La frontière politique intérieure: le sens de l’esclavage dans les Lois et dans le Politique de Platon

Méthexis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Étienne Helmer
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Free People

The presence of slavery in Plato’s political and ethical thought is marked by two contrary tendencies: one signals the conventional character of statutory slavery and tends to reduce the moral boundary between free people and servile people; the other one, going in the opposite direction, strongly reaffirms the functional frontier between these two categories, and makes it impassable. What does this double gesture of integration and exclusion of slavery mean with respect to Plato’s political thought? My claim, based on the analysis of a passage in Book vi of the Laws and some excerpts from the Statesman, is the following: for Plato, the statutory slavery fulfills the function of drawing the inner civic boundary on which the political field must be built if it is to have a true conceptual autonomy, by contrast with what contributes to its construction but without being fully political.

To what question is the Badiouan notion of the subject an answer? On the dialectical elaboration of the concept in his early work

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Jan-Jasper Persijn
Keyword(s):  
Direct Consequence ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Work Up

Alain Badiou’s elaboration of a subject faithful to an event is commonly known today in the academic world and beyond. However, his first systematic account of the subject ( Théorie du Sujet) was already published in 1982 and did not mention the ‘event’ at all. Therefore, this article aims at tracing back both the structural and the historical conditions that directed Badiou’s elaboration of the subject in the early work up until the publication of L’Être et l’Événément in 1988. On the one hand, it investigates to what extent the (early) Badiouan subject can be considered an exceptional product of the formalist project of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse as instigated by psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan) and a certain Marxist discourse (Althusser) insofar as both were centered upon a theory of the subject. On the other hand, this article examines the radical political implications of this subject insofar as Badiou has directed his philosophical aims towards the political field as a direct consequence of the events of May ’68.

Het Vlaamse politieke gebeuren in 1996

Res Publica ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-608
Author(s):  
Jo Craeghs
Keyword(s):  
Review Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Policy Fields ◽  
Draft Constitution

In the political field, Flanders experienced a very eventful year throughout 1996. The inauguration of the Flemish Parliament and the award for a 'Draft Constitution for Flanders ' made up two symbolic heights of the Belgian federalization. On the other hand, the deepening and the widening of the Flemish autonomy regularly led to tensions between the Flemish and the Walloon Community.In the policy fields as well, far-reaching changes took place. The most important ones are mentioned within the scope of this annual review article.

Humans, Jews, and the Other Others

Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Dynamic Key

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereby defining the main register in which the book is proceeding -- as distinct from the keys of chronological periodisation, linear history, paradigm shifts, or other stabilizing approaches. The “Introduction” further draws a distinction between politics and the political, and advances the question of the political in relation to the Talmud as both a text and a discipline of thinking able to shed a new, contrasting, light on the paradox driven modern political notions of a singularizing and even singling out notion of a “Jew,” and a universalizing notion of the “human being.” The “Introduction” concludes by gesturing towards a much closer connection between the question of the political in the Talmud, the notions of the Jews and of the human beings in modernity, and the question of earth and territory as a part of political equation these concepts spell out.

Interroga virtutes naturales: Nature in Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power

Vivarium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Peter Adamson
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ability To Work ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua

AbstractGiles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power (De ecclesiastica potestate), a polemical work arguing for the political supremacy of the pope, claims that the papacy holds a ‘plenitude of power’ and has direct or indirect authority over all aspects of human life. This paper shows how Giles uses themes from natural philosophy in developing his argument. He compares cosmic and human ordering and draws an analogy between the relations of soul to body and of Church to state. He also understands the pope’s power to be ‘universal’ in nature, another idea taken from Aristotelian physics. Further, Giles views the pope’s right to intervene arbitrarily in the affairs of the Christian community as mirroring God’s ability to work miracles. We thus see that Giles, no less than intellectuals on the other side of this debate such as Dante and Marsilius of Padua, believed that Aristotelian natural philosophy could be enlisted in the service of political thought.

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 Question of the Political: Back to Where You Once Belonged?

Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Jacques Rancière

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ontology, exemplified by Jacques Rancière. The notion of the other others comes front and centre in this analysis. In political ontology, the concept of the political is predicated on an ability of a politician, a lawyer, or an artist to employ the philosophical, and in modern terms, “ontological” distinction between what is the case in each case and what seems to be the case in each case. In political theology, it is no longer “being” as opposed to “seeming”, but rather an ability to represent as radically distinct from any particular content conveyed. The chapter further traces foundations of both political theology and political ontology in Kant’s transcendentalism -- in particular in the necessity by which transcendentalism denies “positive law,” which Christianity traditionally ascribed to the Jews. The balance of the chapter shows how, however mutually exclusive, both political theology and political ontology remain intersubjective in their scope and thereby both efface and help notice what, in the following chapters will emerge on the pages of the Talmud as interpersonal rather than intersubjective dimension of the political.

