scholarly journals From the King’s Two Bodies to the People’s Two Bodies: Spinoza on the Body Politic

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Composite Body ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Traditional Representation

Abstract In this article, using Spinoza’s treatment of the image of the political body, I aim to show what happens to the concept of a healthy commonwealth linked to a monarchist model of political order when transformed into a new context: the emergence of a democratic political order. The traditional representation of the body politic becomes problematic when people, understood as individual natural bodies, are taken as the starting point in political theory. Spinoza’s understanding of the composite body, and the assumption that each body is composed, raises the question of the stability or instability of this composition. This has implications for the way one looks at the political order’s conditions of possibility, I argue, and at the same time reveals the imaginary nature of the political body.

scholarly journals Sorismo en el contexto del geunismo

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Sánchez-Seco López
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Efficient Markets ◽  
Efficient Markets Hypothesis ◽  
Economic Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
Regulatory Proposals ◽  
Economic Globalisation

En el contexto de una obra mucho más amplia y en ciernes, que propone como único sistema plenamente legítimo aquél cuyo cuerpo político viene constituido por la totalidad de habitantes del planeta, es conveniente traer a colación la filosofía política y económica de George Soros, porque aporta una visión muy diferente a la aplicada por los endiosados economistas que no supieron ver con antelación la Gran Recesión global en la que seguimos inmersos. La relación entre la realidad y el pensamiento es clave en el sorismo, como también lo es la distinción entre los diversos tipos de ciencias. La hipótesis de la eficiencia en los mercados también es cuestionada, junto con el concepto de equilibrio en economía, la incertidumbre y la falibilidad. También se acomete la crítica del fundamentalismo de mercado y a las propuestas regulatorias. Y todo en el contexto de una globalización económica poco política.Within the context of a much wider and developing piece proposing as only fully legitimate system the one the body politic of which is composed of the totality of inhabitants on the planet, it is convenient to bring to us the political and economic philosophy of George Soros for it adds a very different vision to that applied by the deified economists who could not in advance see the global Great Recession in which we keep on living. The relation between reality and thought is key within Sorism, as it is the distinction amongst the several kinds of sciences. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is also put into question side by side with the concept of equilibrium in Economics, uncertainty, and fallibility. The critique of market fundamentalism is also implemented as well as the regulatory proposals. And all of it taking place within the context of a scarcely political but very economic globalisation.

Outliving the Republic

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Republic

Chapter 4 examines claims in republican oratory and letters that the body politic was dead, dying, or would have died, if not for some timely intervention. To some degree, invocations of the republic’s death overlap with the images of wounding and disease explored in earlier chapters, to which at least a few are directly connected. The suggestion of urgency and permanence and the complex emotional resonances evoked by death, however, also often impart meanings of their own. References to the body politic’s demise are particularly common not only in invective but also in consolatory contexts, as Cicero’s letters to and from friends in the period of the civil wars (from 49 to 45 BCE) and Caesar’s dictatorship poignantly show. Common assumptions that Rome’s republic ought to have been undying lent further significance to statements about the political body’s death.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

CHINAMPAAGRICULTURE, SURPLUS PRODUCTION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE AT XALTOCAN, MEXICO

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Morehart
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Potential Productivity ◽  
Surplus Production ◽  
Full Production

AbstractThis article examines the productivity of agriculture at the Postclassic polity of Xaltocan, Mexico. Employing multiple lines of data (remote sensing, artifactual, ecofactual, chronological, demographic, historic, ethnographic, and environmental), it reconstructs the potential productivity of an integrated raised field,chinampasystem that surrounded the polity. This exercise reveals that the system was capable of producing a sizeable caloric surplus above the needs of the kingdom's estimated total population and the number of laborers necessary to maintain full production. To situate the processes related to agricultural production, the paper considers how farmers’ strategies were articulated with multiple institutions. Increased integration between political, social, and household institutions possibly fostered residents’ incorporation into the body politic and provided mechanisms to finance the political economy. Such integration and dependency fractured, however, when Xaltocan was conquered.

