority of modern states.


Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s contribution to political jurisprudence. It approaches the issue through the concept of politonomy, a concept first alluded to by Schmitt but which he never developed. Politonomy seeks a scientific understanding of the basic laws and practices of the political. The chapter situates Schmitt within the German tradition of state theory and shows that his overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject. It suggests that Schmitt occupies an ambivalent position in political jurisprudence and that this is because of his distrust of the scientific significance of general concepts. To the extent that he acknowledged the existence of a ‘law of the political’, this is found in Schmitt’s embrace of institutionalism in the 1930s and later in his account of nomos as the basic law of appropriation, division, and production.


Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

What for many years was seen as an oxymoron—the notion of an authoritarian rule of law—no longer is. Instead, the phenomenon has become a cutting edge concern in law-and-society research. In this concluding chapter, I situate Fraenkel’s theory of dictatorship in this emerging research program. In the first section, I turn the notion of an authoritarian rule of law into a social science concept. In the second section, I relate this concept to that of the dual state and both to the political science literature on so-called hybrid regimes. Drawing on this synthesis, the third section makes the concept of the dual state usable for comparative-historical analysis. Through a series of empirical vignettes, I demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Fraenkel’s institutional analysis of the Nazi state. I show why it is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the legal origins of dictatorship, then and now.


1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski

“Of political principles,” says a distinguished authority, “whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions.” No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups of which the state is so formidably one be regarded as in its gift to define? Can the state tolerate alongside itself churches which avow themselves societates perfectae, claiming exemption from its jurisdiction even when, as often enough, they traverse the field over which it ploughs? Is the state but one of many, or are those many but parts of itself, the one?


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Flett

This article reviews the way in which the concept of precaution, as commonly referenced in EU law, is received in the WTO. It argues that precaution is not a principle, but one facet of a principle of making rational judgments based on available information, the other facet of which is “that risk is worth taking”. Systematically pursuing high cost measures in response to low risks is not a balanced approach, and has probably contributed to the scepticism with which the concept is viewed in the WTO. However, this article goes on to argue that, without needing to be a principle, precaution is the determining legal feature in the SPS Agreement, because, unlike in the European Union, there is no legislative harmonisation of SPS measures at international level, WTO Members being free to set their own appropriate level of protection. In fact, the concept of precaution is relevant in the context of many other WTO provisions and is in some respects quite close to the concept of subsidiarity. Notwithstanding this, the first WTO SPS cases, driven by regulatory exporters and an interventionist WTO, have excessively emphasised scientific issues, masking policy judgments that the WTO has neither the legal nor the political authority to sustain. The article concludes that the proper way forward necessitates closer political, legal and administrative links between the WTO and other relevant international organisations, and a move away from consensus in the latter.


2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARA MOSKOWITZ

AbstractThis article examines squatter resistance to a World Bank-funded forest and paper factory project. The article illustrates how diverse actors came together at the sites of rural development projects in early postcolonial Kenya. It focuses on the relationship between the rural squatters who resisted the project and the political elites who intervened, particularly President Kenyatta. Together, these two groups not only negotiated the reformulation of a major international development program, but they also worked out broader questions about political authority and political culture. In negotiating development, rural actors and political elites decided how resources would be distributed and they entered into new patronage-based relationships, processes integral to the making of the postcolonial political order.


Author(s):  
Sultan K. Zhussip (Aqquly) ◽  
Dikhan Qamzabekuly ◽  
Satay M. Syzdykov ◽  
Kairbek R. Kemengger ◽  
Khalil B. Maslov

It was 1919, that is, on the eve of the mutual acknowledgement of the Alash Autonomy and the Soviet rule of each other and the incorporation of the Kazakh Autonomy in the USSR. However, historical facts confirm that the leader of the Kazakhs was attempting to build a national army, a fully legal one, even during the period of the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, therefore in the period of the autocratic rule of the colonial empire, despite a number of insurmountable obstacles that seemed to stand in the way. The article is devoted to a historical analysis of the process of creating a legal national army of the Kazakh population and the political legalization of the Autonomous State of Alash on the territory of the Russian Empire in the late 19th – early 20th century. The leader of the Kazakh National Movement “Alash”, Alikhan Bukeikhan was attempting to build a legal national army even during the period of the first Russian Revolution 1905-1907. However, he achieved his goal only after the February Revolution of 1917 – on the eve of the civil war, launched by the Bolsheviks.The leader of the Kazakh National Movement “Alash”, Alikhan Bukeikhan was attempting to build a legal national army even during the period of the first Russian Revolution 1905-1907. However, he achieved his goal only after the February Revolution of 1917 – on the eve of the civil war, launched by the Bolsheviks


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIRGINIA Q. TILLEY

The transnational indigenous peoples' movement (TIPM) can convey important political leverage to local indigenous movements. Yet this study exposes a more problematic impact: the political authority gained by funding organisations who interpolate TIPM norms into new discourses regarding indigeneity, and deploy that discourse in local ethnic contests. In El Salvador the TIPM has encouraged the state to recognise the indigenous communities and has opened a political wedge for indigenous activism. Yet TIPM-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are ‘not truly Indian’.


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