Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keally McBride
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Central Force ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Racialized Violence

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a handbook for developing anticolonial revolutionary consciousness. It offers an analysis of the structures created by colonialism that need to be overcome, and predicts the political distortions that might occur in postcolonial regimes. All three of these themes involve a discussion of structural and interpersonal violence as a central force in politics. Fanon’s political theory traces the interconnected nature of economic, institutional, and psychological racialized violence that undergirds modern global relations. This chapter explores Fanon’s historical analysis of decolonization, emphasizing the difficulty of achieving individual freedom and the pitfalls of collective and violent struggle. Furthermore, Fanon’s volume predicts the growth of new forms of imperialism, and the continued economic exploitation of former colonies.

Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 653-676
Author(s):  
Jimmy Casas Klausen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject

This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.

Toward a Political Theology of the Earth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Keller
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Face ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Ecological Science ◽  
Legal Theorist

This chapter considers incongruent temporalities in the form of a political theology of the earth. Political theology can rarely be mistaken for ecotheology. At least in its guise as political theory, it leaves concern for the matter of the earth to ecological science, activism, and religion. Key to political theology has been its readings of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty in terms of emergency. The current conversation in political theology has been unfolding with the rush of a theoretical currency fueled by old, indeed ancient, theopolitical language. Even as ecological theology seems to slow theory down, capturing it in a geological time far older than language, it also lurches into the terrifying speed of climate destabilization. The chapter asks whether, in the guise of thinking for and as terra, we would territorialize politics itself. It shows how, by seeding an alternative to the political theology of exceptionalist power, intercarnation fosters “the new people and earth in the future.” It also explains how a theology forged in alliances of entangled difference helps that alliance emerge—in the face of what may be mounting planetary emergency.

FREE SPEECH IN THE AMERICAN FOUNDING AND IN MODERN LIBERALISM

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-384
Author(s):  
Thomas G. West
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
American Founding

It is widely believed that there is more freedom of speech in America today than there was at the time of the founding. Indeed, this view is shared by liberal commentators, as one would expect, as well as by leading conservatives, which is more surprising. “The body of law presently defining First Amendment liberties,” writes liberal law professor Archibald Cox, grew out of a “continual expansion of individual freedom of expression.” Conservative constitutional scholar Walter Berns agrees: “Legally we enjoy a greater liberty [of speech] than ever before in our history.” This shared assessment is correct—from the point of view of the political theory of today's liberalism—but it is incorrect from the point of view of the political theory of the American founding.

From Ethiopia to Bandung with Fanon

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-189
Author(s):  
Robbie Shilliam
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Impact

In this article I attempt to reconcile one of the most influential diplomatic episodes of Third World liberation – Bandung – with one of the most influential thinkers of said liberation – Frantz Fanon. I argue that this reconciliation can be usefully achieved by bringing to the fore the impact of the Ethiopia/Italy conflict (1935–1941) on both Fanon’s thought and the political trajectories of various individuals and movements that ultimately met at Bandung. Specifically, I trace how anti-colonial anti-fascism, an intellectual-activist position which emerged in response to Mussolini’s fascist invasion of Ethiopia, prefigured and prepared the Bandung spirit not only in biographical terms but also in terms of casting an ethics of liberation on a global scale that interwove the fates of metropoles and colonies as well as diverse colonial subjects. I frame my investigation of these influences through Fanon’s concept of Black humanism and his diplomatic injunction on behalf of the wretched of the earth, both of which I also argue can be genealogically connected to anti-colonial anti-fascism. I conclude by suggesting that the accretion of the ethics and practices encountered across these journeys from Ethiopia to Bandung with Fanon might aid in reviving an internationalist spirit for our own constrictive age.

scholarly journals Wpływ ideologii totalitarnych na konstrukcje prawne stosowane w zakresie ograniczania autonomii woli jednostki na przykładzie modeli wiązania wzorców umownych

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-415
Author(s):  
Maciej Skory
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Aspect ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Public Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Political Model

The paper aims to examine the influence of totalitarian ideologies on the issue of the mechanism of binding contractual standard forms. Although totalitarian ideologies mainly influence the situation of an individual through the norms of criminal law and administrative law (public law in its broadest sense), private law — especially in its theoretical aspect involving accepted legal constructs — is also influenced by the political doctrines dominant at a given time. As it seems, this also applies to such a technical and far-from-political model as that of contractual binding. It turns out that also in this area totalitarian concepts found room for restricting the scope of individual freedom. This is indicated by a certain correlation between the development of views on the nature of contractual forms and the mechanism of their binding and the intensification or weakening of totalitarian tendencies. Such a conclusion can be derived from the historical analysis of the views represented by the main representatives of French and German doctrine from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.

On the Will of the People: Notes on the Political “Theory” of Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Offe
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
National People ◽  
The Will

The “will of the (national) people” is the ubiquitously invoked reference unit of populist politics. The essay tries to demystify the notion that such will can be conceived of as a unique and unified substance deriving from collective ethnic identity. Arguably, all political theory is concerned with arguing for ways by which citizens can make e pluribus unum—for example, by coming to agree on procedures and institutions by which conflicts of interest and ideas can be settled according to standards of fairness. It is argued that populists in their political rhetoric and practice typically try to circumvent the burden of such argument and proof. Instead, they appeal to the notion of some preexisting existential unity of the people’s will, which they can redeem only through practices of repression and exclusion.

Authoritarian Rule of Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Hybrid Regimes ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Society Research

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.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Brill
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Character

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life studies Aristotle’s understanding of the political character of human intimacy via an examination of the zoological frame informing his political theory. It argues that the concept of shared life, i.e. the forms of intimacy that arise from the possession of logos and the capacity for choice, is central to human political partnership, and serves to locate that life within the broader context of living beings as such, where it emerges as an intensification of animal sociality. As such it challenges a long-standing approach to the role of the animal in Aristotle’s thought, and to the recent reception of Aristotle’s thinking about the political valence of life and living beings.

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