scholarly journals Aristotle’s Pambasileia and the Metaphysics of Monarchy

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Atack
Keyword(s):  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Abstract Thought ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

Aristotle’s account of kingship in Politics 3 responds to the rich discourse on kingship that permeates Greek political thought (notably in the works of Herodotus, Xenophon and Isocrates), in which the king is the paradigm of virtue, and also the instantiator and guarantor of order, linking the political microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. Both models, in separating the individual king from the collective citizenry, invite further, more abstract thought on the importance of the king in the foundation of the polity, whether the king can be considered part of, or separate from, the polis, and the relationship between polis and universe. In addressing these aspects of kingship theories, Aristotle explores a ‘metaphysics of monarchy’, part of the long-running mereological problem of parts and wholes in the construction of the polis, and connecting his account of kingship to his thought on citizenship and distributive justice within the polis.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

Compassion as a Political Virtue

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Whitebrook
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The place of compassion in political thought and practice is debatable. This debate can be clarified by stipulating ‘compassion’ as referring to the practice of acting on the feeling of ‘pity’; in addition, compassion might best be understood politically speaking as properly exercised towards vulnerability rather than suffering. Working with these understandings, I contrast Martha Nussbaum's account of the criteria for the exercise of compassion in modern democracies with the treatment of compassion in Toni Morrison's novels in order to suggest how compassion can be viewed politically. In respect of distributive justice and public policy, in both cases compassion might modify the strict application of principles in the light of knowledge of particulars, suggesting an enlarged role for discretion in the implementation of social justice. More generally, compassion's focus on particulars and the interpersonal draws attention to the importance of imagination and judgement. The latter returns a consideration of compassion to the question of the relationship of compassion to justice. In the political context, although strict criteria for compassion are inappropriate, principles of justice might work as modifying compassion (rather than vice-versa, as might be expected).

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Philosophy for Millions and Millions of Philosophers

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Alexander Rubtsov
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Closed Type ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Internal Speech

In the article, the relationship between the highest professional specialization of philosophy and its involvement in the realities of everyday life consciousness, collective and individual, are considered. Karl Jaspers defines philosophy precisely through the natural need and ability of human being as such, from the piercing questions of children to the revelations of anomalous geniuses. Great philosophers only concentrate this sleeping ability in a person to see the world directly and every time anew. Rightly considered the most closed type of intellectual activity, philosophy at the same time provides examples of live communication and direct appeal to people and society.  The fact that each of us is the bearer of philosophical ideas (whether we are aware of it or not) leads to the problem of ideology. By analogy with the constitution of the political by Carl Schmitt through the opposition "friend — enemy", ideology is constituted by the opposition of "faith — knowledge" in a single continuum between the poles of "almost religion" and "almost philosophy". If ideology asserts the non-obvious as obvious, then the mission of philosophy is a systematic criticism of the obvious.  This conflict manifests itself both in society and in the consciousness of an individual.  The classic understanding of ideology as a purely external manipulation (“consciousness for the Other”) is challenged by the presence in the consciousness of the individual subject of “internal dialogue” and “internal speech” with the effects of ideological work and ideological struggle with oneself (the individual as a micromodel of society and the state).  Postmodern all the more accentuates the non-professional dimension of philosophy by rejecting the schemes of progress and hierarchy, the logic of binary oppositions, including high and low, center and marginal, specialized and amateur.  The ability to reflect is the most important feature of a sovereign personality in its resistance to the "penetrating" ideology and new mythology, degrading to intellectual barbarism and political savagery.

Political thought in Central and Eastern Europe: The open society, its friends, and enemies*

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110496
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu ◽  
Stefan Kolev
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Relationship

A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.

Trade Unions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political System ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Moments

In assessing the relationship between trade unions and British politics, this chapter has two focuses. First, it examines the role of trade unions as significant intermediate associations within the political system. They have been significant as the means for the development of citizenship and involvement in society, as well as a restraint upon the power of the state. Their power has also raised questions about the relationship between the role of associations and the freedom of the individual. Second, the chapter considers critical moments when the trade unions challenged the authority of governments, especially in the periods 1918–26 and 1979–85. Both of these lines of inquiry underline the importance of conservatism in the achievement of stability in modern Britain.

A New Quarrel

On Universals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
To Come ◽  
Question Today ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.

Ideology and the Intellectuals

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Berry ◽  
Michael Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Analysis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

Democracy and Ontology

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-227
Author(s):  
Bernard Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Dimension ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

AbstractThis paper elaborates a conception of the relationship between Philosophy and the Political which would not be one of exteriority but one of an intertwining between them. An analogy with Rémi Brague, who presents the conditions whereby the concept of 'the world' became a thematic object of reflection (The Wisdom of the World), is proposed to show the emergence of the concept of 'the political.' Following Lefort's philosophy, we trace the emergence of modern democracy with that of the political by claiming that there is an ontological dimension of the political. As the concept of the world could not emerge within a conception of the universe that united man and world in an organic whole, so too the concept of the political cannot emerge when the discourse on power is determined theologically (premodern societies). It is argued that there is an ontological dimension to the revolutions that introduced our political modernity. Modern revolutions are not simply a change in a form of governance; they effect a mutation in the symbolic order of a society by which the political, as such, can become visible. The indetermination of modern democracy corresponds to "the disappearance of the markers of certainty" that characterize the modern experience of the world, an experience that reveals a transformed ontological dimension. This dimension of uncertainty, the experience of the place of power as an "empty place," is contrasted with the totalitarian impulse to fill this empty place with a determinate image, e.g., the Party, the Fürher.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document