History of African American Political Thought and Antiracist Critical Theory

Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams

The relationship between antiracist critical theory and the study of the history of African American thought merits consideration in light of an ongoing debate between anachronists and antiquarians about the relationship between the current practice of philosophy and the study of the history of philosophy. Contemporary antiracist critical theory is extensive and includes expansive genealogical and critical historical accounts of modern racism; racial and gender oppression; roles that policing, prison growth, and segregation play in perpetuating racial inequality; and appraisals of recent black politics—including the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Many of these efforts take up the history of African American political thought and complicate our understanding of the relationship between the issues that engage contemporary critical theorists and the issues that engaged some of their predecessors. Recent scholarship on the social and political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois is highly relevant to this comparison between critical theory and intellectual history.

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar

AbstractThis article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUGATA BOSE

This article elucidates the meaning of Indian nationalism and its connection to religious universalism as a problem of ethics. It engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo Ghose on the relationship between ethics and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both secularist and subalternist histories have contributed to misunderstandings of Aurobindo's political thought and shown an inability to comprehend its ethical moorings. The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo's thought are related to more general infirmities afflicting the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India. In exploring how best to achieve Indian unity, Aurobindo had shown that Indian nationalism was not condemned to pirating from the gallery of models of states crafted by the West. By reconceptualizing the link between religion and politics, this essay suggests a new way forward in Indian intellectual history.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (35) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elías José Palti

Temporalidade e refutabilidade dos conceitos políticos[1]Temporality and refutability of political concepts Elías José Palti[2] RESUMO: Nas últimas décadas, o conceito do “político” de Carl Schmmitt tem ressurgido nos debates sobre teoria política, e isso também teve importante repercussão no campo da história intelectual. A distinção entre política e o político permitiu-nos reconsiderar a natureza de conceitos políticos, reavaliar a sua natureza controversa. Isso é visto agora como um resultado de sua indefinição. O fato de que conceitos como democracia, justiça, liberdade, etc. não aceitam qualquer definição, que resistem a toda tentativa, nasceria da natureza intrinsecamente aporética deles, isto é, do fato de que eles não se referem a nenhum conjunto de ideias ou princípios que poderiam ser listados, mas sim que servem como índices de problemas. O presente artigo pretende rastrear essa transformação teórica no campo da história política-intelectual, suas consequências para a pesquisa histórica. E também como isso afetou nossos meios de abordar a história intelectual latino-americana. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: História do Pensamento Político. História Intelectual. História do Pensamento Político Latino-americano. ABSTRACT: In the last decades, Carl Schmitt´s concept of the political has resurface in the debates on political theory, and it has had important repercussion in the field of intellectual history, too. The distinction between politics and the political allowed us to reconsider the nature of political concepts, reassess their controversial nature. It is now seen as a result of their undefinability. The fact that concepts like democracy, justice, freedom, and so on, do not accept any definition, that resist all attempt, would spring from the intrinsically aporetic nature of them, that is, that they do not refer to any given set of ideas of principles that could be listed, but rather they serve as indexes of problems. The present article intends to trace this theoretical transformation in the field of political-intellectual history, its consequences for historical research. And also how this affect our ways of approaching Latin American intellectual history. KEYWORDS: History of Political Thought. Intellectual History. History of Latin American Political Thought.[1] Publicação original: PALTI, Elías José. Temporalidad y refutabilidad de los conceptos políticos. Prismas: revista de história intelectual, n. 9, p. 19-34, 2005. Tradução de Pedro Prazeres Fraga Pereira e Vicente de Azevedo Bastian Cortese.[2] Professor da Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina) e da Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina). Investigador do Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas – CONICET.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Maclean

I so appreciate Professor Mack's generous comments onFreedom Is Not Enough—and even more his critical engagement with it. It's an author's dream to have a leading scholar in a related field read with such care and insight, and I am very grateful for this opportunity to converse about the intriguing issues he has raised. I first encountered some of Ken's articles about civil rights lawyering beforeBrownafterFreedom Is Not Enoughwas in press, and I thought then that my discussion of the earlier history would have been enhanced by them because his portrayal was so rich while our perspectives on the relationship between law and activism were so congruent. Now, reading his comments on the work as published, I wish I had studied law with him! His challenges would have made it a better book.


Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.


2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.


1973 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 987
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Donovan ◽  
A. J. Beitzinger

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nelson

Most scholarship on the ideology of the American Revolution asks the question: “What did American patriots think about politics”? But The Ideological Origins asks instead: “ How did patriots think about politics”? At issue here is the distinction between political theory and political consciousness. Once we get this distinction properly into view, we can rethink the relationship between two great, and apparently rivalrous, historiographies on early American political thought.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document