The Political Thought of Bernanos

1958 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Thomas Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social

To include in the same sentence the name of Bernanos and the term “political” or “politics” suggests an initial difficulty. Nothing was farther from his impatient and burning temperament than the meticulousness of the news analyst, or the specialist's careful dissection of the political animal. His domain was, rather, the philosopher's insight and intuition, the social critic's scorn and wrath, and the prophet's prediction of doom. He stated about himself:People say that Bernanos is never pleased about anything or anyone. When the righteous were wishing success to the crusade of our good neighbour, Señor Franco, he wrote Les Grands Cimetiéres sous la lune, and defended himself as being above all democratic. Now [1947] that all righteous are each more democratic than the other, he still proclaims himself Catholic, and no more democratic than before. A peculiar fellow, that Bemanos.

Judicial Control of Official Discretion

1928 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Judicial Control ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
And Control ◽  
Governmental Action

When men reflect about government, whether practically or academically, they always turn up, if they think deeply enough, two central problems: first, how to ensure that government shall do what it is supposed to do, and secondly, how to ensure that it shall not do other things. One is the problem of efficiency, the other the problem of control; and around the two is built most, perhaps all, of the so-called science of politics. At some periods the need for control seems the more vital and pressing. It seemed so to Englishmen, for example, during the two centuries following the accession of the Stuarts. At other times and places the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and in fifteenth century Europe, as in contemporary Italy, the dominant desire was for government strong enough and untrammelled enough to stem successfully a rising tide of disorder. Each age strikes its own balance in favor of one principle or the other, and thereby touches the opposite principle into action to redress the balance at some new point of readjustment.The competing claims of efficiency and control have often expressed themselves in the form of controversy concerning the comparative merits of government by discretion and govern-ment by law—or, in Harrington's phrase, a government of laws and a government of men. In this form the conflict has left its mark everywhere on political thought since Aristotle. Discretion means freedom for government to choose among possible alternatives of action. As one judge has said, “In honest plain language it means ‘Do as you like.’” It is thus a condition of efficiency, but it is very apt to exact the price of arbitrariness. Law, on the other hand, requires that government shall act by set rule, shall limit itself to a particular way of acting in each particular situation. It seeks to eliminate choice in favor of certainty; it narrows the possible range of governmental action in order that such action may be predicted and controlled in advance.

scholarly journals Qualified reader or interpreter: on the attitude of the researcher towards the sources of cognition of legal and political doctrines

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Vladimir Sergeevich Gorban
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Practical Orientation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Techniques

This article determines and analyzes certain characteristics of modern approaches towards the problem of attitudes to the sources of study on the history of political and legal thought. The attempts to speculate on hermeneutic practices as the constitutive method in analyzing the political and legal views of the philosophers of the past and modernity are subject to critical evaluation; and, on the other hand, the importance of qualified interpretation and analysis of the classical legal heritage is emphasized. It is demonstrated how conventional, shallow, or ideologized attitude towards the sources of study on the history and political thought creates fallacious and often just quasi-religious patterns of interpretation of the fundamental ideas and concepts, content of the discussed topics and problems, and social-practical orientation of their views. The scientific novelty lies primarily in determination and clarification of certain crucial aspects of modern methodology of the history of political and legal doctrines that are meaningful for the philosophy of law and legal theory overall. This pertains to the improvement of cognitive techniques and practices of the political and legal ideas of the past and modernity,  namely through minimization or elimination of such approaches towards their cognition that speculate on anti-historical attitudes; constitute interpretation as the key semantic unit in assessing the legal views of various philosophers; neglect the principles of objectivity and integrity in reconstructing the intellectual heritage; tendentiously articulate the accents of artistic, rather than documentary reconstruction of legal and political representations.

scholarly journals How to think beyond sovereignty: On Sieyes and constituent power

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Rubinelli
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty ◽  
The French Revolution

Historians and political theorists have long been interested in how the principle of people’s power was conceptualised during the French Revolution. Traditionally, two diverging accounts emerge, one of national and the other of popular sovereignty, the former associated with moderate monarchist deputies, including the Abbé Sieyes, and the latter with the Jacobins. This paper argues against this binary interpretation of the political thought of the French Revolution, in favour of a third account of people’s power, Sieyes’ idea of pouvoir constituant. Traditionally, constituent power has been viewed as a variation of sovereignty, but I show it to be an independent conceptualisation of people’s power. Sieyes’ political theory led him to criticise and refuse contemporary theories of sovereignty in favour of what he understood as a fully modern account of people’s power. Based on extensive research in the archives, I show how Sieyes opposed the deployment of sovereignty by the revolutionary Assemblies and recommended replacing it with the idea of constituent power.

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