Ernest Barker and Greek Political Thought: Aristotle

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Quentin Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Significant Advance ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Ethical Vision

Ernest Barker is best remembered for his study of Plato and his Predecessors (1918), yet his early efforts to mine Greek political theory for relevant insights centred on Aristotle.While not as original as his teacher, Aristotle represents a significant advance in political science, first, by avoiding Plato’s extremes, second, by forwarding a naturalistic and ethical vision of civic life, and finally, by adopting a pragmatic approach to improving ‘deviant’ regimes. Both thinkers serve as a foil for exposing the shortcomings of modern politics, particularly the atomistic individualism of Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. Unlike Plato, Aristotle exhibits an ‘English spirit’ of compromise, moderation, and balance, although from a distinctly Burkean perspective. Barker’s sympathies did not, however, blind him to the ‘reactionary’, ‘primitive’, and ‘illiberal’ aspects of Aristotle’s teaching. His failure to reconcile these discordant elements—culminating in a quixotic call for an ‘aristocratic democracy’ — merely echoed the ambiguity and equivocation that marked his treatment of Plato. Barker maintained a grudging respect for Plato, but knew he was politically incorrigible. Aristotle showed farmore promise, but in the end could not be made to fit the mould of the Edwardian progressive.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
James Schleifer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

Political Theory and the Study of Politics: A Report of a Conference

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 475-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
Political Inquiry ◽  
The One

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

Corruption and Partisanship: Rousseau, Ferguson and Two Competing Models of Republican Revival

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Sparling
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
The Common

AbstractPartisanship inspires a degree of ambivalence. There is a widespread tendency—which has a long history in republican political thought—to decry division and partisanship as corrupting, undermining individual judgment, and promoting clientelism, dependencies and loyalties antithetical to the common good. Yet there is an equally widespread intuition that excessive unity is corrupting, undermining the vigour of civic life. Contemporary political theory remains divided on the normative implications of division and unity—witness the battles between agonistic and consensus-oriented schools of democratic theory. In this article I examine the thought of two eighteenth-century writers who, while often treated as contributing to a common intellectual project of reinvigorating classical civic virtue, took opposite positions on the desirability of division. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson offered competing accounts of what corrupts civic virtue, one decrying party divisions and the other lauding them. The article examines the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Rousseau and Ferguson's competing claims and suggests, ultimately, that both positions suffer from neglecting to attend to an important distinction between salutary and harmful divisions.

scholarly journals Machiavelli’s Political Thought and Its Inspiration—Text Analysis Based on the Prince

2022 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. p33
Author(s):  
Zhang Haokai
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
First Time

Machiavelli is one of the founders of modern bourgeois political theory. The birth of his masterpiece The Prince creates a new pattern of western political thought, which marks the first time that political science has escaped from the bondage of religion and ethics. At the same time, Machiavelli is also named “Machiavelliism”. The so-called “no means to achieve the purpose” has become the greatest misunderstanding of Machiavelli. Based on the prince analysis of Machiavelli’s political thought, around his national unity of Italy launched the national regime, military, monarchy and other aspects of thinking.

scholarly journals Political Education and the History of Political Thought

1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 985-999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Sabia
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Science Students ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Interpretive Strategies

Texts designed to introduce political science students to the history of political thought or to past political theories have been commonplace in the discipline, as have disputes about their pedagogical utility or justifiability, and methodological debates concerning their adequacy or legitimacy. In an effort to address these disputes and some of these debates, I construct three models of historiographical inquiry. Each model represents a particular approach, and each is defined in terms of three common features. The methodological debates are joined both indirectly and directly: indirectly by identifying clearly the major features and purposes of these approaches, and directly by consideration of such issues as the nature of a historical tradition, the legitimacy of certain interpretive strategies and presuppositions, and the viability of certain conceptions of past political theory. I conclude that each approach can make significant contributions to the education of political science students.

Political Science, Political Theory and Policy‐Making in an Interdependent World

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Habits Of Mind ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Policymaking And Implementation

For Anyone Interested in Modern Politics There Could scarcely be a more pressing issue than how best to approach the task of identifying and comprehending the novel political challenges and opportunities which flow from the ever increasing interdependence of the destinies of human populations. At the intersection between challenge and opportunity there lie both fresh processes of policymaking and implementation and distinctly older political routines and habits of mind: the attempt at worst to pour very new and volatile wine into disturbingly antiquated bottles, or at best to bring the accumulated resources of centuries of statecraft to bear upon a bewildering array of often unprecedented hazards.

A Virtue for Courageous Minds

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Common Notion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, this book examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. The book begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. It then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. The book looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. It traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. The book demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and it challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, the book reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

History, the Hindu Right, and Subversion of Brahmanical-Hindu Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Stuart Gray
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Locus Classicus

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

scholarly journals How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-114
Author(s):  
Adrian Blau
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Framework

AbstractThis paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Entangling Plato: A Guide through the Political Theory Archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172199807
Author(s):  
Liam Klein ◽  
Daniel Schillinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Athenian Democracy

Political theorists have increasingly sought to place Plato in active dialogue with democracy ancient and modern by examining what S. Sara Monoson calls “Plato’s democratic entanglements.” More precisely, Monoson, J. Peter Euben, Arlene Saxonhouse, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Jill Frank approach Plato as both an immanent critic of the Athenian democracy and a searching theorist of self-governance. In this guide through the Political Theory archive, we explore “entanglement approaches” to the study of Plato, outlining their contribution to our understanding of Plato’s political thought and to the discipline of political theory.

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