scholarly journals Democracy and the Body Politic from Aristotle to Hobbes

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of

The conventional view of Hobbes’s commonwealth is that it was inspired by contemporary theories of tyranny. This article explores the idea that a paradigm for Hobbes’s state could in fact be found in early modern readings of Aristotle on democracy, as found in Book Three of the Politics. It argues that by the late sixteenth century, these meditations on the democratic body politic had developed claims about unity, mythology, and personation that would become central to Hobbes’s own theory of the commonwealth. Tracing the history of commentary on the relevant passages in Aristotle reveals new perspectives not only on the political theories of both Aristotle and Hobbes but also introduces modern readers to the richness of early modern commentaries on classical political texts. The article ends with some thoughts on why attention to traditions of commentary might be valuable for political theorists today.

Translating the Body Into Image. The Body Politic and Visual Practice at the Mughal Court During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Paragrana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-266
Author(s):  
Monica Juneja
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
The North ◽  
Multiple Regimes ◽  
New Ideas

AbstractThis article investigates the ways in which visual representations reconfigured the body in North Indian political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While images were meant to transmit and translate ethical conceptions of the polity, communicative modes of the visual medium followed a dynamic that was not a rehearsal of the path taken by texts. As images cut across distinctions formulated elsewhere and drew up new boundaries, they worked to refine and pluralise the understandings of political culture beyond the normative. Pictorial experiments at the North Indian courts involved negotiating multiple regimes of visuality and arriving at pictorial choices that ended up creating a new field of sensibilities, especially the corporeal. An argument is therefore made for the agency of the visual in defining new ideas of the political body that were constitutive of politico-ethical ideals in early modern North India.

scholarly journals GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA BECKER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

The Body Politic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marli F. Weiner ◽  
Mazie Hough
Keyword(s):  
Medical Journal ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
The South ◽  
Severe Attack ◽  
Remarkable Case ◽  
History Of

This conclusion discusses the political significance of different definitions of the body for slaves, slaveholders, and physicians in the antebellum South. It begins by telling the story of T. S. Hopkins, a physician from Waynesville, Georgia, who published an article titled “A Remarkable Case of Feigned Disease” in the March 1853 Charleston Medical Journal and Review. In his article, Hopkins presented “the history of the case” of a slave man named Nat, who was suffering from “liver affection.” The doctor initially interpreted Nat's condition in terms of hysteria, but later claimed it was “the result of a severe attack of climate fever.” This conclusion argues that Hopkins's presentation of Nat's story is illustrative of the ways in which the body politic of the South was rooted in race and sex. In particular, it considers Hopkins's recognition of the power of the body in defining slavery. It also describes how science and medicine reinforced each other; medicine served to define bodies and minds and their characteristics with the growing authority of science.

The pressure of coherence and the diachronic reconfigurations of metaphorical discourse

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Shogimen
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Of Salisbury ◽  
Medical Context ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
History Of

The metaphor of the body politic is diverse in the history of European political discourse yet it remains unclear why such diachronic variations occurred. Drawing on Zoltán Kövecses’s idea of “the pressure of coherence,” the present paper argues that diachronic reconfigurations of metaphorical discourses occur due to differential contextual experiences; more specifically, metaphorical discourses on the body politic, which consist of mapping between the domain of the POLITICAL COMMUNITY and that of natural BODY, are reconfigured diachronically in accordance with not only the ideological but also the medical context. In order to demonstrate this, the paper examines the texts of three key medieval political thinkers — John of Salisbury, Marsilius of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa — and the medical knowledge that was influential in their respective era. Thus this paper constitutes a contribution to the historical cognitive linguistic study of metaphorical discourse.

The Poetics of Anatomy

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
Jamie McKinstry
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Anatomical Dissection ◽  
History Of

Jamie McKinstry examines the early modern history of anatomical dissection as an exploratory process of formalising knowledge and of encountering the unexpected within. The sixteenth-century journey inside the body has parallels, McKinstry argues, with the contemporaneous exploration of the New World and in Donne’s poetry he sees reflected a linked throwing-off of ignorance and an embracing of new physical metaphors.

Fellowship and Freedom

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Leng
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Northwest Europe ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers—sixteenth-century England’s premier trading company—in its final century of existence as a privileged organization. Over this period the company’s main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticized in an era of political revolution. But the company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, the book views the company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. It addresses the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of internal disagreements and external attacks. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England’s transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.

Rivers of the Sultan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal H. Husain
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
River System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Realignment ◽  
Provincial Autonomy

Rivers of the Sultan offers a history of the Ottoman Empire’s management of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the early modern period. During the early sixteenth century, a radical political realignment in West Asia placed the reins of the Tigris and Euphrates in the hands of Istanbul. The political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia allowed the Ottoman state to rebalance the natural resource disparity along its eastern frontier. It regularly organized the shipment of grain, metal, and timber from upstream areas of surplus in Anatolia and the Jazira to downstream areas of need in Iraq. This imperial system of waterborne communication, the book argues, created heavily militarized fortresses that anchored the Ottoman presence in Iraq, enabling Istanbul to hold in check foreign and domestic challenges to its authority and to exploit the organic wealth of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium. From the end of the seventeenth century, the convergence of natural and human disasters transformed the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with its twin rivers. A trend toward provincial autonomy ensued that would localize the Ottoman management of the Tigris and Euphrates and shift its command post from Istanbul to the provinces. By placing a river system at the center of analysis, this book reveals intimate bonds between valley and mountain, water and power in the early modern world.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sanskrit Poetry ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.

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