Feminist Theory and the Canon of Political Thought

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zerilli
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Nation States

This article describes the connection between feminist theory and the canon of political thought. It explains that feminist approaches to the canon of political theory are characterized by deep ambivalence and the majority of canonical authors have mostly dismissed women as political beings in their own right and casted them instead as mere appendages to citizen man. The article suggests that the question of how to make political judgments about other cultures and practices that deeply affect women is particularly important for feminist theory today. Globalization and the weakening of nation states have also pressed feminists to raise political demands with an eye to their multicultural and transnational significance.

A Virtue for Courageous Minds

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, this book examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. The book begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. It then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. The book looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. It traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. The book demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and it challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, the book reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

Sovereignty

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hermann Heller
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Political System ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The People ◽  
Pluralistic World

This 1927 work addresses the paradox of sovereignty, that is, how the sovereign can be both the highest authority and subject to law. Unlike Kelsen and Schmitt who seek to dissolve the paradox, this text sees the tensions that the paradox highlights as an essential part of a society ruled by law. Sovereignty, in the sense of national sovereignty, is often perceived in liberal democracies today as being under threat, or at least “in transition,” as power devolves from nation states to international bodies. This threat to national sovereignty is at the same time considered a threat to a different idea of sovereignty, popular sovereignty—the sovereignty of “the people”—as important decisions seem increasingly to be made by institutions outside of a country’s political system or by elite-dominated institutions within. This text was written in 1927 amidst the very similar tensions of the Weimar Republic. In an exploration of history, constitutional and political theory, and international law, it shows that democrats must defend a legal idea of sovereignty suitable for a pluralistic world.

History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Stuart Gray
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Locus Classicus

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

scholarly journals How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-114
Author(s):  
Adrian Blau
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Framework

AbstractThis paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Entangling Plato: A Guide through the Political Theory Archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172199807
Author(s):  
Liam Klein ◽  
Daniel Schillinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Athenian Democracy

Political theorists have increasingly sought to place Plato in active dialogue with democracy ancient and modern by examining what S. Sara Monoson calls “Plato’s democratic entanglements.” More precisely, Monoson, J. Peter Euben, Arlene Saxonhouse, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Jill Frank approach Plato as both an immanent critic of the Athenian democracy and a searching theorist of self-governance. In this guide through the Political Theory archive, we explore “entanglement approaches” to the study of Plato, outlining their contribution to our understanding of Plato’s political thought and to the discipline of political theory.

Kierkegaard's Socratic Alternative to Hegel in Fear and Trembling

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Matthew Dinan
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fear And Trembling

Abstract Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling has traditionally attracted interest from scholars of political theory for its apparent hostility to political philosophy, and more recently for its compatibility with Marxism. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Kierkegaard's potential contributions to political theory by suggesting that the work's shortcomings belong to its pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, and are in fact intended by Kierkegaard. Attentiveness to the literary development of the pseudonym allows us to see a Kierkegaard who is a deeper and more direct critic of Hegel's political philosophy than is usually presumed. By creating a pseudonym whose argument ultimately fails, Kierkegaard employs Socratic irony in order to point readers to the need to recover Socratic political philosophy as the appropriate adjunct to the faith of Abraham, and as an alternative to Hegelian, and post-Hegelian, political thought.

Universal Suffrage as Decolonization

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
KEVIN DUONG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The Voice

This essay reconstructs an important but forgotten dream of twentieth-century political thought: universal suffrage as decolonization. The dream emerged from efforts by Black Atlantic radicals to conscript universal suffrage into wider movements for racial self-expression and cultural revolution. Its proponents believed a mass franchise could enunciate the voice of colonial peoples inside imperial institutions and transform the global order. Recuperating this insurrectionary conception of the ballot reveals how radicals plotted universal suffrage and decolonization as a single historical process. It also places decolonization’s fate in a surprising light: it may have been the century’s greatest act of disenfranchisement. As dependent territories became nation-states, they lost their voice in metropolitan assemblies whose affairs affected them long after independence.

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.

Feminist Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 488-503
Author(s):  
Jean Mills
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Feminist Community ◽  
Critical Responses

This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

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