Contesting Patrilineal Descent in Political Theory: James Mill and Nineteenth-Century Feminism

Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Jose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Patrilineal Descent

Liberal philosopher James Mill has been understood as being unambiguously antifeminist. However, Terence Ball, supposedly informed by a feminist perspective, has argued for a new interpretation. Ball has reconceptualized Mill as a feminist and the sole source of the feminism of his son (J. S. Mill), suggesting a revision of the received wisdom about their relationship to the development of nineteenth century feminist thought. This paper takes issue with Ball's “new interpretation” and its presumed feminist basis.

scholarly journals The Geopolitics of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Quimera: Femme Fatale as Split Feminist Subject

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Marina Cuzovic-Severn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Power Balance ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Feminist Thought

AbstractThis paper analyzes the representation of the femme fatale in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Quimera (1905). Femme fatale is described by many critics as an expression of masculine anxieties and fears, caused by political crisis and growth of feminine independence in the nineteenth century. Male authors employed this figure to preserve patriarchal structure and the existent power balance between prescribed gender roles. I argue that Pardo Bazán, through imitation of male writers and manipulation of hidden meanings in La Quimera, employs this masculinist projection to express latent feminist ideas and a critique of the contemporary social position of women. In her novel, Pardo Bazán creates a feminist femme fatale and, through her geopolitically split formation (France/Latin America/Spain), criticizes Spanish patriarchy, domesticity and non-modernity. She achieves this without overtly violating masculine narrative structure or demeaning patriarchal order, as she appropriates the originally masculinist imagery of fatal woman. Nevertheless, the eventual fate of Pardo Bazán’s femme fatale—especially the elaboration of internal dialogs and her presentation not as antagonist and invasive Other but as protagonist and subject—demonstrates fundamental differences of a feminist perspective within her elaboration of this masculine fantasy. In this way, in a time and space where feminism as a movement did not yet exist or was in its formative years, Pardo Bazán immensely contributed to the development of European/Spanish feminist thought.

Creation, Fall and Political Order — Prussian Conservatism and the Old Testament

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Laura C. Achtelstetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars

Abstract This article examines differences within the theological basis of early nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism. By exploring the usage of the Old Testament in the writings of conservative thought leaders Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, this article contributes to scholarship of both traditions of biblical interpretation and that of the relation of theology and political theory. The focus of this article centers on three concepts of the Old Testament and their implementation in conservative political doctrine. I will discuss Hengstenberg’s concept of biblical historicity and unity of Scripture, Gerlach’s use of the Old Testament as the source of a role model for just religious wars and a theocratic concept of law, as well as Stahl’s bible-based political philosophy of history and the resulting model of political order. Thus, the basis for different, resulting concepts of church, state, and nation that were merged into an overall religion-based political conservative doctrine in pre-1848 Prussia are analyzed.

From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism

Kropotkin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. This theory is described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Kropotkin and Bakunin that advocates of his evolutionary theory invented in the 1960s in order to rescue anarchism from its reputation for violence. This repackaging of historical traditions underpins judgments about the irrelevance of anarchism to contemporary politics and political theory. In response, critics of post-anarchism have sought to defend nineteenth-century revolutionary traditions. The result of this argument is that Kropotkin emerges as a political theorist of class struggle. This defence raises significant questions about the coherence of Kropotkin's position on the war in 1914.

Information brokers and the making of the Baring crisis, 1857–1890

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Vedoveli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quality Information ◽  
South American ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Redundant Information ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Structural Holes ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Information Brokers ◽  
Social Clusters

This article offers a new interpretation of the Baring crisis, the most dramatic financial collapse of the nineteenth century, by focusing on how information brokerage allowed Barings to abandon its risk-averse practices in the mid 1880s. I argue that the mediators who bridged structural holes (gaps between social clusters) shaped actors’ access to information as well as their expectations regarding its quality. Information brokers who enjoyedphilosties with at least one of the parties connected by the bridging relationships could promote collaborative arrangements more likely to survive an environment of heightened uncertainty. The performance of such brokers in the 1880s enabled cooperation between Baring Brothers & Co. and the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas and supported the London house's growing association with the Anglo-Argentine firm of S. B. Hale & Co. in the second half of the 1880s. Cooperation gave Barings an illusion of security amid the costs of increasing competition and supported the house's growing engagement in South American affairs. Nevertheless, the strategy proved ineffective at barring the entry of new players. By the late 1880s, ties produced by brokerage connected Barings to the house's former competitors, producing a cohesive social cluster. Barings thereafter had access to redundant information, which hindered the house's ability to assess risk.

Commentary: Necromance

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-839
Author(s):  
Irvin J Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Cooperative Economy ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article reconsiders the recent turn in political theory to love as a countercapital affect, helping us endure when hope has lost its salience. The article offers the concept of “necromance” to attend to the ways the popular configuration of love as life-giving often overlooks how in the history of slavery and liberal empire love operates as life-taking. Distinct from necromancy, necromance is not a process of reviving the dead but of bringing subjects in ever closer proximity to the dead. Grounded in a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), particularly its vision of a cooperative economy and its response to the evolving meaning of love in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century, necromance is both a structure of feeling and a form of writing. As a resource for activism indebted to the creative powers of melancholic attachments, necromance contests the common conception that in order for grievances to become social movements or collective insurgencies they must be framed to create feelings of outrage, not of grief. By working inside existing conditions of irrevocable loss, necromantic love registers the feeling that the revolution is already here.

scholarly journals Scripture, Time, and Authority among Early Disciples of Christ

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 762-783
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Disciples Of Christ ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Alexander Campbell ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Testament Church

This article explores the relationship between the idealization of the Bible and the material characteristics of printed bibles among the Disciples of Christ in the early nineteenth century. The Disciples were founded on the principles of biblical primitivism: they revered the “pure” Bible as the sole source for proper faith and practice. The tenacity with which Disciples emphasized their allegiance to an idealized, timeless Bible has obscured their attention to its physical manifestations and use as printed scripture. The timeless authority of the Bible was entangled with the historical contingencies of mere bibles, and the ways in which they dealt with these tensions offer important perspective on nineteenth-century bible culture. Scholars have treated primitivism as an ahistorical impulse—the idealization of the New Testament church as a mythical sacred era outside of time that could be perpetually inhabited. By contrast, through an examination of the New Testaments edited and published by Disciples leader Alexander Campbell and the heavily-annotated preaching bible of Thomas Allen, an early Disciples preacher, I argue that in seeking to recover the New Testament era through historicized understandings of scripture, primitivists like Campbell and Allen situated the early church itself firmly within historical, not primordial, time.

A Series of Footnotes to Plato's Philosophers

2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-269
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
True Nature ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Political Communities

AbstractIn her magisterial Plato's Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert presents a radically new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. In doing so, she insists we must overcome reading them through the lens of Aristotle, whose influence has obscured the true nature of Plato's philosophy. However, in her works dealing with Aristotle's political science, Zuckert indicates several advantages of his approach to understanding politics. In this article, I explore the reasons why Zuckert finds Aristotle a problematic guide to Plato's philosophy as well as what she sees as the character and benefits of Aristotle's political theory. I conclude by suggesting a possible reconciliation between Zuckert's Aristotle and her Plato, insofar as both the Socrates whom Plato made his hero and Aristotle agree that political communities will rarely direct citizens toward virtue by means of law and that we must instead look to informal means of doing so.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document