American caudillo: Princely performative populism and democracy in the Americas

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego von Vacano
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Juan Domingo Peron ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Getulio Vargas ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas

Populism is on the rise throughout the world and it poses a challenge to democratic theory. Conventional political thought has not dealt seriously with this challenge throughout most of its history. The article takes the challenge seriously, underscoring the rise of Donald Trump as an example of populism. I argue that dominant paradigms in the study of the history of political thought and in normative, Rawlsian approaches do not elucidate populism. I argue that we need to look beyond the mainstream and to comparative political thought in particular. The Latin American political theory tradition, which has been in conversation with European ideas since the dawn of the modern age, provides a model of ‘princely performative populism’ that is more useful. Drawing on a Machiavellian conception of the prince’s aesthetic relationship to the people and the centrality of populist experiences in Latin America (e.g. Juan Domingo Perón, Getúlio Vargas, and Lázaro Cárdenas), my model provides a novel definition of populism emphasizing the leitmotifs of racialism, gender/machismo, caudillismo and the ‘civilized versus barbarian’ trope.

“We the People of Israel”: Covenant, Constitution, and the Supposed Biblical Origins of Modern Democratic Political Thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia R. C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Federalism ◽  
We The People

Abstract As an originally political term, study of the concept of “covenant” has long demonstrated the intersection of biblical studies and political theory. In recent decades, the association between covenant and constitution has come to the forefront of modern political thought in attempts to find the origins of certain democratic ideals in the descriptions of biblical Israel, in order to garner either religious or cultural authority. This is exemplified in the claims of Daniel J. Elazar that the first conceptual seeds of American federalism are found in the covenants of the Hebrew Bible. Taking Elazar’s work as a starting and end point, this paper applies contemporary biblical scholarship to his definition of biblical covenant in order to reveal the influences of his own American political environment and that of the interpreters he is dependent upon. The notion that biblical covenant or its interpretation remains a monolithic or static concept is overturned by a survey of the diverse receptions of covenant in the history of biblical scholarship from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, contrasting American and German interpretive trends. As such, I aim to highlight the reciprocal relationship between religion and politics, and the academic study of both, in order to challenge the claim that modern political thought can be traced back to biblical conceptions.

The Politics of Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Definition Of

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.

scholarly journals Temporalidade e refutabilidade dos conceitos políticos

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (35) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elías José Palti
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Controversial Nature

Temporalidade e refutabilidade dos conceitos políticos[1]Temporality and refutability of political concepts Elías José Palti[2] RESUMO: Nas últimas décadas, o conceito do “político” de Carl Schmmitt tem ressurgido nos debates sobre teoria política, e isso também teve importante repercussão no campo da história intelectual. A distinção entre política e o político permitiu-nos reconsiderar a natureza de conceitos políticos, reavaliar a sua natureza controversa. Isso é visto agora como um resultado de sua indefinição. O fato de que conceitos como democracia, justiça, liberdade, etc. não aceitam qualquer definição, que resistem a toda tentativa, nasceria da natureza intrinsecamente aporética deles, isto é, do fato de que eles não se referem a nenhum conjunto de ideias ou princípios que poderiam ser listados, mas sim que servem como índices de problemas. O presente artigo pretende rastrear essa transformação teórica no campo da história política-intelectual, suas consequências para a pesquisa histórica. E também como isso afetou nossos meios de abordar a história intelectual latino-americana. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: História do Pensamento Político. História Intelectual. História do Pensamento Político Latino-americano. ABSTRACT: In the last decades, Carl Schmitt´s concept of the political has resurface in the debates on political theory, and it has had important repercussion in the field of intellectual history, too. The distinction between politics and the political allowed us to reconsider the nature of political concepts, reassess their controversial nature. It is now seen as a result of their undefinability. The fact that concepts like democracy, justice, freedom, and so on, do not accept any definition, that resist all attempt, would spring from the intrinsically aporetic nature of them, that is, that they do not refer to any given set of ideas of principles that could be listed, but rather they serve as indexes of problems. The present article intends to trace this theoretical transformation in the field of political-intellectual history, its consequences for historical research. And also how this affect our ways of approaching Latin American intellectual history. KEYWORDS: History of Political Thought. Intellectual History. History of Latin American Political Thought.[1] Publicação original: PALTI, Elías José. Temporalidad y refutabilidad de los conceptos políticos. Prismas: revista de história intelectual, n. 9, p. 19-34, 2005. Tradução de Pedro Prazeres Fraga Pereira e Vicente de Azevedo Bastian Cortese.[2] Professor da Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina) e da Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina). Investigador do Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas – CONICET.

scholarly journals What’s it got to do with the price of bread? Condorcet and Grouchy on freedom and unreasonable laws in commerce

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-448
Author(s):  
Sandrine Bergès
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
The People ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Ideology

István Hont identified a point in the history of political thought at which republicanism and commercialism became separated. According to Hont, Emmanuel Sieyès proposed that a monarchical republic should be formed. By contrast the Jacobins, in favour of a republic led by the people, rejected not only Sieyès’s political proposal, but also the economic ideology that went with it. Sieyès was in favour of a commercial republic; the Jacobins were not. This was, according to Hont, a defining moment in the history of political thought. In this article, I offer a different analysis of that particular moment in the history of the commercial republic, one that instead of focusing on Sieyès and the Jacobins, looks at the thought of Girondins philosophers Nicolas de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy. I argue that their arguments provide sound models for a commercial republic, reconciling late 18th century republican ideals in which virtue was central, with the need for a flourishing and internationally active market economy.

The People’s Two Bodies: An Alternative Perspective on Populism and Elitism

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 842-853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alin Fumurescu
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Two Bodies

Inspired by the late medieval doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, the idea of the People’s Two Bodies has been so far used lightly by scholars, mostly to point out a supposed contradiction in our shared assumptions about “the people.” The essay argues that the People’s Two Bodies paradigm is more than a mere linguistic artifice, proving useful for dealing with the pitfalls of elitism and populism while taking advantage of both approaches. It shows that the dual understanding of “the people,” both as a multitude and as a corporate whole, enjoys actually a long pedigree in the history of political thought. As such, the paradigm of the People’s Two Bodies helps address some of the major theoretical and practical challenges that liberal democracies are facing today.

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