Francisco Suárez on Consent and Political Obligation

Vivarium ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Close Inspection ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
Social Contract Theorist ◽  
The City

AbstractInterpreters disagree on the origin that Francisco Suárez assigns to political obligation and correlative political subjection. According to some, Suárez, as other social contract theorists, believes that it is the consent of the individuals that causes political obligation. Others, however, claim that for Suárez, political obligation is underived from the individuals' consent which creates the city. In support of this claim they invoke Suárez's view that political power emanates from the city by way of "natural resultancy". I argue that analysis of Suárez's less studied De voto and De iuramento reveals that, for Suárez, consent causes both the city and the citizen's political obligation. Moreover, close inspection of the notion of causation by natural resultancy within Suárez's metaphysics shows that what emanates from the body politic in this fashion is not, as claimed, political subjection and political obligation, but rather the city's right to self-mastership. Because for him political obligation does originate in consent it is not incorrect to regard Suárez as a social contract theorist.

scholarly journals Francisco Suárez y la tradición del Contrato social

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schwartz Porzecanski
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Social Contract Theorist ◽  
Mode Of Production

RESUMENesisten importantes discrepancias entre los intérpretes acerca de si Francisco Suárez fue un teórico del contrato social. En buena medida, este desacuerdo tiene que ver con la relación entre el consentimiento constitutivo (por el cual la comunidad política es creada) y la obligación política. De acuerdo con una interpretación de Suárez, el consentimiento constitutivo no crea obligación política; más bien tal obligación corresponde a la comunidad política en virtud de la clase de entidad que es(igual que las personas tienen sus derechos de autonoía por ser personas). Argumento en contra de esta interpretación de Suárez al proponer que los efectos del consentimiento constitutivo deberían ser comprendidos a la luz del tratamiento que ofrece Suárez de "actos operativos" como votos, promesas y juramentos. Defiendo que muchos de los pasajes de Suárez han sido incorrectamente interpretados como apoyo de una lectura organicista, cuando en realidad corresponden al planteamiento que hace de la causación moral.PALABRAS CLAVEFRANCISCO SUÁREZ, CONSENTIMIENTO, OBLIGACIÓN POLÍTICA, CONTRATO SOCIAL.ABSTRACTInterpretars disagree on whether Francisco Suárez was a social contract theorist. Much of this discrepancy turns on the relation between constitutive consent (that consent by wich the political community is created) and political obligation. According to one interpretation of Suárez, it is not constitutive consent that creates political obligation. Rather, such obligation belongs to the political community by virtue of he sort of being that it is (just as persons have self-rule rights by virtue of being persons, independently from their mode of production). I argue against this interpretation of Suárez by suggesting that the effects of constitutive consent should be understood in light of Suárez's treatment of "operative acts"such vows, promises, and oaths. i establish that many of Suárez's phrases incorrectly deemed as supportive of an organicist reading, bellong, in fact, to Suárez's treatment of moral causation KEYWORDSFRANCISCO SUÁREZ, CONSENT, POLITICAL OBLIGATION, SOCIAL CONTRACT

‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault, the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The City

Revisiting Foucault's month-long stay in Toronto in June 1982, this article explores the reception and appropriation of the first volume of The History of Sexuality by activist-intellectuals associated with the Toronto-based publication, The Body Politic, and some of their fellow travelers. Reading Foucault's introductory volume through the intersecting frameworks of social constructionism, historical materialism, and socialist feminism, gay-left activists forged a distinctive relationship between sexual theory and political practice. If Foucault had a significant impact on activists in the city, Toronto also left its mark on Foucault. Based on the recently rediscovered and unedited transcript of a well-known interview with Foucault in Toronto, along with an interview with one of Foucault's interlocutors, the article concludes with Foucault's forays into Toronto's sexual and political scenes, particularly in relation to ‘bodies and pleasures’ and resistance to the sex police.

Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
JANET BEER ◽  
KATHERINE JOSLIN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
North Side ◽  
Hull House ◽  
The City

Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

scholarly journals Claire Weeda, 'Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts'

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Weeda
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
Concepts Of Health ◽  
The City ◽  
The Ideal

Latin and vernacular urban panegyrics, describing the ideal city and its residents, mushroomed in the twelfth century. Painting a utopian view of the city that mirrors the heavenly Jerusalem, they rhetorically conveyed ideals of urbanity for aspiring members of the body politic to emulate. This chapter explores the ways in which the cityscape constructed in these texts, and residents’ behaviour (as influenced by conduct manuals and regimes of health), appear embedded in a natural environment reflected through the lens of Galenic medicine. Evoking the benefits of cleanliness and beauty, these concepts of health and hygiene accorded closely with issues of social status. The disciplined quest for moderation and balance offered spiritual and physical health, as well as enhanced personal repute.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

scholarly journals The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Douglass
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Central Purpose

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.

Political Trust and Racial Ideology

1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 1199-1219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D. Aberbach ◽  
Jack L. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Trust ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Voluntary Consent ◽  
The Government

No government yet established has had the loyalty and trust of all its citizens. Regardless of the popularity of its leaders or how careful they are in soliciting opinions and encouraging participation in the process of policy-making, there are always those who see inequalities and injustices in the society and harbor suspicions of the government's motives and intentions. Resentment and distrust are elements of disaffection and the first step toward resistance. Therefore, even the most dictatorial governments have usually striven to increase their credibility and popularity. For democratic governments, however, the problem of combating distrust and encouraging voluntary acceptance of its institutions and decisions is a paramount concern. One of democratic theory's distinctive characteristics is its strong emphasis on voluntary consent, both as a basis of political obligation and as a central attribute of citizenship. The concern expressed by democratic thinkers about the elements of due process and the protection of opportunities for widespread participation is directed toward the creation of citizens who voluntarily accept the society's goals; “the demand for consent is the demand that the government must be more than self-appointed and must, in some significant way, be the chosen instrument through which the body politic and community acts ….”Democracy's guiding ideal is the substitution of mutual understanding and agreement for coerciveness and arbitrary authority in all phases of social and political life. The existence of distrustful citizens who are convinced that the government serves the interests of a few rather than the interests of all is a barrier to the realization of the democratic ideal.

Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule, c. 1724–1946

Urban History ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
NELIDA FUCCARO
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Action ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.

A Recognized and Respected Part of the Body Politic

2018 ◽  
pp. 86-108
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Grover Cleveland

This chapter documents the aftermath of Butler’s defeat for reelection in 1883. Butler’s supporters and a growing group of black independents backed Grover Cleveland for president of the United States. They hoped that Cleveland’s election would inaugurate a national black commitment to political independence and push the national Democratic Party towards a pro-civil rights agenda. Black Bostonians worked with like-minded activists in other states to leverage black political power towards recognition from the Cleveland administration. Despite some success, the limited gains in black rights during the Cleveland administration illuminated the limits of siding with the Democratic Party.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

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