Review Essay: The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Makings of Aesthetic Political Theory, by Diego A. von Vacano. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 230 pp. $60.00 (cloth). Machiavelli in Love: The Modern Politics of Love and Fear, by Haig Patapan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 182 pp. $65.00 (cloth)

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-167
Author(s):  
Laura Janara
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Politics Of Love

The Marxist Critique of International Political Theory

2018 ◽  
pp. 651-663
Author(s):  
Andrew Davenport
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
International Politics ◽  
World Systems ◽  
World Systems Theory ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
The Status ◽  
Leading Schools ◽  
Normative Issues

Marxism’s critique of International Political Theory (IPT) is not of specific themes but of how the latter understands international politics generally. Where IPT typically focuses on ethical and normative issues and problems of justice, Marxism has always given priority to capitalism and class, which it regards as fundamental to modern politics and as inadequately recognized within IPT. Marxism therefore rejects the view of the international as a shared “societal” space open to negotiation and compromise, and instead emphasizes irreconcilable conflict and exploitation. Through its leading schools of Imperialism, World Systems Theory, and Neo-Gramscian theory, Marxism has provided accounts of international politics that strongly contrast with the concerns of IPT. However, a potentially more far-reaching line of critique, drawing upon Marx’s analysis of liberal forms, remains undeveloped because Marxism has not yet clarified the status of the international within its theoretical space.

African American political thought reimagined: A review of African American Political Thought: A Collected History

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110387
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
American Political Thought

This review essay surveys the contributions of the new edited volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The thinker-based approach to the study of African American political thought advanced in the volume highlights the ways in which thinkers reformulate the central political questions of the intellectual tradition and constitute the canon through the citation and invocation of earlier figures. It also draws attention to the rhetorical, strategic, and tactical dimensions of their political thought. The volume sets a new standard for study of African American political thought and makes a persuasive case for the tradition’s important contributions to political theory broadly. However, by tying its significance too closely to its interventions within American political thought, the volume inadvertently minimizes the global resonances of African American political thought.

Tocqueville and the French

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-165
Author(s):  
Cheryl B. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Marxist Tradition

For contemporary political theorists, the events of nineteenth-century France – the "bourgeois" revolution of 1830, the revolutionary eruption of 1848 with its dénouement in Bonapartism, and the "heroic" moment of the Paris Commune – have entered the domain of reflection on modern politics through Marx. Not only for Marxists, but for those who learned political theory in a Marxist tradition or whose primary acquaintance with nineteenth-century France came from Marx's trenchant dissection of its class struggles, this was a story fraught with universal significance. Indeed, French historical events have long functioned as dramatic signs or markers of the modern relationship between state and civil society, and between democracy and revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore, London: Routledge, 2009

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingo Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Effective Demand ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Economic Outlook ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

Abstract This review-essay discusses the contributions to Ricardo Bellofiore’s book Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy in their respective historical and theoretical contexts. A key goal of the book is to establish Luxemburg’s work as a ‘macro-monetary class approach’, which means linking an economic outlook on effective demand and finance with a political focus on class-struggles in the domestic and international arenas. This approach marks a significant, and positive, departure from widespread interpretations that separate Luxemburg’s political theory from her economic theory. Given the apparent limits of neoliberal globalisation it is also a very timely approach that can help us to understand the current conjuncture of economic and political crises. Bellofiore’s book offers a useful framework for such analysis but focuses much more on economic theory than on politics and the historical developments of global capitalism. To fully exploit the potential of Luxemburg’s political economy, complementary work on these latter two aspects has to be done.

SHADOWS OF DU BOIS

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Turner
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Color Line ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk

Political theory is catching up to Du Bois. More than a century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997), political theorists have begun to realize that “the problem of the color-line” (pp. 45, 61) is constitutive of modernity. That it has taken this long for political theorists to recognize what Du Bois saw so clearly more than a century ago reflects the field's all-too-frequent parochialism. At the same time, the field is home to dissenting voices which insist that we cannot understand modern politics without confronting the White supremacist character of the modern West.

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.

scholarly journals Dugin's deconstruction of postmodernity: Postliberalism and postpolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 887-907
Author(s):  
Srđan Perišić
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Politics

The paper studies Dugin's argumentation of postmodernity. In his philosophical and politicological works (Philosophy of Politics, Postphilosophy, Fourth Political Theory and Postmodern Geopolitics) written after 2000, Dugin applies the deconstruction method to explain the postmodern paradigm which the West definitely stepped into at the end of the twentieth century. We begin with his understanding of the end of modernism and revelation of liberalism as a matrix of the emergence of the postmodern paradigm. Afterwards we study the revelation of postmodern liberalism as postliberalism. Moreover, the question is analyzed as to how postmodernization of the liberal individual into the postindividual one proceeds. In the final considerations we speak of the transformation of modern politics into postpolitics.

Constantinian Toleration

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Vincent Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Marginalized Community

Recent secular theorists of toleration have turned to Christian thought as a resource to overcome problems faced by secular-liberal accounts of toleration. This review essay examines three such projects, one in the tradition of Thomistic virtue ethics, another in the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, and another in political theory. While Christian ethics can learn from the methods and theoretical machinery deployed in these studies, each study assumes that the question of toleration is posed from a position of power and privilege. The essay asks what it might mean to consider toleration from the perspective of a marginalized community—like the early Christians.

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