Professor Brecht and the Tragedy of Twentieth-Century Political Thought

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.

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Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History

The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.4 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Ryan Balot

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Thought ◽

The Political ◽

Leo Strauss ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Philosophical Inquiry ◽

Natural Right ◽

Philosophical Dialogue ◽

Rational Order ◽

Stated Purpose

This chapter evaluates the arguments and intentions of Leo Strauss’s most ambitious political text, Natural Right and History. Strauss’s stated purpose is to rehabilitate the ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of “natural right”—a term of art by which he referred to the justice inherent in the rational order of nature. His express motivation was to rebut the relativism and historicism that, in his view, characterized twentieth-century political thought. This chapter contends that the book’s core lies in its implicit presentation of philosophical inquiry as the highest human vocation. This idea is presented less through systematic argument than through Strauss’s own engagement with canonical political texts—an engagement designed to illustrate both the excitement and the fulfillment of philosophical dialogue. The political virtues, while defended on the surface of the text, remain as unsettled by the end as they were in the introduction.

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Liberalism & the Liberal StateFurious Fancies: American Political Thought in the Post-Liberal Era. By Philip Abbott Social Justice in the Liberal State. By Bruce A. Ackerman Political Philosophy and the Issues of Politics. By Joseph Cropsey The Collapse of Liberal Empire: Science and Revolution in the Twentieth Century. By Paul N. Goldstene Approaches to Democracy: Philosophy of Government at the Close of the Twentieth Century. By W. J. Stankiewicz

Polity ◽

10.2307/3234472 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 701-710

Author(s):

Gerald M. Bonetto

Keyword(s):

Political Philosophy ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Justice ◽

Political Thought ◽

Liberal State ◽

American Political Thought

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Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. By Arnold Brecht. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 1959. Pp. xviii, 603. $12.00.)

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr/65.2.340 ◽

1960 ◽

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Theory ◽

Political Thought ◽

Princeton University

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3. The history of political thought and Marxism

10.1093/actrade/9780198853725.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 31-50

Author(s):

Richard Whatmore

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Working Class ◽

Political Thought ◽

Karl Marx ◽

Historical Materialism ◽

History Of Political Thought ◽

Scientific Philosophy ◽

History Of ◽

Friedrich Engels

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.

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Churchill’s Wars

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474450140.003.0004 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 56-91

Author(s):

Ian Ward

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Political Thought ◽

Modern Society ◽

The State ◽

Radical Politics ◽

History Plays ◽

Contemporary Theatre ◽

Caryl Churchill ◽

And Gender

This is the first of three chapters which focus, in their different ways, on the writing of history in contemporary theatre. This chapter concentrates on two ‘history’ plays written by Caryl Churchill during the 1970s; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom. Churchill emerged as one of the most influential voices in radical British theatre during the closing decades of the last century. Both plays were set in the mid-seventeenth-century, but were written to resonate with themes familiar in modern legal and political thought. The title of the first play is taken from a Leveller tract published in the second part of the 1640s. Churchill uses it to explore the state of radical politics in later twentieth-century Britain. The second play, Vinegar Tom, is a contribution to a distinctive sub-genre of ‘witchcraft’ plays, which use the ‘crime’ of witchcraft as a vehicle for revisiting the relation of law and gender in modern society.

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Twentieth-Century Political Thought.

Pacific Affairs ◽

10.2307/2752310 ◽

1946 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 333

Author(s):

N. A. M. MacKenzie ◽

Joseph S. Roucek

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Thought

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Intellectuals and Political Thought in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Intellectuals and the Search for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil ◽

10.1017/cbo9781107785298.004 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 12-56

Author(s):

Ronald H. Chilcote

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Thought

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The City and the Law. Aspects of Ibn Khaldūn’s Critique of the Philosophers

Philological Encounters ◽

10.1163/24519197-12340071 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 4-24

Author(s):

Leonardo Capezzone

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Thought ◽

Historical Development ◽

World History ◽

The Political ◽

Islamic Philosophy ◽

Critical Attitude ◽

History Of ◽

The City

Abstract The history of Khaldunian readings in the twentieth century reveals an analytical capacity of non-Orientalists definitely greater than that demonstrated by the Orientalists. The latter, at least until the 1950s, prove to be prisoners of that syndrome denounced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which projected on Islamic historical development a specificity and an alterity, which make it an exception in world history. Orientalist scholarship has often wanted to see in Ibn Khaldūn’s critical attitude to the philosophy of al-Fārābī and Averroes only the confirmation of the primacy of the sharīʿa over Platonic nomos. This article seeks to highlight some aspects of Ibn Khaldūn’s critique of classical political thought of Islamic philosophy. His critique focuses on the importance given to the juridical dimension of social becoming, and to the role of the political body of the jurists in the making of the City. Those aspects witness Ibn Khaldūn’s effort to interpret change and fractures as factors which make sense of history and decadence.

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