Persuasion and Force in 4 Maccabees: Appropriating a Political Dialectic

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-112
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Edsall
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Political Persuasion ◽  
Political Dialectic

The present study explores the themes of persuasion and force in Greco-Roman political thought and their appropriation in 4 Maccabees. I argue that among Greco-Roman political writers, stretching from Plato to Plutarch, the problem of balancing persuasion and force and their relationship to civic virtues cut to the heart of the varied constitutional theories and proposals. While persuasion was preferred in ideal situations, force was recognized to be an important corollary for the masses (§1). Turning to 4 Maccabees, a good example of the Jewish appropriation of the dominant political philosophy, I demonstrate that the political persuasion/force dynamic is foundational both to the philosophical prologue and the martyr narrative (§2).

Rethinking Kant as a public intellectual

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Sofie Møller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon.

The Scholastic and Conciliar Roots of Samuel Rutherford’s Political Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.

Politics and Morality in the Thought of Karl Popper

1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Minogue
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

The political and conception of the self – a Wittgensteinian approach to political thought/ Polityka bez podmiotu – wittgensteinowska perspektywa w myśli politycznej

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Krzynówek-Arndt
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper proposes to examine the variety of ways political theorists understand the political importance of Wittgenstein’s thought. Any analysis of Wittgensteinian political philosophy start from different understanding of this philosophy of language and possible ends of philosophical activity. However, each attempt to interpret the significance of Wittgenstein’s work to political thought anticipates or is linked to a particular conception of the self, a particular conception of the human being that is not easy to reconcile with the Wittgenstein of Tractatus and the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations. For that reasons any Wittgensteinian approach to political thought should make an attention to the way Wittgenstein discusses on the self, the “I”, the way we use the word “I”.

scholarly journals The Use ofKairosin Renaissance Political Philosophy*

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Paul
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
History Of

AbstractAlthough the Greek concept ofkairos (καιρός)has undergone a recent renewal of interest among scholars of Renaissance rhetoric, this revival has not yet been paralleled by its reception into the history of political thought. This article examines the meanings and uses of this important concept within the ancient Greek tradition, particularly in the works of Isocrates and Plutarch, in order to understand how it is employed by two of the most important political thinkers of the sixteenth century: Thomas Elyot and Niccolò Machiavelli. Through such an investigation this paper argues that an appreciation of the concept ofkairosand its use by Renaissance political writers provides a fuller understanding of the political philosophy of the period.

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The State ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Interpretative Approach

Of all the major episodes in Hegel's Rezeptionsgeschichte, British Hegelianism can seem the most foreign and outmoded, to have the least relevance to our current understanding of Hegel's thought. Even today, we are lead back to the Young Hegelians for the problems they pose in reading his work; we can sympathise with the concerns of Peirce, Royce and Dewey that drew them to him, and the interpretative picture they developed; we can take seriously the attempts by Croce and Gentile to bring about their “reforms”, given our contemporary ambivalence to his project; and we can see how in different ways the influence of Hegel on Kojève, Sartre, Lukács and the Frankfurt School have made some of his ideas central to our times. But few feel this sense of identification and illumination on encountering the work of Hegel's British interpreters from the turn of the century; rather, in their writings we seem to find a Hegel that is darker, more distant, more difficult for us to relate to contemporary concerns. This is not true in every respect, of course. In particular, several recent commentators have stressed how far it is possible to find here a reading and assessment of Hegel's political thought that does connect directly with many current issues, and that in this respect the thought of T H Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Henry Jones is not dead, either as a tradition within political philosophy, or as an interpretative approach to Hegel's theory of the state. Nonetheless, even those who seek to defend the importance of British Hegelianism in this regard clearly recognize that this is a fairly modest claim: for it fails to resurrect and revitalize the more fundamental aspect of the their encounter with Hegel, which was with his metaphysics – on which, as for Hegel, their political theories were based, rather than being primary in themselves. Those concerned with the political thought of the British Hegelians have not tried to take on this wider issue, leaving unchallenged the assumption that in their appropriation of his metaphysics, the British Hegelians have little to offer us either interpretatively or philosophically.

scholarly journals Metafísica y política en El nacimiento de la tragedia

1999 ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
José Emilio Esteban Enguita
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Essential Question

This text aims at throwing light on the political thought which is implicit in The Birth of the Tragedy, and in the Posthumous Writings. Although politics appears not to be important in a work on aesthetics and metaphysics, the author shows that tragic experience is intimately related with the need for a tragic state. The ecstasies of the Dionysian experience form the ethos of the citizen, and nourish the political institutions which, in their turn, allow the artistic liberation of Dionysian forces. Furthermore, the author shows that, to Nietzsche, Euripides represents not only the decadence of tragedy, but also the destruction of the Greek polis and the transformation of the citizen in a mediocre bourgeois. Politics is certainly not the base of existence, but is a mere normativity which changes with aesthetic conceptions. Nevertheless, in his view of politics, Nietzsche responds to the question concerning the value of politics and, accordingly, responds to the essential question of all political philosophy.

scholarly journals Trzy razy res publica: Thomas Smith, Gasparo Contarini i Wawrzyniec Goślicki

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-104
Author(s):  
Iwona Barwicka-Tylek
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political System ◽  
The State ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
The Republic

The interest in Republican thought is on the increase again, now chiefl y thanks to the works of Quentin Skinner and the circle of so-called neo-Republicans (or civic Republicans) concentrated around Phillip Petit. They stress the peculiar perspective that Republicans have had on the state and society. This is seen in their distinctive view of freedom as the absence of domination, or attachment to the category of citizenship and the related role of civic virtues. These special characteristics justify, in their opinion, distinguishing the Republican trend of political thought (historically and now) from other positions, especially the liberal tradition. Accepting generally the above opinion, the paper draws our attention to signifi - cant differences within Republicanism itself. To do this, it cites the three conceptions of republic that were formed in the 16th century and refer to England (Sir Thomas Smith), Venice (Gasparo Contarini) and Poland (Wawrzyniec Goślicki). Although they were formed around the same time and have common roots mainly in Aristotle’s philosophy and Roman Republican ideas, each of the three perspectives views the republic from a different angle. While all three authors believe the coexistence of three elements – orderly institutions, wise law and virtuous citizens – to be crucial for any state, they rely in their deliberations on one element only. This has an impact on the way their conceptions fi nally appear and on the conclusions for the political system they draw. And so, Smith gives precedence to institutions, Contarini emphasises the key role of law and Goślicki gives primacy to virtue, concentrated in an ideal senator. Taking notice of such differences among thinkers openly admitting to an attachment to the Republican tradition should make us even more careful so as not to oversimplify it as if it were uniform and completely cohesive. Further, the awareness of such differences may provoke refl ection how justifi ed the use of the Republican banner is in respect of so different authors as, for instance, Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

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