scholarly journals An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-484
Author(s):  
Carol Atack
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conjectural History

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

ANXIETIES OF DISTANCE: CODIF ICATION IN EARLY COLONIAL BENGAL

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON E. WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Continuous Flow ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Historians of political thought tend to emphasize the continuous flow and transmission of concepts from one generation to the next, and from one place to another. Historians of Indian ideas suggest that India was governed with concepts imported from Europe. This article argues instead that the sense of rupture that British officials experienced, from both the intellectual history of Britain and Indian society, played a significant role in forming colonial political culture. It examines the practice of “Hindu” property law in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that the attempt to textualize and codify law in the 1810s and 1820s emerged from British doubts about their ability to construct viable forms of rule on the basis of existing intellectual and institutional traditions. The abstract and seemingly “utilitarian” tone of colonial political discourse was a practical response to British anxieties about their distance from Indian society. It was not a result of the “influence” of a particular school of British thinkers.

scholarly journals LIU ZEHUA 劉澤華 (1935–2018)

Early China ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Yuri Pines
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Chinese Political Culture ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractThis obituary surveys the biography and major works of Liu Zehua, a leading scholar of China’s intellectual history, political thought, and political culture. It explores the impact of Liu Zehua’s personal experience, in particular the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, on his conceptualization of Chinese political culture as subjugated to the overarching principle of monarchism. Liu Zehua’s critical engagement with China’s past distinguished him from proponents of revival of traditional values and made him one of the powerful opponents of cultural conservatives in China.

THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY MODERN SWITZERLAND

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC H. LERNER
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Good Government ◽  
History Of

What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

scholarly journals Ein Modell Politischer Diskursanalyse

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Model ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Cambridge School

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

Seneca the Elder, the Controuersia Figurata, and the Political Discourse of the Early Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-150
Author(s):  
Matthew Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Specific Event ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Seneca The Elder

This paper studies examples of how exponents of Roman declamation could insert into arguments on the trivial, even fantastic, cases known as controuersiae statements of striking relevance to the political culture of the triumviral and early imperial period. This is particularly apparent in the Controuersiae of Seneca the Elder but some traces remain in the Minor Declamations attributed to Quintilian. The boundaries separating Rome itself from the declamatory city referred to by modern scholars as Sophistopolis are significantly blurred even in those instances where the exercise does not turn on a specific event from Roman history, and there is much to be gained from how the declaimers deploy Roman historical examples. Some of the most sophisticated instances of mediated political comment exploit the employment of universalizing sententiae, which have considerable bite when they are related to contemporary Roman discourse and experience. The declamation schools are a forum for thinking through the implications of the transformation of the Roman state and deserve a place within any history of Roman political thought.

Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517-1625)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

The period 1517–1625 was crucial for the development of political thought. During this time of expanding empires, religious upheaval, and social change, new ideas about the organization and purpose of human communities began to be debated. In particular, there was a concern to understand the political or civil community as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular structures, characteristics, and history. There was also a growing focus, in the wake of the Reformation, on civil or political authority as distinct from the church or religious authority. To explain these new ideas about political power, the concept of sovereignty began to be used, alongside a new language of reason of state. Yet political theories based upon religion still maintained significant traction, particularly claims for the divine right of kings. In the midst of these developments, the language of natural law became increasingly important as a means of legitimizing political power; natural law provided a rationale for earthly authority that was separate from Christianity and its use enabled new arguments for religious toleration. This book offers a new reading of early modern political thought, drawing on a wide range of sources from Europe and beyond. It makes connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim societies that lay to its south and east, showing the extent to which concerns about the legitimacy of political power were shared. It demonstrates that the history of political thought can both benefit from, and remain distinctive within, the wider field of intellectual history.

Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 287-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Vast Area

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

STRATEGY AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
History Of ◽  
Strategic Thought

The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-centuryrealpolitik, and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of international relations and war studies, intellectual historians have, for the most part, left the matter to the experts. The strategic maxims of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart may fascinate IR theorists, political scientists, and military historians, but they seldom fire the imaginations of tender-minded historians of ideas. The two books under review challenge such preconceptions. They ask us to consider the history of Cold War strategic thought in a wider conceptual frame. Buried in the history of strategy, they suggest, are some of the central themes of postwar social and political thought.

Nnamdi Azikiwe and Nineteenth - Century Nigerian Thought

1974 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. C. Echeruo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Man

This article is concerned chiefly with the connection between Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's thought and that part of Nigeria's intellectual history which was the product of its nineteenth-century heritage. This relationship is important because, until comparatively recently, the intellectual life of what is now Nigeria was really an extension of that of the Negro. What we generally speak of as the beginnings of modern Nigerian social and political thought are really parochial manifestations of the more general history of the black man.

scholarly journals Johann Damgaards Alithia (1597). Genrehistorie, teksthistorie og idehistorie: Omkring et dansk fyrstespejl til Christian 4.

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
The Other ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Interesting Point ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bull's Eye

The history of Danish political thought is a neglected field of study. This is due to scholarly traditions as well as to the lack of “great texts.” The present article presents a Danish manuscript mirror of princes, Alithia, written in 1597 by Johann Damgaard and presented to King Christian 4. The text itself is neither original nor of exceptional literary merit, but the King liked it and discussed it chapter by chapter with the author. In other words: Damgaard’s Alithia seems to have hit the bull’s eye of political correctness and royal taste. This makes it an interesting source for Danish political culture in the decades around 1600. It represents a synthesis of humanist and reformation ideology where humanism has determined the form while the contents is mostly traditional Christian kingship in the protestant tradition. An exploration of Damgaard’s sources reveals that Damgaard’s text represents a sofisticated writing up of material found in two earlier manuscript mirror of princes by Jens Skafbo from 1590 and 1592 respectively. Skafbo, on the other hand, compiled his mirror of princes on the basis of Paulus Helie’s Danish adaption (printed 1534) of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Institutio principis christiani and diverse other texts mainly from the 1580’s. This plagiarism, as modern eyes would see it, was typical of the age. The interesting point is the thorough stylistic and ideological twist towards humanism that Damgaard gave his text. A last interesting point is that these mirrors of princes were not destined for the King alone. In more modest and shortened manuscript editions they circulated among the higher nobility. In one such edition of Damgaard’s Alithia one finds a paragraph with no parallel in the King’s version. It describes the relation between King and realm by means of a parable about a lion (the king) and a unicorn (the realm). If the lion behaves peace is assured, but if the lion offends the unicorn it will throw him out by means of its sharp and strong horn (the nobility). The paragraph ends with some barbed verses about the expulsion of King Chrsitian 2. in 1523. This is precious evidence for a radical aristocratic ideology which only occasionally, if at all, surfaces in the sources.

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