The Body Politic and the Politics of Two Bodies: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in Death

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
American Nation

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

scholarly journals Virtue, Production, and the Politics of Commerce: Genovesi’s “Civil Economy” Revisited

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-729
Author(s):  
Adrian Pabst ◽  
Roberto Scazzieri
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Civil Economy ◽  
Specific Stage ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

Antonio Genovesi’s economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid-and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi’s book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy similar to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The aim of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the mutual implication between the economic and the political order of society by revisiting Genovesi’s theory of civil economy, which he defined as “the political science of the economy and commerce.” First, the article retraces Genovesi’s conception of civil economy as a branch of political science and the role of “virtue” in ordering the polity according to “the nature of the world.” Second, it explores Genovesi’s theory of production as an inquiry into the proportionality conditions that productive activities should meet for a well-functioning polity to persist over time. Third, our argument emphasizes the importance of Genovesi’s analysis of production structures for his theory of internal and foreign trade. In this connection, the paper investigates Genovesi’s idea that the maintenance of a country’s “trading fund” should be the fundamental objective for its internal and external trade policies. These policies, according to Genovesi, should be consistent with the context of the body politic under consideration and the economy’s proportionality requirements for any specific stage of development.

scholarly journals Phase Transitions and Macroscopic Limits in a BGK Model of Body-Attitude Coordination

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 2671-2736
Author(s):  
P. Degond ◽  
A. Diez ◽  
A. Frouvelle ◽  
S. Merino-Aceituno
Keyword(s):  
Local Density ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Gradient Flow ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bgk Model ◽  
Macroscopic Models ◽  
Body Attitude ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
The Stability

Abstract In this article we investigate the phase transition phenomena that occur in a model of self-organisation through body-attitude coordination. Here, the body attitude of an agent is modelled by a rotation matrix in $${\mathbb {R}}^3$$ R 3 as in Degond et al. (Math Models Methods Appl Sci 27(6):1005–1049, 2017). The starting point of this study is a BGK equation modelling the evolution of the distribution function of the system at a kinetic level. The main novelty of this work is to show that in the spatially homogeneous case, self-organisation may appear or not depending on the local density of agents involved. We first exhibit a connection between body-orientation models and models of nematic alignment of polymers in higher-dimensional space from which we deduce the complete description of the possible equilibria. Then, thanks to a gradient-flow structure specific to this BGK model, we are able to prove the stability and the convergence towards the equilibria in the different regimes. We then derive the macroscopic models associated with the stable equilibria in the spirit of Degond et al. (Arch Ration Mech Anal 216(1):63–115, 2015, Math Models Methods Appl Sci 27(6):1005–1049, 2017).

Traces of a Tango: The Club Invites Me to Dance—a Study of Materiality in Movement

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 417-424
Author(s):  
Paola Vasconcelos Silveira
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Porto Alegre ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Dance Training ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Two Bodies

This paper is based on my master's thesis, which was developed in 2013–2014 at the Graduation Program in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). This study aimed to reflect on the processes of developing an artistic experiment conducted from the encounter between my body and the club in transient places in the city of Porto Alegre. The starting point emerged from the experience of the artist in the practice of tango from a dialogue bias between peers. The object, in this proposal, becomes a present and active body—a lively piece that will enhance a one-to-one conversation. It is thus intended that the dance results from the relationship between two bodies, and not from the manipulation of one body over another. Therefore, the study finds resonance in the theoretical possibility of thinking of non-human bodies as vibrant matter with the capability to generate relationships and movements. In that way, this meeting would lead to a loss of the self. This study also contributes to a debate on proposals for dance training, as this research has chosen a path of building the danced relationship with the object from the kinesthetic perception of the body in motion. Finally, this study tenses the production of knowledge in the academic field, by assuming that the body produces a kind of knowledge—an embodied knowledge—which must be recognized and legitimized.

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